Well, more A/C troubles

Well, more A/C troubles. The guy came back today to look at our aged window unit (our house was built in 1963, before people always had central A/C) and declared that the coils are leaking and it would take all day to patch them (at $40/hr). Then he tried to sell us a used central unit (we already have central Heating) for not very much. BUT (and, as Peewee says, everybody’s got a big but), there’s no warranty on the used central unit.
I’ll pass. I’ve had too much bad luck with crap breaking down outside the warranty period lately. So, we’re going to go tomorrow and buy ourselves a new big-ass window unit. The other one cools the house just fine (when it’s working), and even a big-ass window unit is way cheaper than central A/C. Ah, the joys of homeownership.

Maybe Catholics are right after all.

Maybe Catholics are right — confession IS good for the soul.

Weird day at work.

Weird day at work. They’re remodeling our building in a MASSIVE way for the next 6 months, and the first wave of the attack begins in about 3 weeks when they destroy my boss’s office. Sure it sounds like fun, right? Nope. He’ll be sitting 3 feet from me after that for about 4 months. It’s okay, though. I can keep an eye on him that way.

I got home from work to find out that our main air conditioner went out today, just 3 weeks after being serviced (and working just dandy ever since). I immediately called the service guy and insisted that he do something about it PRONTO. I live in Arkansas, gentle reader, where it is hotter than hell and twice as humid. It was 100F here today, with a heat index well over 110. Nasty, nasty stuff. At least our bedroom A/C is still working, so I can sleep in comfort. Ah, the joys of home ownership. Will they never end?

Went to see Planet of

Went to see Planet of the Apes today. I give it a B+. First, the good stuff. Visually very impressive. The sets are cool, the spaceships are pretty original designs (what little you see of them), the ape costumes/makeup kicks ass, and the ape city is more arboreal than in the original. The acting is excellent, especially Tim Roth’s Thade (the head bad-ape) and the lovely Helena Bonham-Carter, who remains lovely, even when all chimpy. They obviously spent a lot of time coaching the actors on ape behavior and the results are that the ape characters are sometimes just funny-looking humans and sometimes startlingly simian. They sniff each other a lot.

The bad stuff: iffy science (evolution doesn’t happen that fast, though the modified genetics could account for that some), iffy time-travel, iffy astrospace (”magnetic storms” in space that last thousands of years in the same spot and allow time travel?). So, basically, if you don’t do like me and over-analyze the science part of the sci-fi, you’ll enjoy it.

I had a good birthday.

I had a good birthday. We had fun hanging out and eating Japanese food earlier this evening, even though everyone didn’t really know each other at the beginning. Fayetteville’s still small enough that you can play “It’s A Small World” and quickly find a handful of common friends or acquaintences between just about anyone who’s lived here for at least five years. I posted some photos and some relatively lame accompanying text in Birthday 2001.

Another important thing about the Birthday 2001 section is that it’s my first homegrown dynamic app (even though it’s just a little slideshow-type thing and it’s not fully dynamic) using PHP and MySQL. At work, we use WebCatalog to do just about everything, but with Mac OS X supporting PHP, MySQL, and Apache, I’ve started learning how to code in PHP/MySQL, since Mac OS X is our future at work, and the present of more and more places. It was fun, but I’ll be happier once I get more comfortable with the PHP syntax.