Geeky Ramblings

Oh the joys of home ownership … yes indeedy.

Today I acomplished two major household tasks … one required a lot of work … the other required just a phone call.

The first was fairly involved … at least for me. The toilet in the master bath (such as it is, the bath that is) was leaking underneath the bowl. I figured it was the wax ring, so I replaced it … but that didn’t fix the leak. I’m pretty sure I put the new wax ring on wrong, which caused the new leak.

I got a new item to replace the wax ring … it’s basically a funnel that goes down the drain pipe and sticks to the bottom of the toilet. Seems to be working … although the only way to really tell is wait to see if more water shows up.

This little project only required 4 trips to the home improvement stores (Lowes, Home Depot, and twice to Menards) and took 3 months to complete (yes, we were without a toilet in the master bath for 3 months).

The second major task was calling the sales person from Anderson Windows to tell her that we wanted to go with her proposal.

We’re getting new windows throughout the house … the windows we currently have are all aluminum, which lets a lot of cold through, most of the glass panes have blown seals … so there’s a lot of moisture between the glass, and at least one window’s mechanism is totally shot (we need to use a 2×4 to hold it open).

We got a quote from Pella also … which was significantly higher than Anderson’s … and, although the comments I saw indicated that both Pella and Anderson had quality products, the consensus I saw was that Anderson’s were somewhat better.

We tried to get a quote from Lowes … but it took them almost a month to send someone out to do the measuring … and after waiting a week for them to call me back with estimates, they didn’t even have the measurements available. I was told by someone in their custom installation department that I would be called on Saturday … but didn’t hear from them.

We actually paid $35 for the measurements from Lowes … which I’m going to try and get back, as it took such a long time for them to come back.

Final cost for the Anderson windows is going to be $14K. I think I can get $400 off on taxes ($200 off for the windows, another $200 for the patio door {assuming it counts as an exterior door}). It will probably take 10 years or so to recoup the cost in energy savings, but it will be a good selling point when we go to sell the house (nothing planned in that arena yet).

Luckily we have a fairly sizable amount in the home repair / improvement savings bucket … so the cost won’t kill us.

[tags]Home Improvement, windows, heat, savings, toilet, repairs, taxes[/tags]

Ginny and I saw “Prairie Home Companion” today … in a word: Yawn

Don’t get me wrong … I enjoy the show on NPR (although I don’t go out of my way to listen to it), but this movie was just plain boring.

Maybe I’m just not sophisticated enough for it … but I could find no point to the movie. The music was pretty lame, with one or two exceptions the humor was absent (the off-color jokes by Dusty & Left [Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly respectively] were good and Kevin Kline as Guy Noir was pretty funny), and I couldn’t detect a plot at all.

Garrison: stick to radio.

[tags]NPR, Garrison Keillor, Prairie Home Companion, Radio[/tags]

This is just way TOO painful …

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

[...]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

- Your Own Personal Internet

And this guy is a senator?