Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Blog

  • Saturday update

    Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover.  I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide.  The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect.  Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped.  Anyways, tomorrow I hope to get out earlier and get the bulk of the work done.  Not sure if I’ll get to blowing out the return lines.  We’ll see.

    On the calendar front…  turns out Sunbird is not buggy after all as I had assumed yesterday.  Apple’s iCal exhibits similar behavior.  It appears that if I have events with RECURRENCE-ID properties, somewhere there needs to be an event that “defines” the recurrence with an RRULE or RDATE property.  Oracle Calendar’s output is missing this “defining” event.  I thought briefly about trying to “fix” the recurrences by adding RDATEs, etc. to the iCalendar output, but I think that’s more trouble than it’s worth.  I’m just going to try rewriting the recurring events as separate events, giving them unique IDs based on the start date of the event.  I’ll try it out Monday and see how it goes.

  • Time to brew!

    It’s been a long time since we’ve brewed a beer. Going by my financial software (which is going to be indispensable when I write my memoirs), the last time I bought homebrew ingredients was June 21, 2000, and according to Oracle Calendar, we brewed an Amber Ale on the following Saturday, the 24th. That’s practically a lifetime ago. If I recall, we picked an Amber Ale in honor of Alaskan Amber, which we had consumed large quantities of during our recent trip to Alaska. By 2000, I had brewed several batches of beer and was just starting to perfect my routine. Now I’m going to have to see how much of that I can remember. I also need to dig through my brewing stuff to see if I need any new equipment, supplies etc. I know I need a new bucket or carboy for primary fermentation, plus some plastic siphon tubing and possibly bottle caps. We’ll see what else, I guess.

    Here’s the recipe we’ve chosen. It’s very seasonably apropos. Cathy sent it to me in November 2000, and it’s sat in my inbox ever since.

    Anne’s Choice Christmas Ale

    Contributed By: Mare
    Ingredients for 5 gallons:

    • 3 1/3 pounds Munton and Fison Stout Kit
    • 3 1/3 pounds Munton and Fison amber malt extract
    • 3 pounds Munton and Fison light/amber dry malt extract
    • 1/2 ounce Hallertauer hops (55 minutes)
    • 3/4 pound honey (simmer 45 minutes)
    • 5 three-inch cinnamon sticks (simmer 45 minutes)
    • 2 teaspoons allspice (simmer 45 minutes)
    • 1 teaspoon cloves
    • 6 ounces ginger root
    • 6 rinds from medium-sized oranges (simmer 45 minutes)
    • 1/2 ounce Hallertauer hops (five minutes)
    • Wyeast No. 1007 German ale liquid yeast
    • 7 ounces corn sugar to prime

    Original specific gravity: 1.069
    Final specific gravity: 1.030
    Primary fermentation: 14 days at 61 degrees F (16 degrees C) in glass
    Age when judged (since bottling): six months

    Brewer’s specifics: Simmer spices and honey for 45 minutes. Boil malt and hops 50 minutes. Add finishing hops and boil five minutes. Cool, strain, and pitch yeast. (Note: Honey/spice mix is added to the wort just before cooling. They are not boiled together.)

    I think I’ll throw a page up on my wiki to document my brewing procedure, as I recall it in bits and pieces.

    On a totally unrelated note, I can’t believe that it’s mid November and most of the leaves are still up on the trees. By this time last year, the yard was knee-deep in them. So far this year, I haven’t even touched a rake yet. I’m sure the extremely warm October had something to do with it, or maybe it just hasn’t been windy enough yet, but whatever, it’s really strange.

  • Bedroom wiring finished

    Finished up the master bedroom fan switch wiring this weekend. It turns out that after I removed the downstream wiring from the box, I was able to fit the switch in the box just fine. No need to muck around in the attic pulling new wire. Five years ago, when I had more time on my hands, I probably would have pulled that wire. But now, if there’s a shortcut to be taken, I’m taking it.

