7 posts from 2008

Reading Wired Blogs's "Unsexy" category (for no other reason than I happened to notice it existed), I encountered an entry on "The Brannock Device" - the shoe-size-determiner that lurks under furniture in shoe shops. I mention it mostly for the before-the-marketing-department-existed name, but also because it made me think back to the wondering automatic foot measuring device that they used to have in Clarks shoe shops when I was growing up. You'd stand on a platform, and put your foot down into a metal box thing, and then metal blocks would slide out and measure your foot. There was always a slight frisson of "will it malfunction and crush my foot?" combined with a bit of Awe of Advanced Technology. And, apparently, now they're gone.

Yay progress, I suppose.

This weekend, I helped my father-in-law replace his broken water heater with a shiny new tankless one. This, however, has been a bit of a marathon, since it also involved building a new stud wall (to hang the new heater on), running a new gas line from the main (the existing one was too narrow), running a high-temperature vent pipe halfway across the basement, and re-plumbing the water system (water softener, filter, new heater, external taps, all need to be re-arranged to account for moving from a huge water heater tank in the middle of machine area to a nice little heater hung on a wall).

And so, here is a run-down of some of the Things I Have Recently Learned.

• If a critical part is on special order, it will arrive late.
• If a critical part will take weeks to arrive, when it does arrive it will turn out to be about one foot too short.
• If the hardware store happens to have a suitable extension in stock, and are willing to part with it, they will give you the wrong part.
• No job can be completed without at least two, possibly three, 20-mile round trips to said hardware store.
• Cuts on fingers may only be detectable when you force silicone sealant into them.
• It is somewhat difficult to remove silicone caulk from open wounds. But, on the plus side, silicone makes an excellent blood-resistant barrier.
• Silicone also adheres to hair very well.
• Builders go on special training courses, entitled "How To Place Joists, Trusses, Ducts, and Pipework Exactly Where Ian Will Need To Be".
• There's nothing like a good sniff of natural gas to really get a headache going.
• All the TFE paste in the world isn't going to hide the fact that the hardware store sold you ropey pipe fittings.
• "Oh hello again" isn't something you want to hear from a hardware store employee.
• The cut ends of copper pipe are really, really sharp.
• Silicone can do a good impression of a big flap of skin hanging off your finger.
• When it comes to confined spaces, you are not as thin as you think you are.
• The tape measure is always at the other end of the ladder.
• Mosquitoes know to bite you exactly where the bite will chafe worst during subsequent project tasks.
• Any critically-positioned part will shift about half an inch when you're not looking, and will only reveal this after it's been screwed down and daubed with sealant.
• It's going to take longer than you think.
• Optimistic time estimates lead to disappointed mothers-in-law.

Their water is still shut off. I'm going back there tonight to help finish the job. Probably.

Great Britain is doing unexpectedly well at the Olympics, which is a pleasant surprise. The BBC has us at third in the medal table. But are we?

The BBC, like many news outlets, displays the medal table sorted by number of gold medals won (with silver and bronze counts breaking ties). But in the US, NBC ranks countries by total medals won. Now, coincidentally, this ranks the US higher than China. I suspected foul play, but some digging shows that they did this back in 2004 as well, when they out scored Russia and China in both golds and total medals.

A little Perl hackery, and the data culled from the BBC News site today, yields the following tables, ranking countries by total golds, total medals, and two "points" rankings - one with gold worth 3, silver 2, and bronze 1, and the other with 5, 3, and 1 point values.

You can herniate your brain.

At work, I keep a few microwavable meals in the freezer. They're convenient, especially if I've hurried out of the house and forgotten to bring anything for lunch, and for the most part palatable. But they are, inescapably, microwavable meals. Not gastronomy at its finest.

What irk me are the cooking instructions, which invariably end with "...and enjoy!". I shouldn't have to be instructed to enjoy something. It's a tacit admission that the food is sufficiently dull that I will need a reminder that eating should be pleasurable, rather than necessary exercise in refueling.

I think, perhaps, I need to cook more again.

While writing my previous post, I strayed into the time-sink that is Wikipedia (and you know I just spent a couple of minutes reading the entry on "Time sink" there - go on, read, I'll wait) and discovered the term escribitionist, referring to one who keeps an online diary. I can't tell you how glad I am that that one didn't gain the sort of traction that "blog" did. I hate the deliberate cleverness of it. "Look, it's like exhibitionist but, you know, with writing." Escribosphere, anyone? Weblog I can deal with. It's a log, on or of the web. Blog, OK. Bit clunky, but simple and punchy. Escribitionist? No, you've disappeared up your own backside there.

Incidentally, Wikipedia (oh, damn, there I go again) says that "neologism" was coined around 1800. I can't help but feel that whoever did it went home and sat at the dinner table thinking he (or she) had had a good day at the office. Just coined a new term for coining new terms? Down tools for the day - you've done all you can do.

We had a big thunderstorm a few weeks ago - tornado warning, hail, the works. I was sitting in a cinema at the time, watching The Dark Knight, totally oblivious to the fury outside until the power went out 15 minutes before the end of the film. But I digress.

Sara was sheltering in the basement with Evie and the dogs, waiting for the tornado threat to pass, when she realised that she'd left the window in my office open, and couldn't risk going up to close it. Once the storm was over, and I returned, I started drying and mopping. Amazingly, most of the stuff near the window was impervious to water (although I've not actually tried to use the computer's keyboard since emptying the water out of it).

Once of the things that wasn't impervious was a leather-bound journal I'd lusted after, and finally bought, about five years ago. Lovely paper, thick soft leather cover, leather cord fastner, the works. Beautiful. And I wrote in it once. I had the best of intentions. It would be a casual-but-thoughtful journal. A paper blog, filled with insight, and maybe a few sketches, line drawings, clippings, and so forth.

My problem was twofold. One was that the journal was, as I have said, beautiful. My handwriting, never the finest, has been reduced by years of typing to a rather cryptic scrawl. My sketches are best left unmemorialised. Writing in this piece of paper-and-hide craftsmanship was a desecration. I debated excising the only entry I made with a razorblade.

And then there was the question of content. I am vain. Much as many Americans support the abolition of estate taxes on the optimistic and largely unfounded assumption that they'll die rich, I can't help but believe that when I die my papers will be pored over by bands of scholars. So, anything I write in something so serious, so permanent, as a paper journal must be something of merit. We're talking about my legacy here. Crippled by expectation, I could write nothing, lest my legacy end up "Wrote about nothing of consequence, and couldn't spell".

So I've always gravitated toward electronic publishing. It gives me the illusion of impermanence, allowing me to delete and amend content at will, it's legible and spell-checked, and it satisfies my vanity in that (at least theoretically) those bands of scholars can start before I've had to do anything so mundane or inconvenient as die.

I wrote an online diary in 1997 (Wikipedia says the term "weblog" was coined on 17 December 1997). That got to be too much work, and I next dabbled in blogging in 2000, keeping it up for a whopping three months. Managed a bit better in 2003, as golb ran for seven months. And then... nothing.

Until now. I find I'm writing monologues on IRC, which is a sign that perhaps I'm using the wrong medium. I have conspicuously failed to set up blogging software on indecorous.com, so I'm going to see if something like Vox will lower the barrier and get me writing again.

Wish me luck. And do alert those scholars, won't you? They have work to do.