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blackholes of punishment
Thursday, November 8 2007
I was briefly up on the roof again today and noticed that the pinhole leak I thought I'd fixed in my home made solar panel is leaking again! It's leaking extremely slowly and probably wasn't leaking at all just after I "fixed" it a couple days ago. A tiny leak like that, which produces a drop of fluid every twenty minutes or so, can be sealed up with flux after a "repair" and gradually open up over time. It's very rare for me to observe failed joints that don't fail spectacularly, but I've learned that they do happen, and knowing this would have made me a lot more paranoid back when I did my first pipe soldering back in 2002. Who knows if I'd even be doing it still if I hadn't been convinced it was idiot-proof back then.
I've decided to put off a repair of the leak until I replace the plastic covering the panel with actual glass. As part of that project, today I ordered sixty square feet of double-strength glazing divided into four sheets, which will cost me about $200. I'll have to get some T-cross section gaskets, make some custom metal brackets, and invest in some silicone before I can do that project.
I spent most of the day chin-deep in PHP code becoming familiar with the trackless thicket that is X-Cart. It wasn't just that maddening code that set me on edge; one of PHP's nastier bugs stole hours of my life this evening and the only thing I have to show for it is more knowledge about browser cookies than a person should ever have to know.
Meanwhile the prison guards at Eastern Correctional Facility were giving Gretchen hell for accidentally bringing her cellphone into the security checkpoint (where it was promptly discovered). They made a huge production out of monotonously telling and retelling her that it was contraband, eventually even interrupting the composition class she was teaching a half hour early to continue raking her over the coals about it. They then said they'd have to ship the phone to Albany to make sure it didn't have anything on it designed to illicitly benefit prisoners. Gretchen argued with these assholes so vehemently that the prison superintendent overheard her in the background of an unrelated phone conversation and, perhaps fearing some sort of unpleasant political or bureaucratic fallout, decided it was unnecessary to have Gretchen's phone sent to Albany after all.
Prisons are, it seems, blackholes of punishment, turning the environments around them grim and sucking in and punishing far more than just their inmates. And the people who work there, by and large, tend to be sadists with a pathological need to wield power. What with Guantanamo, Blackwater, the War on Terra, Iraq, and beefed-up border security, such people have all sorts of employment opportunities and it's entirely possible prisons have had to settle for the hiring of more empathetic people in recent years.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071108 feedback
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