rains and pours

of course there's the unsettled weather, perhaps caused by global warming. a summer that seems to be hanging around all year long interspersed with the furies of tropical cyclones, and when those tempests are not to be found, afternoon or early evening thunderstorms.

...boy, those are really some thunderstorms. great cracking bolts of lightning and car-alarm-tripping thunderclaps amidst instant road-flooding deluges (both in las pinas and makati).

but that's not what this post is about.

i'd been feeling a little pressure in my left groin area (wrong side for an appendicitis episode). it wasn't painful, just somewhat uncomfortable. last friday, however, it turned into a pain, but not like the stabbing pain that lit up my back when my (former) kidney stone announced its presence some years back.

drunk a couple of tylenols and waited for the pain to dull, which it took an hour to. took a bath -- and a leak, and pink urine.

blood.

worrisome to say the least.

long story short, get to makati, drag housemate to makati med e.r. and get this looked at.

took a while, and took a while longer to get the result of the urinalysis. blood in the urine.

location of the pain seems to mean that the stone is near the bladder already, so may actually pass soon. to aid that eventuality, i was prescribed a 10-day regimen of little golden spheroidal gelcaps (at 3x a day). after which, see a urologist for further instructions.

hmm. this is looking to be expensive. at any rate, that's still next week, so just take meds and lots of water and hope for the best.

...and then this morning...

parking at the las pinas apartment has its own little thing going on, primarily because the person i refer to as "the green bastard" insists on considering the whole driveway fronting the units to be his particular right (and right of way, nevermind what godforsaken hour he feels the need to go out). also, he does not park in his unit's carport, which makes it difficult to park in our carport unless i reverse up the driveway.

whole other story. suffice to say i've made an arrangement with the landlords where i use the parking allotment of the first unit (where they stay).

back to this morning. thanks to an enthusiastic attendant at a gas station, who cleaned the radiator overflow bottle unasked (and managed to crack the old, brittle plastic), i've taken to filling up the radiator every few days. today, was another of those days. i took the car out of the "unit a" carport and parked it in front of our unit. stopped the engine, popped the hood, topped up the radiator.

car wouldn't start. engine would turn over twice, and then the dash indicators would die.

um.

commute to office, check online, batteries are in the 4-5K range.

so that's my rains and pours; looming expenses for test procedures and specialized medications -- and now the car also needs attention. could be just the battery, could be more than that.

ah, well.

scary

dark, coming back from a jaunt to find the location of the end-of-month wedding...

south superhighway, heading north, just got down from the alabang viaduct.

seeing as i try to maintain a steady 60kph in the interests of fuel economy, i have taken the middle lane.

just then, up ahead. something. blinking, dim, orange. there's a car, stopped in the center lane.

i am being passed at that very moment on either side by people impatient at my lack of velocity, and there's a car behind me closing fast.

out of gear, brake and hit the hazard button on the dash. following car sees the blinking hazards and jinks to the left - car comes to a stop and there's a man there, just now setting up those triangular warning reflectors behind his 80's s-class benz. boy, his blinkers are sure dim.

with the road behind clear, i go to the left and head off, noting that there's an 80's bmw 3-series in front of the benz, and a wrecker truck in front of the bmw.

geez, the wreckers could have at least been the ones to put out the reflectors, or have better warning markings or flashing lights or something on their vehicle.

much later, closer to home; only then do i notice just how much i was stressed by that incident.

monday

sometime in the past two weeks, an officemate handed me a little card that entitled the bearer to a free training session at the boxing gym nearby.

so: borrowed gloves and hand wraps from jo last saturday, all set for monday, then.

you know the saying about the best-laid plans? well...

not that all was in perfect readiness, mind. i'd left my workout shorts at the office, for one. for another, i overslept. then there was the crawling traffic from sucat to the alabang interchange. then there was the monday morning reactivation of user accounts (that i've yet to find a way to automate).

all said and done, i finally managed to show up at the gym a full hour later than was likely good for me (and the workday to follow): 8am.

so i go up to the gym, get to the counter, and...

