Tag: plumbing

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Lessons of the night

In my plumbing exploits, which really should be documented on video, I’ve learned the following:

  • Brass fittings strip easily.
  • No matter how sure footed you think you are, when doing the splits between the top of a bar stool and a two by four bracing the hallway drywall suspended over a stack of paint cans and a mop bucket, applying torque to a monkey wrench that is above your head will cause you to fall down.
  • Swinging a two foot steel bar with your left hand against a drop forged pipe wrench (often mistaken for a monkey wrench) being held with your right hand is a mistake if you are not left handed.

Last time I did this, this plug came out much easier. Surely I’m doing something wrong.

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Milestone Rewards

How do you encourage yourself to reach a milestone? I know smoking programmers who give themselves a smoke break (7-15 minutes) when they accomplish a task. I don’t smoke, so I do a chore that doesn’t involve the computer. Today’s milestone breaks are brought to you by "Crack Plumbers, we’re just cheeky!" After Sarah did an art project involving rocks and the bathtub, our drain slower terribly. Now its stopped completely. This could be a coincidence. We have enough longhairs in this household to clog the public waste system so periodically I have to open the drain and pull out the alien creature that grows in there. It will be about 4 feet long, black, sluggy, and psuedo-intelligent. The most frightful thing I ever saw as a child was a Twilight Zone episode that involved a housewife vacuuming a dust ball out of her air ducts that turned out to be an alien creature that ate her. Since then I have never been fond of dust bunnies, air ducts, or alien looking snake-like gooey lengths of beyond description filth. However, I do want to bathe today…

So I just accomplished a very big deal on my current project involving combining functionality of two different parts of the application into a single page. It also involved altering the roles based security. Implementing roles based security on custom apps can be a time consuming pain in the neck. But fun! Time for my 7-15 minute break. Here creature creature!

Update: Pipes-1; Doug-0. Expect @cathymccaughan to report on my highly anticipated trip the emergency room during my next milestone break.

Update: Pipes-2; Doug-0. Done until Saturday.