05.02.08
Posted in Ranting at 12:10 am by DMZ
Last weekend, a small thing got bigger and I ended up tearing out the master shower, at which point I discovered that (as I’d suspected) the people who did the last bit of work in there did a really horrible job. I did what I could tearing down the master, and then got through the week without it, working a little bit after work — the fiberglass insulation was moldy, so that had to go, and so on.
Pretty soon, I was tearing out the plumbing. Starting Friday after work, I started to go through and fix stuff. Hall hot water pressure’s always been pretty bad. I found it’s because the pipe was 90% clogged with corrosion.
And as I went down, I got angrier and angrier. Like this.
Things going on here:
- on the right, that white thing is a CPVC pipe, a hot water run. I don’t know when it went in, but it’s super fragile and breaks easily. I would later crack my head on that very joint, and it came apart, dumping water all over me. So I had to re-do the CPVC run. I did not use CPVC. No one uses CPVC.
- the rest of those pipes are the old steel pipes that have rusted. You can see they’re leaking corrosion at the joints
- the joint in the center there is, on the left, held together by electrical tape. At some point in this house’s history, someone went down there, saw a leak, and made a decision that they wouldn’t fix it. You can see that it’s dripping there.
- behind that piece, you can also see that there’s a different pipe run (cold) that comes in, hits a T, one leg of which continues, takes a 90 degree turn up to another T. All of those fittings were rusty and leaky
Or check out this piece of work:
On the left, a badly-done union. Note that it is leaking rust-heavy water.
On the right, that’s a 1/2 inch copper run from the master shower (which I tore out) to the cold water line. Note that it’s directly connected. Two different kinds of metals. This leads to all kinds of corrosion problems. This apparently didn’t occur to whoever did the conversion.
Anyway, my point is that in going through and making all these repairs at once, it’s good, but it’s essentially a re-piping job. Once I’ve replaced a broken CPVC run and the corroded fittings it’s attached to, I’ve broken the next run of rusted-out steel piping, and repairing that…
So my week’s run:
Friday: get home, plumb
Saturday: plumb (several hours of discussing plumbing while not doing plumbing)
Sunday: plumb
Mon-Wed: vacation
Thurs: plumb
I spent ~7 hours under my house today, which is down from Sunday’s 15. We’re four fittings away from being done, but the problem with plumbing - heh - is that getting those fittings working
Here’s what gets my goat, though. Every time I have to use a Sawzall to pull out a pipe or a set of fittings, I think “Someone made a decision to leave this for me, and I hate them”. And it’s true. Whoever welded those copper runs directly in either didn’t care enough to find out the right way to do that or didn’t care that it was wrong. And it goes all the way back — someone made the design decision to build this place with piping that would rust, even though they were laying it into interior walls.
And working all day in a crawlspace because someone didn’t want to put the time and effort in before me, well, that’s not the kind of situation that leads to happy thoughts about those who came before me.
Still, I have high hopes that the water pressure will finally leap back up when I’m finished. Here’s hoping.
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04.28.08
Posted in Ranting at 9:15 am by DMZ
Yesterday I spent ~15 hours working on my house’s plumbing, and as you’d expect I’m now covered in small cuts, scrapes, bruises, and one burn. The worst of these, functionally-speaking, is the side of my right thumb, which is exactly where I hit the spacebar while typing.
So writing this is a battle between mindfullness, negative reinforcement, and almost a lifetime of touch typing. It’s going badly.
Also, we still don’t have water. There are four outlets (two to sinks, two to toilets) that use compression fittings and last night I managed to get one of them to go from “spraying water everywhere” to “works” at the end of my long shift. I hate compression fittings.
Now that I think about it, the only thing I like about plumbing at all is running pipe, soldering, and doing the planning, because they’re binary: they either work or you screwed something up. This compression fitting type stuff, where I fix it, it leaks, I fix it, it leaks… oh, how I hate it.
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04.04.08
Posted in Ranting at 12:10 am by DMZ
Look up something popular, say… iPods. Go the actual category for MP3 Players > iPod. Even pick a particular model.
I did this with the nano, as I was considering replacing my venerable one. Searched for items with the “buy it now” option, sorted by price+shipping, lowest. 1,349 items.
The first two pages are all miscategorized items. And of course, ebay makes it hard for you to report those. You might get to some broken ones if you’re lucky. It’s all skins, batteries, adapters — everything that shouldn’t be there. But they can’t be bothered to police even the top-tier categories they spend money advertising on Google with. It’s crazy. Lord forbid people be forced to put their ipod cases in “Consumer Electronics > MP3 Accessories > Cases > Apple iPod” where I might go to shop for those.
It’s like if I went to Target and went to the housewares section, to the toaster aisle, and instead of toasters, there were 900 people trying to sell me bread, extension cords, power adapters, non-conductive forks for sticking into the toaster…. faaaaaaaaaaaaahk, man, it’s just ridiculous.
And now I can’t shop on Amazon, because I’m mad about the whole print-on-demand issue… drives me nuts. Is it really that much easier and cheaper to run a maddening cesspool that drives people like me away that it makes it worthwhile?
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04.02.08
Posted in Ranting at 10:23 pm by DMZ
After over a week of pretty much coughing continuously, I have to say my abs haven’t looked this good in years. I’m two into my six pack, and I’m betting a couple more days and I’ll be showing another two. I should write some kind of best-selling fitness book. “The Sickness Solution: Your Shortcut to Losing Weight and Looking Great”.
Sure, I might have pneumonia, but isn’t that worth it?