...the building's water pump had just gone kaput earlier, so no post-workout showers available.

hmm.

were i a little more superstitious, i'd think that i wasn't fated to box my way to better health. hehehe.

da picz

gorilla, no mist



big birdie



tyger, tyger, pacing fast



and fast asleep



taal volcano island, another view



...long way to fall...



top of stairs...



view from the bottom



lord of the beasts

zoo on the ridge

tagaytay ridge, that is.

once more, borrowed the handy little casio camera of jose with the intention of revisiting a zoo on the tagaytay ridge. it's actually part of a hotel called residence inn -- i'd been there god knows how long ago and didn't even remember where it was located.

the internet was less than useless insofar as a map of establishments on the tagaytay ridge, so it was an "ask when we get there" kind of thing.

the plan therefore was to leave bright and early (with makati housemate glenn in tow), have lunch at the bag o' beans and then inquire of the local populace where this zoo might be found.

now this would make the second sunday in succession that i'd be driving to tagaytay, so i decided that it would be a good "control" test too for something i'd noticed the previous trip: the car seemed to get excellent mileage -- provided one did not exceed 2000rpm in any gear (which equated to 60/70 in 5th). needless to say, that kind of velocity had others zooming by on either side, but what the hey.

at any rate, got to bag o' beans, lunched, and asked of the policeman/traffic aide outside where we might find the zoo. he didn't have a clue.

the only information i got from the web search was that the establishment was around the kilometer 62 marker or somesuch. in which direction, i had no idea. therefore we decided to ply the route to the people's park in the sky (which happened to be the end destination of the previous trip).

hmm. past the junction, past the rotonda, past the santa rosa road -- still no kilometer markers to be found. and no residence inn.

beyond picnic grove, on the right side of the road, finally a marker. it was in the 50's so that was good. onward then.

all the way to people's park. still no residence inn.

finally, glenn got out and asked one of the parking wardens at the park if he knew where the zoo was.

well, what do you know. it was just beyond bag o' beans.

back, back, then.

all the while not exceeding 60kph.

and then we found it. entrance fee was rather steep (200 pesos per -- then again, i have no idea what the fees are for other zoos). pictures next post.

picture taking done, another fairly leisurely drive back to makati.

i did my calculations and ended up with at least 15 kilometers to a liter. wow, twice the mileage of my weekly commute.

so the car can get quite a ways on a tank of gas, as it were.

just takes a heck of a lot of discipline on the gas pedal.

anger management

best intentions notwithstanding, to date the render farm hasn't seen too much use. ergo, the best time to do some administrative housekeeping and all that.

sometime in the past months, the farm had been regenerated (the tech's term for a fresh install of various os'es). not surprisingly, the impossible man's idea of a regen involved taking some shortcuts and precious little by way of communication/consultation...

suffice to say that some whole steps were left out - and those are the things that i've been spending the last few weeks sporadically addressing (between editing and workstation troubleshooting).

in a nutshell, i made sure that each machine in the under-100-strong farm had the proper user and password; copied over the temporary database and set permissions on the folder structure; verified host lists for the whole farm system (license servers, job servers, render units); and did some render benchmarks to check if the system was usable.

so far so good.

in the latter regard, i also finally managed to inject a whole bunch of in-house code into the render system's submission script (after a call-for-help email to the software's programmer...).

the circumstances surrounding that bit of coding eureka was odd indeed. i had actually been sitting on the tip that the programmer had given for a week or two. until one day, as i came into work, an officemate (who had taken a personal mouse home the day before - without telling me) announced the need for a replacement or wouldn't be able to work. i inquired as to why that had been necessary, and the snappish reply that the mouse was "personal" after all took matters swiftly downhill...

long story short, replacement mouse was found, more ill-considered behavior and words were expressed, a heated mutual apology then transpired.

however, it takes me quite a while to descend from the plateau of heatedness to which i had levitated - oddly enough, to take my mind off the bad trip morning, i decided to take on the task of grafting the non-working code to the submission script.

lo and behold.

the script finally worked.

although i am happy to have worked that programming thorn out, the notion of having to fly completely off the handle and then redirecting the anger to solve the problem is not something i'm looking forward to applying at the next coding roadblock...

