Posted by Doug
Fri, 05 Aug 2005 12:59:16 GMT
I got home from work last night while the family was out doing karate and soccer (BTW, two kid’s activities in the same night is insane). The house was a little warmer than I’m used to.
Carla and I have been doing some serious talks about reducing our budget in an effort to plan for some upcoming events. One of the things she did was bump the AC up another two degrees. It doesn’t sound like much, but every little bit helps.
So the house is warmer than I’m used to. I go up to my office to start hacking on one of my projects. Of course, my office is warmer than the rest of the house because of the home file server I have running in there.
So I’m working away and the family gets home. Carla goes over to the thermostat and proclaims that it’s 89 degrees F in the house; only about five degrees cooler than outside! The short story is that the bearings in my blower have seized. By this time it’s 8:15pm and I can’t get (or don’t want to pay even rates for) an HVAC man to come out.
If the basement had been half-way clean I would have moved us all down there to sleep. As it was, we all sweated in our beds. I don’t remember the last time a cool shower felt so good!
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Posted by Doug
Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:57:00 GMT
We finally made a move last night we’d been planning for a long time. When we first moved into this house, we agreed to let my wife have our fourth bedroom as her playroom (meaning crafts, scrap booking, etc). I had put my very large desk down in the basement and did my moonlighting from there. After about a year, I started telecommuting for my day-job half-time and needed a better working environment. So, Carla lost her room and I moved my stuff up to the fourth bed room. Now that I’m not telecommuting anymore, Carla wanted her room back.
In the mean time, we had gotten Carla a fairly large roll-top desk. About the same time I quit telecommuting we also got her a nice
LCD display. So, in addition to not working as many hours at my desk I was also using Carla’s quite a bit because of the nice display! Since our basement is pretty much a pit right now I wasn’t too excited about moving my desk back down there until we got around to finishing it off. So, I decided to get rid of my desk and just keep using Carla’s. I had someone from church who needed a desk so I gave it to them if they’d come get it.
Last night we had a group of friends over for a Bible study. This is the first time in a couple months the group has met at our hose. So, I got some of the guys to help me move the desk into the fourth bedroom. Even taken apart (the top comes off in one piece leaving two pedestals) it’s heavy and difficult to maneuver. The desk had been down in the living room and needed to move up stairs.
The net result is that our living room is now much larger! We rearranged our other furniture to give the greatest amount of open space. I’m sure the kids will like it. Also, the room up stairs got quite a bit smaller. When we got rid of my desk from out of there, all the stuff that was in it is basically still piled up in the corner. Plus we pulled all the stuff out of Carla’s desk before we moved it. So, that room will still need a lot of work to get it in shape again.
Changes like this are pretty good. It’s nice to get a different feel for our house. Carla plans to do a lot of painting this summer too. I’m looking forward to the results.
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Posted by Doug
Mon, 16 Jun 2003 19:13:00 GMT
I lost power today for no good reason for about 40 minutes. This is one of the first times I’ve been at home when it’s happened in a long while. I watched my UPS wake up and start beeping. It’s not linked to my firewall/gateway (that’s really an old Apple Powermac 8500 running Debian GnuLinux), so I had to manually ssh in and shut it down. I’d always had quesitons whether my UPS worked or not. It does. It just only lasts about five minutes. Of course, my ThinkPad switched over to batter power with no problems at all. The problem was when power came back up. Getting the two power events caused my sound driver to pork up. Now the only thing that will fix it is a reboot. 
Since I don’t really like working in total silence I’ll probably reboot before too long. Actually, I probably would like to work in total silence. The problem is all the noice all these computers make. Having some music going just covers up the whine of fans.
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