Category Archives: About Me - Page 12

Making The Good Even Better

Posted by on September 18, 2019 No comments

I hate my kitchen sink.  I have hated it for a very long time.  The thing I hate the most about it is that the sides are so curved, you can barely put anything in the basins.  Any glass I put in there topples over.  It is infuriating to me.

So finally, I made the commitment to get a new sink.  Not only that, but I was going to get a hot water dispenser, a filtered water dispenser, a new garbage disposal, and a new, fancy, pre-rinse spray faucet.  I began my search online and was immediately overwhelmed by the potential options.  I mean, there are a LOT of sink options out there.  Eventually, I settled on a 50/50 split sink.  In the process, I learned a bunch about sinks.  One thing I learned was the gauge of the steel.  You can get anything for 16 to 22 gauge thickness.  16 is probably overkill and you don’t really want more than 20, so 18 is a great target point. 

Also, the thicker steel will reduce some of the tinniness when banging items around in the basins, but that can also be mitigated by sound deadening material.  I looked at my existing sink and it had something like a spray-on sound deadener all over the bottom.  When I bought my new sink, it said it had sound absorption as well.

When I got the sink and unpacked it, I saw the deadener on the sink.  It was a 4” square pad on the bottom of the basins.  What good is that going to do?  I knocked on the sides of the basins and the gong was obnoxious.  Sigh.  This is fine.  I can fix it.  The fix idea isn’t mine or even a new idea at all, you can see plenty of examples of the technique online.

When I was installing my stereo in my car, I used a material called Dynamat, which is essentially the same deadening material that is stuck on the bottom of my sink (although much thicker).  When people deaden their cars for improved audio quality, they usually go overboard and cover every exposed bit of metal.  But the key is that you really only have to cover the areas that resonate.  Corners?  No.  Large flat panels?  Yes.  Cover them entirely?  No.  Cover about 50% of the area?  Yes.

So I made a small purchase of Dynamat online, about $18, and applied it to the edges of the sink.  Each of the flat walls got a treatment.  I made a short video of the before and after effects of the treatment.

Refusing To Be A Victim

Posted by on August 30, 2019 No comments

I’ve made a couple of posts about my Plex server and recently how I’ve been trying to clean up the files and metadata, specifically, the album art.  Using a self-written utility to audit the artwork dimensions and a downloading utility to find better versions, plus the effort of scanning and cleaning artwork that has no high quality option, I’ve done pretty well.

The next step was to clean up – actually add – the artwork for artists.  It’s a smaller effort, only 600-some items instead of 1600 items.  However, I wanted to get through it easily.  This process requires a bit of explanation on how Plex handles things.  Some of this I learned painfully as I went.

Plex gets a lot of its data from Last.fm, which is really cool and pretty effective.  However, when you don’t want to use that data, you have to disable that “agent” for your library.  Because I was manually managing the artwork on my library, because I wanted hi-res art, and I also wanted the specific original cover instead of the cover on the latest remaster of the album, because of all this, I set everything in plex to manual.  No last.fm anywhere.  That was good.

However, that also meant I had no artist images or bios.  Since I had cleaned up my album art, I wanted to now download artists from last.fm.  I wasn’t going to be picky about images there.  So I re-enabled the last.fm agent and stumbled around trying to figure out how to get plex to refresh the artist data from last.fm.  It’s important to know that the command to use in the artist menu is “Match”.  That will allow you to pick an artist from Last.fm for which to get metadata.

It’s also somewhat important to not use the command, “refresh all metadata”, because that caused Plex to utilize the newly-enabled last.fm agent and download all the data for my albums again.  That wiped out over half of my 1000px covers with 300×300 images.  When I saw this, I was devastated.  The worst part is that even if I used my auditing utility and worked my way through those hundreds of albums, the image picker in Plex gives no indication of which image is small and which is large.  It shows them equally at 150×150.  It would literally be a blind guess between 2 and 4 different images for 900 albums.  It’s not reasonable to accomplish.

I resolved to rebuild my Plex database from scratch.  That would wipe out all the effort I made on the artist artwork, but at least I could preserve my work on album artwork.  I would also lose hours I spent building my playlists.  And I figured if I was going to wipe out the database, I would try some more aggressive actions against it.

