Month: July 2005

Mirror Madness

Remember when the rear-view mirror in my car fell off? I picked up some appropriate glue that evening and stuck it back on, but what I didn’t realize until the next morning was that I hadn’t gotten it in exactly the right place. The driver’s-side sun visor would hit the corner of the mirror every time I moved it. So I grabbed a new tube of the adhesive, then put off actually removing and reattaching the mirror for a week and a half. (The mirror was in place, and I could aim it properly, I just had to be careful about moving the visor around.)

Today I decided I was finally going to fix it, so I pulled the mirror off the mounting button and tried to remove it from the windshield with a razor. No luck. I pulled out the package, looking for removal directions, and discovered that when they said “permanent,” they meant it. Directions for fixing a botched job were to mount a second button on top of the first.

So, back to the auto parts store looking for an extra button. It turns out they’re not standardized, so I have to get one for this particular mirror. Not likely to be at a generic auto parts store. And if I go to the Nissan dealer, it’ll probably cost as much as a new mirror. (Buying OEM parts is annoyingly expensive. I spent upwards of $40 for a replacement wheel cover because I wanted it to match the other three.) I did not want to buy a new mirror just because I glued the original one a quarter-inch out of place!

They did have a mounting arm on its own, so I went back out to see if my mirror would hook up to it. I pulled it off of the button, and noticed something about the arm: It had ball-and-socket joints at both ends.

Problem solved! I just swiveled the arm out to the right so that it clears the visor, and I can still position it correctly using the other socket.

Current Mood: accomplished

Geometric reading

I was fixing tags on recent LJ entries (every other web app I’ve used tags with makes them space-separated, not comma-separated) and noticed that I’d mentioned where I was in HBP several times. It got me thinking:

Tuesday I read to page 50.
Wednesday I read to page 200.
Thursday I finished the book, which is about 650 pages.

That’s roughly 50 pages on day one, 150 on day two, and 450 on day three. Fortunately that was enough to finish the book, since I don’t think I would’ve had time to read 1350 pages on Friday!

Sunset

Since about 7:15 (barring a break to bring in laundry), I’ve been out on the balcony with the laptop, doing Net stuff I’ve been meaning to catch up on. It’s been quite nice outside today, except in direct sunlight, but there’s been a light cloud cover most of the afternoon. But we just can’t seem to get the apartment cleared out.

There was a dicey moment when I was watering the plants, though, and somehow managed to overwater the plant that hangs above our patio table. So it immediately started dripping on the table and splashing the laptop and small stack of books next to it. It was closed, at least, so no harm was done, and the day was so dry that by the time I finished with the other plants the table was already drying out.

We don’t have a view of the horizon — there are too many trees and buildings in the way — but the high cloud cover meant a very nice sunset, and the parts of the sky I could see turned fantastically gold, orange, and finally pink before fading.

Now it’s dark, and while I don’t need to see to type (and the screen casts plenty of light for that anyway), one of the things I was doing was typing in the quotes we collected at Comic Con. The balcony light really doesn’t cast enough to read at this end, so I’ll probably have to either go over to the bench by the light, where there’s nowhere to put the notebook, or go back inside, where it’s still uncomfortably warm.

On the other hand, I won’t be able to hear my neighbor hocking loogies on his patio. He started about halfway through this post, and I hope he’s finished. Blech.

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative

No Looking Back

I got in the car to go to lunch today, and noticed something sitting on the cup holder in front of the dashboard: the rear-view mirror.

I tried to stick it back to the window, but wasn’t confident that it would stay. Rather than risk it falling off in the middle of driving, I pulled it off again (too easily) and set it on the chair.

On another note, I was standing in line at Robeks when someone behind me asked, “What part are you at?” I said something eloquent like, “Huh?” and he repeated the question, at which point I realized he was referring to HBP, which I was holding in my left hand… without the dust jacket, and with the spine facing downward. He had to have recognized it solely by its size and the color of the cover.

Secondhand Rows

Finally got out to see The Kingdom of Heaven at one of the local second-run theaters. Once upon a time it was Edwards Woodbridge. Never a flagship theater, it was getting pretty run down by the time they sold it off. I think the last movie I saw there was Star Wars: Episode I three or four months after it came out.

