Minutiae

Posted by Ace on October 4th, 2009 filed in letters from Ace

reprieve

The sale of the house I live in has been completed.  It was purchased by a local:  the son of the travel agent whose office is in the center of town.  He seems very agreeable (although so did Flora, at first) and does not have any apparent plans to throw me out or raise my rent.  He is planning to move into the first floor with his family in the spring, after completing the extensive renovations necessary to restore the place to livable condition and bring it up to code.  Some of this renovation will involve my floor.  The house inspector, for instance, cited the need for there to be a railing along the opening in the floor that leads to the stairwell (only six years after that would have been helpful to keep my toddler son from killing himself!  And just in time for it to be a pain in the ass that prevents me from getting to any of my bookshelves, or closing the jury-rigged structure I created to prevent all the air-conditioning from draining down the hole.)   Reputedly there will also be some level of treatment of the bathroom-  hopefully before the remaining intact floor tiles crumble through the rotting floor underneath.

At my behest, he has also expressed a willingness to fix the hot-neutral reverse-wired outlets just as soon as the electrician first shows up.  That’s exciting, although it may be too late to save the carpet:  the duct tape I used to immobilize Eve’s power line when I ran it across the living room floor to the good outlets has been there for months and months, and the glue seems to have fused to the fibers…

Terminex has also been by, as he discovered evidence of termite damage while ripping the first floor apart.  He wryly observed that he suspected the previous owners probably knew that and just didn’t bother to mention it.  Gee, ya think?

malfunction

Discovered last night that the eraser side of the pen that goes with my Cintiq is no longer functioning properly in PS4;  it duplicates whatever the pen side is set to rather than erasing.  That’s relatively inexplicable, given that everything is working correctly otherwise, and all of the pen and tablet calibrations tools that I can find, both for the program and for Vista itself, are set correctly.  Have to start by updating the drivers first, I suppose, then check the forums more thoroughly.  There were some posts about similar issues, but not my specific issue with this specific program.

damage

Also swung my laundry basket at a funny angle today and managed to snap off one the two plastic nubs that hold Gloria’s cargo nets in place.  Ouch!  Sorry sweetie.  That’ll be a trip to the dealer this Saturday…


2 Responses to “Minutiae”

  1. Ace Says:

    Updating both the Wacom drivers and PS4 itself solved the “malfunction” problem. (Thought they were set to update automatically, but apparently not.) In addition to the eraser problem, I was also missing any kind of pressure-sensitive functionality with the pen at all, and just never noticed, because it’s been such a long time since I’ve actually sat down to DRAW with the damn thing!

  2. Ace Says:

    The Mini dealer fixed not only the broken cargo net pin, but also some discoloration on the weatherstripping that I didn’t mention, and wrote it off as covered under warranty. Sweet!