I just got back from shipping a care package to a former classmate of mine who is now a soldier in the 'Stan. After I sent it off that I realized that I had failed to include one of the required items for this sort of package: a think bundle of USMC recruitment pamphlets. It's all part of the honorable tradition of intra-service rivalry.

Next time, I guess.

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I got with the times and purchased myself a Kindle. (The "Paperwhite" model to be specific.) I've only had it for a few days, so I can't really review it at length, but so far I'm quite pleased. The battery life is very good, its onboard storage is sufficient, it's survived one fall onto the floor so far, and it's quite lightweight. It charges by USB, but it didn't come with a USB power adapter– if memory serves, it's the first device I own that charges via USB that didn't come with a wall-wart. I guess they assume everyone now has a zillion of those things.

One interesting feature is that Amazon has a program where if the publisher agreed, a Kindle user that has in the past bought a physical book can get a discounted e-book edition of the same book. But Amazon's computers, as smart as they are, are not all-knowing. I can now buy very cheap electronic copies of quite a few of the physicals books I've given as gifts over the years.

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I got home from work today at about 3:30, and it's warm. I'd like to go for a bike ride, but it feels like there's a 50% chance of rain. Breaking that down further, there's a 0% chance if I stay home, and a 100% chance if I go out riding.

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I work in a bank's office building. As you might imagine, pretty much everyone dresses like, well, a banker.

Except for the copier guy. The promise of the "paperless office" has still not arrived, so there are multifunction printer/copier/scanner/fax machines all over the place. The bank has a contract with the manufacturer– the bank pays a fixed fee every year, and the copier company provides all the hardware, maintenance, and supplies. We get an eighteen-wheeler full of paper every two weeks.

Anyway, the copier guy. Part of the supply contract is that there's a copier tech in the building every weekday from 9-5. He looks to be in his early twenties, and stands out from all the suits because his work attire is "skater casual", with sneakers, jeans, and flannels. He has a closet full of his supplies in the loading dock, but no actual office, so most of the time he can be found lounging in the lobby's waiting area, just playing with his smartphone and waiting for some work to do. I'm not sure if I pity him for his boring job, or envy him for getting paid to sit around 80% of the time.

The printers/copiers/etc are actually somewhat interesting from a technological standpoint. They are all networked together, so whatever computer you are on just prints to a central server. Then you walk up to whichever printer you want, wave your ID badge at a touch-pad so it can read the badge's RFID chip, and the pad will show "Two documents in queue. Print all?" (Or you can select copies, faxing, etc.) This means you never have to worry about stuff being accidentally printed somewhere across the building. Also, as banks have paranoid internal controls, I'm sure the central server keeps an audit log so they can investigate information leaks (e.g. insider trading and whatnot.)

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I miss the sea.

Don't get me wrong, I don't miss riding in Navy equipment. Living conditions for officers were about equivalent to low-security prison, while enlisted got medium-security prison. The work schedule was twelve on/twelve off, except there was a forty-five minute passdown meeting at every shift change, so that's thirteen-and-a-half on/nine-and-a-half off.

But if I got a few minutes to steal, I could sit on the leading edge of the flight deck. The breeze riffled through my lack of hair, smelling of iodine. The ocean was a deep, mysterious cerulean, the sky a clear azure. On the horizon, a few small squalls added white and gray. If we were near shore, there might be dolphins playing in the bow wave; further out at sea, the flying fish would dance across the surface.

If I was a millionaire, I'd buy a yacht.

But Hil doesn't like the open ocean. I don't know if I'll ever again spend a week without seeing any land whatsoever. I guess I'm at that stage in my life, where constraints are more visible than they once were.

But I'll always remember that color, that smell, that feeling, of being on the sea far from shore.

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Buffalo had its first official blizzard since 1993, and I got to be in the thick of it. Specifically, I was at work, in the heart of downtown. Someone has to be manning the control room all the time, and it was my luck that my shift started at about the same time the storm did. While we were there, the rest of the building was closed, and all the office workers scurried out. The parking lot was empty expect for my car, the shift supervisor's car, and quite a few tons of snow. Soon there was only the snow, because the building has an enclosed loading bay for trucks, and the two of us pulled our cars in there to spare us digging them out later.

Safety-wise, we were fine. The building has multiple regularly-tested backup generators, and we had permission to raid the cafeteria's deli cooler for food. We were busy with work, though, as the storm was causing problems with lots of our branches. Customers were slipping and falling in parking lots, sprinkler pipes were bursting in attics, freezing rain was messing up walk-up ATMs, branches were closing early, all sorts of crazy stuff. The only consolation was that the weather was so bad, potential armed robbers were staying home.

As the night wore on, we each took a nap- the supervisor in the mother's room, and later me in the passenger seat of my car. I went with the car because it was padded and reclined, and I was plenty warm enough under the wool blanket and the sleeping bag I keep in the car. After sixteen hours, another console operator managed to get to work, so I was sent home. The poor supervisor ended up being there for 24 hours.

