Say again?

Ok, before you click on the graphic, try to figure out what it represents.


Cheers...

Discovery is NEAR...

Apart from the daily summary from the Russian side, all is fairly quiet, mission-wise. There are a number of system-level briefings to review, but there are only so many technical documents you can review before your head starts to swim.

A short jaunt to the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous site shows that the planned landing of the NEAR Shoemaker probe on the asteroid Eros is scheduled for just under 36 hours from now. The descent to the surface will, besides leaving a human artifact on another (small) world, provide some really spectacular images of the surface of the asteroid from really close up.

Ah, well...back to boning up on the Service Module software upgrade.

Cheers...

Happiness is hot water!

Moving the hot water heater from the living room to the utility room was fairly easy, but there was no way I was going to be able to lift the heater onto the low platform that I'd built. That was just as well, because I was still bugged by the gas company man's red tag that said I had to raise the unit 18" off the floor for code compliance reasons.

The idea behind raising the heater is to prevent flammable and explosive vapors from coming into contact with the pilot flame. Should such vapors be be present, they stand a good chance of being ignited if the pilot flame is near the floor, and the aftermath is quite unpleasant, involving fire trucks, ambulances, and often, coroners.

Such vapors are common in garages, but not common in utility rooms, so some codes don't require indoor heaters to be raised. I'd built an 8" stand for the unit, as a kind of halfway measure, but then as I went to look for something - I forget what it was - I opened the bottom door to the pantry cupboard and found...a can of paint thinner. My nose found it before my eyes did, and at that point, I decided that maybe 8" was not enough. And since there's still an open building permit on this house - and a gas company red tag is, after all is said and done, a red tag - I decided this morning to go out and do what was necessary to install the unit in such a way as to make the gas company proud of me, and maybe save my butt should I ever be stupid enough to store paint thinner or similar substance in the pantry again.

It turns out that with a stand under it, there is just enough room above the unit for the 10" clearance that is strongly recommended by the manufacturer. I also bought the appropriate PVC and CPVC piping and accessories to extend the cold and hot water piping 18".

Lee came over to help because the heater is heavy...or at least it was before I drained a bunch of water from it. It never occurred to me that the heater had water in it because there was no sloshing sound as I moved it. As it turned out, there was maybe 5 or 6 gallons inside.

The work went rather quickly, with the hairiest part, actually, being the stovepipe that I shoved up through the ceiling. That's going to require some patching up on the roof, but while Lee was up on the roof nailing down a temporary patch, I did the honors for the washer and the dryer.

Ooohh. Hot water never felt so good.

Yippee!

Time to get ready for work, though. Gotta run.

Cheers...

Toolin'...

I, too, am having lots of fun playing with the "insanity" hack that adreiennerad mentioned in her journal (she got it from gardengnome, just to keep citations up to snuff, but I digress...). The hack takes LJ entries and scrambles them. Here's the link. To run it on your LJ, replace the 'gardengnome' in the URL with your user name.

Here's what it did with my LJ (warts and all):

alexpgp's livejournal?
(since some of you don't get it: this is an "interpretation" of the content in alexpgp's journal.)

I suppose I entirely agree that McAfee can ever be stopped but then? Petersburg times yesterday. Sleep is Education of the time to the drawing board. The Folly of the conversations were visible last night; and be on the morning, I called a lot of cars the snow was spent a couple of the store without incident of time to back. First store with European cultural superiority by the evening, I said, that the gathered night, and I'm an old program: book, has brought out what it as the kibosh on dealing with prodigious amounts of techniques for code for a message while I upgrade.

-- alexpgp

There are some interesting wordings in there. (Please, no cracks about it being better than my usual posts. :^)

Gotta go on console...back later.

Cheers...