The Blog of Harald

Of course, since I drive to work now, I don’t have commute-time for reading anymore, so I should really get off the computer and go read one of those books I just bought. But Firestarter: Rekindled is on in two hours :-)

On the way home the other night I stopped at the huge Chapters big-box bookstore at Bayview Village. Sadly, they only had _one_ of the many books I was looking for. This wasn’t obscure stuff, either; it was all recent mass-market SF&F paperbacks. I was quite surprised; the store’s SF&F section alone is larger than some small mall bookstores. Naturally, the computer said that all but one of the books were available at four _other_ big box stores. But I was _in_ Bayview Village…

So today on the way back from Lenscrafters (Charlotte whacked me in the glasses earlier this week, bending them), I stopped into the small Coles store in Fairview Mall. They had all of the books I was looking for (except the Diane Duane ones), and three more besides that I didn’t know I was looking for. This in an SF&F section about one-tenth the size of the one in Bayview Village!

Sure, I could order this stuff online. However, with the cheaper selections I get no discount at amazon.ca, a 5% discount at chapters.ca, and a 10% discount in store, so I like to get stuff in store when I can.

bq. From a nutritional standpoint, you should think of soy in two categories: soy that is non-fermented, and soy that is fermented. The troubles I’ve documented on this site are associated with using primarily processed, non-fermented soy foods such as soy milk, flour, nuts, baby formula and the many soy products that have been flooding the market recently.

bq. However, studies have shown traditionally fermented soy–which is the form that is wildly popular in many Asian cultures–aids in preventing and reducing a variety of diseases including certain forms of heart disease and cancers.

(More at mercola.com: Soy Bad, Soy Good: What You Must Know When Considering Soy-Based Foods)

bq. A cup of coffee each morning may wake you up, but a new study suggests caffeine might hinder your short-term recall of certain words.

bq. Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew – the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.

(More at BBC NEWS | Health | A coffee can make you forgetful)

Japan has come up with “an expensive version”:http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/bottle-cap-tripod-017939.php of a bottle cap tripod for your camera, but you can “build your own”:http://www.fiendishthingy.org/tripod/ with a trip to the hardware store…

bq. “Food is an important part of a balanced diet”.

— Fran Leibowitz

bq. “Vegetables are what food eats”.

— Andrew Flint

(I may add more :-)

The low-carb fad is apparently dead, or at least dying; woo hoo!

Yahoo! News – Americans Abandoning Low-Carb Diets -Survey

(via “Teal Sunglasses”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001534.html apfn)

It’s fun walking through Home Depot with two (yes, only two) 4-foot lengths of rebar (steel reinforcing bar, for concrete). People do look at you strangely, especially the staff…

We use them for kiting. Specifically, for supporting those fiberglass telescoping fishing poles used for displaying banners, spinsocks, and the like…

It’s been a week since “I installed postgrey”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/07/06/greylist/.

Wow!

My spam volume has droppped back to manageable levels; 10-20 per day (maximum). Even better, I’m no longer getting 10s of those encrypted ZIP file viruses every day; greylisting stops them all dead (at least so far :-).

I suppose the spammers will eventually figure it out, and start runing mail queues, but (in theory) it should be easier to pick those up via DNS block lists…

A “mesmerizing animated gif”:http://boardgamegeek.com/bggavatars/avatar_1083617851.jpg for your enjoyment…

(via “defective yeti”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000929.html)

bq. “Journalism, like all commodities, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. As the demand for skeptical reporting dropped, the supply fell back to match it.”

– John Cassidy

(via the “Quotation of the Day”:http://members.rogers.com/quotationoftheday/index.html mailing list).

Wow; the “ultimate messy computer desk”:http://bash.org/mess/accepted/382128_PinkFuzzyBunny! My Ivar isn’t nearly as bad!

On the other hand, I do have friends whose desks are almost this messy! I wish I had known the contest was running; I would have taken a picture of my father-in-law’s office…

(Click on the arrows to see the rest of the collection of messy desks :)

Spam volumes have been rising continually around here. I started my foray into automated spam filtering a couple of years back; at the time, I was receiving about 100 per _quarter_. Now I’m getting almost 100 per _day_.

I needed an excuse to upgrade my “postfix”:http://www.postfix.org/ install to the new “2.1 release”:ftp://ftp.utoronto.ca/mirror/packages/postfix/index.html, so I decided to install “postgrey”:http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/, a “greylisting”:http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/ daemon. So far I’m using it after all of my other spamtraps, but it seems to be working reasonably well. I’ll be watching the logs for a while to make sure…

In a nutshell, greylisting relies on the fact that spammers use dump-and-run tactics, while legitimate email gets queued at the sender. So, when a new, previously unknown client connects, the mailserver sends a “temporary deny”. If that connection is a spammer, they’ll probably not return; the reject means the spam was refused. If the sender was legitimate, it will retry, and our server will allow the retry through.

Pretty cool, if you ask me :-)

I’ve put a temporary patch on the drain pipe, so that the kids can use their bathroom. A piece of rubber and a hose clamp will seal the leak until I have time to do the heavy lifting (and until I can invite a friend over to help :-)…

In the People With Too Much Time On Their Hands Category, We have GPS Drawing and the new, more challenging, “GPS Drawing in the air”:http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/air/wingfest.htm.