?

leaf

once, as all leaves were, it began as a bud on a branch. heeding the call of relentless evolution, it began to grow; cells differentiating, specializing. till, at some stage, it had unfurled there; a minor miracle on a twig connected to some branch that in itself was connected to the trunk and thence the roots in the earth.

and from those roots came the water and trace minerals, up, in defiance of gravity by capilliary action; to the leaf where by chlorophyll's might light was converted, combined with the water, carbon dioxide split - and from that chemical reaction the food came to being, that food that the tree would grow with.

one wonders at the events without that the leaf, indeed the tree, would be a mute, deaf, blind witness to. it may be said that the leaf would be naturally attuned to the light, that source of power for the chemical reaction within. but there were also the other forces, some of nature: rain, wind, earthquake, fire...

of fiestas and marching bands, of incessant honking and the diesel rumble of jeepneys and trucks, of conversations between myriad humans, of the twittering of the birds; the nigh-microscopic pattering of insects and the like - of these the leaf might only have trembled, perhaps aware at some cellular level...

and if, by some stroke of random chance it was not bent into service as a webbed home for a colony of ants, nor for a colony of spiders, the leaf spent its life alone among it's brethren in the sun...

...there would be a time when by some clock of chance design its workings would begin to falter, and the flow of water and nutrients from the twig would begin to wane...

and there it would be, still attached by cellular bonds; but those were now brittle with the onset of decay.

and then, a gust of wind, and that bond was broken. now the brittle thing gave in to the force of ever present gravity, physcially held aloft by the impact of millions of atoms of gas in the atmosphere rushing along in that selfsame gust; leaf spiralling ever downward, but not to the earth, no, not at this time.

it fell, and came to rest at the junction of metal and glass, at the point where a car's hood met the windshield.

the driver got in, early morning. car started and began to move. of the little brown papery thing no attention was paid; there, lying just before the wipers.

and then it caught the driver's eye. as the car got onto the highway and began to speed up, somehow the leaf did not blow away. there was a pocket of still air there, at the junction of the hood and windshield just before the wipers.

somehow this little observation made the driver smile. wonder how long the leaf will stay there? all the way to the office, perhaps.

but then, circumstances demanded an abrupt lane change, and of a sudden the leaf was gone.

some accidental mornings

i'm not sure i mentioned this before, but ever since i got the deed of sale for the car, it seems to me that nearly everything else on the wild streets has a propensity for hurling it/themselves in front of me.

...either that or i'm not paying adequate attention.

take yesterday, for example. my commute from makati to alabang requires that i use the south superhighway cloverleaf interchange at edsa. to that end, i take a few turns in the innner streets till i get to a point just shy of the onramp of the bridge. now, this being a place where drivers operate on the notion that giving way is an alien concept, getting on the onramp can be an exciting thing indeed between the cars rushing for the side road to take them to edsa and the vehicles committed to getting on the bridge with all speed unabated.

so: i get car in position, look left for a reasonable opening that won't require me to gun the engine to get into the traffic flow...

just as i get the car moving, and swing my head to the right so that i can see where i'm going, there's a guy on a bicycle directly in front of the car.

gaaah!

good thing i didn't jam on the gas. but that left my nerves queasy the entire drive to work.

must remember to look both ways all the time.

...

and today, on the corner of our street and evangelista, there was an accident between a 1992-era lancer and the previous generation cr-v. based on the geometry, the cr-v was crossing evangelista, and the lancer was in either no mood or condition to give way, resulting in the mitsubishi mashing its front against the left front quarter of the honda. the impact must have been significant, as the car's front had crumpled to the front wheels.

on reflection, perhaps the lancer was overtaking one of the jeepneys that habitually clog that portion of evangelista that choose not to get in line and then crawl along, picking up passengers. if that was the case, it then becomes no surprise that the cr-v and lancer had their "meeting". if not, and it was the result of the no-give-way mentality, then that's all the more unfortunate.

either way, for all you drivers out there: look both ways, and drive defensively...

perhaps not wise...

...to continue eating at a place we call charcoal

it's a burger joint near the office, and i'd say the burgers are decent enough; the rest of the menu i really can't speak much of - other than to say, perhaps, that if you're hungry, it will do.

at the very least it's a bit different from the daily fare at the other eateries on the street.

now, this is not the first time that elements of an insect-like persuasion have been in or near food in charcoal: once before, there was a tiny roach in someone's coffee...

but this was a sort of eye-opener, as if the roach-coffee wasn't enough.

just had lunch there, and my technical co-worker's order arrived first, a roast beef burger. as he's eating, i notice another small roach on a walkabout, antennae twitching as it obviously smelled the food. now, there's a bit of tilework on charcoal's interior, and to this my eye was drawn.

first, one, then two and then more pairs of antennae began popping out of the bottom of the tile band on the wall. i stopped counting at 8 pairs and we then moved to another table.

