Linux

This is 'way OT (off-topic) regarding the house project; but after all this is MY blog, and, anyway, the Rman has to show some that he's a multifaceted individual to justify the moniker.

This post starts with a dead computer motherboard. Apparently there was a generation or two of MB's that had reliability problems with the bypass capacitors around the CPU. Our 2.4GHz P4 system died due to these capacitors, and in the process damaged the Windows file system. Fortunately, some experimentation (done by removing the old hard disk and putting it in another computer) showed that the remaining files were accessible. I tried rebuilding the Windows system but it quickly became apparent that I needed to do more homework before potentially destroying/overwriting the rest of the data on the disk. The problem was compounded by the fact that the old MB was obsolete so I couldn't buy a more-or-less equivalent hardware platform. Windows' startup sequence panicked when it found a really different set of hardware so it needed some fairly serious brain surgery to get it running again.

So I decided to get a fresh hard disk and install Linux on it, then use Linux to copy the damaged hard disk to a backup drive (a 500MB external drive with a USB interface). I went down to Fry's and spotted a distro of Linux called Ubuntu, so I bought it. After a somewhat lengthy installation process, Ubuntu started up. I was surprised to find that it had found ALL of the computer hardware, including the wireless router that's between the DSL modem and computer, and a laser printer with a USB interface. Just for grins, I fired up FireFox and -- damn -- it WORKED. No fooling with anything. This distro also came with Open Office, so I tried loading in a few Word documents and spreadsheets. No problem there, either.

Ubuntu also recognized the external USB hard disk, so I copied the entire contents of the damaged HD, removed the damaged HD from the system, and stuffed it into my other "experimental" computer in the back room. I did eventually get the XP OS reinstalled without loosing the rest of the data on the HD; but that's really not the point of this post. The main point is that we're still using Ubuntu -- it's doing just about all we need for the "family computer". I'd thought that we would have to have at least ONE Windows based system around, to do things like run the flatbed scanner and film scanner; but yesterday I started wondering if Ubuntu could operate the flatbed scanner. It's USB based, too, so....who knows, right?

So I unpacked the scanner, plugged the power supply in and plugged it into a spare USB port. Nothing -- apparently Ubuntu didn't figure out that something interesting just happened (unlike the situation when I plug in a flash drive -- Ubuntu figures that out immediately). OK, let's check the Accessories dropdown menu that Ubutu gives us. I found an app called "Xsane image scanner", so I fired it up. After a moment or two, it opens a window and indicates that we have an HP 4100 scanner available. Holy Moses. Click on the Scan button, and it scans. Good grief.

Given my previous experiences with Linux, this was totally amazing. My first exposure to Linux was in the days where you had to pore through all sorts of documentation to manually configure the system, and getting X Windows to run was even more arcane. Not too bad for an OS you can download for free (well, sort of -- it would take a looong time to download for most folks @ 100's of MB for a decent distro). And this particular distro is not the latest & greatest, either.

In the meantime, I've downloaded a lot of free S/W, including CD-ripping S/W to put music (from CD's we own, if there are any lawyers out there reading this) on our MP3 players. MP3 is now a proprietary format so I switched to OGG, which works on our Sansa Clip. And here's yet another interesting story: I have copied some of my old vinyl records onto CD's. For commercial audio CD's, the ripping S/W can look into its online database and figure out what CD you just ripped and then use the song titles (rather than mundane titles like "track 1" etc.). I ripped one of my home-brew CD's using this S/W, and it tried to figure out what the thing was ... and it did. The only way I can figure this out is that someone else out there must have made a copy of the same vinyl record that I did, and used this very same program to rip it, then sent the data to the online database. It's a small world. It also indicates that the data-recognition system doesn't use hidden data on the CD to determine what CD it is.

In addition to these kinds of niceties, Linux inherently is a lot more secure than Windows. I did a search looking for anti-spyware and anti-virus S/W for Linux, and it appears that the only reason to have it on a Linux system is to keep you from passing infected files on to your unfortunate MS Windows-using friends and associates.

Linux also seems to be a lot more crash-proof -- the core system hardly ever goes bonkers. The X server (or X-based S/W) can sometimes lock up, but you can usually recover by killing the app and restarting it. Just open a terminal window and type "xkill". The mouse cursor turns into a scull and crossbones: then click on the dead window and it should go away. You DID make sure to save that 600-page memo you were writing at the time, right?

Well, time to go to work & earn more health insurance. That's all for now.

The house project; shameless photo of produce.

Here's another photo of our rock garden. Who knew that many giants (our excavators called them dinosaur eggs) were lurking under the surface? The large one in the foreground (just behind and to the right of the concrete form) is the one starring in an earlier post as it was - reluctantly - being pried out of the ground.