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03.21.08
Posted in Ranting at 9:42 pm by DMZ
I haven’t coded seriously in almost five years. Actually, seven, and that was writing some testing tools to do log scanning in Perl. I’ve tinkered a little since then– when I was unemployed, I toyed with using Ruby to prototype a startup idea, for instance.
I’ve been writing an interactive fiction game (think Zork) relating to baseball, in which the player is a general manager of a baseball team, and hilarity ensues.
The funny thing is I’m having the exact same feeling I used to have when I was coding, where I don’t entirely know what I’m doing, so I’ll go in and write out the desired behavior, and then in implementing it resort to increasingly ugly hacks until I can get it to work. I can’t figure out how to get a character to only take certain objects, for instance, so for now I’ve got them accepting anything you give them. While it works, it makes me wince to play through when I can give someone two redundant objects.
Or following: for a plot point I need to get someone to follow the player and then stop when they meet someone else. The only way I’ve figured out how to do that is to turn the follow rule off when they’re near the someone else, which works okay, but it’s also not a particularly good way to do it. And I’ve ended up doing a lot of making environmental behavior location-specific to the player and it just seems unsatisfying.
Part of the problem is that there’s no K&R book for Inform 7. There’s documentation and a recipe book that almost but don’t quite ever seem to tell me what I’m trying to figure out. I have a wishlist for things I want to be able to do and can’t yet.
So my process right now goes:
- pick an item off the to-do list, be it feature or bug
- re-write it
- compile (if fail, troubleshoot)
- test (if fail, troubleshoot)
- repeat
It’s slow, slow going.
The game’s 4,000 words now, which I believe would make it the longest post in USSM history if I pushed it out now, and it’s still a ways from being finished.
The really weird thing is that as much as interactive fiction’s been a niche for ages, it’s been a fairly viable one, but I cannot figure out where to get help on this stuff. I joined a list, it’s dead — though the mod approved me that day. I don’t see updates. I feel like I’m wandering around a ghost town where everyone decided to leave in June of 2007 without bothering to pack up or anything.
Even when I was programming in Fortran 77 in college, you could still find other people tasked with the same kind of work maintaining obsolete systems. But this, this is a little eerie. I can’t seriously be the only person writing a text adventure, can I?
Interestingly (to me, anyway) the only place people seem to be actively discussing this stuff at all is on Usenet, which I haven’t used seriously in many, many years. To see that it’s still living on, well… it warms my heart a little.
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03.11.08
Posted in Ranting at 8:55 pm by DMZ
Netflix doesn’t let customers sign in on the front page, which is the most absurd, ridiculous design decision they could possibly make: they have a default no-cookies-detected home page which includes fields *with which you can register* but if you’re a returning customer there’s absolutely no way to sign in there. You have to click “login” each time, get a new page to render, then submit.
I can’t think of another large-scale ecommerce site that makes this so difficult, and certainly not one that, like Netflix, you have to return to continually.
But let’s say you want to drop them a line and say “look, instead of having the login page render on a second page, even if for some reason you don’t want to immediately draw one, why not just have the “login” link create a small box where you can enter your name/password, like many other sites do?”
Nope.
“Contact Us” has no contact information.
The Help Center supposedly offers ways to contact them, but you can’t actually send them an email: there weirdly is a “Answers by Phone” box when you dead-end, but there’s never any contact information besides that. So I have to call someone, wait on hold, and then talk to someone? Why? And running a call center is expensive — it’s far easier to do something useful with email feedback.
There’s a host of stuff like this — they recently made it impossible for not discernible reason to browse some things in the same way you used to be able to
It’s amazing that Netflix somehow managed to create a help system more difficult and frustrating to use than eBay’s. Congratulations, Netflix. That must have taken some doing.
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03.02.08
Posted in Ranting at 6:33 pm by DMZ
Microsoft’s thinking about targeting ads to Sync users in their car.
“We know where you are and we know where you’re headed. We could target that advertising directly to your car.”
When I worked at AT&T Wireless, I used to have an argument about this pretty frequently. They all went like this:
“We’ll be able to deliver ads to your phone based on where you are! So you’ll be next to a Starbucks and we’ll send you a coupon for $1 a latte!” (it was always Starbucks)
“Do you realize how many Starbucks locations there are in Seattle?”
“What?”
“There are dozens of Starbucks. Are you going to send me dozens of Starbucks coupons as I drive up I-5? I’d turn off my phone to avoid that. It’d be a horrible experience.”
“Um…”
You could, of course, solve this by only sending a few messages and upping the cost and the incentives for the user (”free latte at the Columbia Center Starbucks? I’m there!”) but the implementation ideas always ended up delivering horrible user experiences.
I’m not surprised that the idea hasn’t died: it’s so easy to think that there’s an impressionable customer base just out of current reach, and if only you could reach out and touch them, you could drive them to take a particular action. They just don’t ever think it through to the user’s perspective.
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02.27.08
Posted in Ranting at 8:43 pm by DMZ
… will be entirely determined by whoever first promises to have the FTC shut down companies that include a “subscribe me to all your spam lists” checkbox that resets to checked on re-draw (say, if you recalculate shipping, or attempt to continue with a phone number that doesn’t quite meet their formatting expectation).
Sure, it’s petty. I don’t care.
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Posted in Ranting at 12:53 am by DMZ
“The Great Apathetic Revolution” is one of the best simple pieces on the destruction of the content industries I’ve read, and I highly recommend it.
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02.18.08
Posted in Ranting at 6:15 pm by DMZ
I wrote earlier about what could go wrong if you allowed the MPAA/RIAA/whoever to determine which torrents were violations of their copyright and go after them.
There’s actually a great example already out there: The Church of Scientology abusing copyright claims on eBay.
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