Air Mattress Fixed!

I've discovered a much better way of detecting leaks in air mattresses, than any I have seen before. This one does not involve getting anything wet, or making a mess.

1. Get a thin sheet of tissue paper, the kind you use for wrapping gifts.
2. Make sure the room is relatively quiet and the mattress is full.
3. Lay the tissue paper on the mattress and let it rest. If the hole is under the paper, it will make a very audible hissing noise.
4. If you don't hear any hissing after a few seconds, move the paper to cover another area.
5. Flip the mattress over and try the other side.
6. Then stand the mattress up on its edges and cover the edge with the paper, moving and rotating until you have covered the whole mattress.
7. For the corners, just hold the paper in place in a way that tightly covers the corner.

I have an expensive air mattress with built-in pump and velvet top with a hole it it, so we didn't want to use water or soap on half of the mattress, and none of the other methods worked.

Other methods we have seen documented:

• Dunk the mattress under water and look for bubbles. With the velvet top, and built in pump, we didn't want to do this completely. We tried putting water over small areas, but not effective.
• Cover the mattress with soapy water and look for bubbles. Same problem with the velvet side, even worse. Also incredibly messy, cleanup is slow and annoying.
• Coat with powder, look for puffs. Didn't want to try this because it would be very messy.
• Fill with smoke or otherwise colored air. Tried this, but difficult to get enough smoke in with the built-in pump. Was not able to see any smoke come out of the hole after we found the hole.
• Listen to the air mattress. It was a very small hole, couldn't hear anything without tissue paper.
• Feel around for air. It was a big mattress, hard to find the hole.
  

Tissue paper made the tiny hole quite obvious even on the corner of the mattress. One small patch later (patch kit came with the mattress) and the mattress works perfectly, no need to get an expensive replacement.

Whee Maps are Cool

And I'm completely impartial of course :)




View Larger Map

Happiest Day of My Life

Yes, I know, I haven't posted in a month. Me and blogs don't always get along. Sometimes I'm in the mood to write stuff, other times I'll go for a long time with nothing to say. But now I have something HUGE to say!

I'm Engaged!

Yeah, I'm so happy! I proposed to Chi this evening, and she said yes. We will get married next spring after she graduates.

Not much more to add, I'm excited, I'm happier than I have ever been before. Call, IM, or email if you want any more details.

Wasting Time

I'm good at wasting time. Especially when I can't afford to. Good thing I have a wonderful girlfriend who tries to force me to not waste so much time.

How have I been wasting time lately. Well, a lot of it with Desktop Tower Defense. It is addictive. It is basically a flash real time strategy game, with online scores. Chi won't let me play it anymore until I finish my homework, and this is probably a good thing.

I have also been "wasting" time with more useful things, like cleaning my room and the kitchen. My room really needed it, and it looks pretty nice now. I'm going to have to clean everything up in a month or so, so might as well get started at least.

Saw the movie 300 the other day. It's a bit bloody for my taste, but I liked the movie overall, and it is a good story. Not quite the style I would choose to represent it, but that's okay.

I really should stop wasting my time and go do my homework.

Work, allergies, and more work

This weekend was the weekend of work for me. I had three major assignments due on Tuesday. The first, which I should have been working on long ago, was a semester project for my architecture class. I started Sunday evening. The second was a homework assignment for my image analysis class. The third was a project report for my visualization class.

I spent the earlier part of the weekend doing the image analysis, but I was satisfied with my results rather quickly and it wasn't due until Tuesday night, so I stopped after I got it working. This homework was then postponed to be due Thursday night.

Then I spent Sunday night and pretty much all of Monday until 3 am working on the architecture project. I finished at 3 am Monday night, and went to sleep for a few hours before class. At 7 in the morning we got an extension until today at 5 pm on that project. I was annoyed.

The visualization project report I kind of pawned off on my two groupmates for the weekend and then contributed to on Tuesday afternoon just before it was due. This is the only one of the homeworks that wasn't extended, and of course the last one I worked on.

Amidst all of this work, I've been having allergy problems. I usually take loratadine once a day, but for the past week or so it hasn't been enough. So I went to the doctor today and got some Allegra, which should hopefully make it better.

Now I have more work to get done, assignments due tomorrow, assignments to grade, projects, you name it. Geet is visiting for a couple of days starting tomorrow, which should be fun.

It's Saturday!

Yay, it's Saturday! Which means that I have time to do my work... and procrastinate by blogging!

This weekend has been candidates' weekend here at the UNC Chapel Hill Computer Science Department. That means everyone who was accepted into the department next year was invited to come for free so that we can convince them that this is where they want to go. The official program is basically all of the professors who might be interested in new students talking about the research they do. The current students like the make the visit a little more fun for the candidates.

