Category: Life with Pratts

Netflix flub

As you can see, I’ve been using Netflix for over six years.

In all this time I’ve never had a problem with Netflix. Until now.

We rented ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on Blu-ray, and the disc was defective. It froze at a certain spot and wouldn’t recover. (Yeah, yeah… I cleaned it and tried again, etc.) So I returned it and asked for a replacement. They sent a high-def disc, but it was in the defunct HD-DVD format! I returned the disc, indicating it had been mislabeled. So what did they send? Another HD-DVD copy. Grrrr…

This time I called and actually got to speak with someone. “Destroy this disc!” I told him. I’m not going to bother asking for another copy from Netflix. I think Bismo owns ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on DVD. We’ll watch that.

BTW, Best Buy and the Sony outlet stores have stacks of the BDP-N460 Blu-ray player for only $140. If you can use Ethernet instead of Wifi for streaming video, that’s an incredible deal.

Spectator blues

Stuck on sidelines again for the Boston Marathon. I was told by the ortho doc and a couple of PT’s that my injured knee could take six months to recover. It’s been four, and it’s starting to feel better.

Here’s a brief look at the scene this morning, as the second wave of the 27,000 participants was queuing up for the starting line that’s way up over the hill. Carol can be glimpsed at the end ducking through a corral, followed by Eric, who waves.

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Plugging a leak product

A week ago I talked about the leak around the water feed pipe coming into the basement, and my clever way of getting the water to go into a bucket.

The seal around the pipe failed during an exceptionally heavy rain that fell on top of snow, so my next challenge was to plug the gap around the pipe. I used Loctite epoxy putty.

All you have to do is cut the amount of putty you need, then knead it to activate the epoxy. Once mixed, you have 10-15 minutes to mold it before it sets. I don’t know yet whether or not the leak is fixed, but if it is all it took was half of a $4 tube of putty.

Quick, call the Patent Office!

A couple of years ago I featured adorable Sumpy the sump pump. We’re getting a lot of rain, and I was expecting Sumpy to kick in, but he can’t help tonight, because there’s water coming in from the other side of the basement, around the water supply pipe, where it’s never been before. After getting tired of using the wet-dry vac, I came up with this idea to get the water into a bucket, and it’s working OK.