Category: Rant

Water heater

The night before last I slept in the new house, and with Vicki away there hasn’t been any cooking or dish washing going on, so this morning’s shower was probably the first time anybody but Laura has used the hot water since the engineer’s inspection on Tuesday. And this morning I discovered that the water in the tank was stone cold – the pilot light was out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot light went out because of something the inspector did. I don’t know if Laura had had any hot water during the last couple of days – this wouldn’t be the first time where something wasn’t working right but she never bothered to tell anybody in a position to fix it – or if the tank just cooled down overnight.

I’ve got to say, though, that crawling around on my hands and knees lighting the pilot light, and then taking a sponge bath with tepid water, is not my favourite way to start the day.

Linksys ruins my plans for the evening.

Regular readers of my blog remember that back in April I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to replace my Belkin router, which had this annoying habit of sometimes showing you the configuration interface on the external port 80 even though it’s supposed to be forwarding the external port 80 to my Linux router’s port 80 and even though it’s configured to not allow external access to the configuration interface. That was a dismal failure because every now and then, at first every couple of days and later several times a day (and definitely more likely to fail if you were doing a large file transfer), it would stop allowing wireless clients to access the outside world, even though wired clients (like my Linux box) were still working fine. Often the only cure was to power cycle, because a soft reboot from the web interface wouldn’t do it.

Because of all that, I continued to use the Belkin at home, in spite of that annoyance. But when they installed cable at the new house, I dug out the Linksys and brought it over, figured that even if it needs to be power cycled once in a while, it would still allow us to use the net when we were over at the house.

So that was my plan for this evening – come home from work, cart out the 7 or 8 bags full of garbage that Vicki and I filled over the weekend, tend to the dog, watch a bit of the Tour de France on TV, then come over to the new house and take care of the birds and keep them company while surfing the net wirelessly down in the bird room. But it didn’t work out that way, because when I got to the new house, I found the Linksys unable to get a DHCP address from the cable modem, even after power cycling both of them. The Linksys actually smells a bit “cooked”, so it’s probably completely ruined now. So now I’m sitting in my office in the new house, on an uncomfortable wicker rocker, connected to the cable modem with a patch cord, and wishing I could be down with the birds on the comfy sofa.

Oh well, it’s cooling down now, soon it will be time to go to bed and not get the sheets too sweaty. (Vicki warned me not to get them sweaty, because they’re new and expensive.)

Ok, Brain, Stop That!

You know how your brain will suddenly dredge out of nowhere a memory that you would prefer if you never remembered ever again? (I only have the courage to admit that this happens to me because Dave Barry mentioned it, so I know I’m not the only one.)

I was just sitting there minding my own business when the following memory popped into my head. As explanaton, I should mention that I’m not the best person with faces in the world. I see strong resemblances between people who everybody else says don’t resemble each other at all, and I’ll not recognize people after they’ve changed “their look”.

It was back when I worked at GeoVision, so some time before 1993. I was cutting through the conference room that sat squarely between the front entrace and my desk, and I usually did. The lights in the room were quite dim. Coming in the other direction were a man and a woman I worked with, he a sales person and the woman a developer who spent most of her time in (what was then) recent years working at customer sites and training. The woman was normally attractive, but had the most boring hair style in the world. Today, it appeared she’d done a complete 180 in style, and she was looking really good. So as I blew past them at a fast pace, I said “I really like your hair”. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I saw Allison with her normal straight hair. And then it hit me, that the woman whose hair I’d complemented was a complete stranger, and probably a customer or potential customer. I bet she was baffled. I tried very hard to avoid the conference room and training areas for the rest of the day.

Dilated

Is it just me, or does getting eye drops put in your eyes rank just below “assault with a deadly weapon” or “trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to your ex-wife that your daugher’s version of events isn’t correct” in stress levels?

I had an eye exam today, and when they put eye drops in your eyes I have to strongly resist the urge to kick the doctor in the balls and run the hell away. The doctor has to clamp open my eyes with his fingers, but I’m sure if he’d had that device they used in “A Clockwork Orange”, he probably would have used that. It’s a wonder I didn’t bite his fingers as they approached my face. Afterwards I’m panting and sweaty.

I can’t understand how people can practically touch their own eyeballs to put in contacts. I’ve never in my life managed to put eye drops on my own eyes – any good I get from eye drops occurs because some of it stays on my eyelids afterwards and gets into my eyes after the eye dropper is gone and I open my eyes again.

After the exam, I couldn’t see anything close up for hours afterwards. Luckily my distance vision was barely good enough to drive. I had a useless morning at work, even compared to my normal slow Monday mornings.

A tale of two super domestiques

This time of year, I’m majorly enthralled by the Tour de France. I’m going to presume to explain a few things about professional cycle racing even though I’ve only been following it avidly for 7 years now (and a little less avidly back when one of the riders in the peleton was a guy I’d shared tips on preventing penile frostbite with). Some of this might be laughably wrong to people who are really into the sport, but it should be close enough for the rest of you.
Continue reading “A tale of two super domestiques”