An update on the addition plans

I am still fiddling with the plans for the 2nd floor of the house. Our appraisal came back on the existing house, we think we have enough money to do this, at least in theory. (I need to get some soft numbers soon, I have been trying to get the plans right first so people can give me some fairly close bids...) If I don't hear back from the credit union tomorrow, I plan to call them back, because the underwriter has had the stuff for 6 days now, and was working on things actively on Friday, I assume things are just about ready. I also need to find out if I should pay my April mortgage payment or not...

I talked to the building inspector for the city today, he liked what I had done with the plans so far, and thought they were very clean. (The beauty of using the computer to draw the plans, I guess.) He gave me some "suggestions" on what else to do, meaning the plans will not get approved without some of the details on the sheet he gave me. He also told me to get in touch with a structural engineer to validate and stamp the plans. The engineer would verify that the house could hold the addition. (One big thing Tara doesn't want is the house falling in because it couldn't hold the weight.) I suppose that means I need to do a drawing of the foundation, crawlspace, and basement area, with the retaining walls down there.

The first floor plans now include a list of changes to be made to the existing house. Some of this we can do right away, some needs to wait.

The plans for the second floor are essentially still the same, I expect that the closet to bedroom #4 will be a little smaller to accommodate heating/cooling ducts. I think I can take these up to the roof, and push the air down, I am not exactly sure. It's one of those things I still need to ask someone about.

The building inspector said to include a site plan for the construction, the example they have is about as detailed as this one is, so I think this is ok, I can't imagine there is a lot left to do here.

What's left on the plans? Not much I hope. I need to get an estimate for the roof trusses, Drew (Who just got occupancy permission on his addition, if it matters to anyone out there...) tells me that they will print out some drawings when you do the estimate that you can include with your plans. I need to get the answer on the HVAC questions. I think I also have to do an electrical diagram, showing sets of things will go to what breakers, which switches do what, etc. I also need to ask the city what they think about pulling the power to the new roof line, which will get the power lines up higher in our back yard. I have never liked how low they are back there, and if we can tie it to the new roof line, there will be plenty of room to stick a tree in the corner of the back yard...

Pasta with sausage, broccoli, and tomatoes

That is what the recipe is called, honest.

Goal update

Some updates on our goals. I tried doing the pictures side to side, but took them from the old post, and it is not really letting me change the orientation, so they look kind of weird:

• Reduce our family debt by 5 figures. We aren't going to be able to do this one this year. Next week we blow the thing out of the water, to get ready for putting on a second floor. We are still just a little over $19k now. Our new mortgage will come with a new lower interest rate, (currently sitting at 4.75%, I hope it drops again in the next couple of days before we lock in a rate, unless we already did without realizing it. The rate was 5% when we started the process 2 weeks ago.)
• Watch more baseball on TV. The World Baseball classic helped, I missed a bunch of those games. The final between Japan and Korea was quite a game. Adam and I tried watching a preseason game between the Cubs and Rockies this afternoon, but we both fell asleep in the middle.
  
• Finish some unfinished projects (Including some before and after shots):
  

The little path right behind the house. It may look like this is just a complete mess, but it is about half the mess that it was a week ago. I would have worked on this a little more today, but there was the nap I mentioned earlier...

The garden wall. This is done. I added some solar lights along the wall, they don't throw a lot of light, but what can I expect for $4 at Walmart? You can see the soaker hose down, just waiting for me to plant something that needs watering...

Our closet. Which looks a hundred times better that it did before. I kind of like having a light in the closet.

My 200 puzzle sudoku book. I have finished 110 so these so far, and I can see myself finishing sometime this summer.

Our little closet thing behind the washer and dryer. I wanted to put shelves in this thing, and maybe pull the door to Lily's room (Now Adam's room, by the way) out. I would have taken a new picture, I cleaned the thing out once, but new stuff is piled over there. The plans for the house has this becoming part fo the kitchen pantry and the door to the bedroom getting framed in.

That thing around the dishwasher. Two subtle changes - the top is finished, which a little strip in place and the cord has been rerouted. Now all I have to do is put in a piece of laminate on the side, and some sort of trim around the thing to finish it. I might just leave it until the other construction starts, so that we can see what things look like before finishing this off.

The shed, which looks nearly done, unless you open the doors and unleash the beast that needs to get cleaned up behind there.

The mission journal. Someday this will be done. (But not today...)

Wii games. I am about 90% through both Mario Kart and Star Wars. I have also been working on Super Paper Mario and Super Mario Galaxy... But I haven't worked that hard on any of them lately for some reason.

Steak with a sauce, sort of.