My auditing utility has only ever done database reads.  It doesn’t do any updates.  But I spent some time restructuring the code and adding a new feature, which I descriptively named, “replace art with largest version.”  See, Plex never gets rid of things, it just accumulates.  My data folder used to have 44k files in it, but after the last.fm influx, it now had 124k files.  All of my old artwork was there, too.  I just needed to scan and compare sizes, which is what I built my utility to do.

And within a day, I ran my new code and updated all the records to use the large artwork I had added previously.  It worked just as planned.  So now, I have my large artwork back, my playlists are still in place, and the artists artwork is still there.  It seems that anger is an excellent motivator for progress.

It Seems To Be Working

Posted by on August 28, 2019 No comments

Last July, I had a major update to my HVAC system, getting a whole new unit and a sparkly new thermostat.  I was sort of excited about the thermostat because it was programmable.  However, at the time, my ex and I were working opposite shifts and so I never had the opportunity to exploit the scheduling features.

Well, as circumstances changed a while ago, I only recently decided to revisit these scheduled temperature changes.  I actually wouldn’t have thought much about it if it wasn’t for the cats.  The cats were enjoying hanging out on the patio in the middle of the day and it’s like 90 degrees outside.  While I watched them bake, I was reminded that cats internal body temperature is higher than humans and how an average house temperature is actually really cold for them.  That’s why they’re always looking to curl up in warm places, like sunbeams and beds and laps.

I thought, I guess I could raise the house temp a little for them, and realized, I can do it every day while I’m not around.  That’s why I have this programmable device.  And while I thought the idea was novel, I also questioned whether it would really work.  To me, it didn’t seem like anyone would really be fooled by this scheme.  Sure, you let you house temp rise all day and save the money with the AC not running, but them you have to cool it all back down, so your AC runs hard to bring it back down.  Shouldn’t it be cheaper to maintain than to binge and purge?

I set my thermostat to let the house warm to 79 degrees while I was at work and return it to 74 for the time I would be at home, which includes all day Saturday and Sunday.  After a full month of this, I was able to use my electric company’s data tools to actually see if this was a noticeable improvement.  This is how last month looked.

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The significance of the rising and falling isn’t anything, but the peaks are.  Every peak happens on a weekend, when the AC is keeping the house at 74 all day.  The only other major contributor to my energy usage would be laundry day, which actually varies, so it’s not really identifiable in the graph.

While that seems interesting for a month’s timeframe, if we zoom out to 14 month’s worth of data, you can see some other things of note.

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Here, you can definitely see when I replaced my HVAC unit.  The electrical usage dropped right away.  Of course we get into fall and winter, so things are light at that time.  But you can see last month, I had a decent amount of tier 3 usage (which costs more).  This month, in the first graph, I haven’t hit tier 3 yet, so I’m definitely ahead of the game.

Since the cats actually seem to like the warmer house, I think I may bump the day temp to maybe 84.  The only issue that causes is that my office and my master closet stay hot for quite a while, since there’s no AC vents there.  But, I can manage to deal with that if I’m saving a lot of electricity.  I keep a budget of $350/mo for electric, because that’s actually what it used to be in the summer.  But this year, I’m averaging about half that.  That’s how to promote conservation, make it pay.

Spreading The Art

Posted by on August 27, 2019 No comments

In a recent post, I’ve talked about the rebuild of my Plex database and one of the things that process exposed was the poor quality of my CD cover art.  Long past are the days where a 500×500 cover image would be sufficient, and you could even get by with 240×240.  After all, MP3 player screens didn’t have any significant resolution.  But now, the “MP3 player” in my house is a 60” television screen, with a beautiful “now playing” screen.  And it’s not all the beautiful when the album picture looks like crap.  So it’s time to remedy that.

For a large part of my collection, I was able to rely on a utility called Album Art Downloader, which is a pretty descriptive name as that’s all it does.  It searches a large variety of websites and lets you pick the picture you want to download in whatever resolution is available.  Initially it’s very overwhelming, but once you get it scaled back to a reasonable number of art sources, it’s quite workable.

I settled on a minimum size of 950×950 for my art.  I wanted to have a nice round number like 1000×1000, but one of the album art sites has a default of 953×953 (how odd), so that’s a lot of what I ended up with.  Ridiculously, iTunes and Google Music both have images up to 4000×4000.  Why so many pixels?!  But anyway, I got the best of what I could, and the rest I would have to handle myself.

