Long time in the pipes

This post has been a long time coming. The post gets categorised under podcast because, believe it or not, I’ve recorded one! It’s meandering and mumbling for almost 5 minutes, but it’s here, for your listening enjoyment.

I’ve just had the pleasure of sending an email to the realtor for some maintenance in our unit. As my last email told you, we hadn’t had a real shower for several days. Not so bad, but neither was it so good – who would have guessed it wouldn’t be a grand time? I promise you, however, that I have taken at least four showers in the last two weeks. I decided to write you this post to show you what I sent to the realtor – more for your own discomfort and the amusement it will afford me, knowing you didn’t need to know.

Repairs/Request Required:

1. Screening on balcony needs to be sealed to stop water coming in during rain. This was a previous repair request and, while the installers came and sealed some spots, none of the areas most in need were sealed. Consequently in rain yesterday the screens have again leaked water when closed.

I didn’t send it to them in January, but this is the water we had coming through screens that aren’t supposed to let the deck get wet.

2. The toilet water in our unit is not cool. It generally causes an unpleasant odour to hang in the air that can’t be dispersed. While not being a plumber I suspect it’s a flushing problem since sometimes – and I apologise for the imagery, but it explains the issue – objects thought sent on their way have ‘reappeared’. The smell is constant and has been for a while – reappearing objects are infrequent, but more disturbing.

See? I knew you all wanted to know that.

3. When our bath leaked a few weeks back I informed you via phone that water had come through the wall and stained the carpet. I was supposed to hear from a carpet cleaner, but didn’t, so this is to remind you we have a very obvious 70x40cm brown stain on the carpet inside our front door.

That stain’s pretty. Having a brown explosion on a beige carpet to greet your guests as soon as you open the front door is a great conversation starter if a little short-lived as a novelty,

In other news, I think I may have previously mentioned the program Autostitch. It does a great job on panoramic shots – stitching them together automatically, as the name adequately explains. You can see it in action in the honeymoon pics gallery – two named ‘pano’. It’s a Windows only program, so I have to use my old laptop instead of my do-no-wrong iBook, but the results are well worth it.

This image is another one by autostich, taken at my church (click for full size). Actually, it’s 66 images (2,592 x 1,944 pixels each) put together by the autostitcher at only 5% of the original output size and jpeg compression at 75% quality. After doing the one you see here, I wanted to go the whole hog, so set it to 100% output size and 100% jpeg quality. That was at about 1am Tuesday morning, 41 hours ago. It’s up to ‘Rendering block 23 of 54′. Admittedly my five-year-old Compaq Presario 700Z is probably not suited for the task – with its raging 946MHz and rubber-burning 112Mb of RAM – but she’s having an honest go at it! Task Manager would have me believe the program’s not responding, but it’s progressed 6 blocks in the last 12 hours…liar.

I guess that’s it for now. I’m off to do some jobs before my wife gets home. I’ll likely blog about this panoramic shot when it finishes in another three days or so.