Furi.us

A lot happened today. Lastly, the texturing:

Well, they said it would be messy, and it was. But it turned out nice, and used 2.5 little hoppers of mud. There is also so, so much innuendo that’s just very tempting to mention about the process, but you can make that stuff up yourself easily. The texture style, by the way, is called “knife-over”.

At the beginning of the day the thermostat in my hot water heater failed again (luke-warm shower). It was tricky to get the pilot to re-light, and it kept going out. But I left it heating and went to work.

That afternoon my server began emailing me frantically that there was a problem in the garage, and that it wasn’t getting any power measurements. “Hmm, strange”, I thought. So I ssh’d in to find out the problem and a few seconds later the connection went dead. Filled with visions of exploded garages, I went back home, watching for the fire truck.

It turned out that PG&E had had an outage: the first unplanned one at my house in about five years. Unfortunately, when my server sees the power going down it turns off the USB: which means it doesn’t measure power any more (sigh). Since the power was out for two hours, and my UPS only lasts about 20 minutes, I decided to shut the system down. I also ripped out the thermostat and left the heater turned off. (The new thermostat seems to be working, though the pilot line had to be tightened more that I liked to get the compression seal to stop leaking. Steel line with a brass 7/16″ fitting and what looks like a copper collar: go figure. Always test gas fittings!)