drip, drip, drip

We had a bit of a water issue in the basement. We'd cleaned up the puddle a couple times, but wasn't sure where exactly it was coming from. I assumed it was condensation-related from the A/C, but it's been nice here and the air hasn't been on recently. We both mopped up a lot of water before finding a small rubber tube that had been dislodged from the French drain. Tucking it back in place stopped the puddling on the floor, but there was still water dripping though the tube. It was an overflow for the humidifier that we never use. There's a spongy material that rotates through a plate of water that helps keep the air less dry in the winter when the heater is running all the time. However, we never use this -- and looking in there it's caked with mold and gunk. No thanks.

Even though we don't run this, it's still hooked up. There is a small copper tube that tabs a cold water pipe in the ceiling which was slowly feeding water into the humidifier. Of course, since it isn't running, it just drips in the plate and then overflows. Since the overflow tube on the floor was actually in the French drain until recently, I have no idea if this has always been dripping like this or not. But I almost have to believe it has been like this for a long time. Since we have very little water in the basement, the drains are just dry rock. So these drips just seep around the local area (far away from the sump area) and evaporate -- keeping the basement moist. But just how moist is the question because we do run two little de-humidifiers down there.

Watching the drips, I can ballpark their size and rate. I tried to make a similar size drop in the kitchen, but probably made it a bit smaller. I measured these at 9 drops to fill a 1/4 teaspoon measuring spoon, which is 1.25 ml. This comes out to 0.14 ml/drop, and looking at the relative sizes I think I'm underestimating the volume per drop. However, we can move forward with this value. For the rate, I figure it was about 1 to 2 drops per second. Again, estimating low, we'll go with 1 drop per second. Multiplying, 0.14 ml/drop * 1 drop/sec * 3600 sec/hr = 500 ml/hr. I have no good feel for milliliters per hour, so let's keep converting: 500 ml/hr * 24 hr/day = 12,000 ml/day. Sounds like a lot, but what is 12,000 ml? There are 3785.6ml/gal, so this turns out to 3.17 gallons/day. Wow.

I'm probably underestimating both the size and rate, but we're looking at 3 to 6 gallons per day dripping through this tube into the drains. The de-humidifiers in the basement are typically emptied once per day (though not regularly) and probably remove a combined 5 gallons per load. Which means we haven't been keeping up. So while the basement looks dry, it always feels moist and I finally know why.

I've turned off the valve now, reducing the drip rate to 0. I've also emptied the humidifier case so that even if it's still dripping a bit, it will take quite a while to refill to overflow. I have also emptied the de-humidifiers, and they are cranking away right now. I will empty them again tonight as well. By my calculations, there's probably a good bit of moisture still in the drains to take out, but staying on top of the de-humidifiers for 2 or 3 days may actually dry the basement out almost completely. Let's see.

Dwarf Fortress

Somewhere along the line I stumbled across a "succession game" thread (here). This is where people play a "round" of some game and then pass everything off to another person to pick up where they left off. This thread is particularly interesting because of the care the players have taken to write "in character" as a person in the game.

So on to the game: it's called Dwarf Fortress. It's an ASCII adventure game. Yep - colored blocks is the limit of the graphics. I've read a lot about it, but it's daunting. The learning curve is something like 5-10 hours. I'm a little fearful of just digging in because of the micro-management involved. You start with just 7 dwarves, which seems easy enough to manage. But you need to do things like dig out a home in a mountain and start managing food and defenses with finite initial resources. Like I said, it's daunting, but then you have bad guys coming in, winter 6 months away, and trading also. It's an immensely deep game. See some stories from players here (it's a blog, so you'll need to dig around for DF posts and stories).

What has me fascinated about the prospects is all the logical choices you need to make. It's a game, but it's not one where you need to figure out the trick to get to the next level. You just need to make good choices to help your clan survive. Infinite possibilities.

There's a wiki to check out for more details. And some graphics packs (I'm using this one) which help get you over the ASCII hurdle, especially if you're running higher resolutions.

I want to get hooked on this game, but I'm not sure I have the time!

Firefox FTP

I love FireFox and despise it when I need to open anything up in IE. I'm also becoming more of a minimalist installing extra tools to do things other tools can (or should) be able to do.

Today I needed to upload some files to a new Sun box we have. I'm writing a demo for the Sun Grid engine, translating an older demo I did for Windows Compute Cluster Server to the distributed Java environment. So I needed to FTP from my work laptop. I don't have WS_FTP installed there because 99% of the time I'm just downloading from FTP and FireFox works fine. But it doesn't let you upload.

After 20 seconds of searching, I found the FireFTP add-on. It's an FTP client that sits inside FireFox. Clearly not as fully features as WS_FTP, but it got the job done. Kudos to the devs. Check it out.

New Car!

So our minivan, a 2004 Honda Odyssey, the daily driver of kids to school and the wife to work, is starting to show its age. It's about 4 years old with 87,000 miles on it. Now we all know Honda's could pretty much run forever, but there's a balance of investment required and trust in the vehicle versus the cost of a replacement. We've been talking some bout getting a replacement, planning to do this in the winter when the '09 models would be on the showroom floor, and probably with some good incentives if this economic downturn keeps going.

However, time was against us. First, the '04 van just went through and passed inspection, but it would need breaks soon (at least pads, likely rotors) and at least 2 new tires (after a rotation). Further we found out soon that it would need a timing belt as well. For somewhere around a $1500 to $2000 investment, it would continue on in good shape. But after these touches, it wouldn't be soon before we cross over 100,000 miles. Again, no big deal for a Honda in general, but it's psychological and its trade-in value drops significantly.

Recognizing this and with a free evening we decided to pay a visit to Apple Honda. We knew exactly what we were looking for (EX-L model, no navigation, no entertainment system). We poked around in the new 2008 on the floor and found some nice additions including:

• Rear door windows that roll down (OK, power down)
• Sunroof
• 3-zone auto climate control (old was front auto, manual rear)
• Auxiliary audio input jack (3.5mm plug for any MP3 player)
• 60/40 split 3rd row (old version was sometimes heavy to fold in and out)
• Additional 8th seat (an official seat with belt between the 2d row captains chair)
• Cylinder deactivation (drops to 3 cylinders when coasting or decelerating)

So we agreed to take one out for a test drive while they evaluated our '04 for possible trade-in. The one we drove was nice, but had a strange shimmy at 60mph. We ended up driving a second that didn't shimmy and was just fine. We were really pretty impressed overall with the car. Plus they have a $3,000 incentive plus 2.9% financing. The sales manager told us you'd usually only get one or the other, but they were doing both for the Odyssey. And after a little bickering we got a trade-in value of $8,600 (well over Kelly Blue Book's estimate). The combination of $11,600 off the top and 2.9% interest rate really made this a tough deal to pass up. It was basically a gamble of the trade-in value, interest rate landscape, incentives, and cost of '09 models (which aren't any different than '08s except a restatement of horsepower). Instead of gambling and having to invest a couple thousand in the '04, we bit the bullet and drove home the '08.

Unfortunately, I couldn't take off my PIAA 1400 fog lamps off the old car. Which means I'll need to invest in replacements soon (even though the wife doesn't think they help, I love them).

But so far, all of us a very happy with the new car. The kids just love having their own windows. I'm starting to track gas mileage to see how the cylinder deactivation helps.