Going from my Mother's to my Father's place, I decided to let my GPS navigation system take me via "Avoid Highways" mode.

So I took Rt-96 to Rt-13 to Horseheads. There, I deviated from the route to visit Tuna II, a very good sushi place that is sadly somewhat obscure. With fresh sushi in the passenger's seat, I decided to skip the backroads, and took I-86 the rest of the way home.

It was a bit interesting to go through downtown Catatonk and Candor, two towns that I had never even heard of. I may go back to Candor sometime with a camera, as it looked to have quite a few well-preserved old buildings.

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With my compadre gone, I finished up the wiring project. (Finished for now, that is.) I went to the basement to put in a new circuit on the panel box, only to discover after much irritation that there are a couple of types of circuit breaker these days, that are internally indistinguishable, but have a design incompatability to force you to buy from the manufacturer. (The slot where the breaker connects to the power inside the box is shaped slightly differently.) With a new breaker (cost me 54¢ more than the standard one), it worked fine.

Then I went running around the house checking switches and outlets. All was good, we didn't wire any outlets backwards, but there was one room that didn't work. A quick check of the relavant brand-new junction box in the attic revealed that someone had screwed up the wire splices inside the box, and by "someone" I am refering to a person that I see every morning when I shave. In my defense, I had to work on that box while standing over the attic access ladder, so I was in significant peril of my life, and whenever I dropped something I went 18 feet down before bouncing somewhere.

With that junction resolved, all the wiring worked, but I still had to get the ceiling of the upstairs common room to work.

Wiring that light/overhead fan was a pain, as it was mounted onto the joist, instead of into a ceiling box. In the other rooms we installed the boxes, but I was running out of steam, plus this ceiling wasn't suspended like the others. And the fan had a mounting bracket that held the wire splices nicely.

The fan gave me trouble, as I had to install it three times to get it to hang level and not have the blade hub rub the decorative housing. I had actually given up after try two and was putting it back together with instructions to my Mom to not turn on the fan until I'd had another chance to work on it. But third tries are a charm, I guess.

And contrary to the post title, it's not quite done, as we're out of wire to connect one last outlet. Plus we'd disconnected a light on Circuit 13 from it's light switch, because we erroneously suspected it of misdeeds. So I need to reconnect it, but I'd like to put the joint inside a box, because the previous homeowner had just put electical tape over the splices and dropped the wires into the insulation. That's Not A Good Thing, for the record.

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We knocked off work for the night an hour ago. We're almost done.

For this project, I bought a 250 foot spool of wire. Naturally, we need 280 feet. Also, it's quite late, and we can't find the new circuit breaker that we need to install.

So, status: All wiring done except one outlet, and connecting an overhead light. Also, need to add a circuit breaker to the basement panel.

My co-worker is leaving tomorrow morning early, as he's got a bachelor party to attend. I can finish on my own though, although running wire into the outlet would be easier with two people. The other two tasks are one-man jobs.

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I owe Circuit Thirteen an apology. It was innocent of leaking current into Circuit Eight. I think what happened was that a wire going to an outlet on Eight ran parallel with a wire going to a switch on Thirteen. The live Thirteen wire induced voltage in the not-live Eight wire. Not a lot of voltage, but enough to trigger our very sensitive current detectors.

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We have a new theory about why the infamous Circuit Eight was getting power when it shouldn't have. It now looks like it cross-connects with Circuit Thirteen somewhere. We even have a guess as to where, which will be further investigated following lunch.

Of course, all the time we're spending tracing wires is time not spent installing new wires like we're supposed to be doing.

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We now think that circuit eight is actually the house's original wiring. The whole building just had one fuse. We came to that hypothesis because Eight runs every overhead light in the house except for one over the kitchen sink, which is a retrofit anyway. It also runs some miscellanous outlets on the second floor.

Four outlets and seven or eight lights seemed a bit excessive for one 20 amp circuit, especially since there are fifteen other circuits. So we're going to add a new circuit to the basement power panel, and the second floor wiring we're replacing will be on that one, while the first floor lights can remain on Eight.

