School is back in session, sports are in full swing, we’re tossed and turned by the weekly routine. This past month has been a season of fixing and repair and I’m thankful everything went well and we’re (hopefully) through the hard parts.
Fixing electrical problems
Ramping up to Spooky Month, the lights in our house were acting up. We’ve always had the occasional power problem; lights dimming, oven clocks resetting, but they were random and isolated. But around the beginning of September our lights would flicker for a solid minute every time the A/C kicked on. I was getting concerned about a potential fire – and no matter what anyone says, I was not concerned about a ghost, ghoul, specter, gremlin, dracula or otherwise – so I scheduled a bunch of maintenance calls:
- An electrician - He didn’t see any
ghostsred flags, but a bar in our main breaker panel was a little loose and possibly shaking when the A/C kicked on, causing the flicker. He also swapped out a non-LED dimmer for an LED dimmer and that seems to have fixed the extra-spooky dining room. - A dryer vent cleaner - Thanks to a
D80code on our LG dryer, I got suspicious that a clogged dryer vent was causing extra draw on electrical system. An older gentleman who liked to talk helped us clean out the 7ft pipe that shoots hot air and lint out of our roof. Works great nowand no gremlins. - A refrigerator repair man - The stainless steel column in the middle of our side-by-side fridge was hot to the touch. Heat means energy. Heat is also not what you want in a fridge. Our fridge was over-working to keep itself cool but also freezing our groceries in the non-freezer side. A repair man pulled the fridge out and vacuumed the condenser unit
like Luigi’s mansion. Easy enough and cool to the touch again. - A new garage door opener - The electrical surges in our house fried the motherboard in our garage door opener, so we replaced the unit and now it has Wi-Fi, an app, and other features I don’t need. It’s so much quieter now and does not sounds like a T-Rex
or a howling wolf mananymore.
The flickering lights seem to have resolved. All ghosts busted.
Fixing a knee
It wouldn’t be a year at the Ruperts house without maxing out our deductible. This time my wife’s tennis habit got the best of her and she needed to undergo laparoscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus. Surgery went fine, she was walking the same day and (even in bandages) was walking better than before. Surgeries are no fun, but necessary at times.
Fixing the dogs
The week after my wife’s surgery our two new adopted pups had their scheduled appointment from the adoption center to get spayed. A non-event except that two young dogs in two cones is an absolute ruckus. Days and days of bonking into doors and knees (some of which had surgery the week before).
After a week the cones were off and they’re back to themselves; eating rocks, wrassling, and digging holes in my yard and whatnot.
Fixes on the horizon
Thousands of dollars and a handful of stressful weeks later we’re on a path to recovery. Shaking off the stress of the last six weeks is yet another thing to fix. And the fixes don’t stop. The near future is going to be figuring out our next major family expense. We need to update both our cars, the kids want a camper again, and almost all the rooms in our house need updating. I also made an enormous mess decanting all our hoarding piles while trying to clean the garage and need new shelving and storage. Oops, will fix.
Stats
🧠 Learning
- Went on a deep dive about Kowloon Walled City, the densest city in the world renown for its lawlessness, crime, and poverty. Kowloon has a deep history under Chinese and British occupation in Hong Kong. A Chinese settlement within Hong Kong territory, Kowloon self-regulated. While I knew about pre-modern China’s opiod crisis, I didn’t understand England’s role and learned how they were the drug dealers in this situation, trading opium from (occupied) India so they could get cheap tea and dinnerware. Fast-forward a few wars, opium dens and organized crime play a prominent role in the story of Kowloon but somehow the urban maze of dystopian unregulated buildings has a charming sense of community to it.
📖 Reading
Finished
- The Adventure Zone Vol. 6 by McElroy, Pietsch, McElroy - My annual reading of tres horny boys. Its been long enough I forget moments from the original podcast so it’s fun to relive them in graphic novel form.
- Awe by Dacher Keltner - I love the notion of “micromoments of awe” and consider myself an awe-seeker, but I don’t think I’m new age enough for this book.
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt - Phones and access to social media are harming our children. As a parent, I think there are valid concerns about device usage but I don’t think you can take this book as gospel. There’s a If Books Could Kill episode on Anxious Generation that makes for a good pairing.
- Coda: False Dawns by Spurrier & Bergara - A continuation of the super good Coda post-apocalyptic fantasy universe. This time a preacher comes to town.
- Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson - A recommendation from a coworker and probably my favorite book of the past two months. Validates a lot of how my own brain works by making connections in adjacent ideas and technologies.
Started
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Misc. comics
📝 Blogging
- The Dev Tools Performance Monitor Panel - a post about a helpful but somewhat hidden debugging tool in Dev Tools
- Finding questions and answers about why I like books - a post about being a book-a-week person
- Good forms - a post about forms
- Hibiclens - a post about combatting armpit odor
📺 Media
Movies
- Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024) - A more surreal sequel. Perhaps too many plot lines crammed into one 90 minute film but a fun addition to the series with most of the original cast plus some welcome additions.
Podcasts
- Scene on Radio S7: Capitalism - An in-depth examination on the origins of capitalism and its impact on democracy. A MUST LISTEN!
- Living Planet - An environmentalist podcast that seeks to answer questions like: What’s better: coffee or tea? What’s better: dairy vs plant-based milk? I think about these dichotomies a lot so this feels like a podcast engineered in a lab for me.
- The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula - Finished this actual play arc. Not my favorite but still fun.
- The Adventure Zone: Abnimals - New season, I’m a bit lost.
🎙 Recording
Some great guests talking about everything from game dev, to AI, to WordPress, to bespoke apps for adding multimedia experiences to live music.
ShopTalk
- Adam Coster on Game Development and Crashlands 2
- Thomas Steiner on AI in Chrome and the Web
- Fabian Kägy on WordPress, Blocks, and Enterprise Dev
- Jeff Robbins and Visibox as an Instrument for Video
🤖 Gunpla
- Started on the MG Gundam Astray Red Frame
⌨️ Open source
- Been active in the Web Components Community Group for
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👾 Video games
- Brawl Stars - Got roped into playing this with my son and his friends again. There was a Spongebob Squarepants even and that was fun but I’m maxed out and am not picking it up much anymore. It’s a repetitive game but they do good to make it seem different (daily map rotations and updates, etc).
- Bought the new Zelda, haven’t played it but my son is almost done.