It was way back in 2008 that I made a post saying I was scanning my less-accessible albums and posting them online.  Of course, back then, I was posting images at 500×500, which was fair over 10 years ago.  In 2014, I made another run at it.  But now, I’m continuing again, but posting the images online at 1500×1500.  This sharing is all well and good, but it doesn’t have the reach I feel it deserves.  Not many people are going to go to Flickr to search for album art, and also, the Album Art Downloader does not search Flickr for artwork, so that should be a sign.

So, where should I upload my contributions?  There’s one website that is pretty highly respected, Album Art Exchange, and I found them many years ago.  But I was immediately turned off by many factors, primarily the site owner’s terrible behavior and the site’s draconian policies.  For a long time, I stayed with Flickr, primarily for the independence, but also because nothing else out there seemed as organized.  Recently, I learned about Fanart.tv and I’m very hopeful that can be my new home for my efforts.

Of course every site has rules and guides to preserve the quality of their content, but it doesn’t seem to be as toxic as Album Art Exchange.  The site is a little rough around the edges, but on the plus side, they have an integration API, so they are open to sharing their content, unlike AAX, who wants to retain complete control over everything.  Fanart ties their entries to MusicBrainz, which is another site I have a little experience with.  I chose Discogs over MusicBrainz for my collection tracking, but I don’t have animosity for them like I do with AAX.  The point is that their artist and album entries are based on an authoritative source, instead of AAX’s free-for-all text entry is a clear positive.

So right now, I have 200 CD covers on Flickr that I can contribute, excluding any dupes of course.  But then again, I’ve pretty much only uploaded covers I can’t find anywhere else, so that’s promising.  In my collection, I am down to 37 albums under 950px where I can’t find any better source of artwork.  Some of the albums I’ve been scanning I am really surprised don’t have a high-quality image online already.  I have some obscure albums, but Eddie Money’s Greatest Hits?  Surely that would be on iTunes or Google Music, right? Nope.  You can’t find a good image anywhere.  I was also surprised I couldn’t find Styx – Return To Paradise.  On the other hand, I am also amazed at how a lot of classical albums can have different covers for the same album, sometimes with different working, sometimes different pictures.  It’s very strange.  “That’s the album, but that’s not the cover.”

Entering any new community is always scary, especially on the Internet.  Wish me luck.

This Blows. Or Doesn’t.

Posted by on August 7, 2019 No comments

If you have been following along, I’ve had some issues with my car, specifically the heating/cooling system.  Going way back, I had a dealership repair shop tell me once that I needed a new blower motor because that’s where the “hissing” sound was being caused.  I knew that was bullshit because the hissing was the AC condenser (or evaporator, I can never get those two straight).

Somewhat recently, the blower fan started a ticking sound, that would speed up and slow down with the fan speed.  I started to think, ok, this is where it needs to be replaced.  But, I also knew it could be debris stuck in the fan.  So before I actually ordered a new fan, I pulled out the blower motor.  As far as replaceable parts in my micro-vehicle, this is one of the easiest.  Crawl in the passenger footwell, unplug a wire harness, remove three screws and done.  I wish it was all that easy.

When I did drop the motor out, it came with about half a dozen dried up leaves.  No motor problems.  That saved me a little money.  A new OEM fan is about $150.  A new aftermarket fan is $50-$75.  But right now, it was unneeded.

Then, a couple days ago, I was out driving and upon starting up the car after a store visit, there was no AC.  Not just no AC, there was no fan.  This is worse.  I clicked the fan switch on and off to no avail.  I could hear the AC compressor kicking on when I turned the fan switch, it’s just the blower fan wasn’t moving.  Ok, I’m no stranger to driving all day with no AC, especially this year, so I headed straight home for troubleshooting.

At home, I dropped the motor quickly and used a simple test light to see if power was getting to the motor.  That would identify if it was a fuse or the motor.  Yes, power was being sent.  I plugged the fan back in and switched the fan on.  No movement.  I touched the fan blades and the slight bump I gave started the motor spinning.  Ugh, so the motor just can’t get started.  Oh well – replacement time.

