Diane Trout

I was trying to fix a badly done phone patch job and acquired some of these



According to the instructions, the plastic connector may cause eye and skin irritation and if you poke your eye with it flush your eye with large quantities water.

If you inhale it, "no need for first aid is anticipated". However if you swallow it, don't induce vomiting but do drink two glasses of water.

Somehow I think inhaling a something roughly the size of peanut M&M might require a bit more than first aid.

So here it is MLK day, and I have the day off, so having recently moved, I went back to unpacking.

And for a time I was able to force myself not to find the ideal place for all those books, just get them out of boxes and onto shelves.

But then I had to go get myself distracted by Wikipedia: Library Cataloging and classification. Where I got to read about the differences between the Dewey decimal system and the library of congress system.

And then I learned about the Universal Decimal System and that they have a summary of about 2,000 classifications in Browseable form

Now I need to resist the temptation to install some library cataloging software and go stick call numbers to all my books.

We finished cleaning out the old apartment and turned in the keys. I was a bit sad as it was a nice, albeit too expensive, apartment. Hopefully life as a homeowner will be manageable.

Mostly finished moving. We still have to clean out the old place, and the long process of unpacking. But at least I have working broadband again and finished setting up the bed.

It was very confusing, the internet moved a couple of days before the rest of my stuff, so I couldn't tell where home was... Was it where my IP was or was it where my bed was?

Today we painted our new bedroom, It took most of the day to TSP and lay down two coats. I got the job of edging along the top of the wall, which involved lots of climbing up and down the step stool to get more paint.

While we were waiting we also managed to wash the previous owners someone smelly refrigerator out.

Unfortunately for me I found some muscles that have been ignored for a long time, and so in addition to being really tired now, I suspect I'm going to be in a lot of pain tomorrow.

On the plus side, the room looked really nice when we left.

On the downside, we can see how the carpet looks rather worn, and with my new homeowner powers I keep thinking I should replace it.

About a year ago Caltech installed a 200 kW solar array on top of one of the parking structures, its the largest solar installation in the city of pasadena. Recently I saw that they had a "building dashboard" showing how much power they produced.

On sunny days in winter they're producing about 514 kWhs per day, which is roughly how much I used for an entire AC heavy month.

The part that's scary, is they'll cover that KWH to other units, like dollars of electricity, or pounds of coal, or... gallons of gas.

That 514 kWh could have been generated from just under 15 gallons of gas.

It boggles the mind how much energy we use going to and fro.

So Charlie Stross posted about the British "digital economy bill", a blow job for the largest media corporations allowing permanent disconnection from the Internet. (After 3 copyright infringements)

It is likely this provision requiring that ISP monitoring and disconnection accused users is part of the secret ACTA treaty, currently being negotiated.

Of course since the treaty is being negotiated in private, we don't know what companies are actually behind it. (I suspect Disney).

As a result I should return to my total boycott of anything released by members of the RIAA or MPAA.

If you love the Internet, you should complain to your congressperson about ACTA, and try to boycott the major media providers, and/or consider participating in some part of The Free Culture Movement.

And to think it only took 2 days to recover from packing my bookshelves. Still quite a bit more to pack, and I need to get an estimate for movers at some point soon.

Hopefully the loan paperwork will be finalized soon.

Does anyone have any advice on how to pick a home inspector for southern california?

Thank you all for your congratulations.

Its fun looking at the post times of all the messages. It appears I have full 24/7 "friends who are awake" coverage.

The sellers agent responded and my offer has been accepted. It took him a bit to respond as there was a "death in the family".

Next up, he has to "open escrow" and I have to hand over a large sum of money.

And then next the challenging part -- packing.

Back on the 12th I put in an offer on a condo, I was thinking of making them wait a bit so I could then haggle further, but after looking at the other options in the area, I realized that their counter was in actuality a fair price, and I further realized that the reason I was worried I couldn't afford it was because I was confusing interest rate and APR in my little excel sheet.

The end result is I signed their counter and emailed it back sunday night. But I haven't heard anything from the sellers. I did check with my agent and she'd received the signed offer and had forwarded it to the agent. (And called, and texted him)

But no response.

We wonder what's going on with them. *sigh*

Although house hunting does have the advantage of much more of it can be done via email than apartment hunting, there's a lot more opportunity for disappointment.

Thank you all for answering my survey.

Basically thanks to living in an area rich with Overlay Area Codes there's a good chance most people around me have mandatory 10 digit dialing. In some places the 1 prefix is required for calls that are billed as long distance, sometimes it's always required -- however the 1 prefix is rarely harmful.

As a result if you're able to use your mobile phone book to call out over a land line it's pretty likely to work if you enter things with the 1 + 10 digit format for phone book entries. (The only issue might be if the mobile phone caller id to name mapping would match an incoming 10 digit number to the 11 digit number in the phone book.)

Because of the feature of the 1+10 -- that it's the string likely to work on both mobile and land line phones, I've always wondered why PBX systems aren't using 1 as the indication a person is trying to make an outside call. Most of the office PBX I've used are set to dial internally, unless you dial 9 first for an "outside line", however there's no technical reason why 1 couldn't do the same job, and would have the advantage that you can always dial the same thing, regardless of what type of phone you're using.

For my own small scale PBX purposes I realized I could solve how to differentiate between "external numbers" and "internal extensions" by using digits for external and sip addresses like "desk@server" or "diane@server" as my internal phone numbers.

