First impressions of VMWare

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I’ve been setting up VMWare ESX Server at work, and it’s quirky, but I like it. I shut it down improperly once (logging into the console on its Linux-based host OS and doing a shutdown -h now resulted in a system that wouldn’t boot anymore) so I’m afraid of what may happen. The upside is since every virtual machine is just a collection of files, disaster recovery is dirt simple: Build a VMWare box, restore those files from backup, point the VMs at them, and you’re back in business. No more need to worry about locating identical or close-enough-to-identical hardware. For that reason alone, I’d advocate running all of my Windows servers in production environments on VMWare, since Windows isn’t like a real OS that will allow you use a disk or image on dissimilar hardware with minor adjustments. We get some other benefits too, like allowing us to put all the toy servers in one box with RAID to protect us in a disk crash. We’ve lost far too much to disk failures on desktop PCs recast as someone’s pet-project server.
It also appears to try to only allocate to machines the amount of memory they’re actually using, so theoretically, if you were doing server consolidation and had, say, four servers with 256 MB of RAM, you could potentially get away with putting them on a VMWare host with less than 1 GB of memory.

I also like VMWare for tasks you don’t like to dedicate a single machine to. For instance, DNS on NT is totally brain-dead. It’s slow to propogate. It works about 99.9% of the time, but that .1% of the time that it feeds wrong answers will infuriate somebody, who will holler at you, and the struggle to fix the problem will infuriate you worse.

If you want DNS that works, your best bet is to load Linux or BSD with BIND on something and use it. But if you don’t already have a production Linux server somewhere and you don’t have a machine you trust to give the job, carve out a server on a VMWare box. Allocate 16 megs of RAM and a couple hundred megs of disk space to it, and give it a thin slice of processor time. DNS lookups don’t take a lot of power, so it won’t detract noticeably from the other hosted servers.

It ain’t cheap (the price isn’t listed on the web site for a reason), but software’s cheaper than hardware.

That’s it, I want to be an author again

Dave Farquhar Personal

I want to write a book. A short book. One that won’t mention computers at all, hopefully. I’m thinking 100-120 pages would be a good length. A Christian book. Not terribly deep, but very hands-on and practical, which will say what God has to say about a problem a growing number of people face. (What I have to say alone isn’t especially worthwhile. I’m just a journalist turned systems administrator, which means I studied a lot about nothing in particular in college, and somewhere along the way learned about computers.)
Back to that book. I want it to say to people what my heroes Paul Zindel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Max Lucado said to me the first time I picked up and read a book written by each of them: Hey, I understand what you’re going through right now. Not only that, I understand you, because I’ve been there too. I know your doubts and your fears, because I’m having them right now. I know it doesn’t seem like enough that God says He’ll pull you through it, because I know He will, and yet it doesn’t seem like enough for me either.

Anyone out there have any experience in the Christian publishing biz, by any chance? (You never know.) The subject matter? Well, one might be able to make an educated guess, but I’d really rather not confirm anything just yet.

Do something for copyright freedom

Dave Farquhar Copyright ,

Please go sign the Petition to reclaim the Public Domain if you haven’t done so already. The man behind this is Eric Eldred, the “Eldred” in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
If you’re curious about what the public domain is or why it’s important, here’s an introduction.

Keep in mind that this is coming from a copyright holder. I retain copyright on the content of this website, for example, because parts of it may have commercial value. At times I have reworked entries from this blog and published them elsewhere. Quoting material from this site, linking to it, or even printing copies of it to retain for future reference falls under fair use and I don’t just allow it, I encourage it.

In 14 years, I doubt there’s going to be much use for the information here anymore. A historian may find it interesting. My main reason for protecting the copyright beyond that timeframe would probably be self-protection. Copyright would allow me to keep this content obscure.

Think about how many books, record albums, and movies originally published in 1989 are still in print. Some of them, like the movie Batman and Disintegration by The Cure remain very commercially viable. But the majority of media produced in that year is now out of print and difficult to find. There’s limited interest in it, but that interest may be so limited that even used record stores and used bookstores aren’t all that interested in carrying a lot of it.

That’s not to say it’s useless. It’s still valuable for research. It’s still valuable for other things too. You can make new media by combining old media. A budding artist can combine out-of-copyright audio and video to make new things and legally do things with it. For some examples, look at the World At War collection.