Annoyingly, we still can't find how power gets to the wiring in the attic. We know where the power for it leaves the basement, and can trace it until it goes into the first floor ceiling. Then it apparently disappears. We thought we'd traced every wire that leads into the attic, but we just could not discover how the power gets to the top. Nikola Tesla may be involoved.

So today we decided to solve it the empirical fashion. We ran the new power cable from the basement to the attic, which took some effort, since we did it from an external wall, and had trouble getting from the first floor into the basement. Then we started ripping out knob and tube and replacing with nice modern romex cable. We've done a bit over half the attic and replaced one ungrounded outlet and are almost done with the master bedroom overhead light.

Good times, good times!

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My best friend Paul and I are working on replacing the old knob and tube wiring in my Mom's attic. That meant tracing the wiring down to the circuit breaker panel to see where it was supplied from.

Then we discovered that the wires coming out of the panel were labelled, but the labels had zero relationship with reality. So we traced all the wiring and labelled it. Now we're still trying to find how the wire goes from the basement to the attic. There was a wire that went town from the attic straight down the endwall of the house, which was surely it... except it just powers an outlet in the bedroom.

The actual power wire comes up from the center of the house, splits at a junction box between the first and second floors, then two wires disappear under a roof. So we're trying to trace that out now.

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Imagine Dumb and Dumber crossed with Three Men and a Baby. Except pre-natal hi-jinks vice infancy hi-jinks. And not as funny.

Watching The Brothers Solomon is like being stuck in a Kids In The Hall marathon: occasionally funny bits, surrounded by acres of painful mugging and weak jokes. This movie is irretrivable dumb. My LCpl C, whose standards are much lower than mine, finished watching this movie and said "I am now just a little bit more retarded."

Executive summary: Do not watch.

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John Scalzi is an overnight sensation in the SF world. Like most overnight sensations, he spent years and years working at it before becoming known.

The Android's Dream is his third published book. It's full of references to the authors that have come before; the major inspirations seem to be Keith Laumer and L. Ron Hubbard. No, really. There are plenty of other influences, of course; I picked out nods to Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Harry Harrison, and Phillip K Dick too.

The main character is Harry Creek, a geek genius working for the State Department as a "Xenosapien Facilitator"; his real job is "Bearer of Bad News". He's calm and has combat experience, so when someone's got to talk to an alien and it's unclear if the alien is going to get unhappy and start spraying acidic ichor, Harry gets the job. So he gets to go break the news that, say, an insectoid ambassador's wife has been denied a visa because she's in a family way.

Harry's got friends in high places, and he owes them some favors, so when a diplomatic situation goes first downhill and then asymptotic, Harry gets the call to find a particular sheep. One sheep on the whole planet Earth, needed to head off an interstellar war that Earth will certainly lose.

Except the sheep isn't really a sheep, it's a woman. Robin Baker. She had deactivated sheep genes inserted into her genome before conception. She had no idea she has sheep genetics, and in fact finds the whole idea rather distasteful. She'd really like to continue running her small pet store. But before you know it, there are three species of assassins closing in, and the only help she's got is the capable but overtasked Harry, and a band of Scientologists, err, "Cultists of the Church of the Evolved Lamb".

It's a decent book, although the first two chapters were an unnecessary shaggy dog story, and the ending seemed a little forced. In between, the hero gets credit for an idea so brilliant that no one had ever thought of it, including hundreds of alien species; but that idea has been discussed in (human) science fiction for the last sixty years.

I don't know if it was intended as a sequel hook, or just the author running out of gas, but the nature of Harry and Robin's relationship was also left hanging. Still, it was a decent read. Especially for someone widely read in SF, who will catch the in-jokes. But to start with Scalzi, I'd recommend Old Man's War instead.

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My nephew's school is doing a magazine-selling fundraiser. I decided I could help out, so I filled out the form, wrote a check, and mailed the completed packet off.

While writing the check, I noticed that this was only the third check I'd written in 2008, and here's it's October already. Of course, I've been living a live where my housing, food, healthcare, and utilities are all provided. But even when I was a civilian before, I tried to pay as many bills electronically as possible. At this rate, the current stack of unused checks I have will last me the rest of my life.

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