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.

Buckle Your Seat Belt!

Late last week a friend of a friend's son was in a seemingly minor car accident in northern Virginia. He was steering his pickup truck around a corner about a mile from his home. He was sober and not driving extremely fast (maybe 30-40 mph), but apparently took the turn a bit wide. It sounds like he was making a left turn, drifted wide, and the rear passenger wheel of his truck struck the curb. With it's high center of gravity and the angles involved, the truck flipped over.

Now, had he been wearing a seat belt, he likely would have been pretty well banged up -- maybe some bruises and cuts. Unfortunately, he was not buckled in. So as the truck flipped, he was ejected through the windshield (which pops out easily for safety reasons), and he struck the brick wall of house headfirst. In an effort to keep the swelling of his brain from killing him, they had to remove the top of skull to reduce the pressure. Further, about 20% of his occiptal lobe was dead. There was a slight chance of the body healing and his brain regaining some function, but today we heard they have pronounced him brain dead. He probably won't see the end of the week, and may not see the end of today.

He is 21.

There is no excuse for not wearing your seat belt, ever. Accidents happen, which is why they're called accidents. BUCKLE UP.

ZoneAlarm and KB951748 Windows Update

Like many others, applying this update has killed my internet connection. Apparently something in KB951748 upsets ZoneAlarm at which point it blocks all internet traffic. The stupid thing on my part is that I actually read about this in passing somewhere and then went an did an update this morning on my desktop anyway. This is the only machine running ZoneAlarm, so all the other computers in house still could connect which let me research the problem further.

I've never been a huge ZA fan, but like I'm always more comfortable with a program that alerts for both inbound and outbound connection attempts. I've reverted to ZA because they killed off the free version of Tiny Personal Firewall (aka Kiero), at which point I switched to Comodo. But that one wreaked havoc on my internal network traffic (connecting to laptops and the Xbox 360 became painful). So I eventually moved to ZA. Each time you install a new firewall, it goes through several days of training where it questions you about all activity. This is very annoying, so I don't really want to switch from ZA right now. But I need internet on this machine and don't want to be firewall-less.

One option of course is to uninstall KB951748. Do this by opening Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> check "Show Updates". Pick it off the list. The problem is that it warned me all these other updates would stop working too. I don't really want to mess with this system's stability (it's already agining and I don't want to upset it!), so partially uninstalling various updates is one of those things that will surely break other things that are working OK.

Disabling ZA of course lets me back on line, but I feel like a naked teenager stuck in the mall.

So for now I've shut down ZA and turned on the Windows Firewall. I have actually never used this on any of my machines. I know it's better than nothing, but it doesn't warn (or trap?) outbound connections. I'm not sure I feel much better, but it's like throwing a towel to the naked teen in the mall. For now, I'm on line. And really this machine gets abused a lot less than it used too and I haven't noticed any fishy calling home actions via ZA recently anyway, so things should be OK for now.

I'll need to watch for ZA updates or possibly move to something else. Maybe since I don't connect to the Xbox anymore for streaming audio (due to using the HTPC), Comodo is a viable option again. But, ugh, those training days suck.

No more training wheels?

Now that the littlest child has her first real bike, her cries of "I wanna ride my bike" echo through the house every evening and weekend. As such, we've been heading out around the block much more often again (after seemingly taking all of last summer off). But of course now Jake is big enough that he shouldn't need training wheels at all, but watching him ride, he still relies on them. I raised them up, but he would just drop the bike onto one wheel or the other and go down the street -- no concerns for balance (or the noise!) and just merrily relying on the extra wheel.

So we decided that was enough of that and he should be going without training wheels. He's taken to swimming like a little fish (piano lessons too) because he wants to do it. And these past 7 years with him have shown me that whenever he's ready to do something, he just does it. If he's not ready, it's a lot of yelling and pouting and crying and a general uphill battle until we give up, and he decides a month later that he's ready for whatever it was. This is how taking off the training wheels is going. He's afraid to fall, but won't try in the grass because it's too hard to pedal. When you're walking next to him, he just leans against you. I was convinced there was a problem with his bike until I got on it and pedaled around a bit (it's fine). The boy just leans side to side.

After an hour of explaining how the pedals go around in circles and you can't just push downwards, but need to make them go around, and also that nobody can balance on a bike while it's standing still; that it's easier the faster you go, we finally got out on the street. He was so worried about staying near the edge (as is the regular rule when going around the block) that he kept running up into the grass or else panic braking as he'd drift into the street. It wasn't a busy evening, so I convinced him to ignore those rules for now, that I'll watch for cars. Finally he did get going with me jogging along side. I still had to rebalance him several times while going, but at the top level he's finally getting it. He still needs help starting, and stopping, and turning, and balancing. But at least he was out there on two wheels with no support!

I expect he'll progress quickly from here - but it's all up to him.