|
|
|
zeroing in on a hot water pipe
Sunday, February 8 2026
I was surprised when Neville decided he wanted to come with Charlotte and me on our walk up the Farm Road and back late this morning. The brutal cold continued, but at least it was sunny and not windy. At one point Charlotte decided to head out into the snow off the plowed roadway but soon decided that was a bad idea. She was in loose snow up to her belly and couldn't really get traction to walk, and so had to bound around instead. She only made it about twenty feet before aborting the adventure. Meanwhile, Neville didn't quite make it half way up the Farm Road when Charlotte and I met him on our way back. Charlotte gets all yarfy whenever that happens and tried to interest Neville in some roughhousing, but he wasn't interested.
Next I spent some time up in the laboratory trying to get my I2C bootloader to work on another model of AVR microcontroller, the Atmega644p, which has 64k of flash storage and 4k of RAM. I quickly ran into trouble, of course, and in the past it would've been impossible to know how to proceed. But these days, for all its faults, ChatGPT makes it possible for me to do things I would've never considered doing or would've abandoned early in a string of failures. I would experience problems getting the Atmega644p to do things (usually the problem was entering bootloader mode from an Arduino sketch) and the describe the symptoms to ChatGPT, and it would come up with an idea. This would never work, of course, but (unlike other recent ChatGPT debugging sessions) I didn't feel like I was trapped in a loop. ChatGPT was also helpful in pointing out obvious mistakes too, such as when I was still specifying the Atmega328p in a .bat file that was doing the building and linking.
After learning Gretchen would be returning from Maryland today, I decided I should probably have made some progress on the hot water replumbing project. So as I was setting up to cut into the drywall in the entranceway coat closet (where the hot water pipe runs up to the upstairs bathroom), I thought maybe I should run some hot water to be sure the pipes I was looking at were the hot ones (something I would be able to feel). But when I went to turn on the water, nothing came out. The brutal code had managed to freeze the pipes again even with the basement minisplits running. So I had to turn on the boiler to get the hydronic pipes circulating through the frozen zone so it would thaw out again. While that was happening, I continued my ChatGPT-facilitated Atmega644p bootloader debugging, periodically checking to see if the pipes had thawed out. When they actually did thaw out, I'd left the hot water faucet in the upstairs bathroom on, and it was wasting water when I showed up.
I could feel the heat from the hot water pipe on the drywall as cut out a small rectangle near the top of the closet on its short east wall. My measurements had been good, and I was within a couple inches of where I needed to be. I then cut out a circular hole in the drywall near the bottom of that inter-stud bay that will help me when I need to fish the PEX through. I also drilled a hole into the inter-joist bay below for running that.
Gretchen arrived a little after 5:30pm with lots of goodies from the Paramus Trader Joe's. After the dogs had calmed down and I'd helped her put that groceries away, she gave me a leftover taco from a meal she'd had at Oxacan restaurant in or near Tacoma Park. After watching Paolo sweep the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, we both watched a BBC program called Detectorists that had been strongly recommended by our friend Chrissy. It's a bit of a slow burn but seems watchable. I was so cold from having spent s much time in the under-heated laboratory that I then took a nice hot bath. (My frost-bitten toe, the one that acts up in this weather, really appreciates a hot bath.)
Neither Gretchen nor I paid much attention to today's Superbowl game, although we were curious about how the musician Bad Bunny would do in his halftime show after Donald Trump decided to make him into a political test (resulting in widely-panned alternative halftime show featuring the washed-up retrofascist musician Kid Rock and various unknown musicians upset about trans kids and the like). Gretchen called her old (as in, literally old) friend Wendy this evening and at the time she was watching the game and didn't want to be disturbed. I didn't know and didn't care which football teams were playing, so Gretchen told me a story about each team she'd heard on some podcast. These didn't make me develop a preference for which team won, but it did give me some context.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260208 feedback
previous | next |