Access to public domain material today is difficult. But disk space is dirt cheap now. Bandwidth is getting cheaper. Access is going to become easier and easier. Admittedly, most of the material created from public domain sources is going to be at least as bad as, if not worse than, the source material. But there will be masterpieces as well. Disney got its start by using the public domain, after all.

Why is there a stigma about meeting people online?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

Steve DeLassus just made a funny observation to me. He said when he talks about me, sometimes people consider meeting and communicating with people online as somehow abnormal. And they tell him via e-mail.
My coworker, Murel, has told me several times that when he was my age, the last place he would want to say he met someone was in a bar. Without making any moral judgments, I would rate the likelihood of me meeting someone in a bar and finding the right stuff for a serious, long-term relationship as very low. There are numerous qualities and values on my must-have list that you’re just not very likely to find in that kind of environment. And most of the things on my can’t-stand list that are very easy to find there.

But what’s the stigma about meeting people online? Steve DeLassus and I met on a bulletin board back in 1989 or 1990. We both had Commodores and modems, and it was summertime and we had time on our hands. The closest thing we had to the Internet in our homes those days was CompuServe. People who didn’t want to pay for CompuServe dialed into BBSs instead. I have one other friend from that timeframe that I talk to at all, and that’s about once a year. But Steve’s been one of my best friends for a very long time.

I met Dan Bowman online. I fired off a rant to Jerry Pournelle about alternative operating systems, and–these were the days when one could post an e-mail address on a Web site without fear of having 250 spam messages in your inbox the next day–Dan replied to me. And we quickly found some common ground. Dan noticed that at the time I was working for a Lutheran organization, and his dad was Lutheran. The result was, once again, a lasting and very valuable friendship.

It’s true that online you can pretend to be othing that you’re not, but it’s hard. Eventually the truth comes out. Some people are fooled for a long time, but every relationship I’ve made online that later fell apart, whether it was of romantic nature or strictly friendship, had one thing in common: My initial impression of the person was slightly wrong.

Funny. When I think of relationships that started in the physical world that fell apart, the same thing is true.

Now, some people are better at talking and listening than they are at reading. As a journalist, I had to be able to look at available information and take educated guesses about what was missing. No, not so I could print those along with the facts, but so I could go and find the rest of the story. As a computer tech, I’m constantly faced with solving problems for which there is little information. I can tell a lot about a person by their writing style and by the questions they ask me. Talking on the phone and later meeting in person tells me some more, but for me, that’s the optimal order.

And it’s easier for me to open up in writing than it is to just talk. It’s easier for me to be real and transparent and honest with someone I barely know when I’m not watching their expression or hearing their voice. Once I’m comfortable with the person, we can talk, but it’s pretty obvious when I get into an uncomfortable situation, and my discomfort can tend to overshadow anything that I might say. Plus, in writing, it matters a lot less how long it takes me to find the right words to say what I’m thinking.

For someone who’s a better listener than reader, the optimal order may be different. That doesn’t make this new way of doing things any less valid.

Nasty weather takes down a site (this one)

Dave Farquhar General

Last night, we got pounded with some severe storms here in St. Louis. My power flickered off a couple of times and actually stayed down twice that I know about. The longest outage was a couple of hours.
There was lots of other goofy stuff going on too–I heard sirens almost nonstop for about half of the long outage. After the rain let up, I went out to my car a couple of times to listen to the radio but I didn’t find out anything useful.

And, of course, any time there’s severe weather, my Internet connection goes goofy. Since my networking equipment and Web server are on UPSs, I think the site actually stayed up a good while after I lost power.

Anyway, there’s another round of storms rolling in tonight, and there’s supposed to be another one tomorrow too. Less severe, or so they say. We’ll see.

If the site is up and down a lot for the next few days, that’s why. Don’t worry. Once summer arrives in St. Louis, we should have some pretty smooth sailing. (I don’t know what to call the season we’re in right now.)

I wish I had something interesting to talk about, but I don’t. I slept through the night last night but I sure didn’t sleep very well. So my idea bank isn’t exactly running over right now. It might be just as well–I don’t know how many people will be able to read whatever I post.

