Category: around the house

After seeing this leak appear a few days in a row in the toilet off of my bedroom I believe that it is time to replace the toilet tank gasket. Thankfully this is an easy task, requiring nothing more than disconnecting the water supply, drying out the tank, unbolting it from the bowl, reversing all the steps after fitting a new gasket, and having a test flush.

I must remember to pick up two new gaskets tomorrow, as I shall replace both toilets’ gaskets at the same time. They were both installed at the same time (October 2001) and should wear based on age and exposure, but not use. Utilizing, cleaning, nor flushing the toilet should cause little wear on a gasket which normally sits just below the flapper and is dry save for during flushes. Thus as toilet usage patterns can be ignored when considering gasket lifespan, one can presume the other gasket is likely to fail soon as well due to simple effects of aging.

(Note that in presuming even wear between the two toilets I’m ignoring differences in the bathrooms such as airflow patterns, temperature, exposure to light, humidity, and the possibility of someone leaning back while on the toilet introducing stress to the gasket, as all of these have uncertain outcomes and would be much harder to quantify than simple age. And anyway, who really leans back against the bowl while sitting on the toilet? Things won’t come out right if one does that.)

Today I spent time rewiring my office to incorporate the new iMac. A few armloads of cables connecting the Mac Pro-bearing rack were removed and things were simplified / organized. I absolutely love having a quiet desk with cables only visible where necessary. I tucked a USB hub out of the way under the desk to the right of my chair for flash drives, and another behind the desk for more permanent connections.

As I’m not sure how it’ll be done the scanner is not yet connected, but I suspect it’ll involve a 10′ USB cable run to the hub on the back side of the desk and a shorter cable to Danielle’s desk for when she wants to use it. My older Dell monitor was moved to Danielle’s desk and fitted with a mini-DVI connector so that she can watch movies on it while using the Macbook screen for normal browsing / work. A new power strip was also added to the rack next to her desk to make plugging in her laptop and charging phones easier. This mostly carpet fisheye shot (full res) shows the two desks as they are with the rack.

Before doing all of this the Mac Pro was also wiped and reinstalled. Hopefully it’ll be photographed tomorrow for listing on eBay come Sunday evening.

Here, have a photo of bubbles coming off of dry ice under hot tap water in the (hallway) bathroom sink. Here is another, better framed and more interesting, but not used as the post image as it lacks clearly defined water vapor-filled bubbles.

These were taken using the shiny, waterproof Olympus Stylus 850 SW.

Likely due to the action of the agitator in my washing machine, long pieces of fabric such as the sheets seen above become very twisted and almost rope-like while being washed. They are so tightly twisted that I suspect they actually aren’t getting as clean as they should, and thus I end up washing sheets twice, manually unwrapping them between cycles.