More Housenanegans

Almost 20 years ago a friend of mine had a radio program at KDVS, where he played experimental/industrial music. The studio had a mechanism for recording the shows to tape, so I hoarded them and eventually they became files on my iPod. Turns out they're the perfect soundtrack to home repairs:



Here's the problem: A leaky faucet. Somewhere up in the guts of the faucet mechanism, a seal has failed, and water dribbles into the cabinet below every time someone uses the sink.



Things could have been a lot worse... The faucet could have had a constant slow leak, turning the wall to mush and filling the cabinet with mold before anyone noticed. Water damage is evil.

Aside from a replacement faucet, I needed two new things for this operation:



That's a "telescoping basin wrench" and a set of "pipe-wrench pliers" with little silicone covers so they can work on fragile things.



The replacement operation took about four hours, including the research I did online and the shopping trip I made on my bike. The trickiest part was getting the basin wrench up behind the sink so I could unscrew the old hoses. If I hadn't learned about that tool from an online video, the operation would have been nearly impossible.



A nice little bit of amateur-level maintenance, and a few more tools for the basement.

Upgrade-itis

So I've been running on the same Mac Pro for about nine years. That's a pretty incredible stretch of time for a computer nerd to be using the same computer.

Over that time I've:

• Upgraded the video card four times
• Installed a Blu-ray drive
• Migrated my boot drive to an SSD
• Expanded the hard drive capacity a dozen times or more
• Installed a wireless module, mail-ordered from a shifty Chinese part supplier
• Installed a SATA expansion card (two if you count the one that didn't work)
• Installed a USB3 expansion card

I would have upgraded the RAM too, but it was already maxed out.

Not a bad run of upgrades for one system. But earlier this year, some internal component blew up, and the rear fan stopped working. I installed a firmware hack to spin the other fans faster, but the inside of the case was still getting uncomfortably hot.

So I prowled around the Craigslist ads for a few months, until I found the right system at the right price, and performed a brain transplant:

At the same time I bought a little gadget that hooks up to my wireless network and tells me how much electricity a single power socket is using in the house. So I put it on the socket leading to my computer and stereo setup.

When I transferred to the new machine, my power consumption dropped by about 40 watts. That was nice, but it was nothing compared to how much my whole system uses:

That's about 400 watts when the system is awake!

Eventually I realized that my old amplifier is a POWER HOG, even when it's not playing any music, and when I shut it off the usage instantly drops by another 200 watts. Good grief. That explains why it's also a pretty decent space heater.

Of course as soon as I was done with the upgrade, I booted into Skyrim to check out the increased graphics performance.

It was pretty good!

Then I lost several hours to digital homesteading. I acquired digital lumber and digital stone, and made some parts on a digital forge, and pretty soon I was buying furniture and hanging weapons on the walls.

The lengths a person will go to, to avoid driving in San Francisco...

The stickers make it look cooler than it is. It's actually an aluminum table that folds up nicely for camping.



Found it on Craigslist. It would have taken me just as long to find rush-hour parking for my van, I swear!

The guy I bought it from said he transported it on his motorcycle once. The whole time he was riding, he had to keep muttering to himself, "don't lane split ... DON'T LANE SPLIT ..."

I could relate! I had to fight my instinct to move as close to the side of the lane as possible.

No accidents, thank goodness.

Plastic bags

Oakland has a separate recycling mechanism for plastic bags, relative to the standard throw-it-in-the-can method we used for everything that has a little symbol on it.

There are free dropoff points for plastic bags around the city, and if you feel like a good samaritan, you can haul your bags out there and stuff them in.



This is approximately eight months' worth of plastic bags for three people.

Some of it was wrapped around vegetables from the supermarket. Some of it was peeled off the lids of yogurt and soup and sour cream containers. Some was used to transport cables, or batteries, or zipties, or bread, or bars of soap. There are bags in here from restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, gas stations. A surprising amount of it was packing material that arrived in the mail.



One night I stuffed it all into my bike trailer and pedaled it out to the recycling kiosk outside the Safeway.

I don't know where it goes from there, but I hope at least that it stays out of the ocean.

The big bucket back at the house remained empty for about two days. Then I received a piece of junk mail - a catalog - wrapped in plastic. The plastic went into the bucket.

Light gathering

If something looks odd about this picture, it's because it was taken at 3:00 in the morning.



Oh okay I suppose that's believable, right? Long exposure times make strange shadows. I took this one around the same time:



It's all on account of Kerry's camera having a 1.4-aperture lens. I've been obsessing about lenses lately - again - and I decided to walk around and use her camera to help figure out what I wanted.



Of course the exercise is academic, because I'm saving money for a new roof. But in a way, that doesn't matter. It turns out that I get a fair amount of enjoyment and satisfaction from the big purchases I make during the time before I make them, when I'm considering the options. I love to consider options.



So how many options is TOO many options, and how much time can I spend obsessing before it becomes a problem?

Well, usually the most intense thinking happens when I've narrowed the list down to less than five things.

The same thing happened when I was shopping for sunglasses recently. I opened fifty browser tabs, one after the other, just clicking on anything that looked semi-acceptable. Then I cut the fifty tabs down to less than five. All of that took about twenty minutes. Choosing among the remaining four took another half-hour and I had to come back to it a few times between other tasks. It was like, leaving the decision almost-made, then not making it for a while, was a fundamental part of my whole decision-making process.

How hard can it be to pick among four things that are all pretty good anyway? Not hard. But I found a bit of pleasure in lingering. Part of me enjoyed the delay, savored it even, after all the clearly bad options were eliminated.

I don't know if this is a good way to behave in general. It's probably meaningless to say so, either way, because it's a behavior that's useful sometimes and aggravating at other times.



And that's the way it is right now, with camera lenses. I'm down to three options, after exhaustive research.

Do I go for the 70-200mm 2.8-aperture lens that would be versatile, but heavy?

Do I go for the 28-300mm lens that would let me frame almost any kind of shot, anywhere I go, but has poor low-light performance?

Or do I go for the 1.2-aperture 85mm lens, like the one I'm walking around with on Kerry's camera right now? An ultra-narrow depth of field like 1.2, with no zoom, is very difficult and restrictive to work with. But the way it separates the foreground from the background, and the absurd amount of light it collects, can get me some shots that look absolutely unreal.

This one, for example, was taken in an almost totally dark room, without a tripod:



If I was just talking about night photography, there'd be no debate.

But if I'm going to be traveling, wouldn't a zoom lens be the only way to get all the shots I want?

Or maybe, if I want to go wide-angle, I can just take pictures with my phone instead. Decent wide-angle shots combined with the spellbinding medium shots of the 1.2 lens would be an adequate substitute for a real zoom lens, right?



I don't know. Do I come back from a trip with 250 good-looking shots, or 15 amazing shots that could serve as movie posters for Lord Of The Rings? I like night and macro photography and I'm pretty good at both, but I also just love taking pictures of everything everywhere and telling stories about it.



FIRST WORLD ... FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS ... *duh nuh nuh nuh duh nuh nuh nuh*

Watch on YouTube