What I’ve learned about love

Dave Farquhar Personal

The most appropriate word I can think of to describe most of my relationships is “rocky,” but if there’s one thing I can say about my last effort, it’s that I’ve finally learned something useful about love. I post it in the hopes that it will help somebody else.
I don’t know that this is the best way to happiness, but it’s the best way I’ve found in my 28 years walking this earth. Find somebody, then dedicate your efforts into making that other person happy.

Happiness, to me, has always been fleeting. I have a pretty somber disposition, so happiness is a rare treat. I found a bunch of it when I went on a mission trip. I found some of it the first time I published a magazine article, and again the first time I published a book. I occasionally find it in friendships. But I’ll be brutally honest here: Even while on the mission trip, at the very height of the trip, I found myself aged 27 and desperately lonely. I’d written a lyric back in 1997 at the end of a breakup. It said: “You ask what’s left, I’ve just got God / One day that will be enough / But in the meantime I still exist.”

When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking of one day here and there, that being enough. But that was what I got. The lyric was still true, nearly five years after I’d written it.

In October, I found myself in a relationship, and like many of my relationships, it took off like a rocket. Unlike the overwhelming majority of my relationships, this one had some distance to it. But in time, the newness and the perfection faded away, leaving two people who loved each other, but who also seemed to possess a very significant talent for hurting one another.

I’ll be forever in debt to Steve Mahaffey, who pointed me to the Marriage Builders website. Dr. Willard Harley makes a buttload of sense. (I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see his name in the same sentence with that particular word.)

His idea of the most important emotional needs is very like the advice in Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but it gets to the point a whole lot faster and tells you more. It also doesn’t just talk in generalities, which is important. Yes, I’m a man, but I do have at least one trait that’s more commonly associated with women (in my case, it’s because I’m a grown child of an alcoholic).

Here’s my paraphrase of Harley’s take: There are 10 things that people need. They probably desperately want five of them from their relationship. The other five are less important. Some of those may be moderately important. One or two of them they can probably take or leave. Here are the 10 things:

Admiration
Affection
Conversation
Domestic support
Family commitment
Financial support
Honesty/openness
Physical attractiveness
Recreational companionship
Sexual fulfillment

In the case of a Christian dating relationship where there isn’t sex going on, I lump the more physical aspects of the relationship into sexual fulfillment. A short kiss is probably affection, as is a hug. A really long kiss is probably sexual, especially if accompanied with a passionate embrace. So some degree of sexual fulfillment goes on in very nearly every romantic relationship.

Now, here’s something that I noticed. Say a girlfriend comes over a few times before I got off work to cook dinner or clean the kitchen. I appreciate it. It’s work I don’t have to do myself. But I’d be happier just to see her–she could have been sitting in a chair reading a book when I came in and I would have been just about as appreciative.

If she really wanted me to feel special, all she really needed to do was read my Web site occasionally and take an interest in some of my writing–just checking in once a week and reading the non-computer stuff would have been great. That would have meant more to me, even though it’s probably less work. Why? Admiration is my #1. Domestic support is my #9.

So here’s the idea. Take that list, and then figure out if you could only have one of those 10 things from your significant other, which would it be. That’s your #1. Then figure out if you could only have two of them, and so on. Rank them, all the way down to #10. Have your significant other do the same, then share your lists.

If, like me, you’ve learned that making someone else happy makes you happy, you’ve just uncovered what ought to be the secret of the most incredible relationship ever. When you try to do things for your significant other, concentrate on things that fall into their top 5 categories. You’ll score more points than if you hit things on their lower five. (Harley talks about the concept of scoring points with your significant other in his piece The Love Bank.)

If you’ve ever found yourself muttering, “Boy, I sure didn’t score very many points on that one,” you’ve probably noticed that men and women tend to have some opposite needs and wants, and we tend to do things for our significant other that we appreciate ourselves when we’re trying to make them happy, and that often causes us to hit low on the scale. Then they don’t notice and we don’t feel appreciated. But things that involve one of the top five needs stand an excellent chance of being noticed and appreciated.

This principle can be applied instantly in a marriage or long-term dating situation. I don’t think it’s first-date material or even second-date material. But once the relationship has become one of committed and exclusive nature and the newness has started to wear off, it would be a perfect time to bring it in.

