Monday, June 15, 2009

Rather odd...

I recieved two checks in the mail today. They are for identical amounts ($27.68), and are from the claims administration center for an FTC lawsuit against some company I've never heard of, for bogus billing of credit and debit cards for website visits that never took place. Thing is, the case was settled almost nine years ago, according to the FTC website. Maybe it has been under appeal until now. Who knows? I have no recollection of being asked to become a party to this lawsuit, or to file a claim against the defendants. I also have no idea how the FTC determined that I was one of the people who was robbed. I'm actually a little leery of cashing the checks, even though everything seems to be legitimate.

Eh, I'll probably cash them anyway.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Dryer vents...

I redid the vent for my dryer last weekend. My dryer hadn't been working very well of late, so I figured the vent must have had a lot of lint in it. Also, part of the vent duct work was a length of wire reinforced flexible plastic: not really acceptable in such an application, but one that I had been too lazy to do anything about.

The job turned out to be more work than I expected, since the layout of the laundry room is such that the dryer is set against an interior wall, rather than an exterior wall. As a result, the vent pipe must make an immediate 90 degree turn. It then rises at an angle for two or three feet, passes through the wall of the house into the garage, make another 90 degree turn, and passes through the front wall of the garage into open air. On top of that whoever installed the vent originally cut their holes in the house and garage walls off center from each other, cut through a wall stud, and put the vent pipe right next to the gas line coming into the house. In fact the original holes overlapped the gas pipe by a quarter inch or so, hence the plastic duct: metal wouldn't have fit.

Naturally, the vent was plugged with lint where it passed through the wall, and I had to resize the holes to get my new, metal ductwork to fit through. So basically, what I thought would be a fifteen minute job, took about two hours.