I went straight to EBay and evaluated my options: the new OEM or the new aftermarket.  Price was a concern, but speed of delivery was more paramount.  The frontrunner was a $55 aftermarket, but it would take 2 weeks to arrive.  I could pay $20 for priority shipping, with no guarantee it would get here more than a day earlier.  The winner turned out to be option 3 – a used OEM part.  $62 with guaranteed delivery in 3 days.  It was a good balance of speed and quality.  I usually don’t shy away from used parts on a used car, it’s almost more logical that way.

So, while I’m waiting for this fan part, things are a little more critical for me.  Without AC, sure I was suffering, but without any ventilation at all, it’s a hazard.  If it starts raining, I’ll have to roll up the windows and the glass will fog up immediately.  I will have no way to defog the glass.  The best I’ll be able to do is carry a towel with me and wipe the windshield when I can.  That’s not something I’m interested in doing at 80mph on the state highway to hell.  Seriously, it was ranked 2017’s deadliest highway in the US.

Please get delivered early…

Having To Start Over

Posted by on August 5, 2019 No comments

A title like that is pretty ominous considering I just rebuilt my computer, but the damage is not system wide, I’m just dealing with one application.  But as applications go, it’s a big one.  I have to rebuild my Plex library, which means redoing all my playlists and the extensive metadata improvements I had made over time.

After I had gotten all my files moved from my old drives to the new ones, I knew I had to figure out how to restore my Plex database.  I knew there was a backup that ran every 3 days, but I didn’t know where that backup was or how to restore it.  From research on the Plex website, the only thing I really got out of my questions for restoring was to copy the entire data folder from the old computer to the new one.  Well, ok.

And not unlike my amazement at Lightroom’s massive file structure, Plex was the same way.  Tens of thousands of files got copied to my new hard drive, then I reinstalled the server application and fired it up.  No initial errors, which is great, but when I went to the home page and the music library page, all I got was an error message.

In my mind, I sort of expected it.  The reason for that was because I hadn’t installed any application updates in some time.  Why should I?  The features added didn’t pertain to the music portion of Plex, and there weren’t any security fixes, so I never needed them.  Why potentially introduce bugs with a new version if what I had was working fine?

Well, this came back to bite me when I tried to restore a database for an application version much older than what I installed.  And I had no idea what version I had been running before, so there wasn’t an option to install a matching older version.  So there you go.  A mismatched application and database equals a non-functional application.  Time to start over with a new database matching the current application version.

Rebuilding the playlists will be tedious, but I have a pretty good idea of what I want in them, and to be honest, I really only played three or four of them, so I can start there.  The metadata updates will be tedious as well.  I had decided that I was going to use the plex server as my definitive source of collection info.  But now, maybe I will start using Discogs, which can get me info on my collection in greater detail and more expediently, using their mobile app.

I’ve taken a “no rush” attitude with most everything in my life now, so I know eventually it will all work out, when I’m ready for it to happen.

Lightroom Data

Posted by on August 2, 2019 No comments

When I was migrating all my files from my old hard drives to my new ones, I had a slight issue where my documents and pictures didn’t copy, because of a permissions difference.  When I resolved it, I had to copy the files again.  This also meant I had to wait for them to copy and stare at the progress as it made its way through.

While copying the pictures, I was stunned as it processed the Lightroom folder.  I had tried out Adobe Lightroom a while ago and ended up not using it because it was just too much.  And now I see it was more than “too much” in the application side, it was outrageous in the data side as well.  I don’t remember how many files I had imported into the Lightroom catalog when I was evaluating it and I didn’t really know what was happening in the backend while it was processing.  But what happened was a new folder was created to hold the catalog and preview files.

Those preview files – holy fuck.  When the copy was complete, I had to see for myself what had actually been done.  I checked the properties of the Lightroom folder and was floored by the result.

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28k files and 23k folders!  What the fuck!

It’s not really the size that bothered me.  The thing I didn’t understand was why there are so many files and folders.  And every one is named unintelligibly.  It’s not like you can understand what you are looking at when you dive into those folders.  So why not use some sort of database file instead?  At least then you could get some query functionality out of it.

So it was with great pleasure that I deleted that entire folder.  That’s 50k file entries I don’t have to ever worry about anymore.

