With apologies to Cole Porter…

I hate plumbing in the spring time,
I hate plumbing in the fall,
I hate plumbing in the winter, when it drizzles,
I hate pluming in the summer, when it sizzles.
I hate plumbing every moment,
Every moment of the year,
I hate plumbing,
Why, oh why, do I hate plumbing,
Because my leaky, f’ing faucet is near.

That bit of drivel is meant to prepare you for some whining and ranting on my part regarding the latest installment in our plumbing adventures. This afternoon I worked from home as I received a phone call that the plumber had the replacement part he needed and would be coming by. The plumber showed up slightly later than I was expecting, but once he arrived I showed him the tub and the shutoff valve in the basement1. I left him to his work and got back to mine.

The handle on the shutoff valve was old/rusted and back when the first plumber came out for the broken faucet; he broke the handle (but not the valve thank god). Today’s plumber went back to his truck to get some channel locks to turn it with and also found a new handle sitting loose in the truck which he said he’d try putting on2. Then he went back to the bathroom and got to work. A few minutes later I heard him exclaim “SHIT!” I asked if everything was ok, but got no reply. I could still hear him moving about, so I figured he’d just bonked his hand and went back to work.

Shortly there after, he came out and asked if I was sure the faucet was a Price Pfister? I said no, that’s just what the other plumber had told us. He said in any case the part the first plumber told us to order was the wrong part and in fact it’s not even a part for the same brand of faucet as we have. He left then to see if he could track down the part we actually needed somewhere around town.

When he got back, he had the bad news that nobody has the part we need locally and we’ll need to order it.

[INSERT EXPLETIVE]

He also asks a few more questions about the other plumber who’d been out and recommends calling them back to try getting our money refunded. Apparently he used to work for that company and still knows a few things about their procedures. Seeing how it’s been almost a month, our faucet is still broken, the plumber who originally came out to look at it never wants to discuss it with us; my wife thought that was a good idea.

Then he turns our water back on and goes back to his shop. Not more than 30 minutes later, he calls back3 and gives me the details for calling the manufacturer of our faucet as the part which is broken has a 100 year warranty on it. My wife gives them a call. She immediately gets through to an actual human being, who takes our address and say it’ll be sent out via UPS and should be in our hands by Monday, Tuesday at the latest. Time taken to complete the call was less than 10 minutes.

Yes, I said less than 10 minutes. I know, we were both stunned at that too and they did not have us pay anything for the parts! Now that’s some seriously good customer service. She then called back the plumbing company of the first guy who came out and complained at them for 20 minutes straight. Unfortunately it turns out she was talking to a receptionist and the shop foreman will be calling back tomorrow when she’s at work. I’m going to have to field that call and it’s scheduled for approximately the time I’m walking in the door after driving home.

*sigh*

I really hate plumbing.

1 As a reminder, the tub with the broken faucet has no local shutoff valve. To stop the water flowing, we have to shut off the water to the entire house.
2 I don’t believe it fit, but it was nice of him to try.
3 Unlike the original plumber who appeared hating calling us back and didn’t like us to call him either.

While I do love the views and general atmosphere of the office we moved into, the room gets really bleeping cold. Cold enough that some days, such as today, my hands are halfway numb by the time I leave at the end of the day. So tonight when I got home, I grabbed a book, started our gas stove heating up the tea kettle and leaned up against the stove to read. My wife who was on the phone with one of the plumbers1 we’ve been talking to and moved me away from the stove because she thought I was standing too close.

Me being cold and a touch grouchy about being cold, told her I was doing it deliberately and told her to go back to her phone conversation.  I was just finally starting to feel warm again when she came back into the kitchen. Then she asked the plumber to hold on a second because her husband was on fire.

Yes, she said on fire. Woohoo! I’m sexy…. Wait, that was panic in her voice… I reached behind myself to feel at my shirt2 and what do you know there was FIRE. Fortunately my wife grabbed the sprayer from the sink and hosed me down. I didn’t get hurt at all, if you exclude my pride3 and what feels like a sunburn on a single fingertip. Though the shirt I had been wearing was ruined.