A temporary stair put in for the workers. ^ That's a big hole.

A view to the left ^
This even deeper hole (above) is for the holding tank that will be installed in the basement. We have decided to install it for a future bathroom in the basement, although we're not planning on putting anything in ourselves. However if a future owner DID want a functional bathroom in the basement, they will thank us a lot for the foresight. Putting a tank in later would be a _really_ big pain. Also note: no water at the bottom. I think we're very unlikely to have any water problems in this basement.


And finally some more produce from the garden! We planted purple cauliflower for the first time this year & are interested to see how it tastes (it's pretty good raw). We know that the yellow "Cheddar" cauliflower is quite good. We're going to roast a mixture of purple and yellow cauliflower along with some beets, carrots, onions and potatoes. The potatoes and onions are the only items that won't come out of the garden. Lisa is also holding some figs, tomatoes and, of course, the inevitable zucchini.

Foundation work; garden setup

The concrete forms are going in!. We had a small hiatus on this work because the excavator didn't dig out quite enough in one corner. I will post more photos of the forms work -- we're going out to the site today to see what progress has been made. Lisa took a look earlier this week & thinks that there may be a problem with the tandem portion of the garage (it looks like they're laying out the foundation as tho there's a door there rather than a garage door!).


The photo above will take a bit of explanation. In the foreground, it shows a multi-zone sprinkler controller, the kind that can be found at Home Depot, Lowe's, etc, for not a lot of money. Sitting on the ground to the right and above the sprinkler controller is a 3-valve manifold that has 3 sprinkler valves and hose end adapters. This setup was initially put together to allow us to water the garden while we were on vacation. But since we're not on-site all the time now, we're using it to keep the veggies well hydrated. We're borrowing power from a neighbor -- we have two very long extension cords strung out across the back of the property, crossing the mounds of dirt that were pulled out of the basement, and a very long hose going up to our well.

So far, so good.... because, as you can see below, it seems to be working. This is a shot of my birthday dinner, with a lot of our own produce in the starring role. Not the salmon, of course, but the zucchini did come from the garden; then there's the peppers and tomatoes in the Greek Salad -- and the two items next to the salmon are not potatoes. They are fresh figs that were stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in Prosciutto and grilled. The greenish dollp on the left side of the salmon is basil mayonnaise, to go with the fish. Everything was terrific.

Strange times (thankew to the Doors)

We got a call from our contractor, with a message from the excavation sub. There are Big Rocks lurking underground at our property. We had hoped that the really big ones were elsewhere, but not so. See below --
Watching the process of getting this behemoth out out of the basement hole --
Was an interesting (and somewhat exciting) process. At some points, the excavator was tipped up to at least 30 degrees while the operator was trying to pluck this giant out of the ground. By the way, this one is most likely the biggest one yet. Another factoid: it has no sharp edges. Even this one has been tumbled in the Missoula Flood waters that brought it here. That's food for thought. I don't think any of us would want to be around when that was going on....

...and there it is, out of the basement. To get this one out, they wrapped some chains around the rock and attached the chains to a dump truck. The truck couldn't pull the rock out by itself, but it was able to keep the rock from rolling backwards back into the hole, so they were able to work it up and out of the hole. When they got it out, they got a round of applause -- quite an accomplishment.

No, the photo above does not show a UFO. But it documents yet another odd occurence around this project. The object in the sky above the excavator is a blimp that happened to be flying by at the time, and I also happened to have a camera at the ready. How often does this occur? You have me there -- I can't recall anything like it up to this point.

We're definitely going to be using some of these big rocks for landscaping, so we now have some decisions to make, as far as where we put them. Our excavator has offered to place some of them for us for no charge, so we are going to do our best to take advantage of that. The story is that the big'uns are valuable, but it's also costly to move them. It will be interesting to see how this works out....

Ramblings

In spite of the mayhem around it, our garden has been coming through in the veggie department. We've been enjoying the broccoli, which is far better than store-bought; and we should be eating some Cheddar cauliflower (the head is a golden yellow color) pretty soon. We've been eating beet salads, cucumbers and peppers, and the beans will be coming soon. But NO TOMATOES! The plants are big and green (and so are the fruits)-- and that got us wondering. So we did a soil test and found that we overdid the amount of chicken manure--the soil is pretty high in nitrogen. From pillar to post on that one. So we probably will do some pruning on the tomatoes to try to force the fruits into ripening.

Lisa also has been making pickles. Our favorite recipe is here. It's not a "canned" pickle recipe because the pickles are not heated up enough to sterilize them; but with all the vinegar and salt in them, we've never had a problem. And they stay pretty crisp. Speaking of putting food by, we often use recipes from a really great book, titled "The Joy of Pickling", by Linda Ziedrich. We bought the 2nd edition at Costco recently, because it had more recipes in it (we have the 1st edition, too). We used it to make several tomato recipes, including tomato chutney, ketchup, spicy ketchup and chili barbeque sauce. All good stuff--if you have lots of tomatoes around! Maybe not this season....

