Has it really been almost two weeks since I last updated? Yikes! It has! Well, there are some tales to tell... so I'd best get to it.
Turkey Day came and went since I last put fingers to keyboard. In all, it was a decent holiday. I went to visit with my in-laws with a certain sense of isolation, given that Mrs. Geek and I seemed to be so uninvited to the many upcoming events of the season. While no invitations suddenly appeared over the holiday table, there were a few regrets expressed for how things happened... and while there were no apologies, I think the sentiment was as close as we're going to get. I've also learned that I need to keep my mouth shut about what we plan for the holidays -- it seems that some words about our future plans were spoken on Father's Day and these were the cause of the belief that we were traveling to The Land Of My Birth for Christmas.
I took a nice long break for the holiday at least. A day of vacation taken on Wednesday made it a five day weekend. The first three days were glorious. It was the first time spent here at the new house not involved in packing, unpacking, fretting about repairs, or gratuitous amounts of do-it-yourself work.
The last two days... well, that was another story entirely. I decided that the next home improvement project on the list was to install the two rear bookshelf speakers of my home theater system. I was going to be deliberately ambitious about it too; rather than just drill some holes in the floor, I was going to bring wires up in the walls and install nicely finished wall plates. I got some special tools for the job, and planned where the work was going to be done very carefully.
I then killed myself over the course of nearly two days running the wire by going into the crawlspace under the house nearly a dozen times. I had bruises on my arms, legs, hips, and abdomen. Muscles I didn't even know I were sore. I was one hurting unit for the first two days of this week.
Of course, all this effort had an interesting coda: when I actually hooked up the speakers in question and did a "channel test", I discovered that one was broken. After some careful process of elimination, I determined that the unit had a bad crossover. More on the repair of that, later.
And oh yes... the sewer pipe. Work on that continues, in fits and starts. The plumbers came by on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and filled in much of the trench in front of our house. We are currently waiting for city inspection of the work before the finish the road and sidewalk. I both yearn for and dread the day when this will be finished... yearn because it will be over, but the thought of the size of the bill gives me the willies.
Work at Company O. has been thoroughly nuts. After spending a number of weeks working like crazy to get a software release out, some of the test results we collected are not particularly to the liking of upper management... and we have to drop everything and collect some data about a competing product. This was a solution we rejected over a year ago... we should have collected data then.
Everything ended up on a high note though. After 2.5 days of pushing hard to make progress on these new tests, I finally got the test platform set up. We're still about a day behind where I would like to be, but I'm hopeful that the worst is behind us. The speaker problem also resolved itself -- the crossover was still covered by manufacturer warranty. I overnighted it to the factory early in the week, and I picked up the replacement part today. The system sounds great! The new wall mounts for the speakers really help bring out the depth of sound! So, I got home from making decent project to watch parts of Fantasia 2000 and The Thomas Crown Affair (the Pierce Brosnan version) on my newly complete system... it made for a very pleasant evening.
said drgeek
on 2007-11-30 at 10:51 p.m.
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The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
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