It was cold in our house Saturday morning. That's not too surprising, given that we live in an old drafty house, and make an effort to avoid running the furnace more than necessary. However, it was perhaps a little colder than normal. By late morning, it was clear that the furnace wasn't pushing out any hot air.

We finally managed to get a service call Sunday afternoon. The technician immediately diagnosed the problem: a broken gas valve. Of course, while he was there, he decided to look at the rest of the furnace to make sure it was in good shape. That's when he discovered the crack. There was a crack in the heating unit, and he was required to condemn the furnace on the spot (he can do that?). By late afternoon on Sunday we had purchased a new furnace; the installation guys just left.

On the plus side, it's warm in here again. And of course, I went for a very efficient model (94.6% AFUE, whatever that means) with extra air filtration. We'll definitely save on heating costs. It's also much quieter than the old one. To be fair, the furnace that came with the house was nearly twenty years old. The downside is that I didn't know I'd be shelling out thousands of dollars for a furnace. Oh well.

Oh, and did I mention that the installer guy pointed out a leaky pipe in the basement ceiling? I guess the cycle is about to repeat.

Friday afternoon, before leaving my office, I submitted my grant application for what I hope is the last time. The application must ascend through several levels of university administration on its way out the door, and I submitted mine to the final gatekeeper. They review it briefly, and then forward it directly to the government. With luck, they will request no corrections, and I can declare myself done with this grant cycle. With even more luck, I'll receive a grant for the usual five-year term instead of the truncated three-year grant I got last time. The rationale was that I had less time to wait before increasing the size of my grant. Great, except that there's even less money to go around this year. Thanks, guys. Can I just opt to receive two more years at my current level?

It's a relief to get the darn thing off my mind (aside from talking about it here, of course). As with the previous iteration, writing the proposal was an agonizing process. Most of the application is easy, if tedious. The proposal is where you say what you're going to do. By academic standards, it's miniscule: five short pages of 12-point type. It took me five tries before I wrote something I could keep. And of course, once I finally got started, I was over the page limit in a flash. Fortunately, editing it back to five pages is much easier than producing those pages in the first place.

And now, I can retreat back into sabbatical mode. Well, not quite. A few miscellaneous tasks have built up that I ought to take care of. And I'm going on a couple of visits in November, for which I must produce a talk (and, in the more immediate future, an abstract).

After handing in the application, an enjoyable weekend followed. My parents visited over Friday night before heading to Toronto for a party on Saturday. Nath was away all of Saturday with friends, and I had a successful day of responsible parenting. Sunday we went looking for boots for Zebula, and I ended up buying some new ones for myself. The highlight of the expedition was the long walk across town in the bright, brisk fall morning. The weekend ended with us watching the original 1949 All the King's Men, which was very good. Plus, I'm halfway through another detox diet, and have passed the uncomfortable transitional early phase. Overall, I'm feeling pretty good.

For absolutely no reason at all, here is a list of the Forgotten Taglines. The code that generates the main blog page includes a random tagline in the upper right. There are sixteen active taglines, and fourteen that are commented out, consigned to the tagline graveyard. In order to give them a brief moment out in the sun (well, the snow squalls, at least today), I present them forthwith:

• You are hearing me talk.
• Aziz! Light!
• This is beautiful! What is that, velvet?
• Now that is a big door!
• And one time? In band camp?
• That seal is my seal, monsieur.
• On the internet, nobody knows you're Jesus.
• Your Kung Fu is... okay.
• I'm not an actor, but I do play one on TV.
• People like blood sausage. People are morons.
• O pointy birds, O pointy pointy.
• Omnipresence. I like that in a woman.
• The way to a man's heart is through his ribcage.
• Here comes the Wapiti. Hippity hoppity.

If you're feeling up to the challenge, I invite you to tell me how many of these you can identify. Some of them are not entirely accurate quotations, and three of them were made up by me.

[update: 13 October at 09:38]: If anyone really wants to play this pointless game, might I suggest that you share your answers on the associated LJ comments page.

It was three and a half years ago that I abandoned my beige clone box for a stylish Shuttle XPC. The Shuttle box has served me well over the years, up until about three weeks ago when I came downstairs in the morning to find it off and unwilling to boot. Eventually I stopped shaking and set up an emergency backup computer. I then pondered what to do.

I already know I want to replace my home desktop with a Mac. But I wasn't quite ready to do that yet. So I did the reasonable thing and set about trying to diagnose the problem. A grad student in my lab used a similar Shuttle box to confirm that my power supply was dead. I ordered a new one from the campus store, and installed it yesterday, holding my breath in case the power supply was just the first in a chain of malfunctions. No! The computer started up happily as ever, and indeed a bit quieter than before.

Today, I decided to celebrate with a few more toys. First, I doubled the RAM to 1GB. That should solve some of the performance issues when Nath and I are both running X servers. I also finally caved in and bought a wireless router. We're wired for wireless, baby! The signal easily envelops the entire house. I've always been worried about wireless security, but the 128 bit WEP eases my mind somewhat. The network name is suitably mysterious too: "Setec Astronomy".

Alas, now I have the bug. I still really want to get one of those pretty pretty 20 inch iMacs. That can wait until well into next year (perhaps I can celebrate applying for tenure). I'm also still in love with the Squeezebox. I would love to have three of them: one in the basement, connected to the big stereo; one in the dining room, connected to the little stereo, and one in the bedroom, to use as an alarm clock. Okay, that last one might be a bit frivolous. Besides -- when was the last time I used an alarm clock? I think even one is probably frivolous, but I'll keep it in my mental wish list.