For the last few days, I've been 
removing old drywall. The powers that 
be (the local regional district) scare 
the bejeezus out of you about it. I 
geared up. Respirator, Safety glasses, 
Tyvek suit (with hood and built in 
booties, like kids pajamas). I sprayed 
the walls and floor with a pump-type 
sprayer as I worked. I double-bagged 
the drywall in 6 mil poly bags and 
duct taped the bags closed. As I 
worked, I thought about how I sanded 
drywall with my dad when I was a kid. 
That was the very same drywall mud 
that they scare you about now. If it 
was as dangerous as they make it out 
to be, I'd be dead. Anyways....

So I take it all to the local 
landfill, with my asbestos declaration 
form, expecting that they'll have some 
secret, arcane protocol for handling 
it. Not even close. The attendant says 
to throw it in the bin with the 
household refuse. Are you sure, I say? 
"Yes, you double bagged it." Really, I 
say? "Yes." Okay. 

So I went through all of this work to 
minimize dust as I pulled the drywall 
down (which I'd do again... it worked 
so well and there's no dust in the 
rest of the house) and hermetically 
seal the stuff away in super-heavy, 
ridiculously-expensive bags and then 
it goes in the big bin with everything 
else. This means that some poor 
bastard driving a loader is pushing 
that stuff everyday, breaking the bags 
open (they're strong bags, but they're 
not strong enough to survive the 
loader bucket), and getting exposed to 
the dust on a regular basis. I really 
need to write a letter to the regional 
district. It was all so pointless. 
Well, I guess *I* didn't breathe much 
of it.

Not much else is going on. I had a 
brief obsession with the idea of 
buying a ThinkPad T440p (it and the 
L440 are the last completely 
user-upgradeable ThinkPads), but 
stopped myself. I have been using a 
ThinkPad R500 for years and there's 
nothing wrong with it. I just get 
these tech cravings every once it a 
while. It's better to let them pass 
than to act on them. 

Oh, the other thing is that I managed 
to move my gopher server to a 
Raspberry Pi Zero W, which will reduce 
the energy use from 7-10 watts to 1-2 
watts. It was a little difficult 
because the LXer mirror makes use of 
Raymii's totext.py, and I was having 
trouble installing some python modules 
on the Zero. Eventually, I stumbled 
across a low-memory command line 
switch and that did the trick. It 
takes the Zero about 20 minutes to run 
the totext.py script. It used to be a 
lot faster, but time is *not* of the 
essence in this case.