Category: Miscellaneous babble

The new complete copy of The Art of R Programming arrived from the No Starch folks yesterday (thanks!). No missing pages in this one (at least none that I’ve noticed yet).

(The cover is the same, that’s just the strap from the camera hanging over the book on the right). The new book, naturally, is just a wee bit thicker than the first copy.

Gotta give big props to No Starch for their awesome customer service and sending me a new copy of the book.

Back in Nov 2011, I ordered a copy of The Art of R Programming (published by No Starch Press). It sat on my shelf for a while and I’d flip through it now and then looking up a few things about R when I needed something. It’s a pretty well written book with lots of examples, which I like.

Last night I was looking something up in the index, and when I flipped to the page, I couldn’t find it.

Then I noticed it. Somehow, my copy of the book is missing a pretty large chunk of pages (pages 41-88). What amuses me most is that I never noticed until now.

I mentioned it in a tweet because it amused me and mentioned the @nostarch twitter account just because I thought they’d be amused too. A few hours later, I got a response from Tyler Ortman (@oty)

@imabug @nostarch Sorry about that! Can you email info@nostarch.com? We’ll get you a new file in the morning, figure out what went wrong.
— Tyler Ortman (@oty) March 26, 2013

So I fired off an email like he suggested and am waiting to hear back. This is a nice use of Twitter for customer service.

Update: So not only did No Starch send me a PDF copy of the missing pages, but they’re also going to ship a new copy of the book to me! That’s pretty awesome of them. Thanks No Starch!

Pro tip: When you buy things, keep the manual. The ones that have exploded diagrams of all the bits inside and a list of what all those parts are are especially useful

I have one of those refrigerators that has a water dispenser in the door. No ice though, it’s not that fancy.

After not using the water dispenser for a long time, I finally decided to replace the water filter. While dispensing several large cups of water through the filter to prime it, Connie noticed there was water leaking from the fridge.

Uh oh.

Found water leaking from the bottom of the door behind a cover, so out came the screw driver and off came the panel where I found a valve type thing, a couple of hoses and a plastic reservoir. After running a bit more water to see where the leak was coming from, it looked like the water was coming from a tiny pinhole leak in the resevoir. Hard to see, but it’s there when there’s water pressure.

Fortunately for me, I like to keep the manuals around for most things I have, especially things like appliances that have replacable parts. Looking up the part number for the water reservoir was pretty simple, and a search on Amazon turned up a few sources

When it arrives, I’ll hopefully have refrigerator door water again!

Woot! First post in my shiny new blog home!

Stay tuned. More to come.

If you’re looking for my older posts, you’ll find it back there.

And so goes another year. And here comes another “year in review” post.

This past one was pretty busy as far as work goes, with at close to 130 x-ray machines and workstations units that I have to lay my hands on for annual testing. This is probably twice the number that there were when I first started.

Diabetes management has gone pretty well in 2012, with HbA1C staying steady at 5.6%. Trying to stick to a mostly low-carb diet, which I think is helping, although I do occasionally fall off the wagon. Weight has been pretty stable at around 77kg (170lb).

My running fell off quite a bit once the summer heat hit. Then there was much busy-ness and I got lazy about getting up for early morning runs once the weather cooled down again. It’s something I need to get back to again. I’ve been missing it lately.

On the school front, there wasn’t a whole lot of progress in 2012. Going to have to change that for the coming year because I really need to get this over and done with.

2012 was a year for taking up new hobbies for me it seems, with amateur radio and electronics becoming the latest time sinks. I’ve been enjoying learning new things and putting into practice all the electronics that I learned so many years ago. Lots of new gadgets to play with, and there was also much fun had disassembling and dissecting various dead electronic things.

There’s this new and awesome girl that I met in 2012 who’s making life pretty fun and fantastic these days. 2013 together looks like it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.

There’s a lot to look forward to in 2013. Work will stay busy, and I don’t see it getting any less busy anytime soon. Soon I’ll have the ham shack up and running. There will be radios all over the place once that happens plus a beacon or two.

2013 should be a pretty good year.