Or some sort of something on it. I got a new combo blender/food processor yesterday, and made sauce for the steak. We also had some home fried potato chips, but we ate them all before they got to the plates. The sauce has:

• bell peppers
• onions
• garlic
• celery
• turnip
• parsley
• salt
• pepper
  

Letter from Autozone

March 24, 2009

Dear AutoZone.com Customer,

Between March 14 and March 16, 2009, you placed an order with AutoZone.com for an itam that was listed for $.01. At the time your order was placed,we were having site issues related to the launch of our redesigned web site. The merchandise that you purchased is no longer available at AutoZone and we do not have the inventory to fill you order.

This issue has been corrected and the items are identified as no longer available for purchase at AutoZone.com. We regret any confusion this may have caused. Your order has been cancelled and your credit card has not been charged.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

Thank you for shopping with AutoZone.com

Jamey Traywick
Director, E-Commerce
Customer Satisfaction

Would this be the same response I would have gotten out of Checker Auto Parts? I'm not even sure what exactly bothers me about this letter. I ordered seat covers for the seats in the van for a penny each. One of each color that they had, or supposedly had. It is no big loss, really. At least they had the decency to explain what was going on.

Anyway, it must be embarrassing to have to send out a letter like this because you were not able to fulfill an online purchase. Hopefully it is doubly embarrassing to send the letter out, and then have someone post the letter on their blog.

I don't normally purchase things on AutoZone.com. I use the website to check availability in their store, then head over for whatever I need.

Less than helpful tech support

Last night, unbeknown to me, a switch was moved in the Bookstore. I had been telling the bookstore people for a little while that I needed to patch their servers, but I hadn't really gotten around to it quite yet. This morning I heard that they were going live with one of their machines tomorrow, so I scheduled to patch the server before hand. Just before lunch I started patching, and while it was going I walked away from my computer. When I came back, the server was rebooting.

The server never came back up. This is not good. I went over to the bookstore with a department car, and the machine was really, really messed up, so I went back to the office to get my laptop and car, to be in it for the long haul I knew was ahead. (The guys in the office plan to send out a search party if I am not back in 3 weeks.)

This server had a number of shared libraries zeroed out. I didn't know this at first, I just knew that it was popping an error that I couldn't find an exact match on in the searches I did. The box didn't boot off the old kernel I just was on, either. After a bit of trying, I decided it was time for my first software support call to HP in about 5 years or so. (We just haven't needed one in the interm, HPUX is a stable operating system, or our installations of HPUX are, at least...)

I ended up talking to someone with a average Latin accent. He tried to understand my problem, and he didn't understand why he couldn't find my exact error in his KB. (I was getting all zeros for the error number of this particular error, and the error was always supposed to have a whole number associated with it. He eventually told me he would call me back after talking to some of his coworkers about the problem. I was hesitant to let him hang up on me, because of the high likelihood that it would take longer than the 15 minutes he estimated.

While waiting, I poked around for the source of the problem. This was not easy, because one of the shared libraries is called by just about any command inside the OS, I had to stick to the limited commands reserved for a maintainence mode of the OS. It wasn't very fun, but eventually I noticed that the library in question was empty. Not gone, just empty. This is not a good thing.

I had patched one of the other bookstore servers 2 nights ago, so I started downloading the shared library from that machine, so I could burn it to disk, mount it on the sick server, and copy it over. (The sick machine would not talk to the network, and is old, and does not have a USB port.) I got the file copied over, and the OS started complaining about another shared library. It was at this point that I noticed there were about 30 shared libraries that were all zero length. Is this not a good thing.

Wireless access in the little computer room in the Bookstore is not really an achievable goal, I had to keep taking my laptop out to the commons area of the Student Center to connect to download stuff. I ended up downloading about 400 shared libraries from the previously patched machine, just to make sure I got everything I needed. While I was waiting for this, I got an email from the HP support guy (who happened to be in Costa Rica) asking me to try to boot off the older kernel. He thought that might fix my problem. I decided to call him to break the news that I had already tried that, and to update him on my discovery.

The support guy told me that he thought the case should be escalated to a higher level of support, he started sounding sad about it. (Why was it a letdown for him to have to escalate the call? Shouldn't a call always be escalated at the right time? Has HP got some sort of incentive in place sometime in the past 5 years where the front line support people get some sort of bonus if they close the call without escalating it?) Anyway, the guy he sent me to didn't really want to help. I explained what happened, he for a minute tried to lecture me about backups for systems, but I didn't let him apply the lecture effectively at all. I explained what I was in the process of doing, his response was to say that it sounded like a good plan, I should update the case when I got through with that, but he was leaving to go home in 20 minutes, so he wouldn't be doing anything else for me. He let me know that 'someone' would be monitoring the issue if I was still stuck after doing what I was doing. Nice. That meant I would need to explain everything over again if I decided to call back in.

