A Willing Disbelief of Suspension

Ah, learning curves. The last week of 2004 saw good progress on the new office in the lab... most notably the suspended ceiling project. This should be trivial, but as with most things, it's not quite as straightforward as it seems.

The issue at the moment goes back to a comment I made here 2 months ago, when I was trying to find out if one can lay insulation directly atop those fluorescent troffers that take the place of a ceiling tile. Unable to find the answer on the box they come in, from talking to clerks at the store, or even on the Lithonia website, I wrote to the company and soon received the answer:

"All 1-foot by 4-foot fluorescent troffers with two, three, or four T8 lamps with maximum wattage of 32 and electronic ballast only manufactured by Lithonia Lighting are listed for type IC applications in the UL file E77234 Volume 1, Section 4. " (The term "IC" means "Insulation Contact.")

Based on this, I went ahead with the project... buying lights, suspended ceiling parts, and pricey batts of R-38 fiberglass. Since all the old stuff had been ripped out to deal with the mouse problem, the key assumption—that insulation can lie on the new ceiling rather than be stapled into the rafters—was critically important.

So imagine my surprise when, well into the project, I installed one of the new Lithonia GT8 electronic-ballast troffers, discovered that one of the pre-installed fluoresent tubes was faulty, removed it, and found a little sticker underneath: DO NOT INSTALL INSULATION WITHIN 76mm (3in) OF ANY PART OF THIS LUMINAIRE. Great place to put such a warning... not on the cardboard box or near the wiring junction panel on the back, but under a tube where it won't be discovered until (presumably) a few years after installation!

It's impossible at this point to tell who's right, Lithonia or Lithonia. But it's New Year's weekend, and there's nobody there to ask. After I'm done fumbling with construction projects, I think I'll stick with designing gizmologically intensive technomadic adventure platforms, punctuated by occasional breaks to string a few words together. That stuff I can do without constantly encountering the kind of non-entertaining learning curves that have characterized this time-consuming pole building retrofit project.

Work in progress on the new office:


In utterly unrelated news (well, not exactly, since I've been sitting here for the past 5 minutes waiting for the Mozilla-crashing Flickr uploading tool to move a 100K image over the border via Firefox), has anybody found a quick way to get images into a Blogger posting? This is the one thing that has gotten worse since my migration from the old "Live Page": that was done by simply emailing an update with optional image attachment to a Perl script by Ned Konz... whereupon it was dropped into a template and pasted over the previous day's version. There was no automatic archiving and the page had a retro feel like the rest of the Microship website, but hey, it was easy.

Now, we have powerful new publishing tools, but images are a nuisance. I can take a photo, manually make a thumbnail, and host both on my own server... or I can use Flickr in a painfully slow interactive process (partly due to this evil dialup connection) and paste in the IMG tag. Either method takes 10-15 minutes, just to tuck a linkable piccy into a column of text. I'm open to suggestions.

Random Notes

I'm looking for anyone who has successfully "fought City Hall" and managed to bring about redistricting; we have a huge problem here on Camano Island wherein we are becoming the development and tax-revenue generation back yard of Whidbey Island... a land mass that happens to be home to the county seat and all three commissioners. I know even less about this stuff than I do about troffers and insulation, but I'm agitatin' for change anyway. Wasn't there an issue a while back about "taxation without representation"?

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

Swagelok & Cajon Stainless Fittings + extras (21 units)
473 CTS 68 ohm SMD Resistor Networks, 767163680G
2 Intel 28F128J3 (128 megabit Flash memory chips)

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Spiegel Black Twill Trench Coat
Black faux-fur stadium jacket

Items sold since last update

(nil)