Day 4

It’s the start of Day 4 with no furnace. Right now, it’s about 3 degrees outside and 51 in the house.
Fortunately, the water pipes still seem to be okay.
The computers are happy: my PC, which had been making a regular groaning noise for months, is humming pleasantly, whether due to the temperature in the office or the fixes I made earlier this week.

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No Furnace, Day 3

I live in a house with a forced hot air heating system by natural gas, and at 4 AM three days ago, the circuit board that controls the fan died.
It’s a semi-old system, we think it was installed around 1990, so getting parts is a challenge because the circuit board manufacturer has changed the design.
Thus, it’s a guessing game which new version is compatible with my system.

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Problems Solved

I’ve been having a weird problem for weeks, if not months, with Visual Studio .NET, my main development environment.
VS.NET crashed every time I tried to open a file from the IDE.
This is more than a minor nuisance, since there are times you HAVE to open a dialog window; for example, if you want to add an unregistered reference to a project. It had become such a vexation that I was ready – more than ready – to replace my PC.

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To the Trash

I’ve been increasingly irritated by the spam mails from John Kerry, which seem to be more frequent now that the Electoral College vote has been made official.
Conspicuously absent from any meaningful participation in the election protests, Kerry now seems to feel he has a right to lead the loyal opposition through four more years of George Bush.

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