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Jul. 12th, 2005 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickToday at work we fixed the bathtub/sink drain in #3 (same building as #2 and #7 from the 911 late night / early morning phone call, for those keeping track of this kind of thing). I had looked at it on Monday and couldn't get anywhere with it. I snaked it and poured a quart-sized bottle of Liquid Fire (brand name for fairly strong sulfuric acid) down the drain and neither of those efforts got it to drain any better than the mind-numbingly slow draining it had been doing when I got there. *sigh* I was ineffectual and out of ideas so I asked Bill (He works for us. Bill can fix anything, damn near.) for help. Bill snaked the drain and poured about a quart of Liquid Fire down the drain. After those operations, the drain drained about as mind-numbingly slowly as it had been doing when we got there. Right, then. I was happy because it wasn't just me being ineffectual.
We proceeded to the basement. Now, 400 has a very nice, full-standing-height basement with a dry, concrete floor. It has lights that work and highly-visible, easily accessible pipes. As basements go, it's a lovely specimen of the breed, beautiful plumage. The basement at 400 runs damn near the full length of the building, providing spectacular access to the plumbing of the ground floor apartments at 400... well, except for #3. You did see the damn near back there? (I was hoping you'd notice.) Turns out that the plumbing for #3 is located in a dirt-floored crawl space that you can get to via a fairly small hole in the wall of the clean (for a basement), dry, well-lit basement. It's not a very big hole and there are water meters in front of it. In order to get through the hole into the crawl space, you have to remove the water meters for #2 and #7, which means that the people in #2 and #7 don't get to have any water while you're doing your thing in the crawl space because taking out the water meters makes a big old gap in the pipes where the water meters USED TO BE. (On the ball readers have flicked their eyes up top and seen that yes, those are indeed the water meters for the people involved in dragging my ass out of bed for no reason earlier this week. I'm not making this up. It's the truth, 'pon my honor. I may well have vindictively wanted to shut off their water for a couple of hours today just for shits and giggles, but I did not have to do so because the world magically arranged itself to give me a 100% valid and incontestable reason for shutting off their water. The fact that I get guilt-free retribution opportunities like this has got to be some kind of accounting error.) After the water meters were out of the way, the hole still didn't look very big, but I fit into it. Apparently my ass isn't as big as I think it is and that little discovery lightened my mood a bit. Bill gave me a flashlight, which was a great comfort because the crawl space didn't have any lights.
In the crawl space, I managed to take apart the pipe, a process involving pipe wrenches, channel locks, and substantially weakened sulfuric acid dripping down my arms (not harmful -- it was diluted enough that it only stung a bit, like vinegar, and I rinsed off well once I got back out of the hole). I'm sure that you can imagine how much fun that was. Given three or four tries, I can figure out the proper way to turn a joint to get it to unscrew, so I guess those eight years of college weren't wasted after all! Also, I vote we buy some freaking aluminum pipe wrenches. The ferrous kind are too fucking heavy for me to wield using only the noodle-like muscles in my arms.
After I got the pipe apart, I stuck the snake in there and snaked it past the two 45-degree bends to the 4" sewer line, which fix0r3d the problem. Bill and I feel that the two 45-degree elbows were put in the pipe to provide a place for clogs to occur so that we would have occasion to make use of the utterly delightful crawl space. We (I) reassembled the pipe while Bill ran up and put water down the drain so that I could look for leaks. This sort of plumbing excitement is a lot more fun with two people, I gotta say. At least with two people I only had to get in to and out of the crawl space one time each. It would have sucked a whole lot more if I had been getting in and out to fetch tools and test stuff. There were no leaks and everything looked good, so I crawled back out of the hole, we put the water meters back together, and that was that.
I spent the afternoon painting concrete block. If you've never done, it's tedious and mindnumbingly dull. That being the case, I put the hands on autopilot and went elsewhere as the afternoon flew by.
