It’s been 7 months since we’ve done plumbing renovations, so we’re apparently due. This time I have to replace the kitchen faucet. It’s started leaking badly. “But wait, you say, “a leaking faucet doesn’t require replacement, you can just replace the gaskets. Unfortunately no. I’ve mentioned before that our water is acidic with a pH of about 5.5. We’ve got the acid neutralizer in place, but many things have corroded over the years. In the case of this faucet, the weld/join between the base of the faucet and the spigot itself has developed pinhole leaks. You turn on the faucet and you get shot in the eye with water. ...

Okay, it’s only Monday, but it’s been about a week since wrote anything here. In that time: The non-profit I work with and on whose board I serve has gone bat-shit crazy. They say that academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small. Trust me, academic politics haven’t got anything on non-profit politics A friend at the university has announced her resignation to move on to a different job. This is probably good for her – she’ll be happier, but it means that half the people I know took it hard. I got a call last week from a lawyer representing my old employer, letting me know that I am a witness in a case against them. Go me! *grumble* The thing at my new job did go through and I now do people management for six staff members. Oh, and their performance evaluations were due in November, can we finish those soon? They’ll be done and signed tomorrow, but what a pain. Finally, I went to (sort of crashed) a holiday party for the school of arts and sciences at my former employer. That was a lot fun, but odd. Particularly when I ran into my old boss and then the woman who inherited part of my responsibilities when I left. Theoretically, she was doing the job until they hired my replacement. It’s been four months – I don’t think the position’s been posted yet. Regardless, I talked to a lot of people and confirmed my original statement – the thing I miss most is the people. Now if I can only get through this week: finish up the last part of a project and put the presentation together, I’ll be in good shape for taking some time off.

Right before Thanksgiving my iPod went to that great electronics superstore in the sky. More specifically, the cute little 1.8″ hard drive died. Having looked around, I figured the best (or at least most interesting) fix was to replace the drive with a compact flash card. The connector part finally came in today and we had a lovely (and to spare you the suspense, successful) operation. We started with a 30 GB 5th generation iPod video showing the unhappy ipod symbol: ...

In response to the two comments on my last post about the calendar: etselec: I’m not certain if you were kidding or not. FWIW, I don’t usually think of the calendar as something people outside of my family would be interested in. I think that’s a pretty usual INTP trait 🙂 If anyone is interested in the calendar, it’s available at Lulu at the baseline cost of $11.29 each. I didn’t put a markup on it, because it’s a fun thing rather than a plan to take over the world make money. ...

As I mentioned earlier, I’m printing the Yellowstone calendar using Lulu instead of Kodak. I got back my sample and all in all, I’m happy with it. I like that the image is the full size of the page (no border). The print quality is pretty good – it’s not as good as Kodak’s but that’s not a big surprise. The paper is also a bit lighter weight than Kodak’s card stock. But hey, it’s about 45% cheaper! 🙂

Cooking with the world’s most dangerous* additive; or How I stopped worrying and learned to love MSG. A few weeks ago, I heard Robert Krulwich on NPR talking about umami – the fifth taste. If you didn’t hear it, go to the link above. As always, Krulwich makes the story very engaging. He describes how the Greek philosopher Democritus hypothesized the existence of four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Everything you eat is made up of a combination of those four tastes (plus the 10,000 various smells your nose can sense). ...

To forestall my mother’s nagging polite and subtle reminders, I took some time yesterday to select pictures for a 2008 Yellowstone calendar. I tried to limit myself to pictures taken on this year’s trip and was happy to see that I could 🙂 The ones I finally selected are shown below. They start with the cover image and then go from January through December: To print them, I’m going with Lulu instead of Kodak. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is price 🙂 The other is that Lulu will do a full 8.5″x11″ edge to edge print whereas Kodak always puts a border. The images above are all scaled/cropped to a 8.5×11 aspect ratio, so hopefully, I’ll end up with a pretty nice result. ...

Over the holiday (I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!) I spent some time figuring out what to do about my broken iPod hard drive. The simplest/cheapest thing is to replace the drive with another 30 GB 1.8″ drive. The problem is that this is boring. Okay, next thought – up the drive size. I can get a 40 GB drive that’s the same size and is a drop-in replacement. Only problem is that this isn’t very cost effective in terms of dollars per GB. Apparently the wide-spread use of 30 GB drives in iPods has lowered the price point here. What about a 60 GB? It looks like that’s doable too and at a good price point. Downside is that I need a new back to accommodate the thicker drive. Hrm, that’s no good either. ...

Looks like my ipod died today. As I was packing up to head home it slid off of my bag and onto the floor. Not a bad fall – it’s had worse. It seemed fine when I started it back up, played a couple of songs. But apparently, those were in the memory cache. Once it was done with those, it locked up and the hard drive started clicking I guess my options are to either replace the hard drive or buy a new one. I’ll probably replace the drive. I don’t think I care enough about the magical features of the new ipods. At least not enough to justify blowing three to four hundred dollars.

Five years ago, I did a lot of Tai Chi. My teacher at the time constantly related the encouraging (?) story of a tai chi student who went to his teacher and asked, “teacher, when will my knees stop hurting? The teacher told him that his knees would stop hurting, “when he stopped learning. If the guitar is anything like tai chi, then I’m definitely still learning 🙂 Observations after a week of practice: ...