Inert Ramblings

Category: Fundamentals

General stuff.

  • Bronx Reptiles shuts down; hundreds of animals left to die

    The boa constrictor that was discovered and bifurcated at Ludlow train station in Yonkers, NY on Tuesday, October 12th was actually abandoned by Bronx Reptiles, a well-known breeding and rescue operation that recently shut down. I don’t know the full details of or history behind Bronx Reptiles, but a tenant in the building contacted one of our associates after the owners vacated the operation, fled their legal troubles, and disappeared, leaving hundreds of dead or dying animals in their dirty enclosures.
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  • Migrated to a new wicked fast ADSL line.

    SpeakeasyI’ve been a Speakeasy 768/768 SDSL customer for over three years now and, up until recently, I couldn’t have been happier with the service! That is until I found out that Speakeasy had a new 6000/768 ADSL offering in my area. The 768/768 SDSL line was originally chosen because we were locally hosting around a dozen Web sites and needed the corporate class QOS. Now that all of my Web services have been colocated with ValueWeb, I opted to migrate to the much faster consumer class 6000/768 ADSL circuit.
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  • Trunkmonkey.com in the top 100,000!

    According to Alexa Traffic Rank, Trunkmonkey.com has shoved its way into the top 100,000 sites on the Web! We debuted on the list today at 71,071. Sure, Alexa’s demographic is Windows users running Alexa Toolbar, but whatever. It still makes me (and my Google AdSense account) feel all warm and fuzzy.

  • Aw, nuts!

    The neighbor’s $300 as-is POS Buick lost its brakes yesterday so, being the good Samaritan, I helped them out with replacing the brake lines and rotors, and supplied a few bottles of street grade brake fluid that have been collecting dust for a few years and did a full bleed for them. But that’s neither here nor there.

    When I went into the garage to grab my tools, I found it rather odd that a peanut was sitting atop my tool chest. A large Ziploc bag of peanuts was on the top shelf of the rack, but it was sealed. I opened up one of the drawers, and peanut shells were littered everywhere. I opened another drawer. Same thing. Another. Same. Except the last drawer I opened also had a little nest, lots of mouse poo, and scraps of fur. Joy.

    I still don’t know where the peanuts came from. The Ziploc was sealed tight, and there were no holes in the bag. And there was probably a handful or two worth of shelled and eaten peanuts scattered among my tools. I guess it will remain a mystery.

  • Where the heck did CafePress go?

    So CafePress has been down for the past 24 hours. Great. No idea if they just went under and disappeared, or if this is a temporary glitch. I found out this morning when I started getting e-mails from a few people asking me if Trunk Monkey gear was still available because the link to the store was dead. Anyone else have any additional info?

  • A fistful of quickies…

    Many thanks go out to sabominator for pointing out toothpaste for dinner. Applegeeks makes me laugh. A lot. Gina makes a hot bride. Mac Hall inspired Applegeeks. The Inventor makes a guest appearance. We have a bunch of little pricks wandering around the house, and you should buy stuff. The Trunkmonkey is passing 6 GB to 20 GB per day (leeches). Hamor.com needs some attention from Google. And, finally, Pepper Computer just released Pepper Keeper 1.2.

  • Sunny Florida!

    Kelly and I are taking a mini-vacation this week and will be flying down to Sunny Florida for a few days to visit Dad and Gram. It figures…we’ll be leaving on an unusually warm day. It was 50 today, so who knows how warm it will be tomorrow when we leave.

    Once we get to Florida, we’ll be doing the tourist thing, playing with my Dad’s Segway, seeing the sights, then driving home in a free Subaru Legacy that fell out of the sky. Well, not really. Gram sidegraded to a Ford Escort, so I get the Legacy to replace the rally car as my daily driver. On the way home, we’ll be stopping off at Picky Hedgies so Kelly can look at hedgehogs.

    So, once we get home, the rally car goes up on jackstands for major surgery. Fun stuff.

  • Who needs heat?

    image_sfhs.jpgAfter limping along our old oil-fired steam boiler for the past two months, our brand new Utica SFH Steam Oil Boiler was installed yesterday. Although we’re now quite a few thousand dollars poorer, the peace of mind and fuel savings made the investment well worth it! Even though the insulation was removed from all of the steam pipes and hasn’t been reinstalled yet, the new system performs infinitely better than the old decrepit system that we used to have.

    The previous 50 gallon system took over two and a half hours just to get up to temperature and then another few hours after that to raise the room temperature five degrees. The 15 gallon Utica takes a little over ten minutes to get every radiator in the house fired up and, even with the heat off all day during the installation, it only took half an hour to an hour to raise the temperature of the entire house ten degrees! To maintain temperature, it only needs to fire for a few minutes every once in a while.

    To finish everything up, the next step is to draftproof the basement and finish installing fiberglass jackets on all of the steam pipes. Once that’s done, I’ll be insulating the floors to minimize heat soak. Since stripping all the floors down to the wide pine and finishing them with polyurethane, drafts have become an issue because of the plank spacing. You can peer right into the basement in quite a few spots. So, the gaps will need to be taped from the bottom and, if that doesn’t solve the draft issues, fiberglass will need to be installed.

  • It’s Kelly’s birthday tomorrow!

    Yay…it’s Kelly’s birthday tomorrow. The big three-zero. Please leave a comment to wish her a happy birthday!

  • So, where’s the snow?

    We’ve been dusted so far. Maybe a half inch and some wind. I’m still waiting for the second wave…