Computerjargon.com

A few years ago we learned a hard lesson about our street block. The southern end tends to flash flood in heavy rain. We learned the hard way and had to have $1500 worth of carpet repaired in our old Honda.

I arrived home yesterday during the torrential rain last evening to find no less than 4 cars in various predicaments at the end of the street. I felt bad for them but they had already gone in too deep. There wasn’t much they could do except push their car out and wait for it to dry out. Unfortunately they too had to learn the hard way.

In a panic I called Courtney, who was following me home, “DO NOT COME HOME FROM THE SOUTH!” I shouted on her voicemail. About 10 minutes later she arrived home with her car just fine.

One day I will write a book about home servicemen repair. Or at least create a website for them.

Our fridge has been on the fritz for probably two months. We didn’t notice for a month because we didn’t have any food in it. We finally did start to wonder if something was wrong when our ice cream wouldn’t freeze. We tried cleaning out the coils, which did help a bit. But the fridge never really got as cold as it should. So what did I do? I called Sears.

30 seconds and 65 bucks later the guy tells me I need a new fridge. “Compressor’s shot,” is what he really said. He said this after taking 3 steps into my house. He did open up a back panel to give it a glance, but I think he did that to rationalize the tab he was about to stick me with.

The biggest pain about replacing our fridge will be finding one the exact size we need. When we moved in the fridge wasn’t under the cabinets like in most homes. It was off to the side of our kitchen counter, in an inconvienent place. We wanted to put it underneath our cabinet but it required us to shave part of our cabinets away. So now we have a very tight spot for a 66-inch by 29-inch refrigerator to fit. Anything larger just ain’t gonna work.

At some point home improvement will become tiring. Please add sewer mainline drain pipe to the items we have had fixed in the last 2 months. Something, probably tree roots, caused our drains to start backing up. By the time we realized it the drains were not a pretty sight. I will spare you the unnecessary details. Let me just say that I had to do some cleaning up with a ShopVac which now needs a disinfecting with bleach.

I called up RotoRooter again since they did a bang-up job on the water heater. The guy charged me 165 bucks to snake the line. After signing away the 165 bucks he got to work by bringing in an enlarged pipe snake. Unlike the dinky little one I have, this one had to be wheeled in. It had buttons and levers, to the likes I have never seen before. He flipped over his bucket, sat down and pushed a button and my problem was fixed. What a scam. The hardest part of the trip for this guy was hauling the snake up and down the stairs. But then again, would I want to do what he’s doing? Not really.

So, I finally got my technical issues with iTunes squared away and I am now a happy iTunes customer. Rolling Stone has a great interview with Steve Jobs. In it Jobs discusses how they landed the record labels. From the sounds of it, Apple fought an uphill battle. The deals didn’t start rolling in until the subscription-based services started to fail. I am blown away by the fact of how true Jobs comments are. He believes that most people don’t want to steal music. They want an easy way to find music to fill an immediate desire to hear a song. I don’t think he could be more correct. Given the choice between digging through lousy ripped mp3s on a P2P service or just paying a buck to the song on iTunes, I’ll happily shell over the money. The fact that I have to buy an iPod to play it is another story though. I’m hesitant to go balls out on iTunes is there is not an easy way for me to get music without DRM attached to it.

After learning about water heaters and furnaces, this past weekend was spent learning about water piping.

I was surfing the web in my computer room, affectionately known as L1R1, when I heard a peeing sound coming from the door behind me. I turned around to discover water pouring from the ceiling onto my orange carpet. I dashed around the stream and yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop the diswasher!!” to Courtney. A bucket contained the stream while we started troubleshooting the problem.

We started sliding the false ceiling panels around. I could we the swishing of water above my head and I deduced that I was hot on the trail of the culprit. A few tiles later we found the pipe spilling the water.