The New Install

Posted by on August 1, 2019 No comments

A few posts ago, I talked about how I was going to be upgrading my computer to take advantage of new storage.  And that involved swapping out all the important parts of my computer: motherboard, CPU, RAM, and drives.  Well, all the parts came in and sat for a few days, because I know, if I’m going to start a project of this size, it best be in the morning, so I have all day to recover from screwups.  I decided Sunday would be the day and I woke up fairly early to get a start.

The first thing I did was get one last backup of the old computer and break the mirrored drive set.  Then I got to work replacing the guts inside the case.  I spread everything out on the kitchen table, old and new components everywhere.  It all went pretty smoothly and even with taking my time, I was done within an hour.  With everything back in place and ready to go, I brought it back to my office and plugged it in for a smoke test.  All the drives in the computer were blank, so there was nothing to really boot up.

But, to my dismay, I got nothing.  Fans spun up, but no video and no POST beep.  Sigh.  My prior experience says that this is usually a short somewhere.  And what has always been a good troubleshooting step for me is isolation.  So I took everything out of the computer except for the bare minimum.  On startup, no change.  Big sigh.  I took the computer back to the kitchen for some reassembly and inspection.  I didn’t see anything wrong with the mounting posts or anything that could short anything else out.

When in doubt, read the manual, right?  And while I was paging through it looking for some connector I missed or hooked up backwards, I noticed that yes, I did screw something up.  I put the RAM into the wrong slots.  What an idiot.  Ok, fix that up and put everything back together again.  Take it back out to the office and start it up.  Still no video and no beep.  What the fuck.  Back to the kitchen and tear everything back out.  I then decide to consult the Internet, which I know is going to be useless since my symptoms are so vague.  How can I determine if the board or CPU or RAM is bad?  I don’t have extra parts to swap out and isolate the differences.

The first result I clicked on for “no video, no beep” had a confident first response of, “bad power supply.”  Really?  I just changed out this power supply a year ago.  And the old computer was working fine with the same power supply.  BUT, I had no other ideas and I did have a backup power supply (that old post means something now).  And when I put in the new power supply, well, you probably know what happened.  It started up.  I don’t fucking get it.

Now.  Hardware complete, now software.  I had my new M2 SSD drive and my two 8TB drive in the computer ready to go and I had the latest build of Windows 10 on a USB drive.  As has been the case with Windows for some time now, the installation process was quick and easy.  When I went to set up my two big drives to hold all my data, I lost my shit.  Windows installed a recovery partition on one of the big drives.  That totally fucks up my mirroring plan for the drives.  Yeah, it’s time for lunch now.

After a nice calming lunch, I came back and reinstalled Windows without the two 8TB drives attached.  This time, the recovery partition was placed on the proper drive and I was ready to move on.  Before getting into the mass data transfer, I ran Windows update over and over again until I was fully patched.  The last thing I needed was a restart in the middle of my data copy.  It’s around 2:00 right now; about 4 hours of effort so far.

I started creating the virtual drives to hold the files from my old drives and I found out that creating a 1TB file is not a quick process.  It’s something like a hour or more of waiting.  Then the file copy is nothing speedy either.  I got the 50GB drive copied over and started working on the first 1TB drive – the first of three.  While that’s going, I installed software from the Internet that I didn’t have on my archive drive.  That’s one thing about this process is that there’s dependencies, where I can’t do this until this other thing is done first.  And one of the big ones is that I can’t install a lot of software until I get all the data copied over.  So I must work and wait.

To be continued….

Some Digital Housekeeping

Posted by on July 29, 2019 No comments

Today’s random project is de-duplicating a set of files from a 2008 backup.  This is an old archive of five ZIP files built from five old DVD backups of my files from my computer back in 2008.  And what these ZIP files contained were personal files and work files and programming projects from all my jobs up to that point.  Some files go back to 1993, back when floppies were the primary storage medium.  The starting point for the effort is:  20.6 GB in 40,286 files in 4,072 folders.

That sounds like a pretty daunting task.  And it’s not the first time I’ve considered cleaning it up.  I know it needs it because these ZIP files have ZIP files inside of them which have even more ZIPs inside of them.  It’s a Russian doll of redundancy.

Step one is to expand the first zip files into one folder.  Then, I will use the freeware tool SMF (Search My Files) to find duplicates.  Eliminate the dupes, which hopefully includes some ZIP files, then expand the next level of ZIP files inside the folders and repeat.

