Dealing with Idiots

Tiffany recently had a conversation with someone that went something like this:

Dude: [so and so] is one of those Mexicans.
Tiffany: [so and so] is from Venezuela.
Dude: [so and so] speaks Spanish. Anyone who speaks Spanish is a Mexican in my book.
Tiffany: You're an idiot.

I came up with an alternative response.

Imaginary Daniel: You know the most surprising part about that? That you have a book. Asshat.

Oh snap.

Rock and Roll Tile

I just picked up the first load of tile. The price at the register? $666.60.

This is going to be the most metal kitchen EVER!

Plumb Frustrating

Have you ever gone to set up something simple, say, OSPF between a couple-three routers, and spent the whole afternoon troubleshooting this problem and that problem so you can issue the less-than-ten commands to make it happen?

You know, first you realize that this laptop doesn't have an ssh client, and then it turns out that the corporate intranet doesn't want you to download putty, then there's a local firewall issue, then you run out of cables and have to go to the store for more RJ-45 tips, then there's a traffic jam, then the command syntax in the manual isn't quite right, then you spend two hours to realize you fat-fingered the passphrase for MD5 setup, then finally it works?

Well, I'm here to tell you that plumbing can be the same way. But it can be just as rewarding.

Here's the offending critter.
It has a water inflow that works perfectly well.

But it didn't have proper outflow. Most of the time, that's not a problem. But every time I make some beer, I've got to let it drain into a big wine bottle for a few days. You can fit a lot of water into 50 feet of quarter-inch tube. That's a pain in the ass.

So anyway, I endeavored to fix this, and hook the outflow into my drainage. Five or six trips to Lowe's later, and after figuring out the magic words, I've got this sweet hookup that I can be proud of.
Finally, I zip tied it up under the sink (the zip-tie is staple-gunned there) to keep it out of the way.