Alternatively VoIP hard phones support on hook dialing like a mobile phone, so I don't have to parse the digits being dialed one by one, I can parse the whole 3, 4 or 10 digit blob. However that requires that the user hit a "call" or "send" button to indicate they're done keying. Though as a big advantage using on-hook dialing gives you the chance to check what you typed in before the call connects.

I was playing with VoIP over the weekend and managed to configure my mobile phone and an old sip hard phone to talk to each other, go to voice mail, paging, and receiving calls from google voice all using freeswitch.

One difficulty with the insanity of setting up a PBX system in your home is the "dial plan" -- AKA what happens when you start pushing buttons on the phone.

Imagine you encounter something like the following phone in my home in Los Angeles:



Poll #1483025 What would you try to dial?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

What would you first try for a local call

What would you first try in an emergency.

What would you actually do first for a non-emergency call.

We put a back up offer in on a Townhouse a few days ago, and the primary buyer is asking for their second inspection extension, and still hasn't decided if the property passes inspection, and the seller is getting tired of the delays.

So as the first backup offer, my agent was offering us as a quick alternative but wants us to have a loan ready OMG right now.

I only have access to about 10% down, the randomly selected lender seems to think that a 3.5% FHA loan would be fine, even if the condo complex needs to be approved by the FHA.

My agent doesn't want to go through the FHA approval process and wants me to use a different lender to get some kind of alternate loan product that requires 5% down. The lender has no idea what type of loan she's talking about and seems to think that FHA approval is something relatively easy to obtain and the FHA loan would be fine.

I have no idea whose right, or what needs to happen next.

I'm really developing the feeling that they're all motivated strongly be self-interest and I shouldn't trust anyone involved as, to simple approximation, they're all just trying to steal my money.

(And wandering around not knowing if someone is about attack steal all your stuff is a definite part of EVE).

The loss of gay marriage in Maine reminds me of my childhood growing up in a Fundamentalist Christian Church and watching my parents fight constantly.

The christian groups motivated to hate gays are (at least in my experience) the ones most likely to engage in child abuse.

I couldn't find a link to the primary reference, but On Christianity, Fundamentalism, Spanking, and What Constitutes Child Abuse discusses some of the research linking religion and child abuse.

I guess the conservative christians have experience with just how violent, angry, and wretched of parents they are, and since their insane god tells them gays must be worse then them, that's what lets them rationalize the need to "protect" children from gays. At least their advertisements against gay marriage in California, seemed to revolve around if we had gay marriage, children might be exposed to gays.

Speaking as a child raised in a fundamentalist church, why the hell can't we talk about how religion is abusive? Why do the christians get to claim the "moral" high ground of "protecting children". Children bloody well need to be protected from them!

Gah.

House hunting is not a activity for pessimistic impatient people.

We've been occasionally attempting to purchase a home, at first we were thinking a house would be good. But then we realized just how well we'd handle dealing with yard work, and how convenient it is to live near transit options.

So started looking at condos, most condos aren't that exciting, but town homes are looking like a good compromise between fewer shared walls, but being closer to transit.

We found a neat place last weekend, but the buyer accepted the first offer before we could see it and submit our second offer. However today the real estate agent told me we were accepted as the first backup offer.

So that's kind of exciting, its the closest to a home purchase I've ever gotten.

However we'll probably need to continue looking at places.

One of my typical sources of depressive news, linked to something I found positive.

There’s No Place Like Home -- Fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment.

Apparently as we move around less we become more interested in and willing to help our local community.

I've been playing D&D with a group including one of my coworkers, and tonight they did something interesting.

We had a ghost who was using mage the ascension rules for magic while the rest of us were doing standard D&D 3.5. (Well pathfinder). It was an interesting way to show the powers of the old elvish civilization.

Also it was my birthday, and that was at least one good thing to happen. I really wish I'd gotten to see my girlfriend awake today though.

Where do those without health insurance live?, Floyd Norris looked through some of the recently published census data on who's uninsured.

Though it tends to be the "red"/"conservative" states that have the uninsured groups, the actual population in those states tend to be poor black or hispanics who vote strongly democratic.

The Public Imperative argues that one thread in the resistance to a public option is that many in America are deeply offended that there's a chance someone could be freeloading off of their hard work.

Combining this leads me to think that conservatives think we shouldn't extend health care, because that'd just be for the lazy freeloading brown people.

(Obviously sad conservatives probably have never encountered being at the wrong end of social privilege).

Our lease is about to expire, which makes a great time to go look at places to buy.

It looks like prices are going to start climbing back up, as properties around here have scores of offers. Yet at the same time there are large swaths of rental signs up.

I feel like I'm likely to end up like Hiro Protagonist, living in small home but with a cool VR environmnt.

My mind has gotten stuck on a train of logic leading me directly back into severe depression.

I'm pretty miserable when its warmer than 90F outside, one of the most likely effects of global warming is the increase in number of days above 90F.

My only conclusion is that every year that passes, my life is going to directly and at a very basic level become more miserable.

And that's not even counting the almost certain impact of water stress. (due to the earlier springs, there's less snow meaning less available water, due to the continuing climb in population there's increasing demand for water, implying that the per capita availability of water is rapidly declining.

Atmospheric trends in CO2 at Mauna Loa shows definitively that CO2 concentrations are still climbing.

So I was trying to compare socialized medicine to the crazy US healthcare system.

Did you know that Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the US List of countires by infant mortality?

There's a City of Pasadena Fire Update Community Meeting tomorrow Sept 3, at 7pm.

Also I just learned that the "Pasadena Public Information Officer" has both a blog and twitter feed.