I also emailed amazon.com and told them that I thought they should expand how they sell manga to the masses. Partly this was because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fooliv posted about manga in his blog the other day and I was thinking about it. I was also rereading HnG manga because of the video surfeit thing on Saturday and it all got me to thinking. I don't want to have to track the manga serieses (I don't think that's a word. I mean more than one series. I read several and a series is ONE thing, damn it. Serieses. More than one series. Stupid fucking language, not doing what I want it to do) I read and remember new-volume-dates and what-volume-I'm-on and shit like that. I want to be able to SUBSCRIBE to Prince of Tennis manga and then amazon.com can just automatically ship me new volumes as and when they become available, in order, so that I don't have to track that shit myself. It should be like a subscription, kinda. Like that. For manga that are long-running (more than six volumes or so) and already all published or almost all published, they could do a "Send me one of these, every other month, until there are no more volumes or until I tell you to quit doing it". I bet a lot of people would like that sort of thing, not just me. It's a big value-added goodie without being a huge difficult thing to implement and I think they should do it, so I sent 'em an email about it. We'll see if they do anything with the idea. If I'm the only person on the planet who wants to autobuy manga, so be it. I don't think I am, though.
We proceeded to the basement. Now, 400 has a very nice, full-standing-height basement with a dry, concrete floor. It has lights that work and highly-visible, easily accessible pipes. As basements go, it's a lovely specimen of the breed, beautiful plumage. The basement at 400 runs damn near the full length of the building, providing spectacular access to the plumbing of the ground floor apartments at 400... well, except for #3. You did see the damn near back there? (I was hoping you'd notice.) Turns out that the plumbing for #3 is located in a dirt-floored crawl space that you can get to via a fairly small hole in the wall of the clean (for a basement), dry, well-lit basement. It's not a very big hole and there are water meters in front of it. In order to get through the hole into the crawl space, you have to remove the water meters for #2 and #7, which means that the people in #2 and #7 don't get to have any water while you're doing your thing in the crawl space because taking out the water meters makes a big old gap in the pipes where the water meters USED TO BE. (On the ball readers have flicked their eyes up top and seen that yes, those are indeed the water meters for the people involved in dragging my ass out of bed for no reason earlier this week. I'm not making this up. It's the truth, 'pon my honor. I may well have vindictively wanted to shut off their water for a couple of hours today just for shits and giggles, but I did not have to do so because the world magically arranged itself to give me a 100% valid and incontestable reason for shutting off their water. The fact that I get guilt-free retribution opportunities like this has got to be some kind of accounting error.) After the water meters were out of the way, the hole still didn't look very big, but I fit into it. Apparently my ass isn't as big as I think it is and that little discovery lightened my mood a bit. Bill gave me a flashlight, which was a great comfort because the crawl space didn't have any lights.
In the crawl space, I managed to take apart the pipe, a process involving pipe wrenches, channel locks, and substantially weakened sulfuric acid dripping down my arms (not harmful -- it was diluted enough that it only stung a bit, like vinegar, and I rinsed off well once I got back out of the hole). I'm sure that you can imagine how much fun that was. Given three or four tries, I can figure out the proper way to turn a joint to get it to unscrew, so I guess those eight years of college weren't wasted after all! Also, I vote we buy some freaking aluminum pipe wrenches. The ferrous kind are too fucking heavy for me to wield using only the noodle-like muscles in my arms.
After I got the pipe apart, I stuck the snake in there and snaked it past the two 45-degree bends to the 4" sewer line, which fix0r3d the problem. Bill and I feel that the two 45-degree elbows were put in the pipe to provide a place for clogs to occur so that we would have occasion to make use of the utterly delightful crawl space. We (I) reassembled the pipe while Bill ran up and put water down the drain so that I could look for leaks. This sort of plumbing excitement is a lot more fun with two people, I gotta say. At least with two people I only had to get in to and out of the crawl space one time each. It would have sucked a whole lot more if I had been getting in and out to fetch tools and test stuff. There were no leaks and everything looked good, so I crawled back out of the hole, we put the water meters back together, and that was that.