And now on to the second part of this post: Radon. Several years back we started hearing about high levels of radon in local-area houses. In one case, a fellow died of lung cancer, probably due to radon. The radon comes from granitic rocks and sediment that were brought in by the Missoula Floods. We know for a fact that our area has a number of glacial erratics that were rafted in by the flood so there definitely are reasons for concern. Some local house crawlspaces/basements have tested very high, upwards of 500 pC (pico-Curies). The EPA maximum recommended level is 4 pC, so that's really bad. The disturbing thing is that our area is not well-known for this problem.

As a result, we did some research into Radon mitigation. If you have to do it to an old house, it can be expensive. But putting radon mitigation in while a house is being constructed is relatively trivial. So we're doing it, even though we don't know for certain if we will need it or not. The system includes some active ventilation (under the slab). So we likely will turn the fan off and do a test for Radon to see where we stand. Radon mitigation info can be found here. Basically, you put drain pipe underneath the house, and a layer of plastic between the pipe and slab, so the radon can be diverted outside the house.

Driveway; the big dig (rocks!)

There must be some correlation between big events in the house project and the weather. When Big Things are due to occur, the weather heats up. I guess it could be worse -- the flourlike soil around the old homesite could be soupy mud (oops, did I suggest something to the Weather Gods?). Anyway, last weekend we spent time laying out the driveway, to keep the road away from the big trees as much as possible. In the far back (see below), we also put up some barrier netting where the drain field is -- the drainpipes are pretty close to the surface near the septic tank, so it would be a very bad thing if big equipment drove over them & crushed them. 'Course, lightweight barrier stuff won't keep a multiton earthmover out but you do what you can...

Here I am, the proud owner of a pile of really big rocks. The one I'm on is just one of several multi-tonners. Lisa has been talking about keeping the rocks that come out of the hole they're digging for the basement, but it turns out -- belatedly -- that what she really wanted was rocks that were small enough for us to move with our tractor. These babies are well anchored & will just laugh at our puny front loader. With some help, we can use some for landscaping, but the rest will have to go...somewhere.....else.


And here are a couple of photos showing the hole that will become our basement. We're not sure why they had to dig it so deep -- at the far end, it looks like it is at least 12 feet deep. And muddy on the bottom. I don't have a human in there for scale, but trust me, it's DEEP.

The excavators initially thought they could complete the job in 3 days but after finding so many big rocks they've revised their timeline. Imagine that....

Building permit, Septic system

We've had problems getting the building permit. This is a bit problematic because we've already destroyed the house (see below, not to mention previous posts). The main problem has been that the county wants a paved driveway and a sidewalk. There are no other properties in the vicinity that have sidewalks. But something must be there, regardless of what the rest of the neighbors think or want. We thought this wasn't a hard requirement because other recent house projects had not resulted in sidewalks, but it turns out that the county has an alternative: we pay them a fee, based on what they THINK a sidewalk might cost, and they ship that money off to some other place in the county that needs a sidewalk worse. If a sidewalk must be installed along the frontage of our property later, they will take somebody else's money and build ours. Hooray for government. Guess what--our contractor can build us a sidewalk for less than the County's guesstimate, so we will put in a sidewalk now and actually get some benefit from the money. So the photo above shows our site map with the sidewalk and driveway. The purple is the driveway. They don't want gravel, so we have to pave it, too. Grr.

In the world of semiconductor physics, the absence of something (an electron) is just as important as the presence of one. In this case, we have the absence of an electron, and it's called (appropriately enough) a hole. That's the dark rectangle near the center of this photo -- it's where the old house's little basement was, where the water heater and gas furnace were.




This shows some of what's left of the old homestead. We wanted the pump house and garage left intact. This photo shows the pumphouse, and some remnant structure that connected the pump house to the main house. Part of the old brickwork is still there. Partially-decrepit (and deliberately built as such) structures are used in some gardens to deliberately give a sense of antiquity. They're called follies. So this is our folly...

Septic system construction (this is the first instance of construction instead of de-construction!).
A few rocks encountered during the septic construction.
Drain pipes. They're interesting because they are a system rather than a simple pipe with holes in it. The drain pipes (replete with holes) are inside a mesh bag, which is also filled with plastic packing peanuts. The peanuts are supposed to serve as a "substrate" for bacteria to live, to help break down the effluent coming out of the septic tank. In the past, the holey drain pipes were surrounded by gravel, which probably served the same purpose: but gravel now costs a lot more to transport, and there seems to be no lack of recycled plastic peanuts. Ain't recycling wonderful?