Harley talks about a lot of other things, but this struck me as the jewel. It seems to me that if nearly any couple were to rank their needs, then concentrate really hard on meeting one another’s top fives, the importance of the aggravating things about the relationship would diminish very quickly. Have you ever found anything that knocks the rough edges off a person as quickly and effectively as a satisfying, unconditional kind of love, when reciprocated effectively?

To cheat or not to cheat?

Dave Farquhar Baseball ,

Sammy Sosa got caught this week with a corked bat.
For you baseball less-than-afficianados, corking a bat is the process of drilling out the center of a baseball bat, plugging the hole with cork or some other light material, then patching the top. The idea is to lighten the bat so you can swing it harder and hopefully hit the ball further.

It’s illegal. It’s said not to do any good (the loss of mass makes up for what you gain in batspeed). But people do it anyway.

Major League Baseball has examined 76 of Sosa’s bats and found none were corked. Sosa said he used this bat in batting practice to put on a home run show. I believe him. The question is, did he also bring out this bat during crucial moments of games, when the Cubs needed a longball?

We’ll probably never know the answer to that question. But I’ll bet the majority of people suspect he did. I sure do.

Baseball has a bit of a double-standard when it comes to cheating though. When hitters cheat, it puts a black mark on careers. Nobody remembers Billy Hatcher, except for his corked bat incident. Slightly more people remember Graig Nettles. Albert Belle had a terrible reputation, made worse by his use of a corked bat.

What about pitchers? It’s illegal to doctor baseballs, but it’s been known for ages that if you interfere the ball’s aerodynamics, pitches do crazy things. So pitchers long ago started inventing ways to rough up baseballs.

Gaylord Perry was so well-known for throwing greaseballs, he approached Vasoline about doing an endorsement. (Their response: “We soothe babies’ asses, not baseballs.”) He’s in the Hall of Fame. Don Sutton’s nickname was “Black and Decker.” It’s been said that when Perry and Sutton first met, Perry handed Sutton a tube of Vasoline, and Sutton thanked him and handed him a piece of sandpaper. Sutton’s in the Hall of Fame too.

The only thing I can think of is that virtually every shift in the game–the liveliness of the ball, the height of the pitcher’s mound, the size of the strike zone–has been in the batter’s favor, rather than the pitcher’s. So when it comes to cheating, it’s harder to blame the pitcher.

Sammy Sosa has weight training, a lively ball, a smaller-than-a-Sports-Illustrated-swimsuit strike zone, a tiny ballpark, and hours and hours of videotape of every pitcher in the league going for him. During his chase of Roger Maris’ homerun record, he developed an image as a good boy.

That’s gone now.

But he’s no more of a cheater than Perry or Sutton. And let’s face it. The physics say hitting home runs with a corked bat doesn’t work. Sosa does it. He has a skill. Perry and Sutton were skilled as well. They just happened to be better at doctoring baseballs than they were at throwing them, it would appear.

So he’s still a good baseball player. Overrated, but talented. How is Sammy Sosa, the man? The jury’s still out there. But I’d still rather tell a kid to be like Sammy Sosa than to be like Pete Rose.

Heading back to Way Back When for a day

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Someone I know house-sat this weekend for a couple who are slightly older than my parents. Their youngest daughter, from what I could tell, is about my age, and they have two older daughters. All are out of the house.
It was like walking into a time warp in a lot of ways. There’s an old Zenith console TV in the living room. My aunt and uncle had one very similar to it when I was in grade school, and it spent several years in the basement after it lost its job in the family room. First there was an Atari 2600 connected to it, and later a Nintendo Entertainment System. My cousin and I used to spend hours playing Pole Position and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and various baseball games down there.

The living room housed a modern JVC TV, armed with a modern Sony DVD player and RCA VCR. But in the other corner was a stereo. The Radio Shack Special 8-track player was the stereotypical 1970s/early 1980s brushed metal look, as was the graphic equalizer. The tuner was also a Radio Shack special, styled in that mid-1980s wanna-be futuristic style. If you lived through that time period, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if you’re much younger than me, you’re probably shrugging your shoulders. Beneath it was a Panasonic single-disc CD player in that same style, and a Pioneer dual tape deck. A very nice pair of Fisher speakers finished it off. It was definitely a setup that would have turned heads 17 years ago. (I have to wonder if the Fishers might not have been added later.)

