I Thought It Was Friday

[howeird]

Don't know why, but when  I woke up this morning I thought it was Friday, and dressed like Jay Lake in honor of his birthday.

Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals, socks. He mostly wore tie-dyed socks so I was not completely regimental here.

Subconsciously I knew it wasn't Friday, because I didn't get to work till after 10, which on Any Given Friday would mean the bagels or donuts would be gone.

At work I had just enough time to try one experiment with turning a photo into a video, before the IT department, without any notice, disconnected all the test equipment from the network. It was still down when I left at 6. This is part of a planned renovation of the lab, converting most of it to optical cable instead of copper (we need a mix for the current product, but the upcoming one only uses fiber). There was really no reason for them to interrupt anything just to add more fiber. :-( And email woud have been nice. Like last week.

Lunch was at Sizzler, the price for the salad bar has gone up, but seniors still get a free soft drink. The place is decidedly less crowded now, which I blame on all the price hikes because the massive construction project next door is done, and it's a hotel. Ought to be lots of extra customers from that, but there aren't.

Strange but true, boss and I did have a 1-on-1 today, we had a lot of work stuff to talk about, and also moaned and groaned over the sad state of Flickr.com, which has ceased to be the easy to use web site and the app is even worse. Picasa will be getting another look-see. And so will some other photo storage sites. With my luck the best one will be called "cloud-"something.

For those of you who are not long-time Internet engineers, this is what a basic diagram of the Internet has looked like for the past 30 years:




Nobody ever called it The Cloud. Everyone knew that the Internet was symbolized in engineering drawings as a cloud. Saying "we store things in The Cloud" is like saying "we do our computing in The Rectangle". Effing idiot marketing people.

---

This morning I decided Fuzzy had installed the left side of the rear shower door backwards. Sliding doors, the front door has the towel rack, easy to grab onto and slide that door with. The rear door has nothing to grab to slide the doors in the other direction. The glass door is in an aluminum frame, four pieces, top, bottom and two sides. Both sides have a flange which one can use to slide the door. Both flanges face the inside of the shower. So I removed the left side piece, reversed it, and discovered that it was no easy task to slide it back, because there is a cheap silicone liner which pushes into the glass, and then fits in the slot in the aluminum piece.

I didn't have time to mess with it, so I left for work with the door not functional.

So on my way home I stopped in at Depot de la Casa, which is where I figured Fuzzy had bought the shower kit. But they didn't have anything remotely like it, and the only showers they had on display were the novelty ones (corner closet and curved glass door ones). And nobody to even ask.

So on to Lowe's. This took me right past the still-a-crime-scene on Fair Oaks and Maude where cops at about 9 am shot dead someone they had come to arrest. 7 pm and there were still several police cars, vans, one lane blocked off, two TV microwave trucks and a lot of spectators.

One of my pet peeves as a better than average marksman is police shoot to kill, when it is not much harder to incapacitate the perp by shooting her in the leg.

Lowe's had on display the same shower shell, and a large collection of doors, including the one I have. And I was wrong, the flanges do both point inside the shower. Go figure. And no, Fuzzy didn't choose the least expensive doors, he chose the 2nd least expensive.

Right there in front of that one was a type which does not look like it will fall apart easily. I snapped a photo of the price tag, and of the $299 flat fee installation tag. Tomorrow I will go in there and arrange to have it installed. It will come to about $700. :-(

In other remodeling news, in my walkabout, I saw lots of granite countertop. I really want to do the kitchen in that. I really know I won't because I can't afford it.

Another thing which does need doing is have the carpet on the outdoor front steps replaced. I'll ask Lowe's about that too. That's a safety thing, I have to get that done before winter.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work from home, until the AAA Furnace person comes (between 9 and 11) to give me an estimate on air conditioning.
Lowe's
Work
Maybe find a #jaycon gathering. Probably at a pizza place.

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Cloud us such an amorphous marketing name that SUCKS.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

M'kay, so what do you think of the trend of bagels that seem more like donut hybrids (lighter dough, chocolate chip, excessively sweet, etc. I think bagels should be bagels. When I was a kid we called them cement donuts. And donuts should have holes in the middle.

I am now imagining the mess that would happen if one sliced a donut in half and toasted it. Ew.