ABS < -> Copper fittings are 7.5″ long. The drop from the floor to the existing copper elbow is only 6″so, I can’t use an adapter on the vertical run. Suspecting this in advance, I purchased everything I need to replace the DWV piping all the way back to the “closet” (a plumbing euphemism for toilet, apparently): adapter, straight pipe, elbow, closet flange, and a new wax fitting (with bolts).

So now I have to remove the upstairs toilet, replace all of the DWV plumbing, and re-install the toilet. I’ll probably have other parts to replace in the process; the water inlet piping, for example, is old and will probably need replacing.

I’m really hoping that it stops there. Minor leaks like this too often mushroom into massive renovations, and I _already_ need to re-drywall the downstairs bathroom when this is all done…

I was brain-dead on “Thursday”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/07/02/plumbing-trouble-and-bird-nests/. My neighbour helpfully pointed out that I can replace the cracked copper DWV piping with ABS; they make ABS < -> copper fittings for this purpose. No plumber required; even _I_ can work with ABS :-)

So I need to run out to the store and get a bunch of ABS piping, and adapters. However, I need to know what size to get. Applying my superior mathematics skills, I measure the outside diameter of the pipe at slightly less that 10″. Divide by pi, and the pipe diameter is slightly less than 3.18″. Now, I _know_ that copper pipe is made in 3″ and 3.5″ sizes, not 3.18″ :-). This could be an inside diameter vs. outside diameter thing, but the number is still strange. Still, it’s probably safe to assume 3″, right?

Fortunately, there is google. The third hit for “copper pipe diameter”:http://www.google.com/search?q=copper+pipe+diameter is “Notes on Pipe”:http://www.gizmology.net/pipe.htm, which explains that:

bq. Oddly, there is nothing about a ½” pipe that is ½”, be it copper, iron, or PVC

bq. Well, it seems that back in the beginning of time – copper pipe was introduced in the 1930’s – copper pipe was indeed standardized at the nominal diameter inside with a 1/16″ wall, making it 1/8″ bigger on the outside. As the metallurgy improved, allowing manufacturers to use thinner metal (and thus increase profits), they increased the inner diameter rather than decrease the outer diameter simply to allow the pipe fit existing fittings.

bq. As the manufacturers began to make bigger and bigger pipe, they found that 1/16″ wall thickness was insufficient. Thus, the inner diameter of larger pipes is smaller than the nominal size, while smaller pipes are larger.

And, usefully, a chart of nominal sizes with actual measurements, telling me that my assumption is correct; my 3.18″ pipe is, in fact, a 3″ copper pipe!

Next week, we learn why 2″x4″ lumber is neither 2″ nor 4″ :-)

So I found the moldy smell.

The downstairs bathroom has been smelling moldy, for a little while, but between the funeral and our camping trip, I haven’t had time to deal with it. Yesterday, I finally started investigating. The odour was coming in through the vent fan, sucked in by the chimney effect from the upstairs skylight.

The previous owners had blocked up the outside portion of the vent pipe; I was hoping that the problem was that water was getting in from the outside, and soaking the insulation they had stuffed into the pipe.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t it.

I discovered that the vent pipe wasn’t actually connected to the fan; there was an eight inch gap into the empty space between the ceiling and the upstairs floor. Looking closely, I saw the telltale signs of a nail starting to pull out of wet drywall (which wasn’t there before; the problem has apparently been getting worse)…

So I started pulling the ceiling apart. Imagine my surprise when I found that the layer above the drywall was twigs, leaves, and shredded newspaper!!! The reason the previous owners had blocked the vent pipe was that birds were getting in. Sadly, they left the nest in the ceiling; Eight inches deep, and about 3′ square. That much humus can hold a lot of water, and when it gets wet, it rots. Tah-dah; instant mold.

I pulled two garbage bags full of stuff out of the ceiling before I ran out of wet. After cleaning up, I was able to explore the space. Immediately above the wet spot is the upstairs toilet. After wiping off the dampness, I saw the leak; a roughly 1mm crack, in the pipe itself, next to an elbow joint. Such a small hole, to cause so much trouble…

I don’t have the equipment (or skills) for such a repair; time to call the plumber!

* “Black Tea May Help Get Blood Circulating”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040623/hl_nm/tea_circulation_dc

bq. The authors suspect that black tea improved the dilation of the men’s blood vessel, allowing better blood flow [to the heart].

* “Atkins-style diet could damage chances of having a baby”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20040628/hl_afp/health_women_fertility

bq. The research — conducted on mice — found that a diet containing 25 percent protein disrupted the normal genetic imprinting pattern in early embryos. It also had an impact on embryos that were transferred to other uteruses.

bq. Embryos receive copies of most genes from both parents, and imprinting causes a gene from just one parent — and not the other — to be switched on. If both gene sets are switched on, development can go haywire. Imprinting flaws are widely blamed for foetal malformations and the extremely high rate of spontaneous abortions among cloned farm animals.

* “Watching TV may speed up puberty”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3847505.stm

bq. Watching too much television may distort the hormonal balance of adolescents and push many of them into early puberty, say researchers. Italian researchers found children denied access to television for just one week experienced a 30% jump in their melatonin levels. The hormone is thought to prevent the early onset of puberty.

(All via “Teal Sunglasses”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/, apparently my best source of filtered health news :-)

I almost peed myself laughing while reading “On The Ball”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000920.html over at “defective yeti”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com/.

bq. One moment we’re merrily boinging up and down, the next we’re laying there with dazed looks on our faces, I sprawled cockeyed against the wall, The Squirrelly several feet away on his back, looking like two guys waking up on the morning after a particularly enjoyable bachelor party.