June 30, 2008
"I'd like to order 5 of these"?
About 2 years ago, I was told by Tanya and Jess, that I need some better fitting clothes. So they took me shopping, and we picked out some shirts and one pair of pants that look pretty good on me. But it's a dress shirt and black pants. Which isn't typically what I'd wear on a day to day basis being an engineer in Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, it's one of my favorite outfits.
Recently, a few other people at dance tell me I need to find "clothes that don't make me look like an old man," pointing out that the pleats on my khakis make me look fat, and that my shirt is one size too large. Given the shopping experience above, I understood. My teacher tells me, "you know, you have a pretty good figure. It's just you don't wear any clothes that show it off."
So I went through my wardrobe recently and started looking for all the clothes I have, and it seems the majority of stuff I have is all too big.
I went to Valley Fair this weekend, and bought myself a pair of khakis at Express Men... but here's the problem: I need to basically flush out the majority of my wardrobe, but the idea of going to buy more than one pair of the same pants seems strange to me. Is it okay to open up a closet and see like, say 4 pairs of identical pants? I'd feel uncreative or something.
A Software Engineer's Adventure in: Plumbing
Anybody who's visited me in San Jose and used the downstairs bathroom in the past half a year would have noticed that the faucet is no longer held to the sink basin, but rather just supported by the pipes it's connected to. How ghetto.
The metal that held the faucet to the sink corroded after years of exposure to water, toothpaste, and whatever random chemicals I might have dumped there when I was a little boy with a chemistry set.
So I decided to fix that this past weekend.
I went to Home Depot and bought a $29 two-handle faucet thinking this couldn't be too hard seeing as I have changed the toilet's flush valve a while back without incident. (Hence, the "2" in the title.)
After doing the prep work, like pulling all the crap out from under the sink, grabbing all the tools, and turning off the water, I went under the sink disconnect the old faucet.
In 20 years, metal corrodes and rubber seals either expand or disintegrate. So to no surprise, it was hard to pull out the copper supply lines from each side of the valve. Tugging the cold line eventually got it disconnected. Tugging the hot line didn't seem to budge it at all.
In a brilliant move of Incredible Hulk-esque technique, I yanked the hot water supply line right out of the faucet....
....and snapped off the end connected to the supply valve at the same time. Lovely.
The cheap valves the original plumbers used were pretty crappy in that the supply line was solid copper as opposed to braided flex lines. So they're hard to bend. And they were connected directly to the valve, so when somebody* snaps them off the valve, you gotta replace the whole valve. Oh, and the cold one was leaking when you try to shut it off, so I needed to replace it too.
About $25 later, I got myself some new valves and supply lines.
And another hour later, my new faucet.
June 11, 2008
Oops
So as I take the turn to the Tamian Caltrain station this morning, a bird flies low across the front of my car. Both the bird and I were going too fast so it wasn't possible to avoid a collision. Being much much heavier than the bird, my car didn't flinch at all. I saw some feathers fly up from the side.
After parking, I got out and looked at my bumper and there appears to be a small dead bird stuck in the far right of my bumper. :(
Not sure how I'm going to get it out, but I'll have to deal with it later.