The real shock was that the theater was in great shape. Certainly much better shape than last time, back when the carpet was ragged and stained, some of the seats were ready to fall apart, etc. One of the new owners (there’ve been at least three, I think) put in new carpet, new tiles, new paint, fixed the seats… and is still offering $2 matinees. Even the film was in decent shape. The focus was a bit off on the right side of the screen, but it wasn’t nearly as scratched as I’d expect it to be after 2 1/2 months.

Looopy!

Last week I spent every day rushing to get through various projects at work. (For various reasons, I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of back-burner projects, including some server upgrades/replacements.)Twice I had servers crash in the evening. Monday afternoon I started upgrading one system, figuring I could stay a bit late and finish it while alenxa was in class. It didn’t quite work out that way. The upgrade took longer than expected, Katie’s class got out earlier, and most of the critical services stopped working partway though. I ended up leaving to pick her up, grabbed Taco Bell, dropped her off at home, and came back… and was stuck at work until 10:00 while I got things running again.

The big project for the rest of the week was getting a new mail server set up. We’d been planning this for a while, as the previous server was kind of flaky, but it looked like it was heading for a serious meltdown. Not surprisingly, it took until Friday afternoon before it was ready to take over. There’s an old adage about not makng major changes before leaving for a vacation or holiday weekend. I decided that the old box was so close to meltdown that it would be worth the effort. Silly me… Once again it not only took longer than expected to move the mail over, but I got stuck again when I accidentally rebooted the wrong server and it wouldn’t come up again. Katie’s already told that story. I still ended up making more changes after we got home, and doing troubleshooting for the next two days.

So after a week of high-stress running around and not enough sleep, my immune system must have been trashed, because I started noticing a sore throat Friday evening. On Saturday it turned into congestion and a cough, on Sunday my voice dropped steadily to a low croak, and on Monday I could barely speak at all. Katie picked it up from me on Sunday, and we both ended up staying home yesterday. I spent most of the day either in bed or on the couch, and I drank a ton of orange juice/Sprite blend (because after a while, I couldn’t bring myself to drink straight orange juice, but I was tired of just water).

We did at least get to see the local fireworks display on Monday, even if half of me wanted to just stay home and lie down.

We’re both back at work today, but I’m not entirely sure I should be. I had a very mild fever yesterday — less than half a degree — but I still feel really loopy today. I’m sure waking up at 3:30 am and not being able to get to sleep again until 5:00 didn’t help, but overall I probably ended up getting as much sleep as I usually do. The last NyQuil has long since worn off, and DayQuil has never caused me problems.

As far as I know there are no driving-while-feverish statutes, though I hope I’ll be in better shape by the time I’m ready to go home.

Current Mood: 🤒sick

Fighting fatigue and frustration

I’m the only one here today. I at least thought my boss was coming in, but I haven’t seen him yet. Still, he keeps odd hours, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up at 3:00 and stayed into the evening.

Busy trying to get a new mail server set up. Using Mandrake instead of Red Hat due to driver issues. And while things that are built in work great, things that I’ve had to configure manually have been problematic. Right now I’m fighting a PAM/LDAP bug that I hope is limited to SSH, or else the server’s going to be unusable for any sort of authentication. Beginning to wonder whether it will be ready before the current server melts down under the load.

Staying up way too late. I was the first one in this morning, and started some coffee, figuring I’d need more than the one travel mug from home. Didn’t go back for a while. Co-worker showed up a bit later: “Did you make coffee this morning?” “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get enough sleep last night?” “Uh, no… why?” I ran through my memory of the morning and while I could remember getting the filter, the filter basket, and the coffee grounds, and I could remember turning the coffee maker on, I couldn’t actually remember putting the coffee pot under the spout. Guess why.

On Monday, the uberboss talked with me, my boss, and two other co-workers about a reorganization plan. It’s a bit complicated, and involves the fact that someone from a copmany we do development for is coming out to work with us on-site for 8 months, but basically I need to pick up skills I haven’t used in about 7 years instead of doing (a) what I’m good at and (b) what they hired me for. So I’m trying to take care of various back-burner projects before I have to focus on programming.

One of those back-burner projects was a server upgrade that went wrong and kept me at work until 10pm on Monday, and took up a big chunk of Tuesday morning trying to resolve the remaining issues. I’ve still got one web project I need to finish, and just picked up a new one. And there’s the melting mail server. And we’re coming up on a 3-day weekend of which two days are already planned with various sets of relatives. Vacation? Yeah, right!