The really sad part? It was only about two seconds before she sprayed me down that I was finally feeling warm. *sigh*

1 Yes the faucet our bleeping, downstairs bathtub is still broken.
2 I agree in hindsight that was stupid, but my brain was having trouble processing the information her voice imparted on my ears.
3 Which suffered greatly from the experience.

I’ve been using the Hulu plugin now for a few days and it’s great but I do run into the occasional problem.  So I’ve been following the thread over at XBMC Forums about it as the plugin is under active development.  In a recent post to that thread, one of the developers said:

Please use the google addons.
Right now google addons is more in sync.

Sometimes I use my personal googlecode just to back stuff up, or sync it between my home computer and the one at work. Anytime I’m ready for you guys to try something out I’ll just stick it in the google addons svn & if it’s broken I’ll just revert it.

Which is a good tip as the thread has links to a wide variety of versions of the plugin scattered throughout its 45 pages.  Unfortunately the tip does not really clear things up in my particular case.  As I stated previously I’m using a copy of the plugin from xbmc-hulu. The developer who made the above comment is recommending people use the version of the plugin from xbmc-addons instead of his personal version at rwparris2-xbmc-plugins but makes no mention of the version at xbmc-hulu which shows that developer’s username as one of the project owners.

Bah.

I suppose I’ll just have to download the xbmc-addons version of the hulu plugin, try it out and compare it to the xbmc-hulu version.  As soon as I’ve had a moment to do so, I’ll post my results.

UPDATE: I’m not seeing any difference between the xbmc-addons & xbmc-hulu versions so far.  However after reading the thread on XBMC Forums, I did go through the trouble of configuring the plugin (under the XBox version -> Videos -> Plugins -> Hulu -> press the white button on your controller).  Setting a default video quality makes using the plugin much nicer (cuts out 2-3 button presses when trying to watch a specific video).  You can enter your Hulu account username/password but there doesn’t appear to be a benefit to doing so yet.

UPDATE2:Per the XBMC Forums, xbmc-hulu has been removed in favor the version available via XBMC SVN Repo Installer and the SVN Repo Installer pulls from xbmc-addons.

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.

You might be surprised at what you can figure out about your snowblower if you try. My level of mechanical expertise is a moderately complex Lego set, and yet I was able to diagnose & fix a problem with our snow blower earlier this winter.

The trick is to ignore the fact that you don’t know diddly-squat about what you’re doing and apply standard computer troubleshooting techniques…
1. Smack the device. Smack it HARD.
2. When Step 1 fails, swear loudly while pretending you’ve muted your phone.
3. Apologize for swearing.
4. Sacrifice a goat (or a chicken, but a goat is preferred).
5. If the sacrifice does not appease the angry snowblower gods, then try the other standard computer troubleshooting technique. Send it up to level2 support. :p

In response to I’m Not That Guy by Shawn Powers

As previously mentioned, I’ve been working on updating and customizing the VectorLover WordPress theme to include some of WordPress 2.7’s new features and to integrate with certain WordPress plugins which I like. This evening I’m happy to announce the initial release of VectorLover 2.

Features

  • Threaded comments with quick reply links.
  • Integrated plugin support for: Now-Reading, FAlbum, Tweetbacks, wpLicense
  • Custom login page
  • Added a new default Gravatar image to list of options under Settings -> Discussion in WordPress’s admin backend.
  • hCard microformatting to both post & comment authors.
  • A stylesheet to remove unnecessary elements from printed pages.
  • Changed page titles to display as “PostTitle « BlogName” vs the previous “BlogName » PostTitle” for better SEO
  • Wrapped posts in a DIV with post_class() to add support for fancier styling on posts.

Special Thanks

This release would not have been possible without Erwin Aligam — who designed the initial theme, ThemeLab — who ported the design to WordPress, famfamfam — designed some wicked-nice icons or any of these sites: WPEngineer.com, TheEnglishGuy.co.uk, OttoDestruct.com and Sivel.net — all of whom provided valuable information while I was working on this release.

Download

You can download this release from my VectorLover 2 page.