my cilantro and scallions were going bad so i cooked up some savory apple chicken sausage oatmeal for lunch. i watched the hot morning news anchor, a series of political attack ads (republican aimed at democrats), and the much-awaited 5 day forecast.

in the afternoon i went market basket to get some ingredients for a new flan recipe i'm going to try (instead of milk, using evaporated milk [99¢] sand condensed sweetened milk [$1.79]), followed by a visit to the bank in union square. while traveling in the bike lane on my way home, an SUV driver attempting to make a right turn honked his horn at me. i wasn't going particularly slow, so i don't know what he was so angry about. i turned the bike around to stare him down, and even tried to follow him in case he lived nearby (so i could throw my bike lock through his window) but he sped up the hill and disappeared.

my father dropped by briefly to deliver my aunt's broken roomba and the remote for the prolite LED display.

my aunt asked me to take a look at her broken roomba. she had it for many years so the problem is most likely it needs a new battery, which is just $35 for an third party brand which works just as well if not better (not sure how much an official irobot battery costs, maybe $80-90). even after a few charges the roomba wouldn't turn on. worst part is it dumped out some previously-vacuumed debris all over my own carpet.

as for the prolite LED display, sunday night i brought home a 9V power adapter from my parents' basement. i plugged it in and it did nothing. 2 things that could be wrong: 1) it might require the remote to turn on, and 2) the power adapter is only 800mA, and the LED display requires 2500mA. but i wanted to rule out the remote, so that's why i had my father deliver it. unfortunately it didn't work, so now everything points to the power adapter as the problem. the original plug is probably somewhere in either the cafe or my parents' house, but it's probably easier just to order a new one off of ebay.

after some searching i finally bought one from a hong kong seller through ebay, a 9V 2.5A AC/DC power suppy adapter - $5.78 but $5.44 after i used up some accrued ebay points. it's not due to arrive until 2 weeks at the earliest. even then i can't be sure if it'll work, since the LED display itself might be broken, but i do remember powering it on at some point (with the one working power adapter currently be used to run the other LED display at the cafe).

i've been examining the PL-M2014 LED display, and it looks like it's composed of 16 sequentially connected 5x7 LED matrices. theoretically, one could build one of these using an arduino board and a row of color LED matrices. it'd be expensive though, i'd imagine each matrix would require it's own colorduino shield, and then one would run into the problem of not having enough ports to control everything.

drew came home around 3:00 while i was enjoying some quiet reading time in the bathroom. when i came out he thanked me for the can of lavazza espresso ground coffee i got him after he expressed some disappointment with a new italian espresso brand he was trying out yesterday.

for dinner i finished up the remaining october thanksgiving turkey. it smelled a little suspect, but i gave it 15 minutes of cook time in the toaster oven which hopefully killed off anything dangerous. i didn't experience any symptoms so everything looks to be safe. drew and i watched a marathon session of ink master on spike tv. it's a complete ripoff of project runway except instead of designing dresses these artists are tattooing designs on "human canvases."

finally, my upstairs neighbor steve is complaining about the roof again. since i didn't do anything about it when he first delegated the responsibility of contacting roofers (which was weird, because a leaking roof would affect him far more than me, so he should be the one to call), he (finally) said he'd call some people himself. i personally think it's a little too late for any roof work, or that most roofers are probably already busy with projects. but the responsibility is his now, i'm going to let him take care of it.