[howeird]

I'm half with you on the bagels. I learned how to make bagels from scratch when I was about 8, and had perfected the chocolate chip bagel a few years later. Bagels should not be like concrete, they should not be like dinner rolls. I guess I would describe them as condensed challah. In fact, except for the egg:flour ratio, bagels have the same ingredients as challah, and then dropping them into boiling water for a few seconds before baking kills the surface yeast so the bagel rises inside, but is contained by the outer shell.

Noah's has recently gone to the dinner roll bagel, which is disgusting. Too much sugar, too light.

As for donuts, I would not recommend putting a hole in a custard filled one. :-)

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

You have given me a concept or two here: 1. Custard-filling donut holes, perhaps contained in tiny openable plastic balls. 2. A kit for drilling donut holes, for the culinary artist who has everything.

[howeird]

A caterer friend of mine makes donut holes in something that looks like a waffle iron with the world's worst case of acne. She uses a big culinary syringe to fill them with custard, jam, whatever, and delivers them in egg cartons.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Oh, and should you ever have occasion to work with a remodel contractor again (and here's hoping you don't) get one that will take you along shopping for stuff, or let you do your own shopping.

[howeird]

No, I expect a professional contractor with 25 years' experience to listen to his customer, and buy what the customer asked for.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

That is an unreasonable expectation, because the selection of things like faucets, shower doors, etc. is so huge and tastes (whether we know it or not) are very personal as to what kind of knobs we want to do what, what sort of things are on which side of shower doors. What you're doing is kind of like giving someone a blank check to go get you dinner, and when they come back with fried chicken and potato salad, saying, no, no, no I wanted Chinese food. If you couldn't or wouldn't shop for yourself, the contractor should have at least brought out a catalog or asked more questions or something.

When I did my baths and kitchen, the contractor had a bunch of leftover cabinet hardware from some other job. One of the 2 things I really hate about my kitchen that could improve is the cabinet hardware, because I know there are all kinds of styles I like better. By the time he'd put them on, it was too late, because I wanted knobs with single holes and he'd put up handles with double holes. I'd have had to buy new cabinet doors to fix it.

[howeird]

Not unreasonable at all. If I say about 15 times that I want separate hot and cold taps on the kitchen faucet, with the same kind of external spray attachment as in the current one, and he installs one which has a combined hot/cold tap with the spray built into the neck, that's NOT asking for "food" and being surprised when it's papusas and not แกงเผ็ดไก่. When I tell him I need a light above the shower, connected to the switch already installed in the shower wall, but he connects it to the main light switch by the door, that's not solved by a shopping trip. When I tell him to match the replacement tiles as closely as possible to the white tile and he buys tan, that's just incompetence. And installing the shower taps upside-down so that down is on and up is off, well, that's also not solved by a shopping trip.

The only thing which a shopping trip would have solved is the shower doors. He bought the cheapest ones available for the model of shower shell he installed. The shower shell itself is perfect, as is the shower head.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

What's unreasonable is expecting contractors to be able to communicate in English and trusting they've understood or listened to what you said. I've discovered the only way to even get close is to get all the stuff you think they understood in detail, in writing and in the contract, so you don't have to pay them if they do it wrong.

[howeird]

Normally I would agree with you, most contractors come from countries where English, she no spoke good. But Fuzzy is a citizen of Trinidad, he grew up speaking English. Two of the workers were Hispanic, but they both spoke excellent English, and one was an American college student.

And most of what they got wrong we did have in writing.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

If they got stuff wrong, and it was in writing, did they fix it and not charge any additional money? Anything else is dishonest. Did you pay them for work that was not properly completed under the terms of the contract? Did you have to pay extra for them to fix their mistakes?

If a contractor tries to pull stuff like not completing the work properly then telling you how much fixing that will cost, that contractor needs to be fired then and there. And sued to recover damages if an honest contractor runs up a large bill fixing the mess the first one made.

[filkferengi]

I'm definitely with you on the changes to flickr being extremely disagreeable & inconvenient. It used to be really groovy, with lots of thumbnails that made looking at other folks' con photos easy & fun. Now one has to wait all day for unwanted stuff to download. What the duck?