I got the machine functional again after a while, my download and copy fromt he other machine appears to have worked. When I got the machine going again, I had 5 more patches to apply that were sitting on the other server. I tried to copy them over, but the network was in bad shape between the two machines. I noticed errors on the network card for the one box, and called the network engineers to look at this new switch they put in the night before. The network engineer indicated that he hadn't yet gotten the remote access stuff for this switch in place, he had been sleeping all day, and would call me back when he was ready to look at the ports on the switch.

While I was waiting, I decided to try to reinstall the patch set I had already done, to see if any patches got missed. By this point, I had realized that what very likely happened was that there was a network interruption while I was patching, because of this misconfiguration, I guess, that caused one of the patches to not get applied right. The retry of the patch set showed up with 3 patches that got missed, one of these ended up replacing the very shared libraries that were zero length before. Looks like a network problem got me again. (When I got home, Tara's comment was that network problems were always the cause of my problems. I'm not sure that is really the case, but it is a bad sign for the network engineers when the wives of the systems guys notice it is always the network...)

They couldn't get the remote management going, someone was sent over, he corrected the network misconfiguration for these servers, and I was able to finish patching the server. It has a clean bill of health now. It only took me 6 hours to do a 20 minute job.

I should have just not called HP. Then I could still say it has been 5 years since I made a call. It's not like those two really did anything to help matters...

Sorry about the boring story. We'll get back to regular programming soon.

Her engineer is showing...

The little girls like to watch a show called "Little Einstein's" on the Disney channel. It is a cartoon about music, mostly, they have a little rocket ship they ride around in. To get the rocket ship to go, they pat their hands on their laps, and get the audience to also. (To give it more power...)

This evening, they were watching one of the recording of the show, Emma said "That ship never has enough power. There must be a better way to do it. Maybe they can take it apart and put it back to together or something. Maybe it should run on electricity or wind or the sun or something."

Hard to argue with that reasoning.

Vacuum is fixed

For a while now, Tara has been complaining that the girls don't do a good job vacuuming things up. I started looking into it, and the brushes on the vacuum rarely rotate. You had to have it on the highest level, and then sort of tip it a little to get them to spin.

I didn't fix the problem, mostly just ignored it until last week on Thursday, when I was trying to clean up our bedroom from the construction on the closet. I finally went out to the store to get a new belt for the vacuum, which is what I figured the problem was. I got the belt, and took the vacuum apart, and the new belt was about half the size of the old one, so I figured I had purchased the wrong belt. I ended up looking at the Hoover website, then ordering replacement belts off Amazon. (And "Revolver" and "Abbey Road" for Tara. Amazon has everything.)

Anyway, the new belt and CDs came today, and when I opened the package, the replacement belts were the same size as the ones I had gotten from the store last week. The ones I got from Amazon had the right Hoover model number written on them, so I took the vacuum apart and replaced the belt. The vacuum works much better now. A re-vacuum of the entire house is in order. That old belt stretched out pretty far, I wonder what the girls were trying to pick up with the thing. (It may have something to do with marking from what appears to have been a large green crayon on the inside of the thing...)

Ribs

Game Time

Settlers of Catan with Catan Event cards variant

For Christmas, Tara got me a "Traders and Barbarians" expansion of Catan, which has information and stuff for variants of the Catan games, and some scenarios for the games.

Tonight we played Catan with "Catan Event cards". The cards replace the dice, with enough of each numbered card to match the probability of the number. Some of the cards also have some sort of event with them. (Like take a card of your choice, move the robber back to the desert, breaka road, etc)

The game takes just as long to play as the regular game, which for us is two and a half hours because of all the interruptions that exist at our house in the evenings... I won, getting the longest road, and a point from a development card.

Eggplant Parmigiana

I made eggplant parmigiana for dinner tonight. (For Tara and me, the girls had chicken nuggets and tator babies)

We couldn't wait for the thing to cool down all the way, that's why it sort of flowed all over the plate.

The thing was good, we plan to grow some eggplant this summer, so we can have all the eggplant parmigiana we want in August and September. (Not sure what else to do with eggplant. Any suggestions?) I posted an announcement about it on Facebook to see if anyone wanted some, but no one took me up on it, so we have leftovers.

I call it "John's mobile garden"

If I drive fast enough, I can get at least an extra hour of sun each day. Until I drive it into the ocean and swamp it.