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Travels and Images

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Saturday 18 January 2003

Saturday - called my friend D last night and canceled the weekend visit I had planned. Since I could barely speak for coughing he sounded rather relieved not to have me about, but sympathetic. Watched a lot of bad tv today, read some, played with the pc, felt much better actually. Still coughing and sneezing a lot - but the aches and pains and toothache have subsided mostly.

My friend S stopped by with some soup for me, and used the DSL to check on some web stuff - her dial-up connection was having fits today for some reason. Nice to have some company - I hope she doesn't get what I have...

Tried to put Win2000 on the Sony laptop. What a mistake. I'll put Win2k back....

Friday 17 January 2003

Friday - still sick. Went to work and infected others for revenge.

Thursday 16 January 2003

Thursday - out sick.

Wednesday 15 January 2003

Wednesday - seven hundred dollars poorer, but with running water. It's a deal.

The leak was where Bill, the gentleman from American Leak Detection, said it would be, and exactly what he said it would be. A hot water pipe was on top of, and touching a cold water pipe. The copper pipe used was the cheapest legal schedule, M, and over time the subtle movements due to repeated heating and cooling had worn a hole in one pipe, and the resulting stream of water then finished by making a hole in the other. Bill had deduced from pressurizing the cold side, and seeing warm water run, and pressurizing the warm side and having air come out of the warm pipes that this would be the case. He then used a metal and sound detector to find where the pipes crossed, and then drilled, carefully, and jackhammered, carefully, a foot square opening in the slab. It was a bit easier than most. So here is a picture of the result:

Pipes under the floor. The lower two had been touching.
The top pipe was not leaking, and we don't know what it was for.

The repair was fairly quick, soldering, air and water pressure testing performed, and then the hold was backfilled with sand, and a concrete patch put in place. The concrete should be dry and hard by now, 24 hours later, and I can put the carpet pad, the carpet, and the furniture, back.

I can recomment American Leak Detection as being fast, competent, and professional. Balboa Insurance, on the other hand I will soon drop. From first to last, indifference and evasions. After I finally comitted to spending the money to fix the leak myself they claimed that an adjuster would come out during the work to check on possible slab and foundation damages. No such person ever showed, of course...

I am home sick with the flu, or something, anyway. Working on the page I see that once again my links have been mangled by something. This is getting tiresome. Back to Wordpad for the fixes I guess.

Tuesday 14 January 2003

Tuesday - took the cats over to a friends. My good friend C at work says that when the contractors tore up her floors that the cats went crazy, and peed on everything for weeks. My hope is that when they come back there won't be anything different for them to notice.

Phoebe didn't want to get in the cat carrier. He has clear memories of trips to the vet and rectal thermometers it seems. "No, No, NO!! NO! I will NOT go in there, NOT a CHANCE.....mmmmmm......salami" Of course, the friend who is taking them in for the day is also the friend that took him to the vet....

Monday 13 January 2003

Monday - was another Monday. But I did make some advances, got an old code (1993) compiled with PVM. Parts were missing and parts were in (very) non-standard Cray Fortran and had to be massaged. Of course, it doesn't actually run yet. I also put the big monitor from the old windows box onto the Linux box, it helps to be able to see what you are doing! But now the windows box won't boot - either it dislikes the new, small, monitor intensely, or maybe the grinding noise was the diskdrive, not the fan like we all thought...

Going home, late, there was a 40 minute wait because of construction at the corner of Rosamond Blvd and Sierra Highway. Actually there was no construction - they had put up barricades and lights blocking a lane, but not done any work. So around ten thousand commuters had to file through a single lane. If there is a god, then the way to St. Peter's gate for highway contractors will be a detour through purgatory.

In other news, I seem to be coming down with a cold, and a toothache at the same time.

Tomorrow the plumbing contractors are coming to jackhammer up my floor. I finally got an answer from the insurance company, " no", so it's out of my own pocket. But I had to leave an irate message that they were "unresponsive" and that I was changing companies next week before they would even deign to give me that answer. How do these people stay in business?? The answer wasn't unexpected, my father told me that would happen, but the delay in answering is outrageous.

Sunday 12 January 2003

Sunday - a nice sunny day in the valley. The San Francisco Fortyniner's lost, terribly, to Tampa Bay. The Oakland Raiders,
however, won handily.

Not a lot else to say. Went to dinner at the 'Blue Koi' with friends.

Picture of the Week

waterfountain spigot in the shape of a lions head

Photo Notes:This was a little fountain in an outdoor restaurant in Santa Barbara. I particularly like the subtle shades of color on the background wall.

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