Monday, November 03, 2003

I'm not an electrician, I just play one on TV

Two improvements going on in the kitchen - first off, I replaced the relatively weak bulbs in our ceiling fan (old-skool CF bulbs with a yellowish cast to them) with latest and greatest 9 watt fan CF bulbs. They cast a much whiter, brighter light, and only burn a total of 8 more watts when going than our old ones did. Our kitchen tends to be sorta dark, and this helps a lot.

The other is that we have a series of under-cabinet fluorescent lights that predate us in this house. We don't use them that much, but when we do, it's because of intricate food prep - ergo, we really need them.

Well, after over 10 years of service (our time here plus however old they were when we bought the house) they're on the verge of dying. One of them is already dead, and the over-sink one has the ballast starting to fade. They're wired in series, and rather poorly thru a wall and branched off from a light socket in our bathroom closet. So I have to decide which approach I want to take - rewire from that socket area, but better than the kludge job currently in there, or to just come off from one of the outlets in the kitchen on the back wall under the existing lights. I can do it neater-looking from the light fixture in the closet, but it's a kludge now and I'm not sure I want to actually rewire it. If I take the other route and go from the outlet, it won't be quite as pretty (though I can camo it nicely), but an easier wiring job. Either way, though, I'll still have to dike out the existing rig + wire.

Otherwise, no real news. I've become something of a Trading Spaces junkie over the past year, and I picked up Paige Davis' show diary (it's called "Paige by Paige", truly a brutal pun) today from the library. It's an amusing, fast read - I'm already about 2/3 of the way through it and will probably finish tonight. Definitely lighter than my usual fare. The main revelation is just how much goes on behind the scenes, and how hard they work to really stick to the actual stated rules of the challenge.

My mind has begun tuning out the white noise of the new iMac's fan. But it is definitely louder than Jane's is - mine's faster, though, so I can live with it. Nyah.

Pet peeve - Flash sites that embed their content in an MS-specific way and therefore don't load correctly on a Mac. It takes no effort at all to do Flash right, people - so do it right, for Pete's sake!

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