Blessed by the Potato

So, shortly after Netbug’s hot water heater woes, my own has decided to give up for the winter. I went to wash my hands for bed and found no hot water forthcoming. In the midst of coming down with a cold, I took some ny quil in the hopes of waking up healthy tomorrow (note to self: shingles + karaoke to 3 am is not a sound health plan). I thought for a few minutes that the ny quil had broken my brain and that there had to be hot water coming out of the tap, and that I was quite possibly burning myself with my hand under the freezing cold water. Then I went out to the kitchen and heard this eerie wailing sound, like a cross between a tea kettle and two raccoons “fighting”.

It was coming from the basement. I went down there with a creeping, knowing feeling washing over me. Yep, the hot water heater was busted, wailing and dribbling water all down itself from the cold water intake at the top, all over the floor… and flooding the basement up to a depth of just over a centimeter. I then went to wake up Wayfare (who was not happy to be woken up suddenly in the middle of the night) before cutting the water and power (I didn’t want to step into the flood without someone else awake in case I electrocuted myself). Unlike Netbug, I have a cutoff for just the hot water heater, so I’ll still have at least cold water in the morning, but this is still going to suck. It also showcased how the foundation/basement tiles of old homes like this can be laid wrong or shift over time: the water pooled like crazy in the laundry room, but the only floor drain is in the furnace room, and there was at least one hump in the floor keeping the water from flowing out into the drain. It instead decided to move under the walls dividing the rooms and flood our storage area and the bathroom (and having the walls/gypsum drywall soaked through is going to suck come mould season). Even what water did meander its way over to the furnace room drain didn’t go in smoothly, instead choosing to overshoot around one side flooding our old window air conditioners before circling back around to the drain.

Oddly enough, the worst of the flooding went away all on its own as we started to shovel. Without the water continuing to flow to top it up it just seemed to seep away somewhere. Which, while saving me some of the effort of cleanup, just can’t be a good thing.

Of course, my landlord is in New Zealand for 3 weeks (I think this is the last of the 3 weeks), so this is going to be a nightmare to fix. The water heater has a big (recent-looking) sticker on it that says its the property of Union Gas… but calling them lead us no where. They couldn’t find a record of who owned the water heater, and unless they knew it was theirs, they weren’t sending anyone out to help us. I know I don’t pay a rental fee on my bill, and after putting me on hold a few times (though the lady on the phone was quite nice, as was their other 24-hour service person I had to call a few weeks ago), finally determined that my landlord had bought out the water heater, so it was up to us to get our landlord to fix it. Ugh.

I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, so I might as well use the opportunity to give it a quick review here. It makes me kind of feel like some big-shot member of the media to have something like this in my hands, but it was actually given to Wayfare in her role as a potential big-shot librarian collection-builder. I’ll try not to include any spoilers that aren’t already on the back cover.

It’s a (very) near-future story about a teenager dealing with the consequences of a country gone security-mad. In the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, the department of homeland security goes bananas, and everyone driving through a toll gate or taking the bus starts to feel the pain of the airline traveller, where you are always under suspicion, and no proof is needed to detain you. After being arrested for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting thrown in a decrepit prison for days without a lawyer, hearing, or phone call to his parents, after being accused of being called a terrorist, and then upon release finding that he’s still considered to be under suspicion, our protagonist decides to take on the department of homeland security. He sets out to expose the illegal heavy-handedness of the department of homeland security, and to show the american people that giving up their freedoms for the illusion of security and to live constantly in fear is just as terrorizing as the terrorist attacks themselves were.

It’s a young adult book, but I didn’t find that out until after I read it. Like a lot of YA scifi out there these days, it’s of very high quality and doesn’t really talk down to the reader or anything that would preclude this book from making the reading list of “less young” adults. It’s a touch on the short side, but at no point does the story feel rushed or simplified. I quite enjoyed the book, finishing it off in a single night (insomnia strikes again!). It was definitely a book with a message, but since it happened to be one I agreed with it never felt preachy to me (YMMV).

There were a few points through the book where the text became really familiar, giving me a sense of deja vu. In fact, these were the parts where the action seemed to take a slight break for a bit of exposition about cryptography, security, privacy, politics, or the science of networking. It seemed like Cory had cut & pasted a blog post or rant or speech from somewhere else right into the story; I was half expecting to see the fonts change for some of these bits they had such a strong “I’ve read this part somewhere else” vibe to them — and as Wayfare says, since it was an advance, uncorrected proof, that could be quite possible! Even then, it wasn’t like that was entirely a bad thing, as those parts did go with the story, it was just strange, like “breaking the fourth wall.” However, that’s because I’ve read a lot of Cory’s stuff out on the internet (via BoingBoing or other columns/speeches), so a normal person who hasn’t already read so much of his stuff wouldn’t notice or be bothered by it at all.

I haven’t had the time to properly read and write/rant about BC’s upcoming carbon tax, but I have to say that the idea sounds good to me: it’s a not-too-oppressive, revenue-neutral, slowly-incrementing carbon tax. Sounds like it could become the model for the other provinces (and possibly even the states!).

I’ve been fiddling with all the settings I can find, and I can’t for the life of me properly adjust volume on YouTube videos. There’s the little slider in the player that I can use to turn the sound down, but for the most part they’re far quieter than anything else on my computer. So of course, I turn the volume control on my speakers way up to compensate, just to get blown away by the intensely loud sound of an incoming email or MSN message. Does anyone have any ideas of what to do? I’m tempted to just keep my speakers turned up, and try to turn all the other sound settings down, but then there’s always some damn thing that won’t get turned down with the wave control and something else might come blasting out… plus things usually sound better when the hardware (speakers) don’t over-amplify noise…

Dawn is a funny, unreal sort of time. The sun comes over the horizon, and on warm summer mornings, you can sometimes watch the terminator race across the fields, or see the light slowly change colour as the sun, somewhere hidden and close to the unseen horizon, begins to shine in the winter. It’s a quiet time, a still time — nearly supernaturally so. Everyone is usually still asleep, or at least still in their own homes, while the night owls are finally off to bed. No matter what the weather seems to be doing through the night, or planning for the day, it always seems to take pause at dawn.

The dawn often brings feelings of peace, tranquility, of sharing in something special and quiet and private. For me though, I often find two other strong emotions at day break. Anger, for one, is easy to explain: I’m often up all through the night, whether it be frantically working, or losing myself in another world through books or video games. Dawn is the undeniable signal that I’ve been ignoring my watch for too long, and it’s really getting to be time for bed (or, time to finish my work). I feel angry and cheated by the sun, that the night is not long enough, that I’m not finished yet. Sadness too sometimes takes me at dawn, though I seldom know why. Whether a lament for the lack of sleep that finds me awake for the sun (often, in this case, when the lack of sleep is less voluntary), or a nostalgic longing for those times when seeing the sun rise was truly a fun event: playing poker all night at Shubh’s, or goofing off at the cottage. Or perhaps the odd, unpleasant memories of past stumblings through insomnia, like the time I couldn’t sleep when high school ended. The night before exams were released I stayed awake. There was a thunderstorm in the wee hours of the morning, and I went for a walk in the rain, and just kept walking. Dawn broke through the clouds, and by the time I was done walking it was shaping up to be a hot, muggy June day. I stopped by the school on my way home, looking silly with my rain jacket in hand since it had been bright and sunny for nearly 3 hours. I did well on the exams that I collected, but for some reason the memory of that day always makes me sad.