sucketh verily

Plumbing sucketh, verily. (updated x2)

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Just to mention it, plumbing sucks. Last night I discovered that there was a slow leak on the sprayer for our kitchen's sink - no idea how long it had been there but there was visible damage in the cabinet under the sink. The leak was happening because an o-ring was wearing out on the sprayer attached to the faucet/tap, so after dinner I went to Home Depot to get a new o-ring. While there I picked up a small box of multiple sizes, figuring it might save me a trip some other time. Once I got home home I checked the different sizes, only to discover that the one size the box did not have was size I needed. So this morning I get up early to go to a small mom-n-pop hardware store down the road and they're out of the o-ring size I need ("I went through them a while ago and put in an order for more.." gah). I go down the road further to another hardware store and they didn't have o-rings with the same nomenclature, so I used my phone to find the dimensions I needed and grabbed one that fit the description. Took it home and it didn't fit, it was too small. So now I have to go back to Home Depot at lunchtime and hope they too haven't ran out of the size I need. Damnit.

Oh, and why don't have I the original washer to compare against? Because it went flying across the kitchen when I was taking it off and I wasn't able to find it.

Update: So, went to Home Depot, they had a small box of o-rings the size I needed, I bought it, went home, got to the kitchen and asked our son (who had bagged the small box) where the box was, and it was nowhere to be found. We checked the car, checked the path from the car to the house, checked the house - it's gone. Dagnamit. So I'll have to go back again.

Update #2: So.. After dinner I took Kian to the store to ask if anyone had found a small box of o-rings around the cash registers, they hadn't but they were very nice and gave be a replacement box. Got home with them and... they didn't fit, they were too thick to fit. So I called the store to ask if there was another size of o-ring that was a similar diameter but thinner, and after five minutes on hold decided to just drive back. After rooting around I found what seemed like it might work, bought it, put it in the bag and made sure I still had it in my bag when I got to the car, got home and - tadaa, it fits!

So after three days we finally have a fully working sink again! Yay!

Now to hire someone to fix the cabinet.

Working around Exchange Webmail / OWA constant logoffs

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I've always found that Exchange's webmail system, aka "Outlook Web Access", to be extremely buggy regarding remembering who you are. It sets sessions cookies with a pretty far-away timeout but regardless of whether I'm connected via a VPN or from the public internet it always delights in logging me out as quickly as it can. Well, I've worked out a work-around for these all too frequent occurrences. Here's what you do:

  • When you are provided with the login prompt, login.
  • Click the Back arrow in your browser until it asks if you would like to resubmit the form again.
  • Click Cancel.
  • Click Back again. This will take you back to the original edit window with the fresh empty (or if it was a reply, the original quote) edit page ready to go.
  • Click Forwards. It will say that it needs to resubmit a form in order to proceed.
  • Click OK / Accept / Aye Cap'n, whatever is the appropriate response to the affirmative.
  • Your message has now been sent, just like when you originally clicked Send.

Hopefully this will help some others who are also loosing their hair over this stupidity.

Vista is infinitely breakable, megap0wnd!

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Good news today via /. as a research team have discovered fundamental flaws in Windows Vista that make its "security" system completely useless and unable to be fixed to stop the flaw. In other words, WIndows Vista is broken and cannot be fixed. Yay :-)

Time for my D&D half-orc persona's ceremony of choice.

Yes, we have no bananas!

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It seems that the common household banana is potentially heading for disaster. Apparently a fungus has been working its way through the crops of Malaysia and is threatening crops world-wide. A key part of the problem is that our current banana variety, the Cavendish, is not able to reproduce on its own, to grow a new banana plant you take a shoot off the plant itself because the bananas themselves are seedless (a pic of a seeded banana, for comparison). Further complications are that it is possible the fungus will spread to other varieties, including one used in Africa as a staple, which where my concern comes in - this is setting up to be very much a repetition of the mid 1800's Irish famine which caused the deaths of millions of people. :,-(

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