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piece of junk
Friday, May 8 2020
[REDACTED]
I spent much of the day on the phone with Alex, going through the minutia of our database design, though at some point I realized that the socket I'd bought yesterday at Home Depot was 24 millimeters, when the size I'd intended to buy was 26 millimeters. A guy from Rycor was supposed to be coming out today to try to maybe hammer such a too-tight socket onto the chewed-up anode nut in hopes of extracting it. So I made an impromptu drive into Uptown Kingston in the Nissan Leaf in hopes of finding what I wanted at Herzog's. Herzogs had some things I wanted (particularly closet hooks and a beefy
NEMA 14-50R 240 volt socket for the 6.6 kilowatter car charger we're going to end up getting), but their socket selection was poor. This sent me to the Advance Auto Parts nearby. By this point, the Rycor guy was at our house, and I had Gretchen on the phone telling me what sockets he would need. It turned out that 26 millimeters was too big and 25 millimeters was too small. This indicated a one inch socket (25.4 millimeters) was perhaps the perfect size. Advance had it in six point impact-driver style. While at the Kingston Plaza, also got some bottom-shelf booze for the laboratory (JKs Liquor was allowing people into their massive store).
Back at the house, the Rycor guy banged away for a half hour or so, trying to drive various sockets onto the anode nut on our hot water heater. Unfortunately, he was never able to get enough purchase on it to extract it, meaning we're stuck with the magnesium anode for the rest of time. There was, however, a plan B: having some water specialist come out and install some sort of system (perhaps involving ultraviolet light) to kill off the bacteria producing the hydrogen sulfur as they nibble on that anode. This whole episode left me with bad feelings about the whole Rheem/Ruud brand. Why had they made their anodes so difficult to extract? "What a piece of junk!" is one of several things I could be heard saying. I also wondered if perhaps our particular water heater had suffered damage from all that banging the Rycor employee had inflicted on that anode nut.
Near the end of the day, I cracked open a beer and proceeded to upgrade Nginx on one of my employer's Linux servers from source (since Amazon hadn't made it possible using easy tools like Yum). I'd done a dry run on a clone of that server and run into problems (which I thought might be related to the URL differences). So I was pretty sure I was going to experience problems. Amazingly, though, the procedure only took about ten minutes using a protocol I'd developed in a document called connectnotes2.txt. This meant that the guy staying after hours to restore a server image (in case something went pear-shaped) and the other guy staying after hours to test could both get on with their Friday night despite having been "team players." It also meant I could send a triumphant (but magnanimous) email to a list of employees that included the head honcho announcing my success. I felt buoyed by this victory for the rest of the evening.
Neville on Ramona in the blue chair in the first floor office today.
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