It seems like there are only two genres of music capable of being emitted by an 8-track player. Once genre includes Led Zeppelin and Rush. The other includes John Denver, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow and The Carpenters. Their collection was on the latter side, which sent my curiosity scurrying off elsewhere.

But I had to try out that stereo. I kind of like The Carpenters, but I have to be in the mood for them, and I’ve heard enough John Denver and Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow to last me forever. So I checked out the CDs. Their CD collection was an interesting mix, but with a good selection of contemporary Christian (albeit mostly pretty conservative contemporary Christian). I popped in a CD from Big Tent Revival. I don’t remember the title, but the disc was from 1995 and featured the song “Two Sets of Joneses,” which I still hear occasionally on contemporary Christian radio today.

About three measures into the disc, I understood why they hadn’t replaced that setup with something newer. It blew my mind. I heard a stereo that sounded like that once. In 1983, we moved to Farmington, Mo., which was at the time a small town of probably around 6,000. We lived on one side of the street. Our neighbor across the street owned the other side of the street. Any of you who’ve lived in small midwestern towns know what I mean when I say he owned the town.

Well, in addition to owning the biggest restaurant and catering business and tool rental business in town and a gas station, he also owned a mind-blowing stereo system. Hearing this one took me back.

I almost said they don’t make them like that anymore. Actually they do still make stereo equipment like that, and it costs every bit as much today as it cost in 1985.

And Big Tent Revival sounded good. If I’m ever out and see that disc, it’s mine.

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, I spied a bookshelf. It was stocked with books of Peanuts cartoons, but also tons and tons of books I remember reading in grade school. Books by the likes of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume, and books by other people that I remember reading 15 or even 20 years ago. The only things I didn’t remember seeing were S.E. Hinton and Paul Zindel, but as I recall, those books hit me so hard at such a period in my life that I didn’t leave those books at home. Or maybe Hinton and Zindel were a guy thing. I’m not sure. But seeing some of the names that made me want to be a writer, and being reminded of some of the others, well, it really took me back.

Next to that bookshelf was a lamp. Normally there’s nothing special about a lamp, but this lamp was made from a phone. This reminded me of my dad, because Dad went through a phase in life where there were exactly two kinds of things in this world: Things you could make a lamp from, and things you couldn’t make a lamp from. Well, this was a standard-issue wall-mount rotary phone from the pre-breakup AT&T Monopoly days. One just like it hung in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen well into the 1980s.

The computer was modern; a Gateway Pentium 4 running Windows Me. It desperately needed optimizing, as my Celeron-400 running Win98 runs circles around it. Note to self: The people who think Optimizing Windows was unnecessary have never seriously used a computer. But I behaved.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about this stuff. I just thought it was so cool.

But I remember long ago I wrote a column in my student newspaper (I’d link to it but it’s not in the Wayback Machine), which was titled simply “Retro-Inactive.” Basically it blasted retro night, calling it something that people use to evoke their past because their present is too miserable to be bearable.

Then I considered the present. Then I thought about the 1980s. We had problems in the 1980s, but they were all overshadowed by one big one–the Soviet Union–that kept most of us from even noticing the others. We had one big problem and by George, we solved it.

So I conceded that given the choice between living in the ’90s or living in the ’80s, well, the ’80s sure were a nice place to visit. Just don’t expect me to live there.

I’m sure people older than me have similar feelings about the ’70s, the ’60s, the ’50s, and every other previous decade.

And I guess I was just due for a visit.

DietLinux — a Linux that boots in under 10 seconds

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

The tinkerer in me just couldn’t stay away. I saw a reference on Linux Weekly News to DietLinux and had to look at it.
DietLinux is an example of a Linux distribution that can’t properly be called GNU/Linux, because the majority of its userspace didn’t come from the GNU project. GNU’s libc–the main API for Unixish systems, and I’ll call Linux a Unix just to hack off SCO–is replaced with an alternative, trimmed-down libc called dietlibc. It’s not feature-complete but it’s tiny. Those of you who programmed casually in the 1980s and 1990s probably remember a day when you could write a fairly sophisticated program in a few kilobytes. Under modern operating systems, a simple program that simply emits “Hello, world!” can take up 32K or more. Using dietlibc instead of GNU’s libc shrinks that program back down to a couple of kilobytes.

