State of the sink, day 5

[ellarien]

I switched out the receptacle -- a gallon plastic trashcan -- under the leaking shutoff valve under the kitchen sink before I went to bed last night. When I got up this morning, it was brimful, but not yet significantly overflowing; the drip had worsened a lot since the previous day. I switched buckets again with only minor spillage and called the office again when I was dressed. I got a young woman who wasn't familiar with my case, and I had to explain the whole thing again, but it turned out that the maintenance guy was at her elbow, and she eventually put him on. He came over shortly after that. I hung around, telecommuting, until he had replaced the valve, and then went into work, with the assurance that a new bathroom sink is on order and might even come in today.

It didn't. I took a photo this evening: not a very good one, but it's dark under there.




Fortunately, that hole would only be an immediate problem if a lot of water was coming down the overflow, which mostly only happens when I'm doing hand laundry. It may have been there a while; I only noticed it because of the other leak.



Microsoft's Anti-Spyware Beta, which the computing guru helpfully installed on Butterfly, is ... a little too beta for me. I have very little patience for testing programs that interfere with my workflow, such as it is, and this one not only decided that two of my favourite tools were 'threats', it couldn't remember from one session to the next that I'd told it to ignore them, or indeed that it had ever run a scan. So, with the guru's approval, I've dumped it and gone back to my familiar triumvirate of AdAware, Spybot S&D, and Spyware Blaster.

Windows XP Pro is about as annoying as XP Home, but in different ways. (I wanted to say 'differently annoying', but couldn't find a conjunction to fit.) It's a little less slick in appearance, and a little less patronizing, and it doesn't seem to be able to do the 'Mini Player' thing with MediaPlayer. (Another strange mediaplayer thing: I stuck in a DVD last night, and the installed DVD software claimed it was the wrong region and wouldn't play it, but MediaPlayer would. According to the system manager, the DVD region has never been set.

For some bizarre reason, it won't show me my memory-stick reader in Explorer, but the command prompt can see it. It's possible that some of these oddities are connected to my conscientiously running in a 'limited' account mode when I'm not actively installing stuff.

In other news, I received a package today containing the middle volume of the Mageworlds trilogy -- I picked up volumes 1 and 3 at the used bookstore we visited between the Narnia movie and dinner, and ordered the other one through Amazon, the first time I've done that. It worked fine, except that the package looked so like the ones our data tapes come in that it ended up in the wrong mailbox at work. I could really do with some nice escapist reading soon.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

My reader used to not show up in Explorer a lot too, and then one day it finally seemed to really not work, and I got a new, cheaper one that Explorer can always find.

[ellarien]

I'm not sure there is a cheaper one than the one I have -- I think it was less than $10! Oddly enough, when I switched to the Administrator account it popped right up, and then I could see it in the regular account too.

It's probably good that I have a few months to get acquainted with this computer before I take it around the globe.