Woah, the Zaurus SL-5600 is on sale for $299. I've pondered getting one of these before, but the initial price of $550 or whatever that was is a bit expensive. I also wander how much I'd use it after 6 months when the fun-factor wears off. Is it just cool to own, or is it actually useful?

Shana was also interested in the idea. Wouldn't it be neat to have a gradebook/attendance application on a PDA? Just walk up and down the aisle, checking off homework into the PDA. Alas, I don't see an existing software package for this. But that shouldn't be too hard, right? (that's what Linus said when he first started working on Linux)

There is a version of Perl for the Zaurus, perhaps I could write something like that in Perl. This may even be something OpenThought could do. It would give me some extra incentive to create a built-in webserver plugin for OpenPlugin, as opposed to requiring Apache or IIS (and Chris has already done all the hard stuff).

Anyhow, PDA usefulness would be a good topic for some discussion at our next CPLUG meeting.

I spent late Saturday night and some of Sunday trying to figure out why we weren't getting hot water in some of the rooms in our house that normally have it. It worked fine in some, but not others. So, I crawled around looking for a valve which may have somehow been turned off, keeping my eyes open for a pipe which may also have been frozen.

I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. Everything was definitely turned on, and I could not find any exposed pipes which may have been frozen. We used a hair dryer on a few lengths of pipe which were questionable, but that wasn't the problem.

Now, we have a few rooms upstairs which we don't heat, as we hardly use them. We just closed the door and turned off the heating vent. While they're chilly, they definitely aren't *that* cold. You can go in their without a coat.

After some poking and prodding, we deduced that these pipes go underneath one of the rooms which isn't heated. Shana had the idea that maybe we could turn on the heat in there, and see if that makes a difference. And by golly, within 20 minutes of turning on the heat, the hot water began working fine.

My only thought on this is that it was a frozen pipe, and that by turning on the heat in that room, the pipe under the room was warmed up enough to thaw it out. I'm open to other ideas though :-)