After those 16 hours at work, it took me triple the normal time to get home, driving on terrible roads. The storm was far from over. It was fortuitous that I'd bought new tires a few weeks earlier. Once home, I slept for about four hours, then got up and tried to get back to work again. I was scheduled to be back, and in my exhausted state I was regressing to some Marine behaviors, like a bull-headed willingness to do whatever necessary to complete the job.

After an hour of driving, I was less than a quarter of the way back to work. I kept re-routing myself because I kept running into closed roads. Eventually another bit of Marine training popped into my head, that of Operational Risk Management. The people at work had power and food, but there I was risking my life on the roads. So I turned around, went home, and went back to bed.

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Happy New Year to all. I rang in the new year at home with my fiancee and our cat, which was a perfect number. Earlier in the evening my future sister-in-law and her sister-in-law/ward were here, but they left at 11PM.

Anyway, come New Year's Day, I followed my grandmother's superstition and cooked a supper of ham and potatoes. Then I went for a three-mile run, despite the 4° wind chill with falling and drifting snow. I wore so many layers that my core stayed plenty warm, and I thought my feet were doing fine too. Turns out they were just numb, and I managed to injure my right foot. I didn't even know anything was wrong until I'd warmed up for an hour. I'm feeling sharp pain along the bottom of the arch, which might be plantar fasciitis, or it might be something else. At any rate, I'm trying to rest it, and it seems to be improving.

Otherwise, no news. Our wedding planning is kicking into high gear, though.

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I was doing some simple woodworking recently, and I found myself pondering power tools. In my humble opinion, the greatest power tool (for woodworking) is the power sander.

Saws? Modern hand saws are excellent, with high-quality steel that remains sharp. At my sister's timbersports competitions, they sometimes show off for the crowd that a quality crosscut saw will cut substantially faster than an off-the-shelf chainsaw.

Drills? While an electric drill is great for tight quarters, those generally only occur when you're modifying existing things. For new work, two of the three hand-powered drills work fine. The bit and brace gives power for even big bits, the reciprocating plunge drill does fine for quick small holes, and the eggbeater drill is kind of a counterexample, but whatever.

Hammers? Yes, you can get power nailers. They're faster for doing things where you have to put in lots of identically-angled nails, like flooring, but they have only a small speed advantage over a traditional hammer, and a substantial cost penalty both up-front and per nail.

But the sander. Ah, the sander. Sanding by hand is a boring, tedious, laborious task. It takes hours to do it right. But an orbital sander or belt sander will cut 95% or more of the time required for that tedious task. Hooray for power sanders!

(P.S. The lathe probably deserves an honorable mention, because treadle lathes are also much slower than power lathes. But it's a specialized tool not found in the typical workshop- even professionals often don't need one.)

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As heating season started, our furnace did not. It wasn't completely nonfunctional, but it would only fire up once or twice a day. It would run until the thermostat turned it off again, and then it wouldn't start again for anywhere from ten to forty hours.

I did some poking at it, but as a matter of Operational Risk Management, I didn't want to actually take apart a device that could very easily burn the house down and/or cause the house to explode. So we called a local HVAC contractor.

It took a while to get him over to visit, what with it being the start of heating season. Once he was here, it took about an hour of diagnosis to discover that the fan motor for the secondary heat exchanger was sticking, probably from bad bearings. It could be replaced, for $400, but the furnace itself dated from the early 1980s. So we decided to spend about $3000 on getting a new, high-efficiency model installed. The old one was also high-efficiency, but the new one nevertheless promised additional energy savings. The gas efficiency is about the same for both models, but the new one's fan motors are better, and for a forced-air heating system the fans use a surprisingly large chunk of electricity.

Anyway, it took another two weeks or so for them to free up two technicians to spend all day installing the new furnace. They also sprayed expanding foam into a number of passages from the basement to the first floor, around plumbing and whatnot, and then spread some sealing gunk over every joint it the ductwork in the basement. The solvent stunk up the house for a couple of days, but the effect was quite noticeable: our basement is now at least five degrees colder, because less heated air is leaking into it.

As long as we were having the furnace replaced, I wanted to get another project done. The front of the second story had a sash window that was single pane and terribly drafty. I hired a carpenter/handyman that had done some good work for my future sister-in-law to install a new, double-pane window up there. He did a fine job, and I ended up paying him $15 less than the estimate because the window opening was perfectly square, meaning he didn't need to spend any time shimming. Finding anything perfectly square in a new house is unusual enough, let along in a house that's in the neighborhood of 110 years old, and was built cheap in the first place!

So anyway, the house is better heated now, and the upstairs is less drafty. I'm pleased going into this winter.

Future projects, some for me, some for professionals:

• Add insulation
• Replace front and back doors
• Repair cracks in concrete driveway and walkway
• Add bookshelves. Many bookshelves. Many many bookshelves
• Remove disused gas heater in basement & re-route gas lines
• Replace two-conductor wiring with three-conductor wiring
  
• Upgrade house service power from 100amps to 150amps
  
• Cat door in bathroom [I'm joking. Somewhat.]
• Second bathroom, probably in the basement
• Exterior outlet on the front of the house
  

Posted by: Boviate at 09:24 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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