    I also replaced the rest of the outlets in the room. On the last outlet I replaced (the outlet to the left of the closets, behind Cathy’s dresser) the outlet box was a little screwed up… kind of hard to describe, but it’s one of those boxes that can be expanded by removing the side and ganging it together with another box. And anyhow, the removable side, which was attached to the adjacent stud, was loose, and the rest of the box was a little loose and crooked. I fixed it up the best I could, but in a perfect world, the box should really be replaced. Again though, that’s one to put on the list for some mythical time in the future when I have lots of spare time.

    I also winterized the pressure washer and finished hooking up the unloader line on the air compressor. As of today, I haven’t yet managed to psyche myself up enough to turn it on and see if it works.

    So all in all, not a bad weekend around the house.

  • Calendaring revisited

    It’s been a year or so since I gave up on my home-grown calendar sync setup.  It was nice for awhile, then we upgraded our Oracle Calendar server, it broke, I tried to fix it and didn’t get very far, and that was the end of that.  Well, as it happens, there’s been some recent interest in an Oracle-calendar-to-iCalendar gateway at work, so I decided to drag my old stuff out and try again.  And it turns out, things have improved in a year’s time.  First off, the Oracle Calendar SDK seems to be more reliable.  I used to get lots of internal library errors, particularly when trying to download large chunks of calendar data.  But that doesn’t seem to be happening now (I know, famous last words).  And on top of that, the iCalendar output is much cleaner.  For example, recurring events are now properly tagged with RECURRENCE-ID properties, so recurrences “just work” now without any extra work on my part.  There are still a few little quirky things, but by and large, it’s a huge improvement.

    Also improved is Sunbird, Mozilla’s standalone calendar app.  It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it seems much more robust than previous versions.  I’d eventually like to use Sunbird as my main calendaring app everywhere, because it’s cross-platform and it allows interactive editing of subscribed WebDAV calendars (unlike Apple’s iCal).  The only stumbling block is my old, crusty Palm PDA, which only syncs with iCal.  Much as I’ve liked the Palm PDAs I’ve used over the years, I’m wondering if it isn’t time to start thinking about something different.  It’d be great to have something with functionality similar to Sunbird’s, in a PDA form factor.  Never going to get that with something that relies on desktop sync.

  • Wiring: Plan B

    As is often the case with these things, I hit a snag trying to fish wire from the attic to the basement for my bedroom rewiring project. I encountered some horizontal blocking in the stud cavity which prevented me from running the wire all the way through. That basically left me with three choices:

    1. Press forward and try to run the wire through the cavity as planned, turning most of my hair gray and losing several years from my life expectancy in the process;
    2. Try to find an alternate stud cavity to run my wire; or
    3. Come up with another plan altogether.

    I’ll admit, I briefly considered #1. I’ve fished wire through some tight spots in my day, and if I’m determined enough, I could get the wire through, horizontal blocking and all. But if there’s an easier way, I’d rather not deal with the frustration.

    #2 might work. I fished wire through a different stud cavity for a similar project a couple years back, and had no problems. But it’s really kind of a crap shoot, and I’d rather not drill tons of holes all over the place just to find a clear shot from the attic to the basement.

    All this brings us to #3. After consideration, I decided to tap into some existing wiring in the basement instead. It turns out there’s a nearby circuit that has only a single outlet on it (used to be for a window air conditioner). So I’m going to tie the wiring into this circuit. Simpler and easier than trying to fish through the wall.

    Moral of the story: the first plan you come up with is not necessarily the best or easiest, so don’t get set on it.

  • Drilling top plates

    I drilled through another top plate yesterday. Every time I drill through framing, there’s always this nagging worry that I’m drilling through the last bit of wood that’s keeping the house standing, and this hole is going to be the one that makes the whole house come crashing down into a big pile of rubble. So far, I’ve been lucky. But I still have to drill the bottom plate.. so I’m not out of the woods yet.

    The good news is, I think I’ve found a cordless drill I’m happy with — the 12 volt DeWalt. I’ve never been a huge fan of the higher-voltage drills because they’re just too heavy and unwieldy for everyday around-the-house work. My old 9.6 volt drill was nice and light, but it lacked the torque to drive a paddle bit through a double 2×4 top plate. The new 12 volt handled it with flying colors, and it’s almost the same weight. For a weekend warrior like me, it seems to be the perfect balance between power and convenience.

