Congratulations to Amy, who was just contacted by Harvard’s Fogg Museum — they want to purchase one of her murals for their permanent collection, and the curator wants another one for her private collection. Between this and Peter Palmquist bequeathing his collection to Yale, this will put Amy’s photos in both Harvard and Yale’s permanent collections. I’m so proud of her!
Finally, good news in the saga. Plumber came out. Turns out I don’t have to replace the flange to replace the bolts — the bolts were always replaceable; I just couldn’t see it because rust had obscured their entry points. Plumber Dude chipped away at rust until gateways opened up… old bolts came out and new ones went in. Since he had to charge an hour minimum, had him install the new toilet, even though I had kind of looked forward to it. All groovy, except that the flush handle mechanism had been assembled backwards and thus ineffectual. Could not be disassembled. Toilet shop closed, wanted this to be over, replaced with an Ace version. Pooped promptly. It’s all good.
Much gutter week this weekend – cleaning out, pumping water through, extending downspouts to get water clear of the foundation, re-attaching bits and pieces, scooping gravel from troughs. Miles thinks it’s hilarious when Daddy climbs up a ladder. We don’t know why.
Central heat installed a couple weeks ago, and we’ve had landscapers out the last few days installing a monstro French Drain (oops, “Freedom Drain”) — nearly 80′ of trench 2/3 of the way around the house, tied into downspouts. Right out to the curbs, holes in concrete. They also rototilled and de-rooted the desolate moonscape of a backyard into something workable, ready for planting.
Continuing saga of the home repair project that started as a simple leak fix but subsequently yawned out into a miasma of interrelated problems.
Saturday selected a fine turlet to replace the broken one. I joked with the Toilet Dude that we were there to buy a bidet for Miles, but my joke backfired when he took me seriously. “Great idea. I installed one for my little ones as well, and my wife loves it.” Puh-leeze.
Silver lining is that we go from traditional 7-gallon flush to modern 1.6 gallon, awesome. Some of the Japanese toilets we looked at also had buttons for half-flushes, but the French don’t seem willing to go the extra mile for the half flush.
Since new tank is smaller than the original, first had to refinish and paint the wall so the outline of the old tank wouldn’t show.
Remove old bowl, and two of the bolts snapped under light pressure – rusted to the core. Oops. An inch and a half of solid soggy mineral deposits caked on the floor came up easily, but the main retaining bolts spin freely from their mount in the flange, dissolved loose with the years. OK, so I’ll replace the flange as well.
Not so fast, big feller. The flange is inserted 6″ down into the main pipe, which is cast iron. The flange is rusted solid to the pipe. As in, solid. Attempts to wrest it free just damage what remains. To Ace for advice. Ace Dude doesn’t skip a beat: “You need $200 worth of tools you don’t have. Call a plumber.”
The irony is that rust has betrayed us double: It has made soft what we need to be solid, and made solid what we need to be loose. Rust never sleeps.
Recently came across this in a drawer at my pop’s house — the announcement of my birth, which my parents sent to their friends and family (10/19/64, 8lbs 14oz). Pictured is the IRS’ 1040 long form as seen through a blue (for boys) filter, with a possibly reasonable facsimile of me superimposed over the top. Inside, the announcement is signed: “The Tax Payers (And Proud Parents), Jim and Avis Hacker.” It’s good to be loved.
Miles just had his first birthday on 9/23, but woke up with a bad headcold, snot bubbles bubbling. His party was cancelled, but he got a little pounding bench and a new pair of shoes anyway :). We’ll have a makeup party soon.
Caught bits and pieces of the gubernatorial debate on the radio this evening, but none of it was as revealing as these samples of candidates speaking with their language removed. Thanks Sean.
When the east coast lost power back in August, birdhouse lost both its primary and secondary DNS servers. For extra insurance, I then set up 3rd and 4th DNS servers through another host. Shortly thereafter, I started getting occasional reports that people couldn’t send mail to birdhouse addresses. We were handling thousands of messages a day, but a few inbound messages were bouncing back to senders undeliverable. birdhouse wasn’t bouncing them, the senders’ mail servers were.
Finally sleuthed the solution. Unlike A records, MX records should always reference domains, not IPs. This enables them to stay linked to A records if machines change IPs. Not knowing this when I set up the 3rd and 4th, I had entered the IP rather than the domain. As it turned out, certain sending mail servers were looking up the backup DNS before the main, and refusing to send to a mail server that wasn’t registered per spec. Tweaking the backup MX records fixed the problem.
