It was an excruciatingly long day at work today, even though it was technically a short day for me. I was the only one there and so while that makes for productive times, it makes for an incredibly long day.

I came home this afternoon with Mark’s car, since he’s borrowing my pickup to move some things out of his house for the evening. I’ll have it back tomorrow. I don’t mind his car, but I prefer my pickup. It’s interesting how you get used to your own vehicle, how it drives, and so forth.

Shortly after I got home, I fixed the email problem I referenced in yesterday’s post. It was a necessary thing, because I really don’t enjoy coming home from work to about 3,100 emails. It’s unpleasant to say the least. Granted, a spam filter I’ve got in place on the computer caught and managed about 1,800 of those, but they were still downloaded. Unnecessary waste of bandwidth. And time, for that matter.

So I took the steps necessary to resolve the problem. It didn’t take very long to accomplish, but it takes a little analysis to make sure I implemented it correctly (because I need to remember the good aliases, since I set the default (non-specified user) mail to be redirected to the spam account, whose mail file is automatically deleted once per day thanks to cron (and crontab).

So I set up the redirector business and created the crontab entry; things so far are working well. I received about 3,000 emails in seven hours without it. In nearly seven hours since implementing it, the spam account is currently at 8MB in size. So that’s 8 MB of email I didn’t download or have to deal with. Considering that it’s mostly text (and a few small PDF attachments in the 8MB, that’s a lot of junk text.

So I’m glad I got that working again. I’ve only had to deal with about 40 emails in the last seven hours. I can handle that, as can Thunderbird. It doesn’t take on 3,100 emails in seven hours very well.

I spent part of my early evening digging in the basement. The lowest point in the hole when I started was about 20 inches. The average depth of the hole when I started was about 14 inches. I took out about 18 five-gallon buckets of material (heavy, moist clay), and the hole’s lowest point is now about 30 inches (right where I want it to be). The hole’s average depth currently is about 27 inches.

So I’ve got a little work to do yet, which I’ll likely tackle tomorrow in the earlier part of the day (while it’s still on the cooler order). Most of what’s left in the digging department is in cleaning up the hole — squaring it up and leveling out the bottom a bit more. So ideally I will be able to put some rock down in the bottom of the hole (2-3″ of it), then set the sump basin and start backfilling until I run out of rock. Now that I’ve got the hole to about the correct size, I’m guessing that what rock I’ve got on hand will fill about 1/2 to 2/3 of the space. It’s completely a guess, though.

So that will be nice to have set in place. Even if I can’t get the concrete patching done (because I’ll need more rock), having the hole dug will be incredibly nice to have complete. Then I can start focusing on other projects (like cleaning the basement).

One downside to my digging activity today was that I ended up breaking my good shovel. Well, I broke the handle. I’m working in a fairly confined space (under the stairs), so I didn’t exactly have good ways to keep working on expanding the hole. Invariably, I relied too much on the leverage of the handle. I heard it start snapping about ten minutes before it split visibly, so I backed off. But it wasn’t enough.

The handle didn’t completely split, and the shovel still works quite well, actually. But it was shortly after that I decided to simply jump in the hole and dig from there (the hole is about 30″ square), so I wouldn’t have to leverage the handle so much to get the material out.

Ah well. That’s why I have a spare shovel, just in case. I shouldn’t need it at this point in time (especially since I’m almost done), but it’s there just in case.

So that’s about all I’ve got for tonight. I was thinking about something (and I didn’t write it down, of course) earlier, but that’ll have to wait until later, I guess. Until next time…

“In America, anybody can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.”
– Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

–MZ