...apparently, a regimen of regular insecticide application may not be part of the place's operational must-do's...

but that's just an assumption on my part given the evidence this day.

so it's either mcdo or hotshots or brothers for a burger fix from now on...

car.want.attention.NOW

the car is, for want of a better word, good.

i suppose one could say that it's been quite good to me (in addition to being good for me, in the sense that mobility is a good thing, mostly).

...never mind the gas cost and maintenance and registration and stuff that's part of the car-owning world...

...and speaking of maintenance, the car has only had two events of that nature in my limited ownership experience of it. the first time was on santolan coming home from a visit to the mum. the clutch went to the floor and stayed there. some pumping of the pedal got it unstuck, and the car was drivable long enough to get to makati and finally became immobile as i parked in front of the apartment there.

long story short, had it towed to the casa, incidentally near santolan, clutch master cylinder replaced, and working well to this day (knock on wood).

today, as i turned into the street where our office is, shifted to first, rpms to 2000, let clutch take up, and then back into the clutch to slow for the one and only hump on the street.

rpms maintained at 2000. hmm. prod the gas pedal. engine immediately dies.

um. start car. rev to 2000, let gas go. rpms sink to 1500.

okaaay. we've got a problem. get to office, unload bag, get back in car, and proceed to auto repair joints next to alabang town center.

on the way there, tried not to think too much of the sound of the car "idling" at 2000 rpm.

so, repair joint is open, good. describe the symptoms, and go and have breakfast.

coming back, they say the car is fixed - they jigged about with something called a "co"? and vacuum, and lubricated something or other.

while we were there, i remembered something that another corolla-owning officemate had recounted, something about the engine supports and a feedback vibration loop in clutch actuation.

well, since i was there already, might as well have it checked. bingo, one of the four supports was broken, and visibly so. no option there, replace.

and the morning goes by waiting for the part to come in.

i'd also had the aircon looked at, but the quotation is kinda steep, so i'm holding that off till i have a reasonable fund buffer.

going back, i still have some juddering in the clutch when engaging first on slight uphills. its either me or the clutch, but might as well add a clutch checkup to the list of repairs for the next time.

later we'll see if the fix to the carb holds...

on the fifth day

...of the 10-Month Project.

backtrack. on day 3, my mind was mush.

today, as 9 am rolled in, i heard the sound of a stream of fluid onto a soft surface. turned to look, and there was a thin line(?) of water coming from the edge of an aircon access panel overhead, and it was pattering onto a corner of the sofa/bed that i have behind me.

get sofa/bed out of the way, call downstairs to locate utility man; who grabs a pail from the last (unused) row and places it under the leak.

now, this aircon has been running since the start of the week. used to be that i generally would turn it off when i go home, but lately, as eleven rolls around i am in too much haste to be away that i've neglected this little ritual. so it seems that leaving the aircon on 24/5 (so far), means some sort of drainage problem for condensation in the unit.

so: before leaving, turn off aircon.

other than that, the only news to report is the success of a little personal programming project that i hatched up over the past three days - automating a potentially tedious task (which involves typing essential information that is to be overlaid on rendered animation .avi files - for director's benefit when viewing projects).

i now have a mongrel script that takes the information from a text file and composites it onto the .avi in question, at the same time scaling the output and encoding it into quicktime (for a better fit with the mac editing station and software).

...and there we are. day five, and i await further stuff for edit...

pressure

...so to speak, is on.

and now, the work/blog equation shifts firmly into the "work" side; although at present, as the edit-person in this enterprise my main inputs are at the beginning and mostly end of project arcs, i still await the pieces of the puzzles that i need to put together to begin the storyreels.

in the meantime: i have migrated the workstations on our floor to the latest version of the render management software (a sunday implementation - best done when no one else is working, naturally); the extant 12 render farm units have had some tweaking done to some aspect of their operating systems.

also, i have gotten some traction out of a tricky bid to prove a concept workable for a business i seem to be a part of building. yay for me. it involved apache/php/perl -- which meant a whole lot of online searching for code snippets to accomplish what it was that needed proving -- and appparently it was proved enough for the powers that be. now it is for the programmers in the other divisions to expound on the concept (though i do hope they consult back to us to make sure that they're not barking up the wrong tree -- the barking/wrong tree part is frightfully easy to do, and i've seen how that works first hand, in the old company. didn't help that the lead programmer in that effort was so intractable about his code over the needs of the user.).

