Special delivery!

Special delivery for you: Evan! I’ve gotten a little bit behind on updating the blog with baby pictures lately, but then things have been a bit busy. As I type this, there are a couple of guys behind me in the hallway working on the central heat unit, which seems to have stopped centrally heating…about 24 hours before a cold front hits and drops the average overnight low to 9 degrees. Not 9 degrees above or below freezing, mind you…nine degrees above zero. Obviously not a good time to stop heating; as of last night, I noticed that the vents were just blowing cold air, making our central heat more of a Primary Heated Air Reduction Tool (i.e. PHART). We can’t just have a big PHART blowing on the baby. It’s just not on.

In the meantime, the need to keep the house warm has gotten the Avid powered up for the first time since just after Christmas, and work is resuming on PDF Level 2. Rather slowly, mind you, but hey, it’s better than a total standstill. Someday, if we ever build our own house or move into a different one, I think it might not be a bad idea to somehow rework the central heat system so that there’s a system of fans and vents to pull the enormous amount of hot air generated by the Avid away from the system and into the rest of the house for heating purposes. (This may sound like a joke, but I’m serious – this machine, if it was in an enclosed rackmount setup with its outboard SCSI drives and gear and no ventilation, would die in about half an hour from the heat.) The warm air is already being generated, might as well use it. (Then again, you’re talking about someone who rigs up elaborate ways to thaw stuff out using the heat from the oven that vents through part of the kitchen stove – I’m big on making use of warm or cold air that’s already there. We’ve already spent the energy to get it that way, let’s use it.)

I’ll have more to say about PDF Level 2 in a day or two, including something interesting about a game that the second DVD won’t be covering. For right now, I need to check in with the HVAC guys to find out how we broke our PHART.