Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, General

On The Beach

13 Comments

We needed to go to (south) Florida to take care of things and get the house ready to sell, because we don’t seem to be able to rely on anyone long distance. In my experience, if unsupervised people here don’t do things half ass, they do them quarter ass. As the old saying goes, a sunny place for shady people. I had to fix two toilets today that had needed it for months, among other things. And how many south Florida people does it take to change a light bulb? Apparently an infinite number, if they don’t actually own and live in the house.

Anyway, Patricia also was badly in need of a vacation, so I’m writing this after a relaxing home-made dinner of sockey salmon with pineapple salsa and chardonnay procured at (amazing that they finally exist here!) Trader Joe’s, overlooking the Atlantic and listening to a nice wind riffle through the palms. One of the disadvantages of the east shore, of course, is no sunset over the ocean, but it was still pleasant to watch day turn do dusk from our balcony. For those curious, here is where we are staying. Old Florida style, but modernized enough to be quite comfortable so far. We plan to sleep with windows open to the sound of the ocean, though in a couple months, that will be less advisable.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Home Ownership

16 Comments

Doing some plumbing stuff, and the gate valve that controls water to the house won’t open. Handle turns nicely, though. Probably stripped threads or broken spindle. I’m cursing the plumber who installed it, as opposed to a ball lever.

And of course, we’re going out tonight to see Climate Hustle. So I guess no shower for her in the morning. I’ll have to fix it tomorrow.

[Wednesday-morning update]

For those curious, I did end up replacing the valve with a ball valve. The handle had sheared off, and I couldn’t even get it apart to see if there were replaceable parts. It turned out to be sort of a PITA, because I didn’t have a lot of length to work with on the pipe, due to it bending as it came out of the ground, but I managed to solder it in. It will be a huge improvement for future plumbing projects. Including the current one, in which I’m replacing a charcoal water filter with a four-stage reverse-osmosis system.

[Bumped]

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Email Issue

24 Comments

I’m trying to send myself email from my own Linux machine, via SMPT. I’ve written the following Python program:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Import smtplib for the actual sending function
import smtplib

# Import the email modules we’ll need
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# Open a plain text file for reading. For this example, assume that
# the text file contains only ASCII characters.
with open(“test.txt”) as fp:
# Create a text/plain message
msg = MIMEText(fp.read())

# me == the sender’s email address
# you == the recipient’s email address
msg[‘Subject’] = “Test”
msg[‘From’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”
msg[‘To’] = “simberg@interglobal.org”

# Send the message via our own SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP(‘localhost’)
print(“s has been opened”)
s.send_message(msg)
print(“after send_message”)
s.quit()
print(“End script”)

It runs with no errors, prints the statements to the terminal, but no email appears. How do I diagnose this?

[Update a while later]

Thanks for the help in comments. Still haven’t solved it, but the need for the application that I needed it for has gone away. Nonetheless, it would be good in general to know how to email from a Python script.