I spent the afternoon painting concrete block. If you've never done, it's tedious and mindnumbingly dull. That being the case, I put the hands on autopilot and went elsewhere as the afternoon flew by.
I also emailed amazon.com and told them that I thought they should expand how they sell manga to the masses. Partly this was because
fooliv posted about manga in his blog the other day and I was thinking about it. I was also rereading HnG manga because of the video surfeit thing on Saturday and it all got me to thinking. I don't want to have to track the manga serieses (I don't think that's a word. I mean more than one series. I read several and a series is ONE thing, damn it. Serieses. More than one series. Stupid fucking language, not doing what I want it to do) I read and remember new-volume-dates and what-volume-I'm-on and shit like that. I want to be able to SUBSCRIBE to Prince of Tennis manga and then amazon.com can just automatically ship me new volumes as and when they become available, in order, so that I don't have to track that shit myself. It should be like a subscription, kinda. Like that. For manga that are long-running (more than six volumes or so) and already all published or almost all published, they could do a "Send me one of these, every other month, until there are no more volumes or until I tell you to quit doing it". I bet a lot of people would like that sort of thing, not just me. It's a big value-added goodie without being a huge difficult thing to implement and I think they should do it, so I sent 'em an email about it. We'll see if they do anything with the idea. If I'm the only person on the planet who wants to autobuy manga, so be it. I don't think I am, though.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 02:47 am (UTC)Right now is kind of a manga dry spell -- I'm actively reading Genshiken and Van von Hunter (a highly amusing American production) while still picking up .remote and Mahoromatic out of habit -- but nonetheless. The principle's the same!
Ya know, it strikes me that by expanding your concept a bit Amazon could completely put all comic book shops out of business. They could buy Diamond Previews and that guy who does the New Comics Release List, construct a web interface with covers and preview pages, rig up a subscription service to it that automatically deducts your credit card every Wednesday, and bang! Bad for the shops, but it could be a huge deal for indie comic creators. Imagine the cross-promotion opportunities with the DVD and book stores, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 11:32 am (UTC)because the world magically arranged itself to give me a 100% valid and incontestable reason for shutting off their water.
And you don't believe in a vengeful god... it's evil coincidences like these that keep me firmly in the agnostic camp. There may not be a god, but there surely seems to be a sort of jackleg karma at work in the world.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 12:43 pm (UTC)You say that like there is something *wrong* with hanging around pool halls. There's nothing wrong with a couple of longnecks and a round or two of 8-ball. It's practically cultural.
Besides, you don't have to sign up for autobuy (tm) if you think it would be bad for you.
Stupid amazon.com probably won't listen to me anyway, even though I think it's one hell of a good idea. It's the kind of thing that I'd find useful, convenient, and handy. It's the kind of thing that could sucker me into buying a lot more manga than I currently do... and it would virtually guarantee that I'd buy said manga from amazon.com due to the service thing. Convenience. Locked-in buyers. Repeat customers. Stable revenue stream. Low cost of implementation. Service differentiation (always a bonus). Seriously, I've thought about this more than just a little. It's a good idea. They should do it.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 09:48 pm (UTC)This year I had the amazing experience of having a good idea, thinking "Yeah, right. They'll never do that", and then shortly thereafter seeing it implemented (no thanks to me, who kept cynically quiet about it).
I am talking about Netflix's queue system. We used to have to juggle and rearrange our Netflix list if we were watching our movies faster than our Brit miniseries, lest we end up with three copies of "I, Claudius" and no movies. Now we have our alloted three-DVDs-at-a-time portioned out into three separate queues (this is optional - we could have kept one queue, or divided it as one one-DVD-at-a-time queue and one two-DVDs-at-a-time queue, given that we pay for a total of three DVDs at a time. Three queues was just how I wanted to take advantage of the new feature). The movie queue can advance speedily while the Brit miniseries queue (now on Jeeves and Wooster, soon to be Blackadder) can mosey along slowly.
It was amazing to see a corporate entity actually come up with and implement a good idea after I'd thought of it.