That's where I am involved. I started my involvement by getting up early in the morning on Thursday so that I could drive to the airport and pick up two candidates before my first class. They are staying in the (very nice) hotel across the street from our department, so I just had to take them back to Sitterson. Of course I can't park anywhere near Sitterson during the day, and it was time for my class to start, but Chi was kind enough to meet me there, drive my car home, and take the bus back to school since she didn't have to be in class then.

Then Thursday night the candidate fun continued when Chi and I got to take three of the candidates out to dinner on the department's bill. We went to Elmo's, a local hippie southern food restaurant (mostly southern food, but they're in an extremely liberal city so they also do things like hummus platters and vegan meals). That was a lot of fun, and it felt like the candidates enjoyed it and got a sense for what it is really like around here.

Yesterday the candidates were stuck in Sitterson listening to talks and visiting with professors all day. I ate dinner with them (free pizza) but then they had more meetings. Later in the evening there was a party planned for the candidates with beer and the UNC basketball game, but Chi and I were tired and we were with Peter who is not really comfortable around alcohol consumption, so we stayed at Chi's place and watched Battlestar Galactica and the basketball game.

The basketball game was very interesting. UNC kinda sucked it up in the beginning and we were down by about 10 points at the half. But if you've ever watched UNC basketball, that may not surprise you. By about 12 minutes left in the game, we were down by 12 points. Then it happened. Like it always does. They got tired, we got energized. USC didn't score for the next 8 minutes, in which time UNC scored 18 points to be ahead by 6. We then had a couple of crappy possesions, but USC wasn't doing too hot at this point either, so we ended up taking the game by 10 points. Haha to the high school kid who used to be in first place in the facebook brackets but had USC winning the entire tournament.

Now today I have volunteered to show off my apartment to candidates so that they can see how UNC grad students live. The apartment's kind of a mess though, so I should go clean up a bit.

Sam's Club and Shiro

How is a major bulk retailer related to my cat? It's not, I just have things to say about both of them.

On Monday Chi took me to Sam's Club. I've never been to one before. She bought a membership because she likes to go there and save money. It is an interesting store, not quite what I expected. They have a lot of stuff in bulk, including name brands, but very little selection. For example, they have Classico pasta sauces in two or three packs, but they only had three of the twenty or so varieties. I was expecting things to be a bit less name brand and more generic bulk stuff. It is a nice store to save money on things that you will use a lot of before they go bad and you just happen to like the variety they carry.

So I ended up spending a lot of money and buying bulk of some things that I do use and won't go bad soon. I spent a ton of money, but it basically means spending very little money grocery shopping for the next couple of months, so I believe it should be a savings in the end. The biggest savings I got was with medication. I take allergy medication both in the form of loratadine (Claratin or Alavert) and sometimes Benedryl at night. Well I got a year's supply (300 tablets) of loratadine for $10, and that's only if I use it every day, and I usually only have to use it about half the year. And the generic Benedryl was even better, I got 400 tablets, which is 200 doses, for about $3. That will probably last me about a year, and it was only $3!

But I'm not willing to change brands or switch to something I feel is lower quality or I would like less just because I can get it cheaper at Sam's Club, so I'm not going to shop there exclusively or anything. It is useful occassionally to pick up some things that they have, but I'll still be doing my regular shopping at the local Harris Teeter.

Now onto the second subject, completely unrelated: Shiro. Yes, Shiro the cat. What about Shiro? She can be really annoying! Like seriously, does she have to pick times when I'm in the middle of homework or something to decide that she is the only important thing in the universe and I need to center my attention on her? Seriously, she will randomly decide that it is time for her to be petted, and will jump up on my desk and force herself between me and my keyboard. She will walk back and forth across my desk like this, getting cat hair all over my face and my keyboard.

So how about ignoring Shiro when she does this? Haha, nice try. She will start stepping on the keyboard or plop herself down on it so you can't continue working, and perhaps even make her own "addition" to your work. If she can't do that or you forcibly remove her enough times, then out come the teeth, and Chi can attest to that. "Hey, you're not paying attention to me *chomp*! Pet me *chomp*! Don't walk away from me *chomp*!" She doesn't bite hard, but she will use her teeth to guide you and indicate what she feels you should be doing.

So what about discipline? Remove her, scold her, even spray her when she does this? No effect. I've done it. She stops for a couple of minutes, and then comes right back and does it again. I think she knows she's being annoying and preventing people from getting anything done, and it has the possible frustrating side effect of people giving up and paying attention to her. Damn those cats are smart. I just wish Shiro would learn from Shima. Everybody likes Shima because she's friendly and nice, and I think she gets more attention because of it.

Wow, I sure type a lot for somebody who doesn't like blogging, huh? See, it's my new method of procrastination. I have to much work to do right now, might as well start a blog and not do my work.