  • Not a bad year for the pool

    We had a pretty good 2007 swimming season.  We opened up on Memorial Day weekend and were swimming soon thereafter.  And we set a new record for latest day in the pool — October 9.  As a matter of fact, the pool got pretty regular use in late September and the first week of October because of unseasonably warm weather.  We finally shut things down on October 13, so we had a swimming season of a little over 4 months.  Contrast that with 2006, when we didn’t open until a week into June, and closed in mid September.

    The never-ending pool repair project drags on, although significant progress was made in 2007.  The coping stones are now mortared down and grouted, and the entire deck has been caulked with Sika self-leveling sealant.  I also resurfaced an area of sunken concrete by the house.  Still left to do: re-grout between the coping stones and the tile, although I’m debating how I want to handle this.  It might make sense to grind the joint square, which would necessitate draining the pool (because of the mess).  If I decide to do that, I’ll probably put this off until a later year, so I can re-tile the deep end and give the pool a fresh coat of paint as well.  I know it’s not happening in 2008.

    One thing that didn’t happen much in 2007 was mowing.  NWS claims this was the “worst drought year since 1999,” although it seems to me that 2002 was worse than either this year or 1999.   The past two days, we’ve finally gotten some relief, so I imagine I’ll be cutting the grass one last time after things dry out.  Last mowing of the season is typically around the first week of November.  Then it’s on to leaf removal.. fun fun.

  • More WordPress

    Well, as these things always go, the WordPress conversion turned out not to be quite as simple as I had originally thought. Now, I expected that permalinks would be broken, so I went through and fixed all those (as well as some permalinks back into my old Blosxom blog that I never bothered to update when I went to b2evo). What I didn’t expect, was that all of my old 2-part b2evo posts also broke. Back in the day, I made liberal use of these using b2evo’s <!--more--> tag. The export process only extracted the text of the posts up to the <!--more--> tag, ignoring the rest.

    WordPress has a completely different method of handling two-part posts using what it calls “post excerpts”. So, for now, just to pull these posts in, I just went through each one and cut-and-pasted the rest of the post from b2evo, separating the two parts with [More:], as b2evo would display them. It was a tedious, manual process, of course, but I only had to do it once.

    So now, I think I’m entirely moved over to WordPress with no links to old blogs anywhere. Now I just need to go update my Wiki in a few places where I had permalinks.

  • WordPress

    Now that I’m using my blog again, I decided to ditch b2evolution for WordPress. B2Evolution has served me well, but I’ve never been crazy about its look-and-feel or its selection of skins. And, most of my geeky-type friends who blog, use WordPress, so I figured I would give it a shot.

    Importing was easy thanks to these instructions I found.  Ironically enough, it was the same procedure I used awhile back when I converted from Blosxom to b2evolution:  export the existing stuff into Movable Type format, then import.

    I really like the clean look-and-feel of WordPress, and it’s certainly much spiffier than the version of b2evolution I was using, although that’s not really a fair comparison because I hadn’t upgraded b2evolution since I installed it in late 2005.

    In other news, I just registered lpaulriddle.com, which I’ll eventually use to house this blog and some other stuff.

     

  • Michael’s room finished (except for carpet)

    Finally put a wrap on painting Michael’s room last night. Based on prior blog entries, this project droned on for almost a year. Kind of par for the course for projects these days, it seems.

    The room has actually been habitable for a month now (Michael slept there for the first time on 9/22… a month ago to the day), but the room has been waiting on one of us to touch up the paint in the corners and around the trim. I finally knocked that off last night. For as bad shape as the walls were in when we started this, I must say the finished product looks pretty nice. At times, I had my doubts about how it was going to turn out.

    I learned one valuable lesson from this: when cutting in where two different surfaces meet (i.e. around trim and in corners), skip the blue painter’s tape, use a good quality sash type brush, and just do it freehand. I was amazed at how easy it was, and it didn’t take any longer than it would have with the tape, either. Apparently it’s possible to get better results with the tape than we did, but if it’s just as easy to do it freehand, why bother?

    Nothing left to do with the room now except get it carpeted, which we’ll let the pros take care of after we finish painting the master bedroom.