Courtney hopped on the horn to the Father-In-Law to find out what we were looking at. A 2-inch pipe coming from the kitchen area…It’s the drain pipe. The suggested solution was to tighten the pipe. The leak was coming from a joint so it made sense. We jetted to Home Depot, picked up the largest vise grips they had, and were back in minutes. In one fluid move I had the vise grips out of the plastic casing and around the pipe. As I started leaning in to the first turn I noticed a hole the width of two toothpicks right before the joint. Water was dripping from the crevasse rythmicly.

I discovered the solution the next day, epxoy. Plummer’s epxoy to be more specific. What looks like a harmless piece of silly putty, actually hardens into concrete in under twenty minutes when mixed. Not believing that I had actually solved this problem myself I watched the hole as the dishwaher ran. Every 5 minutes jumping from the couch to watch for water. To my pleasure I could find no fault with my handwork. Another home improvement well done.

“Flame sensor,” he muttered.

“What?”

“FLAME SENSOR,” he barked at me.

The service department had told me someone would be by the house in the next two hours. He showed up 15 minutes after I hung up the phone. He dodged through the side door and down into the basement. Within 2 minutes the side of our furnace was open and he was poking and prodding things with a phillips-head. He was chewing gum to pacify himself until he could get back to his smokes in the truck. His mullet was full and long. His handbar mustache neatly trimmed for the beginning of the work week.

“80 degrees to 30. Jeez..” he lamented.

“Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable,” I said. Damn it! I was being so stereotypical Minnesotan. Nothing better to discuss than the weather.

He shot me a glare, “I was talking about me. I was in Southern Mexico last week.”

“And you came home to be greeted by freshly falling snow? That sucks,” I said, hoping to get on his good side.

“Yeah it does. I asked my girls, ‘Are you sure we need to live in Minnesota?’”

I chuckled. If this guy isn’t the same mullet having, thong wearing guy we saw on our honeymoon, he was at least a near relative.

He yanked out a 50-cent piece of wire from the furnace. It looked much like an outlet tester. Nothing more than a little plastic with a metal head.

“Flame sensor…”

“What?” I have bad hearing

“FLAME SENSOR,” he annunciated.

“Oh,” I heard him that time.

“Well, I don’t have an extra on me,” meaning in his pants pocket, “So I’m going to wipe this one off.” He took a small piece of sandpaper from his pocket and sanded the sensor a bit. “See, when this thing gets dirty, then the flame isn’t sensed. The furnace will continue to fire until a flame is sensed. If this thing doesn’t work, the furnace won’t stop firing.”

“Oh,” my first lesson in furnaces.

“You know, you can do this yourself,” he tells me.

For 75 bucks I probably will next time, I think to myself.

And just as briskly as he walked in, he was out the door. The entire transaction took until 6 1/2 minutes. I may be out 75 bucks but at least the heat is back on.

The past two days have been a tad rough at the homestead. Wednesday morning we woke up to our house temperature at 65 degrees even though the thermostat was set to 72. When I went to investigate the furnance a foul smell came from the general area. My initial concern was a gas leak. We called up the gas company and they came out to inspect. They found no gas leak but told us the water heater next to the furnance was giving off so much carbon monoxide that they had to turn it off and give us a red flag violation. I spent all yesterday calling around trying to find anyone who could make heads or tails of a carbon monoxide leak from a water heater. I even called the gas company. Everyone said the heater needed to be replaced. So I made the arrangements to replace the water heater on Thursday. As Wednesday night rolled around our furnance fired correctly 90% of the time. While during the other 10% the pilot lights wouldn’t light. I swiftly ran to the hardware store and picked up a carbon monoxide and flammable gas detector just to be on the safe side.

So, to take inventory of my condition: I have one car in the shop for a squeaky main belt, the heat works sometimes in the house, and I haven’t had hot water for two days. There’s a new funk going on in the house and this time I don’t think it’s the furnace.

Last Saturday I went to Menard’s 3 times and Buffalo Wild Wings twice.