The majority of DietLinux’s userspace comes from Felix von Leitner, the author of dietlibc. Von Leitner reimplemented init–the program that bootstraps a Unix system once the kernel is loaded–and getty, which is the program that handles text-based logins. These unglamorous programs can eat up a fair chunk of memory, and since Unix systems typically go for long periods of time without being rebooted, it’s a bit of a waste unless you need certain features provided by the more traditional init and getty programs. He also wrote replacements for several standard utilities.

Obviously, not every program in the world designed for glibc will compile and run under dietlibc, so DietLinux won’t ever be a complete general-purpose distribution. But for network infrastructure glue-type servers providing services like firewalling, DNS and DHCP (all of which already function), it would be perfect.

I don’t know what the future plans for DietLinux are. The asmutils provide an impressive number of userspace and server utilities, written in assembly language with very low overhead, and would appear to be a nice complement to DietLinux’s infrastructure. Their use would limit DietLinux to x86, however. And the text editor e3 is tiny, full-featured, and emulates keybindings for vi, emacs, WordStar, and Pico, so it’s friendly to pretty much any command-line jockey regardless of heritage and takes little space.

It’s also not a newbie distribution. Installation requires a fair bit of skill and pretty much requires an existing Linux system to bootstrap it.

But it’s definitely something I want to keep an eye on. I’m highly tempted to put it on one of my 486s. I just wish I had more time to mess around with it.

My adventures in bureaucracy

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I don’t have anything interesting to tell you today, but since Steve DeLassus sends me at least a weekly dose from people who think their laundry is interesting, I’ll tell you about my day yesterday.
My Dodge Neon died in my driveway a couple of days ago. Yesterday I paid a towing company to haul it off to the dealer so I could turn it in. The warranty was up 3,911 miles ago. Figures. (Now I feel better about having paid $700 extra to extend my Honda Civic’s warranty to 7 years/100,000 miles.)

That will be the last time I ever lease a car, by the way. Leases make sense when you want to always have a new car. I don’t. I can think of a few things that would make me happier than to still be driving that same Civic in 2018. But it’s not a very long list.

The cause of death turned out to be a broken o-ring, which caused the spark plug chambers to fill with oil. So I can’t exactly count it against the car. Fixing it still isn’t cheap though.

After watching my Neon get towed away, I took my new car off for its St. Louis-is-too-polluted emissions test. If St. Louis really wanted to fix its pollution problems, they’d extend the light-rail system out into the Missouri suburbs where people actually live, but too many people are convinced people (they usually use another word that I won’t repeat) will ride Metrolink in from East St. Louis and steal their big-screen TVs. More on that in a second.

My Civic failed the test. My gas cap was polluting too much. Yeah. Vehicles that get 12 miles to the gallon on the highway are fine, but my 38 MPG Civic with its factory gas cap causes too much pollution to be acceptable.

So I had to drive to Autozone (polluting all the way), spend $5.91 on a new gas cap for a year-old car, then drive back to the emissions station (polluting less all the way) and sit in line for 30 minutes with my engine running (does that pollution count?), and get tested again to prove the world was rid of the scourge of my substandard gas cap.

Yes sir. We’re more concerned in St. Louis about the damage caused by faulty gas caps on ULEV vehicles than we are about our lack of an effective light-rail system. But the good news is I now have three of the four pieces of paper I need to get my vehicle licensed legally. And you thought Missouri’s temporary 30-day tags were a courtesy. No sir. It’ll take you pretty close to that long to navigate the bureaucracy.

And finally I had someone come out to look at my hot water heater. Based on the serial number, it’s old enough to drive and probably got its license last month. (That might explain a couple of those mysterious dings in the Neon.) He replaced a couple of 16-year-old parts, which will hopefully stop its leaking, which will hopefully cause my monthly gas bill to descend from the stratosphere. If I were paying the bill, I’d have just replaced the thing, but my home warranty means someone else makes the decisions.

It was a fine day. Or something.