Staying busy

It's been a few days since I have been able to post an update here, and now that I have the free time I don't know what to write about.

I almost got sent to Pueblo Colorado this week because of the units from work was malfunctioning. However, a technician who was stationed out there did a simple examination of the terminal and found the problem. Thus, no trip out to Pueblo.

Last week our water heater here at the house started leaking, so dad bought a new one. Of course, he decided that we were going to install it ourselves. I'm a pretty handy guy, and I'm damn good with solder (I am now!) so the project actually went pretty well. We have reliable hot water now, but it's not as hot as it used to be (which wasn't as hot as anybody wanted it to be). I think there's some kind of a problem with our tempering valve, but that's a different project for a different day.

We got our new refridgerator yesterday also. They had bought the fridge before the water heater went, otherwise I can't imagine that they would have had both going on in the same week.

The house used to have two water heaters: One normal heater, and one that was a solar-powered heater. The solar one hasn't really worked for a long time (and hasn't been connected to water for a while) and it started leaking so we're removing it. This is a slow process, dad wants to drain all the water out of it trip-at-a-time with the shop vac. The hold up with the solar heater is that it's a closed-system: The fluid that travels to the solar panel on the roof isn't water: It's propylene glycol. That's going to require some special disposal that I haven't even started to plan for.

In the free time that I do have, I've been doing a lot of work on Parrot, my wiki bot program and Wikibooks. Specifically, I've been using my wiki bot to help edit a wikibook about Parrot. The world of open content textbooks has had a lot of exciting news recently, and I've got a "virtual meeting" on line coming up with members from a few other like-minded websites. I'm all about synergy, but I go in with the realization that Wikibooks is probably the black sheep: Almost every other open content textbook organization uses a CC license, while we're stuck with GFDL. It's gotten to the point that I almost derive sexual excitement when thinking about license unification.

Don't know what else to write, but as soon as I click "Save" I'm going to have a flood of ideas. That's how things always go.