Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: around the house

Snowy Laundry Day

Published February 11, 2010

Working from home on a snow day let me constantly cycle laundry while taking brief breaks from reading and writing documentation. For most of the day from my first 7:30am meeting through now the washer and dryer have been doing their thing, removing skin oil and flakes, bits of food, and other debris from my clothes. I’d been a bit remiss in laundry-doing lately, so I had to do loads for socks, underwear, work clothes, towels/robe, t-shirts, jeans, bike clothes, sheets, rags, and a few other things. The final load, towels/robe, is only now drying. This evening I also decided to donate a some clothes that I haven’t worn in years to the Salvation Army, so I had a full load of those to wash, as few years worth of dust on the clothes likely wouldn’t be appreciated.

The result is this nice, clean closet with everything folded and put away. Socks, bike clothes, and various other bits are in drawers. Now to get some sleep and get back to working in the office tomorrow. This will be nice as I’m not terribly fond of working from home, particularly when the weather dictates the preceding and following evenings also involve sitting at home. I do like my house, but work is a very nice change of venue.

Leave a Comment

RedPlum Be Gone!

Published January 26, 2010

Are you one of the millions like me who receive RedPlum physical spam almost daily in your mailbox? If you are, and you too wish to stop receiving the wasteful physical embodiment of e-blasts, head on over to this Valassis Communications page and step through the menus to unsubscribe and avoid the RedPlum processed pork firehose.

Since I receive very little other mail, my daily trips to the mailbox are usually just to pick up this rag and transport it to the recycling box. I’ve also found real mail lost (tucked?) inside of this dreck, so hopefully getting off the mailing list will cut down on lost mail too. Just last month a water bill seemingly never arrived and currently a notification that I’m anticipating receiving from the post office for an international delivery seems quite late. I wouldn’t be surprised if it too was lost.

Leave a Comment

More Furnace Problems

Published January 2, 2010

Here’s one of two limit switches in my furnace. This was pulled out while I was attempting to determine why my furnace isn’t working properly. As it’s nice and clean this didn’t seem to be the reason for the problem.

What I’ve observed is as follows:

1) Pilot igniter sparks for ~20 seconds.
2) Pilot lights.
3) ~20 seconds later main gas valve opens.
4) Main burner ignites.
5) Main burner extinguishes, but pilot stays lit.
6) 4-5 repeat three times before blower starts.

After removing this limit switch, looking it over, cleaning its contacts and surrounding area, then reassembling it #5 didn’t occur and the blower started like normal. I’ll listen carefully for a while and see if the problem reoccurs or if more thought needs to be given to the issue.

I’d generally blame the flame sensor, but there isn’t one on my furnace. I’m concerned that this problem may be caused by the controller board dying (capacitor plague?) or some other passive electronic bit slowly failing, leading to intermittent issues. Replacing controllers or gas valves is not cheap, and I’m wary of doing so without knowing that it’ll fix the problem.

Leave a Comment

Google Maps Fails Again!

Published December 31, 2009

Here’s yet another failure of Google Maps in my area. Not only is my address not found (it worked just fine in the past but now has the street name listed incorrectly), my ZIP+4 alone doesn’t work, and now 22 Mile Rd. shows up improperly in Street View as 20 2 Mile Rd..

I just submitted the following bug report to Google about this:

Google Maps lists 22 Mile here properly, as the name '22 Mile Road'. When in Street View this is listed as '20 2 Mile', which is wrong.

We’ll see how far it goes. My last few bug reports, while acknowledged as correct and noted as being fixed in future releases, have resulted in only one fix that I can validate myself; more appropriate naming of roads on the GM Tech Center campus. It’s now been months since I reported my address as not working and it’s still not right. There are also problems where a local highway and surface road with similar names are sufficiently confused to make businesses appear along the wrong road. As can be seen here a bunch of locations are incorrectly placed roughly one mile east of their actual location. This too has been reported, and not fixed.

I currently use (and rather like) a T-Mobile G1 Android-based phone and I like it enough that I’m seriously considering buying a Nexus One when it launches. However, terribly inaccurate local data including not having my home address available limits some of the major selling points of the phone.

Leave a Comment

Packing with Foam Peanuts

Published December 28, 2009

When packing items with foam peanuts it’s important to ensure that they are compressed and will hold the items they surround firmly in place. One of the best ways to do this is to slightly overfill the box when adding the packing material, compressing it while taping the box shut. It’s easy to tell if this method is done right, as the sealed box will feel solid without internal movement when shaken but there also won’t be any bulging of the packaging.

Leave a Comment

Glitter, Herpes of the Craft World

Published December 18, 2009

Today I received a Christmas card with glitter on it. While I appreciate the card, the glitter is a bit difficult to like. It’s already on my pants, stuck to my hands, on my desk, and in the carpet. I’m sure I’ll find bits of it for years to come. After all, glitter is the herpes of the craft world. (I believe this phrase must be attributed to Demetri Martin.)

Leave a Comment

Let’s Advertise Like It’s 2001

Published December 16, 2009

A new X10.com-branded X10-speaking appliance module has been installed along with my old receiver for switching the light behind my iMac. It’s now much nicer, as I can turn the light on and off without reaching behind or under the desk. Now I just need to wait for Monoprice to get a stock of the short USB cables so I can order them along with a bunch of other stuff to finish the office wiring.

Yes, this is the infamous X10 Wireless Technologies with the terrible popup/popunder banner ads that came to embody the irritation of online advertising. Thankfully I was able to find the devices on eBay from Big John’s Place out of northern Illinois.

Leave a Comment

Globe Valves Suck

Published December 6, 2009

When replacing the leaky toilet gasket I was reminded of another problem said toilet has: the valve on it sticks, and doesn’t really open all the way. That is, once closed the valve is very difficult to open again, without shutting off the water, removing the valve stem, and reassembling it with the valve all the way open. When I last had this problem I contemplated replacing the valve with a new ball valve, but never got around to it.

Well, today I did. After purchasing a BrassCraft (made in Novi, MI!) sweat-on ball valve I desoldered the old builders-grade globe valve, cleaned up the metal, sweated (soldered) the new fitting on, hooked it up, and was content with how things worked. While they are good allowing one to adjust flow, I don’t feel that this is needed for toilets and other places where valves can stick in place after being open for years or exposed to weather, and I seem to regularly have problems with gaskets and seats corroding leading to valves that either don’t shut off or won’t open all the way.

I also replaced the gasket on the other toilet today, and thankfully that valve worked just fine. I may replace it as well, but the effort required to drain the house to a few feet below the floor may preclude this, especially as that toilet doesn’t have any other problems.

Leave a Comment