blueslugs.com

I’ve been waiting for a new electric fan to arrive. I checked in on the shipment today, and the UPS site reports:

 07/26/2006      5:30 A.M.       THE PACKAGE IS DELAYED DUE TO EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL 

Huh. Well, I hope it shows up soon: it’s still taking a while for the house to cool down in the evening.

Courtesy of bloglines.com:

It doesn’t look like I’ll be packing away the downspout extensions or the portable sump anytime soon…

It’s Sun’s U.S. manufacturing shutdown, so I’m getting caught up on reading and household repairs. In addition to last week’s work reading, I read two other business/investing books:

• Jeffrey Zygmont’s The VC Way, which was interesting (but didn’t live up to its subtitle). Mostly structured stories about venture capital, and its role in the startup process. Ok.
• Jeremy J. Siegel’s The Future for Investors, which was simply an excellent book for investors. (Particularly those with a 30 – 50 year window ahead.) Recommended.

Since I also installed all the new doorknobs, perhaps I’ll spend today writing some code for fun.

Now that the Shuttle system appears unsalvagable—no activity, even with a nice fresh BIOS chip—I suppose I should record the emergency server rebuild from a few weeks ago. On Saturday, Dina noticed she wasn’t getting any email. We had houseguests, so I didn’t slip out to Central Computer until Sunday, with a plan to wrap a new system around the old disks. I ultimately ended up with

• Asus A8V Deluxe
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 1 GB
• Intel PRO/1000 GT [32-bit drivers from Intel for now]
• ATI PCI graphics card
• 2 × Western Digital 120GB drives

all in a CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case, and which is now running Solaris 10. The motherboard works well, although I’m only using the IDE controllers and none of the SATA or RAID functionality. (I also couldn’t match a driver to the onboard Gigabit Marvell Ethernet.)

Like any project at our place now, willing helpers materialize, tools in hand, even for a no-tools case:

I’ve built enough systems now that we shortly were ready for action, and blueslugs.com and highmaintenancemom.com were back:

cooler lives in the office closet, which it shares with the UPS which selflessly filters PG&E’s rot gut, leaving only nicely distilled power:

(Without the Shuttle as a new desktop, I’m deciding between building another A8V-based system in a CoolerMaster Cavalier 4, or buying an Ultra 20.)

[T: Solaris]

Nathaniel and Benjamin have been trading an ear infection back and forth for the past few weeks, and Nathaniel also looks like he caught the stomach bug that had been prowling through his class at daycare. (But Ben never developed chicken pox, so that’s one positive.)

I finally decided that the colds and allergies were systematic, rather than uncorrelated, and went under a part of the house to cover an open-to-ground crawlspace with 6 mil polyethelene sheeting. Air quality in the house is already better—I haven’t taken Claritin in a couple of days, and Dina mentioned her nose has been clear in the mornings. It took a little net research to figure out how to do this and, since I can write the Home Depot-based recipe, I’ll go under again and take some pictures for a longer “how to” posting.

I also did the second “clean out the hot tub when the baby turns one” chore. Icky: dead slugs (and live ones). It’s actually turning out to be a useful water experience for the boys, although Ben doesn’t like the bubbles and waves from the “air” mode. There’s a leak somewhere near the top—likely by one of the filter inlets—so I’m going to try a dynamic leak sealing system, but that will be another posting as well.

Homes are fun.

Every so often we have a summer so bad all we can do is try to ride it out until things start to change. This has been one of those summers. In addition to the death of my father, three days before the birth of our son, we have also had what we thought were bees in the house. Stephen’s plan was to spray insecticide and consider the situation fixed. I went along with the plan for over a month watching the bees bounce off the walls and die hitting the light fixtures while I fed Nathaniel and tried to watch (bad) television. After a month of two to four bees a day, I had had enough. Stephen caulked the “hole” from the outside and, as I expected, there were more bees… It turns out they weren’t actually coming from all the way outside. The bees appeared more angry than injured and when one flew into Nathaniel’s car seat I thought I might go insane. So in a fit of rage, over the lack of a true solution, I called an exterminator. Little did I know that I was far from a solution… Read the rest of this entry »