Wife was supposed to fly out yesterday with our son, but the weather misbehaved and could not go. Weather looks to continue misbehaving and we have an appointment at the Vancouver Children's Hospital we've been waiting months for. So it looks like we may make the drive out. Yea!
Lazy day for most of today. Struggling to get my mojo back to keep breaking the house after a break over Christmas. The cold doesn't help. So I took some time to tinker with some code I've been writing. It's coming along quite well.
Really having some good results putting a new utility into an existing piece of code. I had hoped it would be relatively straightforward, and it's been remarkably painless.
Yesterday I figured that since it's so cold I'd run the thermal camera around the work area to see if I missed anything. Most of the brickwork registered between about 35 and 40 degrees. Then came the section that registered in the 20s. Sure enough, tucked behind a beam barely 2" from the wall was another gap in the bricks. So I deployed some cement to deal with the problem (tricky, given how the area is all but inaccessible), and now all is good. I think that was the last of the drafts - previously I was aware there was something not quite right but couldn't figure out exactly what. Initial indications are that I've gained a couple of degrees in the area, thanks to the lack of cold air seeping in. Hard to measure objectively because the temperature outside will obviously make a difference but it's looking good. Now I can get busy with the angle grinder, levelling the bricks so my insulation panels can fit in there, and then fitting the panels.
Got the plumbing job done that I've been wanting to do for a few days now. The radiator in the breezeway is now connected to the furnace again, which means I can bring the electric heater back indoors. It's not a particularly nice job but it works, and the whole lot is temporary anyway. My first experience working with 3/4" PEX. Can't say I like it much, poking it through a gap at the top of a wall from one room into the next seems like an exercise in frustration, but it all hangs together well enough. Then, with the forecast for temperatures dropping into the low single digits, I figured I'd finish off an insulation job I got mostly done. Lifted another 40-odd gallons of cellulose, laid some nice new fiberglass, and then set to poking the fiberglass into the cavity wall in one room, via a gap I cut in the wall in the closet directly above it. Dumping handfuls of cellulose into a space is one thing, but one of the gaps was very small so I was doing little more than trying to poke it into a gap about 4 inches wide and 2 inches deep. Poking insulation into that gap was the best option to fill a space 2 inches deep, about 15 inches wide, and eight feet high. That took a while.... Now I'm about to enjoy a hard earned coffee before getting back to the code I've been writing. That project is getting very close to completion, so now I just hope it sells well enough to make it all worthwhile.
Hah. I have 10mbps. Faster speeds are available, I just don't need to download large files often enough for it to be worth paying the extra. Although by now maybe I can get 25mbps for the same price as 10. When I upgraded the service to 10mbps back in 2015 it turned out it cost no more than the "hi speed" (768kbps) we were getting at the time. Downloading a 950MB file at 768kbps is an experience. Don't ask how I know that....
I remember the heady days of living in a camp on a mountainside in the Congo babysitting a satellite phone emailing files at a baud rate of something around 2400.
I remember using crocodile clips to attach the modem to a rotary phone mounted to the wall (the kind where the handset was on a wire). The modem I had was a 1200/1200. Most of my friends who had modems (which wasn't very many of them) had a 300/300. One guy was a bit more adventurous - he had a 1200/75 modem. For any younger readers, that means 75 bits per second upload speed, 1200 bits per second download speed. Funny to think that 300 bits per second download was enough to get by then.
Internet tower is attatched to the town watertower. My current residence is blocked by a tree and would require an elaborate set up to get a line of sight to the tower, including trenched conduit, haha! New place is very close with a direct shot at the equipment. Service is reputedly sketchy at times. Not in California anymore, it seems. Oh, well. All for the better.
Growing tired of cement. Since it's so cold outside (1 degree last night) and the unheated spaces were down to 41 degrees this morning I figured I'd have another check for anything untoward. And I found another couple of gaps, lurking behind wall studs and the last couple of bits of fiberglass. So I got to spend some more time wielding combinations of cement and building foam. At least now one small area that registered as low as 12 degrees on the thermal camera was at 34 last I checked. Obviously the cold air isn't coming in that way any more. It's chilly in that space, but even at 45 degrees (the tropical heights it reached by the end of the afternoon) it doesn't feel drafty in there the way it did. I really hope I've got all of them now. It's really tedious to be all set to cut insulation panels only to find another issue, because I can't cut the panels until the foam or cement has had chance to dry.