The first run, it found 28k potential dupes – I assume that’s based on filename.  In 7 mins it created hashes for all those file, then quickly identified 16k dupes.  I worked my way through the biggest files, getting down to 1.5MB files and after that first trim, the cleanup folder was: 19.6 GB in 40,105 files in 4072 folders

So that effort saved me about a gig of space.  Worth the effort?  Probably not.  Am I going to work through the other 15k files?  Absolutely not.  What I discovered I needed was a duplicate folder finder, which would check to see if all the files in two different folders were the same.  That would involve creating a checksum at the folder level as well as at the file level.  By deleting some files from one folder and not others, I was not helping the duplication problem and actually making it worse by now having two folders, each with incomplete file contents.

Ok.  That was a total bust.  The more I dug into ZIPs, the worse things got.  That was about 90 minutes of effort for no good results.  So I deleted it all and extracted the original ZIP files again.  This time, I’m going to break out the files into the different sources.  I have 2 or 3 different work archives, plus my personal stuff.  One of the problems this may solve is when I copied work files to home and now I had two archives of the same stuff.  Then at some point, I’ll have to resolve archives of different time periods.  I would probably want to keep the newest version.

An hour or so into the organization process, I’m feeling pretty good about this attempt.  I manually identify some dupes and immediately wipe them out.  Then I use the dupe checker utility to look at smaller folders, so I don’t get hit with tens of thousands of dupes.  The result of this effort?  19.3 GB.

At this point, I’m pretty satisfied with where the archive is at.  Moreso, most of the files have been unearthed from their nested ZIPs, so I can find the dupes and delete them.  So this was more of a cleaning exercise than anything.  There’s some talk on the internet about being a hoarder of digital data and how easy it is to do that because it seems so lightweight.  But if you open up your “archive” folder and immediately close it because it’s too overwhelming, that should be a warning sign.  Physical or digital, stuff serves no purpose if it can’t be found and accessed with minimal effort.  That’s been the biggest satisfaction for me from this task, that at least things are a little more in order, even if they’re not perfect yet.

I’ve Been Ghosted. It Sucks.

Posted by on July 25, 2019 No comments

It’s one of those things that’s always been done, you know.  It just has a slick name now, so people can say, “Aw man, I got ghosted.”  Or they can use a simple emoji to express what happened.  And with or without an emoji, I got it happening to me. 

I sent a text.  The next day I called and ended up in VM.  So I waited a more-than-reasonable time of a full week.  Then I tried calling again and this time left a message.  “Everything OK?  Haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks.  Let me know what’s up.  Talk to you then.”  No reply.  I could keep trying, holding on, waiting for a reply that may never come.  Or, just suck it up and move on.

My biggest worry is how much this change might cost.  Having your pool maintenance guy just up and disappear, leaving your pool growing algae really sucks.  I’m terrible at keeping my pool clean and since finding a company that would handle it for me – at a great price – has been a godsend.  Not only have I been able to enjoy my pool, it’s been very valuable in preserving the value of the pool.  I mean, my method of letting the pool turn into a swamp, then bombarding it with chemicals to bring it back over and over was doing nothing for the longevity of the mechanicals, filter, and surface.

My secondary, although more immediate, concern was getting the pool back to operational order.  Since the resurfacing and professional oversight, the pool has never had an algae outbreak.  Although I’ve restored my pool in the past from my own negligence, I have never been entirely sure it was right.  And the pool has never looked as good as when it was maintained by someone other than me.  But now, I had yellow algae on the walls and steps.  It’s not a bloom, but it’s very, very close to exploding.  I really shouldn’t have even waited that extra week.

My salt water chlorinator was telling me it wanted salt.  Craved salt.  Needed salt.  62 pounds of salt, please.  Is that a lot?  Fuck if I know, I’ve never had to do this before.  So I bought a 40lb bag of salt from the pool place and threw it all in.  I’ll have to see how it likes that and re-evaluate.  I brushed the walls and floor as I remembered doing in the past.  I threw in some algae shock.  …And that’s about the extent of my knowledge.  Well, tomorrow I can hose off the filter.  That’s about it.

Sometime this week I’m going to need to contact at least one pool company and get a new maintenance quote.  And that’s when it’s going to start sucking.  Starting over always sucks.