adrian's home: June 2005 Archives

The Skinny On RSS

Seems like RSS has been all the rage for quite some time now. I've never really spent the time investigating how many sites syndicate content with it, or what you can do with the feeds. It is a very simple concept that makes sense for those that have a number of sites on the 'net that they frequent, which also have constantly updated content. RSS is an XML-based concept which publishes the latest updated news items or content from a site. Using an application to aggregate all of these feeds allows you to get a snapshot of what's happening on multiple sites more quickly than having to visit each one individually.
If you don't have a browser plug-in or application that does this, grab one, or surf over to BlogLines -- a free site (including the obligatory interspersed advertising), which forces you to register, but then subscribe to RSS feeds which it then displays for you.

Posted by adrian on June 3, 2005 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The House On Broken Hill

It's really not that bad, but it sometimes feels like our house is falling apart. Our three-story house has a top floor that gets very hot and stuffy during the summer months. We've had the builder come out to assess the situation once before, and they simply said that it was the design of the house, and there was nothing that could be done. More recently, I was investigating whether there was something we could do, and I noticed that we have no hot air return on the top floor. There's a grate in the floor, which I always thought was a cold air return, but out of curiosity, I pulled the grate up and looked underneath -- there's nothing seemingly there! It's a channel in the floor about 6 feet long that is bounded by ceiling joists on the sides, and an inside wall and some blocking on the ends. Moreover, being the third floor, a cold air return in the floor is almost useless because all of the heat rises. So with three fans plus a ceiling fan, the hot air just gets blown aronund with no where to go.
To add insult to injury, I went down into the basement the other night, and got a soaker. After I turned the light on, realized that the floor near the furnace was wet -- in fact the whole area on the floor near the furnace was wet, and it was hard to tell where it was coming from. After speaking with ny father-in-law, he suggested that I check the drainage pathway for the compressor coil. Sure enough, the drain adapter was plugged and so all of the condensated water was running down the inside of the furnace instead of through the drainage pipe. What came out of the drainage adapter was the surprise -- using a coat hanger, I unplugged it, and dirt, dust, and a piece of carpet came out too! Since then, everything's been fine. We had a similar issue with our furnace this winter, though it was apparently a buildup of algae in the exhaust tubing.
Surprisingly, I received a call today from Greenpark's service department saying that they got the projects mixed up and our HVAC contractor is indeed still in business and will be coming out to attempt to rectify the return air duct problem in our loft. I also called the Town of Richmond Hill to find out how houses get inspected and things like this are missed -- it appears that ductwork is not something that is required to be given more than a cursory evaluation prior to sign off. The gentleman I spoke with was tremendously helpful though and said that if the builder wouldn't fix the problem, the Town would get on them on our behalf to have it fixed. Nice to encounter friendly people who are willing to help.
Thanks to Wendy, my new IBM Thinkpad T42 has arrived. Have I mentioned I love Thinkpads? The T42 has a fingerprint scanner built-in to the front right side of the base underneath the keyboard that can authenticate you to Windows XP and also as a power-on password. The neat thing is, if you authenticate using your fingerprint at power-on, it passes it through to Windows and you don't have to authenticate again. This T42 is a 1.8GHz Dothan P4, with a 60GB 7200RPM hard drive, 1.5GB of RAM and a 15" SXGA+ (1400x1050) screen. It's a piece of work. ;)
I've started work at a new job at iServ Ontario. iServ's the company that provides shared technology services infrastructure for the Ontario Government and all of its ministries. I'm part of the Solutions Design, Build and Integration group, more specifically dealing with network matters amongst a small team of people.

Posted by adrian on June 14, 2005 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How The Mighty Have Fallen

Today has been ingrained forever more as a day to remember. Q9 was down for over an hour today. I don't mean some customer was down, or their website was down, I mean their entire block of networks was completely unreachable from the Internet. Indigo and Moneris, who are both single homed at Q9 were dark -- no online book sales, no point of sale payment processing -- this from the company that guarantees "100% Uptime". Ironically, Q9 as an employer has traditionally upheld the attitude that no staff member should have access to make any changes to any of its core equipment -- except for a VP, and a COO. People just aren't trustworthy or smart enough to be able to make changes without screwing something up. Should you be lucky enough to be in a position to affect any core equipment, the smallest honest mistake has always meant termination. Obviously, no matter how hard you try to protect your assets, eventually human nature prevails.
I'm willing to bet that we won't see a single press release or mention of the major outage that was suffered today, and we'll instead continue to see an increase in stock price. Kudos to a company who has not developed a new service or product offering in over 2 years, and continues to flourish on the wings of senior management who I strongly believe never had any intention of running this business for the long term.
Greenpark has done it again. Sure enough, the site supervisor for our division was supposed to come out to take a look at our return air duct problem between 8-12AM today. At 11AM, when he still hadn't shown up, I called Montwest and asked where he was -- the receptionist had no record of us having an appointment booked to have anyone come out. Sound familiar? Every single time Greenpark makes an appointment to send someone out, they completely manage to screw it up. So after a few more calls, the receptionist finally gets in touch with the site supervisor, who agrees to come by 2PM.
So he arrives, checks things out, and proclaims that there's nothing wrong. The return air duct in the floor is pulling in 50CFM! So I asked him how is it pulling in air, and where is it pulling it to when there's no pathway from the hole in the floor to the lower floor, let along the furnace? That's apparently just the way it is. So I asked him how hot air that rises to the ceiling gets into the return -- "it gets sucked in" he says.
This begs the question -- even if this individual was amenable to acknowledging that there is a problem, and attempting to fix it, would we want someone like this attempting to fix it? His speciality is sheet metal.
Not to beleaguer the point, but we've had to buy a portable air conditioning unit because the office is completely unbearable with both computers on. We have sliding patio doors, so we couldn't get a standard window mounted A/C unit. Instead, the portable unit has an exhaust hose and came with a vertical mounting bracket that the hose attaches to. In order to connect it, the patio doors have to remain open slightly. The site super proceeded to tell us that having the patio doors ajar won't help with the heat.

Posted by adrian on June 22, 2005 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 2005 Archives

June 3, 2005

The Skinny On RSS

June 14, 2005

The House On Broken Hill

June 22, 2005

How The Mighty Have Fallen

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