The Lone Sysadmin

• Amazon.com: JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank: Everything Else
• Amazon.com: The Story About Ping: Books: Marjorie Flack,Kurt Wiese (Illustrator)
  Read the first review.
• Capn Wacky’s Lists
  Unusual eBay feedback

• Welcome to NORAD Tracks Santa 2006

• Electric Heat Repair Parts
  Tips on how to fix a furnace, for example, if your flame sensor dies.

It’s the eve of Christmas Eve, and when I returned from running a couple of errands this afternoon my mother noted that while the thermostat was set to 68 the temperature was 60. Um, hmm. “Well, it’s 2:30, call someone right now,” I said. The burners in the furnace would light but no main blower activity.

A skinny guy named Red rolled up in his van and took a look at it. He mucked with it a bit and it started working fine. “I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said. “It’s all working fine.” I explained what I’d done before he got there, that I could see the burners come on but the fan wouldn’t go.

“That makes no sense,” he said. He explained how the automatic fan control works, and if the burner was going it would turn the fan on.

“Could the automatic fan control have been stuck or something, and you’re moving it unstuck it?” I asked.

“Maybe… I don’t know. I’ll probably get half way home and it’ll fail again, since we can’t figure this out for sure, but it’s working fine now.”

So he leaves, and I turn the furnace back on because I want to see it work. Through the little port you can see the igniter glow, the burners light… and then they shut off. WTF. I call him back, explain what I see. “It’s your flame sensor. I’ll be right back out,” he announces, and hangs up. Twenty minutes later and some sandpaper on the flame sensor (to remove soot) and it works again. Yea!

Some observations:

A) Furnace manuals have approximately zero troubleshooting information in them. There isn’t even a mention of the flame sensor in this one. I find that odd, since the flame sensor is a big reason furnaces will stop working. A simple table of failure modes and potential solutions would be nice.

B) When you’re troubleshooting appliances it isn’t enough to see something running. You need to watch it for a little while to see if it stays working. In this case, before the tech got there I’d seen the igniter light the burners, but I didn’t watch to see if they stayed running. Of course, they worked fine while the tech was here…

C) Why do product designers place screws behind things like the gas pipe to the burners? I think every engineer that designs a product requiring maintenance should be required to take it apart at least three times, with tools normal people will have, before the design is finalized.

Hey, at least I know how furnaces work now.

We get a lot of phishing spam, and we have to deliver it to our users. Most of it gets classified as spam and moved into the user’s “Junk Mail” folder. However, we’ve got a number of users that have been reporting these scams as “not spam” to us. It’s disturbing, because they don’t trust the spam filters now, and they’re probably clicking the links in the email. Could vendors add a feature to antivirus and spam detection systems (like Sophos’ PureMessage) where we could rewrite the beginning of the email to indicate a scam? Or maybe remove all the URLs from the email message? I see it as an extension of virus detection, only with a different rule set to trigger it.

I’d like that a lot.

• Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk - New York Times
  Heirloom whale barf!
• Minnesota Twins : Radke Calls It a Career
  Sad to see Radke go, but it’s for the right reasons, and it’s a happy thing. Hopefully the Twins can replace him with someone as competent.
• Learn the DD command - LinuxQuestions.org
  Good examples of dd, especially doing bootable flash drives.
• nominal comfort on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  “Help is on the way.”
• Will It Blend? | Presented By Blendtec
  Nothing like sticking dolls, rakes, golf clubs, etc. into a blender.

I’m off to the Twin Cities for Christmas. Before I go some overdue congratulations need to go out.

First, to Jon and Maureen. Jon was probably my first reader here, and he’s been a great friend, coworker, and drinking partner for a long time. Maureen is awesome, one of the only women I know that not only tolerates our shenanigans but will routinely one-up us, too. Not unpredictably they are now going to make their relationship official. Yea! :-) Congratulations!

Second, to Derick and Maitri, for the same reasons. Their last attempt at getting married was foiled by big swirly atmospheric disturbances so I wish them a happy, uneventful wedding ceremony this round. May it go off with only one hitch: to each other. :-) It’ll be a traditional Hindu wedding and I have to say that Derick looks snazzy in his kurta pajamas. I feel like I’ve known Derick forever and he’ll be missed around here as he goes back to New Orleans, but love is always a good cause.

Jon has a saying he uses to describe couples, “they’re retarded for each other.” That’s true in both of these cases. It’s great to see people getting together even if it means two awesome women off the market. Damn! :-) I’ll just have to continue my search. :-)

I don’t know if I’ll be writing at all over Christmas but regardless have a happy and safe Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, getting Monday off and sleeping in, whatever you’re up to over the next few days.

Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. The world needs more people like Carl Sagan, bringing science, skepticism, and critical thinking to the fight against complacency, creationism, and blind faith.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. - Red, “The Shawshank Redemption”