I should have written about this two weeks ago.

When we finally got out to Aguanga after the last pipe failure, everything seemed fine. The new outside pipe was nicely insulated, the pump came on with no problem, everything OK. NOT. My wife came out of the house yelling to turn off the water because water was coming down through the ceiling in the bathroom. Water was quickly turned off, but the ceiling in the bathroom fell in moments later anyway.

Inspection in the attic revealed an inch-long burst in a 3/4 inch pipe that feeds a hose bib outside the house. Thankfully it must have burst after the outside pipe broke, and so did only leaked for the brief period we had the water on.

I headed to Anza to buy pipe clamps, and called the plumber. On the return from Anza (having purchased all three sizes of pipe clamps available) I noticed a truck ahead of me stopped at the side of the road within our community. I thought that it looked like plumber, and as I had not had a return call yet, I pulled up next to the truck to see if he could help. It was our plumber, who was dialing my number at that very moment.

Within the half hour the pipe was clamped, we had moved most of the damp insulation out, and were enjoying a cold beer. There is plywood over the whole in the bathroom ceiling, the heat is set at 50° so things won’t freeze, and we await final repairs. I sure hope this is the end of frozen pipes for a while.

Back on December 17th, a cold storm came through and we had some snow. My daughter was delighted, although disappointed when it did not last until morning.

So we did get snow. You could see it falling.

Mandy liked the snow (not!).

It filled the yard

Covered the riding mower (not really a tractor)

And covered the grill

And when we went north of Anza the next day, we did see real snow and threw it at each other.

It finally happened. After basking in the idea that my local disk space was unlimited, I finally hit the wall.

It started with the computer in the observatory. I was taking AVIs of Jupiter, and it was taking a long time to allocate disk space and then started giving warnings about lack of space. This is a relatively small (80 GB, small by today’s standards, anyway) drive. I started to move older data to the second drive on that machine, a 40 GB drive. Problem solved, I thought.

Not so fast. After a few minutes, I got a warning that the second drive was short on space. The move aborted, I was OK with about 10% free on the working drive. Over full by my standards.

Then things went from bad to worse. Or the problem got broader, anyway. I noticed that my main drive on my main desktop machine, a 160 GB drive, was down to 7 GB. Given that I was moving around 800 MB AVIs, that is full for all practical purposes.

Today I cleaned things up. The Observatory computer is still fairly full, but not critical. I compressed 60 GB of AVIs and freed up about 35 GB. Some AVIs compressed by 96% (small object in a dark sky, no doubt). I did a directory command and sent it to a text file via “>”, created a macro to change the file name into the commands I needed, and it ran for several hours. I am now at 56 GB free, a little over 30%. I have breathing room, but I think the next computer will need a terabyte, and I should get another external drive!

Cooper wrote about “Microsoft Attitude” where an application steals focus while you are doing something. I just experienced it inside a Microsoft Application.

I was using Visio, a fairly nice application until Microsoft made it too smart. It tries to do far too much itself so often your diagram gets all out of whack when it decides to make an adjustment based on its rules. But that’s not the point I was going to make. When I was typing a change to the page, the autosave feature started, and stole focus from my typing. Focus reverted to the last item selected on the screen, a piece of text, that was then replaced as I continued typing the new name for the page. It is a good thing undo works.

I haven’t posted anything for almost 2 weeks. I had far less spare time while travelling than I expected. I have many ideas for posts, but they will have to wait until I have some spare time to post.

Yes, who needs to say more. Captain Kirk sells a kidney stone.

Shatner Sells Kidney Stone for Charity – Yahoo! News

FOXNews.com – U.S. & World – Israeli PM Ariel Sharon Suffers ‘Significant’ Stroke

This is major news. I would bet that Sharon is done for as a leader in Israel. God willing, he will survive, but the recovery period will likely extend trough the upcoming campaign.

He has been pivotal to Israel’s current effective response to the Palestinians — what happens now?

The LA Times gets taken by a buried internet hoax! Guess it fit too well with their twisted world view.

Wizbangblog — LA Times Burned By Fake Press Release