Maintenance

It's being like that this morning. I'm going to be down in the Loop later this week, so I downloaded the Ventra app onto my phone so I can use online Metra ticketing. Then I discovered that I'd forgotten the Ventra password that I never use, so I had to reset that. And eventually, I was able to buy some train tickets.

This was followed by fishing a couple of items out of the spam bucket. One was from my bank. It turns out my bank has sold itself to another bank, which is going to mean a whole new round of account numbers and checks, I suspect, in the not too distant future.

And then I fished the notification for Katie's upcoming dentist appointment to have a cavity filled out of the spam bucket and forwarded it to Gretchen. To keep these out of the spam bucket in the future, I went to my web hosting provider and tried to log in, but I apparently forgot which password I was using for that. But I could reset it if I had my user number, which is on an invoice. Which I get via e-mail. Have I kept any of them? Why, yes. Yes, I have. Reset that password, go into the mail management and white list the new dentist's e-mail address for both me and Gretchen so that we actually get these notices.

And as long as I'm there, it is time (past time) to delete Fuzzbucket's e-mail address. I checked the inbox before deleting it. There was a lot of spam there, mostly from Facebook.

*sigh*

Poor old cat.

Lighting It Up

I replaced the CFLs in the office with Cree 100W equivalent LED bulbs a while back. This involved some shenanigans with the ceiling fan fixture that required installing a longer nipple so that the bulbs -- with their big heatsinks! -- would fit. I also installed one soft white and one daylight bulb to try to average things out.

I've noticed it's been getting dim in the office lately when the sun goes down. Yesterday, I finally took a good look at the problem and concluded that the soft white bulb was failing. In theory, it's under warranty, but in practice it will be annoyingly inconvenient and expensive to get that warranty honored. So since I was in Home Depot yesterday on a different mission, I checked out the LED bulb aisle.

I considered getting another of the Cree LED bulbs with the huge heatsink, but I noticed that Philips had a much smaller, supposedly 100W equivalent LED bulb for about 2/3 the price of the Cree. I figured I'd try it and have now installed it into the fixture.

There is a lot more light in here now.

I wonder what I should do with the failed bulb...