It seems like I spent much of the past weekend fixing things and breaking things. As previously mentioned the kitchen sink needed to be fixed. With new parts from Moen in hand I became far more intimately acquainted with our faucet than I had ever expected to do. After nearly completely disassembling and reassembling it, I can say two things for Moen faucets: 1) they’re really well-built, 2) they’re complicated. I was very glad to have the step-by-step disassembly instructions that the Moen service rep emailed to me. After a few hours, though, I had everything put back together, the leak was fixed, and the faucet works as good as new (perhaps better).
However, some time later I discovered that the screen on my PDA was cracked. I usually carry it around in a cargo pocket on my pants; I probably crushed it against something while squirming around underneath the sink. The thing is less than six months old, so I’m somewhat vexed that I have to replace it. I’m trying to overlook the fact that it probably would have cost less to pay a plumber to service the faucet than it will cost to buy a new PDA.
My new Samsung netbook survived its freeze/thaw cycle unscathed. I’m quite happy with it. It seems just as good as the glowing reviews led me to believe, although I’d be happier if the button for the trackpad were elevated slightly rather than flush with the case. As it is, you can’t press it easily with the side of your thumb (unless you have really skinny thumbs, I suppose). Obviously it’s a machine built for portability rather than comfort, which is fine.
I’ve been curious about Linux for awhile and thought it might be fun to try running the machine with Linux rather than Windows XP. I have nothing against XP, but it crossed my mind that most of the software I expect to run on the netbook is cross-platform freeware anyway, i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird. To make a long story short, after a number of hours of downloading ISOs, making bootable USB flash drives from ISOs (since the netbook has no optical drive), installing and uninstalling various versions of Fedora and Ubuntu, and playing with stuff, I arrived at the conclusion that I have things I’d rather do with my time than play with Linux. Yes, it’s a nice-enoug OS and it’s a bargain at the price, but I’m afraid my eyes glazed over as I was reading the 1.5 pages describing the files I’d have to edit and the patches I’d have to install just to make the trackpad and Fn keys on the netbook work right. I gave up at that point and decided to use the OS that Samsung had included with the machine, along with the numerous little helper apps that make it do nice things like let me toggle the wi-fi interface on and off with a function key.
I fixed the kitchen sink Saturday morning. Sunday morning I was working on an ambient piece that I’ve been working on recently, which threatens to be the first piece of music I’ll actually finish in several years. Tracie discovered a small amount of water dripping from the ceiling of the laundry room, which happens to be directly below the kitchen. Imagine my delight.
It turned out that the source of the errant water was the hot-water shutoff valve beneath the sink. That valve has been a little fussy in the past and apparently my manipulations of the previous day were enough to cause it to drip slowly. I figured I’d have to head out to that orange-laden store, buy a new valve, and again spend some amount of the day wriggling around in awkward positions under the sink. The only hitch was that I wasn’t sure how to deal with shutting off the hot water altogether since there seemed to be a fair amount of pressure in the line even with the inlet to the water heater turned off. Fortunately my father is extraordinarily good at fixing things that go wrong in houses (and electron microscopy labs), so I phoned him. He told me to try tightening the stem nut on the valve which would compress the packing and hence possibly stop the leak. This indeed worked, so I was saved from the trip to the hardware store and further under-sink wriggling.
Back to the netbook. During my thrashing around I somehow managed to damage the partitioning in a manner that left me without the hidden “rescue” partition that Samsung pre-installs on the hard drive. (Yes, I probably could have gotten it back if I’d been more patient and/or observant. But I wasn’t.) This meant that reinstalling XP was something of a challenge since I don’t have an external USB drive on hand. (Firewire, yes; USB, no. The Samsung has USB but not FireWire. Let’s take a moment to cheer the fact that Apple is putting the nails in FireWire’s coffin.)
So then I spent some time learning about obscure things like BartPE and the Ultimate Boot CD and how these things can be used to do stuff on PCs that lack optical drives. Sadly, after downloading and constructing these things, neither of them worked particularly well, possibly because I was using an OEM XP CD. That’s when I hit upon the solution which I should have thought of in the first place: take one of the optical drives out of my PCs and use the interface from one of my external USB hard drives to connect the drive to the Samsung. That worked flawlessly, and I was able to install XP in the normal manner.
But hey, I could have had a worse weekend. I could have been in my friend Dan’s shoes. Dan and his wife were flying from California through DIA not long after that Continental flight went off the runway. Dan and his wife got to spend hours waiting around in California, then spend hours standing in line in DIA, then getting shuffled off to a hotel at about 10:45PM to catch their connecting flight the next day. I haven’t heard from Dan since we chatted by phone while he was standing in line, so I presume he’s managed to get to wherever they were headed.
