Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A/C problems, or "Sometimes renting is great"

Our kitchen ceiling started dripping water three weeks. If you own your home, it might make your heart sink, but for renters like us, it's more of a, "Heh. We better call our landlord." One of the benefits of renting. :)

The drip lasted about two hours and left an inch or so of water in an ice cream bucket we put down to catch it. The kitchen also happens to be right beneath the air conditioning unit (who knows why the builders put it on the second floor).

Our landlord is in California so he sent a relative over to check it. Panels were removed and replaced, drains were checked, nothing was really done. The leak had stopped, however, so the relative shrugged and went home.

Yesterday, the leak appeared again. This time the landlord called in a real repairman, who checked it out and found a pool of water sitting inside the ducts beneath the A/C unit. Apparently we need a new "main coil." Sounds expensive. Again, I'm glad we're renting for the moment.

Anyway...the whole point to this was that the repairman is here at our house as I write, fixing the A/C. He was in our backyard doing something with the outside unit when I saw a giant praying mantis sitting on the edge of the unit. I took a trowel to brush the praying mantis off, and the A/C guy saw it and freaked out. "Gaaahhhh!!!" In his defense, they do look pretty scary if you're not accustomed to them, but it was funny to see a stocky, bearded guy react like that.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Journey to the Center of...Acadamia?

Today in the newspaper I read a heartwarming story about a young man struggling through amazing challenges and overcoming almost insurmountable obstacles. Here's what he said:

"There were times where it felt hard but I never doubted myself," [Manase Tonga] said. "My coaches all had confidence in me and my fellow players had confidence in me. My wife and family were always behind me and helped me along through the hard times."

His struggle? Passing two summer school classes with a B- or better so he could play football.

Sheesh. He makes it sound like he was summiting Everest or something.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Lotsa Stuff

1. Ultimate Frisbee. It was cool, almost chilly this morning, so Frisbee was great. We got rained on a little, but other than making the Frisbee slightly harder to catch, it wasn't really a problem. I was surprised how few players there were (seven on seven at the most, where the usual is twice that split into two games) until I remembered that Finals Week was over at school and all the students had gone home for the break.

2. Near the end of Frisbee, Child parks and comes running up. "Guess what, we get to take care of an eight-month-old baby for a few days!" I have to say, she is cute. The baby. Well, both my wife and the baby.

3. We ate sushi for lunch. It was delicious. There were six of us eating sushi, all on the all-you-can-eat plan. After we were done eating, I added up the individual prices of each of the sushis we ordered. All-you-can-eat was $16.95 each person, while the price if we had paid for each sushi individually was $16.65 each person (yes, that's $100 worth of sushi total). We were 30 cents short of getting our money's worth..

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Stupid, but we have backups now!

This time, it wasn't me, thank goodness:

DELETE FROM site_page_content WHERE site_id - 1450;

Whoops! Is that a minus sign or an equal sign near the end? Equal sign--just the one site gets deleted. Minus sign...every single website gets deleted (2,500 of them!) except, ironically, the one site that was supposed to be deleted.

Fortunately, because I accidentally deleted the entire user table discovered the backups weren't working just a couple weeks ago, the backups were fixed and working and we were able to restore all the websites in five minutes. A disaster of epic proportions was averted. Funny how things work out like that.

Apparently the bigger problem is that we are a little too quick on the draw when it comes to making changes on the production server. With only two programmers, though, it's hard to rationalize going to the time and effort of setting up a "system," although it would seem that we're rapidly getting to the point where NOT setting up a system is costing us more time and effort.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Sick.

I've been sick. I rarely get sick. I don't like getting sick.

Last Saturday, I woke up feeling not-too-good and decided to forgo the early-morning mountain biking.

Later that morning, I was playing Frisbee in Provo and just felt tired. I wasn't on top of my game, and for some reason there was only a tiny crowd of people (I found out that Ultimate Frisbee intramurals was that day so a lot of the usual players were gone doing that). The players that remained were taking the game far too seriously, shouting at each other, swearing when they missed a catch, things like that.

45 minutes into playing, another player and I crashed into each other and I almost broke my knee. Later that evening, my knee was still killing me so I took an ibuprofen--the first pill I've taken in a long time. It really helped, though, and my knee stopped hurting, although I woke up Sunday morning feeling blah. My skin was hypersensitive, my chest was congested and I was exhausted so I skipped church, another first in a couple years.

I felt better Monday and Tuesday, then got a head ache which lasted for a couple days--not sure if it was connected or not. By last Saturday I was feeling better, though, and Frisbee was great. The weather was cool, the players were normal and I had fun.

Drek's Opinion of the Day: anything taken to an extreme is bad.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Um...

Child and I are sitting in bed. Child is working on her computer and has been for the last half hour, working on our budget. I am getting bored. "Let's watch 'Trash,'" I say, referring to a Firefly episode. We usually watch DVDs on her laptop.

"Okay," she says. "Where's my computer?"

"Um...it is on your stomach. You are using it as we speak. You have been for the last half hour."

Tee hee. Pregnancy brain makes me laugh.