anyway, onward!

rain rain

that's the house on the corner of palosapis, and its reflection in the floodwaters...

its been raining like i've never remembered it these past few weeks. and the weatherpeople were on the cusp of declaring a drought. but that was before a couple of supertyphoons skirted the "philippine area of responsibility" typhoon tracking zone.

based on the tracks of the storms i've seen (two, so far), the storms coalesced, then began their westward journeys, and then bounced somehow, ending up in a more northward track heading to taiwan and/or japan's southernmost tip.

this, in some senses, is a good thing, seeing as the southern part of luzon has yet to recover from one of the storms of late last year - and these howlers are even more powerful than last typhoon seasons.

skirting or no, they seemed to have enough power to "intensify" a periodic weather phenomenon called the southwest monsoon which is active this time of year.

end result, rain. lots of it.

on a positive note, the dams that provide hydroelectric power to the luzon grid are now mostly over their critical levels, one dam in fact posting a water level rise of 14 meters over these past two weeks of monsoon rain.

...heck of a lot of rain, that.

amazing weather, truly. global warming? hard to ignore the signs.

...such as a flooded street (the incessant downpours are also hard to miss).

atmospheric astronomica

this is about something called the annual perseid meteor shower.

it was scheduled (well, as schedule-friendly as these things can be) to peak the night of august 12-13, although supposedly, it could also be seen early morning on the 12th.

the mechanics are, on the surface, simple enough. the earth, in its yearly sojourn around the sun, runs into the dust left behind by periodic comet temple-tuttle.

now, imagine that. the earth in its relative hugeness, running into a trail left behind by a dirty snowball a few meters wide, and this has been happening for years beyond count (well, years before someone noticed that the shower of seemed to originate in the constellation perseus -- hence perseid meteors).

not sure about the orbital mechanics preventing the earth from running into the comet temple-tuttle itself, but that may be fodder for another post, somewhere if ever down the line...

anyway, set the alarm for 3am sunday, take a hell of a long time to get up, decide to push through with the plan (having earlier informed others by text of the probabilities of the show come 4am). drag long-suffering makati housemate along, and drive to the sucat interchange and cross to the eastern service road, parking by a road next to the commercial outpost i refer to by the presence of a figaro's on its topmost deck.

the eastern sky is dark and cloudfree, and i can't make out where to look for the constellation even with my handy-dandy sky chart. also, the place gives me the creeps, as the road down to an unknown village is unlit except by reflected floodlight from the commercial establishment's parking lot.

failure of nerve, and decide to drive on to the office where, by the light of the other buildings finally discover a means to identify the constellation of choice.

sum total, see no meteors; though glenn did see a satellite of some sort, and this area being where it is as part of the airport's holding pattern, several airplanes going to a fro.

get back home as the sun rises, and check the web. yahoo informs that the main peak should be 9-sunrise sunday night.

now, if it's a good enough shower, it should be visible even in light-polluted makati...

...i recall when living in mandaluyong that there was the beginning of an excellent meteor shower (though don't recall the month) with an intriguing effect: almost as soon as the shower began in earnest, all of a sudden, the sky clouded over.

sunday night, the sky was completely cloudy -- i went outside periodically to check.

there was a strange effect, though. don't know for sure if the meteors had anything to do with it, but even in the absence of thunderstorms in the vicinity, cable reception got scrambled several times.

i do know that one way to track (and count) meteor activity, is to listen to the radio emissions they make as they get pulverized by the friction of their passage in the lower atmosphere. perhaps that emission during a storm is enough to scramble the digital signals from the cable company link satellites or something...

anyway, so much for that.

there's supposed to be another shower sometime in september -- have to look that up, and we'll see how that works out.

3:30am, saturday and sometime thereafter

...the doorbell goes off. well, it's a buzzer, actually. and it's situated next to the light for the "backyard" area, and therefore directly under my window.

jump off my sofa/bed; lights, get a shirt on, fumble for keys. make it to the door, but none of the keys seem to work in the deadbolt. geez. upstairs again, get my car keys (which for sure has the front door key too), fumble that into the deadbolt and get out.

all the while, the buzzer stays on.

in this haze, i'm wondering what the hell this could be all about. heck, green car of unit "d" isn't even in, and i've parked on the street so that i don't have to be woken to let the green car park next to their unit.

make it to the gate...

