Zhanga: May 2009
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Monday, May 25, 2009 (4 comments)
I have a Tux plate on the front of my car. Tux eats bugs:
I like the bug on his belly button. It's actually sticking out but you can't really tell from this angle.
Next picture. This is a "temperature & pressure relief valve," or at least that's what I think it's called. It's on water heaters and prevents too much pressure from building up. Apparently, you're supposed to open it, releasing hot water into the outlet pipe at least once a year. The pipe leads outside, and for at least the past few months ours had been leaking and dripping hot water outside. So I called the water heater company, and they overnighted a free replacement valve over here.
Once I got it, I shut off the water intakes, turned off the flames on the water heaters, and opened the valve to drain the tanks until no more water flowed out of it. Then I ran some hot water in the bathroom to lower the water level in the tanks a bit more, just to be sure. I tried to unscrew the valve, starting with the bottom pipe. No luck. Apparently, whichever genius installed the valve soldered the pipe to the valve. I didn't really want to attempt a blowtorch + wrench combo on a gas water heater (does that even work, assume I don't blow myself up?), so I called a bunch of local plumbers. Most of them quoted $250, except for one sketchy guy who said he'd do it for $125. Just for replacing a part with another part that I already have!
So I went to Home Depot, bought some hardware for $35, and began work. First I cut the pipe coming out the bottom, which was... hard. Then I took a pipe wrench to unscrew the valve itself out of the water heater. As soon as I did that, water started gushing out of that hole even though the tanks should have been much lower than that level. I tried to catch as much water as I could with pails and bowls, but I gave up as quickly as I ran out of containers. My basement got pretty wet... cleaning that up was fun. I did eventually get the thing in there and get it working (TWSS), as you see here.
Conclusion: plumbers suck, especially if they solder together parts to make your life more difficult.
2:51AM
Saturday, May 16, 2009 (7 comments)
Now that I've graduated, I think it's time to retire this website. It's not just that nobody reads... nobody (me) writes here any more either. Too lazy.
While I'm here, I'm going to summarize the entirety of what I learned in 4 years of majoring in economics. In descending order of importance:
- 90% of what I learned has to do with the discount rate. $1 today is worth more than $1 tomorrow. Bond/stock pricing, leases, loans, valuation, ... you name it. That's all finance is.
- Supply and demand intersect and do cool things.
- Government control (price ceilings/floors, taxes, etc) is bad, free market is good, blah blah blah.
- The government can get into as much debt as it wants and nothing will happen. Looks like they have a lot of faith in this one...
- I was sure I could come up with something else I learned, but I can't.
I'm pretty sure that's all I learned. It was a really, uh, useful course of study. On the other hand, it was much more useful than, say, learning about Mesoamerican civilizations (e.g. Mayans), and more interesting than taking a religion class where everybody else was a religion major or minor. Basically all I learned in those classes was how mind-numbingly boring those respective fields are. At least CS was useful.
My first job out of college is as a manual laborer, digging up and turning soil:
I didn't even get paid.
2:41PM
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