An estimate for replacing tub, taps, wall tiles and adding floor tiles amounted to $5k! This didn’t include a new toilet, vanity or light fixtures. For about 1% of that amount I spent the weekend cleaning and epoxy painting the tub. Looks pretty good. Now I have to wait a few days while the paint cures and then re-caulk.
Mom needed a receptacle on her balcony. I drilled through the wall with a 16 inch bit in my hammer drill. Problem: wall is 18 in. thick, brick veneer and two layers of concrete with an empty (?) middle part. As best I could I projected a spot inside for a mating hole and drilled. Then tried two more. I couldn’t see daylight. I figured there must be some opaque insulation in between those two layers of concrete. After much poking I managed to get a stiff wire from the inside to the outside and pulled a 3 conductor wire and telephone cord (with modular jack) through the holes. The major problem was the hollow middle wasn’t as wide as the concrete parts so, in the end, it was sheer luck that I managed to bend that wire enough to find the outside whole from one of the inside ones.
Some day it may grow through your gate.
I remember that it wasn’t as hot but more humid the day I married my wife.
To celebrate we dine at a local French restaurant where I was kind enough to share a glass of Beaujolais with my better half. Or rather she was kind enough to let me have the rest of the bottle and drive us home.
Apparently when a dog lightly pants he is “happy breathing” — something like a cat purring I guess. Finnegan “happy breathes” when I scratch him on the side of his head, when he’s begging at my wife’s place at the supper table or when we go for a walk.
A client provided an MS Access export of their asset database: a table of 330,000 rows by 77 columns. Good ol' Access felt these data needed over 2 Gbytes of storage. I exported the table as a CSV file, about 143 Mbytes and then imported it into PostgreSQL. It needed only 240 Mbytes or so. Queries are much faster than with Access, too. When I made a compressed backup (dump) of the table from PostgreSQL only a modest 7.9 Mbytes was required.
A terse email from the VP of Personnel announced that the IT Manager no longer worked for the company.
He’ll be remembered by most, not fondly though: we all have stories about this strange character.
Someone asked me if I was interested in that job. After some thought while running home tonight I think not. It’s an admin position with 3 or 4 subordinates, budgetting for several hundred leased PCs, a PBX, ISP, software licences, etc. There’s no hint of technical software development in that.