...there's someone there, and he's managed to open the pedestrian gate. he grabs (rather unsteadily), a styro cup of take-out coffee from the ground and then does a double-take as he sees me standing there looking at him.

then he makes a sign with his free hand, index and middle finger up, but crossed one behind the other? as he makes his unsteady way past me, there's a whiff of a smell i associate with someone having drunk quite a bit of alcoholic beverages...

he goes to the door of unit "b," gets keys from somewhere on his person, and lets himself in.

...what the heck was the doorbell all about, then?

anyway, just to be sure, go into the street to check on the car.

get back into the apartment, have difficulty going to sleep.

...

fast forward to today. from makati, headed first to pilar to get a change of pants (there was a hole in a, shall we say, strategic, location on the pair i'd had on -- needed to exchange it for one that was less, um, hole-y). :-)

get into apartment, and pump motor goes on. eh? knock on doors, no sign of occupancy. got changed, and began to check the cr's out, to see if there's anything amiss with the plumbing. downstairs cr, check. upstairs, check. master bedroom cr -- the faucet in the sink is running; a minor stream, but more than a trickle. hmm. wonder how long it's been left this way. likely whole weekend. oh well.

leave apartment, locking up, just in time to see a strangely familiar figure leave unit "b". hmm.

by the time i get the car out to mercury, he's midway down the street and a tricycle has just ignored his hail.

stop the car and wait. as he passes, i ask if he's on his way out and he needs a lift.

thinking back, this must have been so strange; but we get past the oddness of it when i ask if he's from our street, and he mistakes me for the guy from unit "d", but i say i'm from unit "c" and off we go.

turns out that the 3:30am buzzer was his brother, louie (and he was plastered). this guy's name is rex, and they're all siblings in unit "b," which is really his sister's, but their mother doesn't want her all alone out here, hence the brotherly companionship.

rex does apologize for the early saturday rousing, and we're at the pilar exit to alabang zapote, and off he goes to wherever he works (which is in pasig, didn't ask specifically where).

and thus begins another day at work.

electrotomfoolery

the pilar apartment is kinda shy a few electrical outlets. this was they way its always been, ever since we moved in.

case in point: the ground floor has provisions for about seven power outlets, but only two of them were installed with the appropriate receptacles (one in the kitchen, the other beside the front door).

now, having gotten my hands on a tv and dvd player (courtesy of makati roomie glenn), it behooved me to attempt to make use of the other blank outlets. so i got a bunch of receptacles just like the ones already installed (at a reasonable cost, seemingly).

one day, went home a little earlier than normal to maximize the sunlight (have to turn off the power mains before working on electricals, after all). get tools ready, open one of the packages...

...hmm... ...no screws...

after a while, it occurred to me that these units were designed to take solid wire -- you just had to plug the end into the provided holes (and hoped that the mechanism inside would grasp the wire firmly).

okay. opened one of the outlet blanks, and looking at the coiled wires within -- and my resolve left me. best leave this to the (semi) professionals. off to unit "a," and the landlords then. this time, no beer (thankfully!) as the brothers were on their way out to pick up a childhood friend who'd appeared out of the blue after 20 years...

electrician was not available on such short notice, but their "multi-talented" handyman was about (he could open car doors without the key...).

hmm...

anyway, lets see how he does. by this time, though, the sun had gone down, so it would be an electrical job by flashlight.

i showed him the power outlet in question, and the destined receptacle.

he pulled the wires out of the cavity, and with a pair of pliers, cut off two lengths of wire from the coils within. i know the pliers had insulated handles, but still...

turns out the house uses stranded wire. he stripped the insulation off the ends of the wires he had liberated from the wall, and used these to bridge the connections between the two sockets in the receptacle. at this time, he asked for the power mains to be shut, so i did that.

working by the light of my handy-dandy ledlenser flashlight (very useful thing indeed, many thanks to jo who made the purchase possible - by being on hand to loan me the cash. hehehe), the handyman proceeded to install the receptacle. he cut off more lengths of the wire, and essentially spliced the receptacle into the wiring circuit: power going into one plug, across the bridging wires, and out the other plug (so to speak). then he pushed the entire assemblage into the cavity.