The RIAA is now suing dentists (and chiropractors, and etc.) to get them to license the music they play for their patients. The punch line is that in most cases they’re being asked to pay to play easy listening, adult contemporary… the quiet storm. As if getting drilled wasn’t bad enough.
Just discovered that you can abuse the seldom-used @ syntax for passing user/pass combos into URLs to make your domain look to the untrained eye like it lives elsewhere than it does. e.g.:
http://www.nytimes.com@birdhouse.org/blog/
The browser simply ignores everything prior to the @ sign and carries on. Which means an unscrupulous soul can copy a template from any site, populate it with any content they like, and pass out a URL that will fool many viewers.
I’m not interested in doing this, mind you. Merely a technical curiosity.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but The wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh?
Feeling under the weather, channel surfing. Home Shopping Channel is selling electric guitars and amps, showing you how easy it is to play “just like those 70s rockers,” and they bring in a master guitarist to prove it. Dude jabs out a few licks from Hall and Oates, the guitar/amp combos fly off the shelves at $179.99. Then they bring out a classical guitar. They know they can’t convince the viewer how easy it would be to pluck Segovia, so try another tack:
“Ed, this is the kind of guitar that’s so beautiful you buy it for its looks alone. Even if you can’t play, it will look great sitting on a rack in a corner of your living room.”
Kid you not.
The 2003 Worst Manual contest winners have been announced. Who among us haven’t encountered amazingly bad instructions? But this bad?
1. Be tights part E with part I together by fitting M. Also can be installation handle part J in this side.2. Be tights part D with part H together by fitting M. Like a step No. 1. And may be installation handle in this side too.
Honorable mention went to a manual for assembly of a baby bed:
To protect baby’s eyes offending by dazzling light; To prevent baby from dust.
And so on. No wonder people don’t read Joyce anymore.
Weekend in Central Coast : Brother John married Jamie Sheridan after several years of Tru Luv® at Sycamore Mineral Springs in Avila Beach. Classic, non-denominational, lovely law-enforcement wedding (John is a sheriff of 10 years, Jamie is daughter of a cop and is herself a prison guard). Both of them are adventure-hungry – he proposed to her after scuba diving with sharks in a great undersea basin in Belize. He’s also way into no-holds-barred mixed martial arts. Dangerous couple.
I was the best man, stood by my bro on the altar to bear witness etc. Gave the big toast – three minute allotment I parlayed into seven, but it was fun. Oh, did you say toast? I thought you said “roast.” :)
Miles wore a dashing blue satin Chinese outfit, cut a rug, slept on Amy’s back, danced on my shoulders, kept his cool. He’s turned out to be mostly a breeze in public, we’re blessed.
Much love and respect to John and Jamie. Congratulations!
The news was somewhat buried — reading page 8 or 9 of USA Today — Rumsfeld sees no link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and Bush: No proof of Saddam role in 9/11. Well, it’s really big of them to come clean on this, two years after the fact, and long since it was shown that 70% of Americans thought that Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Exactly why would the people have thought that? Because the Pentagon dropped Afghanistan like a hot potato when the going got non-productive, and pursued Saddam instead? Because the insinuation was made over and over again that there absolutely was a connection?
I’m frustrated that this is page 8 news because the war could not have been fought without support of the American people. Therefore it didn’t behoove the pimps in power to come clean on the non-connection, though Rummy says he knew all along that there was no connection. So remind me again what the supposed goal of the war was? (“Removing a terrible dictator from power” is the wrong answer, sorry).
p.s.: U.S. weapons hunters find no evidence Iraq had smallpox and Senator Edward Kennedy says the case for war against Iraq “was a fraud.”
None of this related to the recent disocvery of ancient Venezuelan Buffalo-sized rodents, of course.
A seldom-mentioned side-effect of “the RSS revolution” is the weird way it skews web traffic. If a person subscribes to my RSS feed, index.rdf is going to be pulled off my site every time the person’s (or site’s) aggregator checks to see whether I’ve published updates. I leave NetNewsWire up and running 24×7, and set to refresh its feeds every hour. That means I generate 24 hits a day on Radio Free Blogistan and around 100 other sites I like, even though I actually look at the site only once or twice a week.
In August, I had 24,000 requests for index.rdf — fully 6x more requests than for my homepage. More than ever before, traffic fails to equate with readership. In fact, the numbers are way off. And the more popular RSS gets, the more skewed the numbers are going to get.
If you’re dishing up RSS, make sure all feed paths are removed from your traffic summaries (this is easier and more effective than trying to trap the UA strings of the various readers). You’ll still want to count those requests, but don’t be misled: You’re not nearly as popular as you think.
