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The habits of yesteryear...
Dec. 7th, 2012 09:24 pmI happened to be going past the television yesterday when Dr. Oz was holding forth on a number of factors that prematurely age people, and my attention was drawn to his statement about one such factor: the consumption of water from the hot water tap. Doing so, according to Ox, is not a good idea.
That got my attention because my grandmother, born in 1888 and pretty set in her ways as I recall, was of exactly the same opinion. And her solution—run the hot water for a minute before using what came out of the tap—is exactly what Oz suggested. The culprit, it would appear, is the lead used in piping joints, which is much more easily leached into the water in hot water lines.
The threat of lead poisoning must have been pretty strong to compel my grandmother to "waste" water that way, because in all other respects, having survived the Great Depression, she was a firm believer in cutting waste at every opportunity. If she were alive today, she would probably be beside herself to see how I waste electricity (and not just me in particular; she would probably be shocked to learn about "vampire" appliances that suck current even when "off").
In other news, I had this crazy idea of selling my first Raspberry Pi on eBay once the new board with 512 MB arrived. While this remains a possibility, it would also appear that most of the offerings for RasPis on eBay are for the new board anyway, and therefore, I probably would not be able to sell the board for much. (My grandmother would, at this point, note that selling it for anything would be A Good Thing™.)
However, I ran across an unexpected use for the old board: As a test bed for "experimenting" with new software. With, for example, an open source invoicing program that—unlike the Intuit product I've been using over the past few years—doesn't store my data in a format that cannot be used by any other program (short of printing the old stuff out and entering it by hand).
I just tried installing something called BambooInvoice, and finally got it to work, but after translating 5,000 words and taking care of other business, that's as far as I want to take that today.
Progress has been good. I'm going downstairs to veg out.
Cheers...
That got my attention because my grandmother, born in 1888 and pretty set in her ways as I recall, was of exactly the same opinion. And her solution—run the hot water for a minute before using what came out of the tap—is exactly what Oz suggested. The culprit, it would appear, is the lead used in piping joints, which is much more easily leached into the water in hot water lines.
The threat of lead poisoning must have been pretty strong to compel my grandmother to "waste" water that way, because in all other respects, having survived the Great Depression, she was a firm believer in cutting waste at every opportunity. If she were alive today, she would probably be beside herself to see how I waste electricity (and not just me in particular; she would probably be shocked to learn about "vampire" appliances that suck current even when "off").
In other news, I had this crazy idea of selling my first Raspberry Pi on eBay once the new board with 512 MB arrived. While this remains a possibility, it would also appear that most of the offerings for RasPis on eBay are for the new board anyway, and therefore, I probably would not be able to sell the board for much. (My grandmother would, at this point, note that selling it for anything would be A Good Thing™.)
However, I ran across an unexpected use for the old board: As a test bed for "experimenting" with new software. With, for example, an open source invoicing program that—unlike the Intuit product I've been using over the past few years—doesn't store my data in a format that cannot be used by any other program (short of printing the old stuff out and entering it by hand).
I just tried installing something called BambooInvoice, and finally got it to work, but after translating 5,000 words and taking care of other business, that's as far as I want to take that today.
Progress has been good. I'm going downstairs to veg out.
Cheers...