power mains back on, and test.

right socket, fan runs fine.

left socket, i think i hear the muted sound of sparks, and the compressor of the ref behind me begins to make a chugging sound. i hastily unplug the ref, and thank the handyman for his work...

and away he goes.

okay, working quickly -- power mains: off. remove cover plate, unscrew receptacle...

i said before that the receptacle is designed for solid wire...

what he'd done was to take the stranded wire ends and twisted it, and then plugged that into the requisite holes in the backs of the plug assemblies.

however it happened, as soon as i got the receptacle freed, one of the "out" connections had come free...

oh boy...

(to be continued)

car (un)economy

perhaps its a survival mechanism (or just old age, hehehe), but i do have a tendency to literally not think too hard on many matters (although i do get tripped up every now and again and edge into semi-obsessiveness).

case in point: car's fuel economy.

have had the car for a while now, but i never (up to a few weeks ago, at least) tried to figure out just how many kilometers per liter of gasoline the thing actually consumes.

the concept is simple: at an opportunity to fill the fuel tank, zero out the trip odometer; and then at the next full tank, note the number of liters put in, and divide the present odometer reading by that amount. hey, presto! kilometers traveled per liter.

now, the first time i seriously tried this, it came to a point where i needed to partially load gasoline (else the tank would run dry) before i could afford a full load. so what i did was to sum up all the fuel amounts (two partial fills, and a full tank), and divide the distance traveled by that figure.

the number that came back was low. very low.

this led me to question the approach, but for the life of me i couldn't shake the notion that there was some error in the logic of the sum of partial and full loads to divide distance by.

so, next pay period, take the car to 1/4th tank, then fill.

take distance, divide by fill amount. um.

the previous figure: 7.4Km/L. this time: 7.5Km/L.

so, either approach works (depending on available cash), but either way, the car guzzles gas.

there are a bunch of options available (when spare cash is available, of course): a new carb (from really cheap to breath-takingly expensive), that "xaos super turbocharger" fuel-saving gizmo, or a full on engine change (about as much as the hyper-expensive extra-special model-specific carb).

or: drive less.

hmm...

g-live and the k310i

this is quite irritating.

"g-live" is a free globe service that pops news and public service announcements on the phone (but doesn't save them in the phone memory -- supposed to be a "good" thing).

i'd never heard of it before (though web research indicates that's its been in existence since last year).

first indication that something was afoot was yesterday, when the phone popped up two "message sent" screens though i'd not typed anything up, nor had i anything in my outbox.

next thing i know, these info things start arriving; news, and stuff. several times a minute.

nothing on the globe web site mentions g-live and how to get rid of it, though g-live itself seems to give hints.

catch being this: you're supposed to go to the globe services menu, select g-live and select activate or somesuch.

well, the k310i, for something that globe sold, has no globe services menu.

i'd just charged the phone early yesterday, and now the phone's down to a third of battery capacity; all because the phone lights up (naturally) with the damned multiple messages per minute.

bloody hell.

beer fueled rent payment conversations

charlie the landlord wasn't home the day before, so the payment of rent had to wait a day. inasmuch as that day would be a wednesday (day before coding day), i elected to go home early (better to sleep early and all that).

park car, enter compound, their door is open. okay, charlie's in. requisite greetings, and invitation to have a seat while receipt is made. someone who i've seen before (turns out to be charlie's nephew) comes in and...

...beer.

this time, i politely managed to nurse just one beer until way after it had gone flat; whereas they (the nephew who had instigated the early beer consumption had drunk two and had left - to be replaced by julius) had upwards of three or so apiece.

jose had dropped by the apartment for some stuff, and had gone back to the office; and i was still nursing my beer.

haze of conversations half-remembered, except one story that's just too scary to commit to these cyberspace pages. on other fronts, charlie'd been to south africa in the times of apartheid, seen the "big pit" at kimberly... nephew asked what i do for a living and drew a complete blank when i described my line(s) of work...

ten o'clock, and i made my exit...

strangely enough, sleep did not come easily last night.

had to drag myself out of bed, got to work, slept, had breakfast - and now the headache is coming on.

...must find a better way to deal with visits to unit "a" (just say no?) or, as jose suggests, bring my libation of choice handy when i do go drop by...