Copacetic

We recently had a blocked drain that required sluicing copious amounts of water through it (as well as a bit of poking with a sharp stick) in order to unblock it. No problemo. Unfortunately the copious water sluicing drained our water tank in the attic.

What does this mean? Well you get airlocks in the pipe system. Airlocks mean no water. A bubble of air sits in the pipe between the tap and the tank and blocks the water getting through. So you need to get rid of the air. God bless Google, lets just whack in “plumbing airlocks” into Google and get lots of hits.

The basic theory is you use the pressure in the working tap to force the airlock out of the the blocked tap. Requires pipes and jubilee clips, basically you need to have been a plumber once.

However nobody seems to get airlocks in mixer taps. Well I had a brainwave tonight. So as indicated in the picture attach a balloon to the tap. Then;

1. Open the airlocked tap
2. Open the tap with water flowing
3. Let the balloon fill
4. Close the tap with water flowing
5. Now with the airlocked tap still open, squeeze the balloon to allow the water to force the air out
6. Rinse and repeat until the balloon starts to fill because water has started to flow

Sorted.

A few hundred quid in plumbing fees saved and me with a big shit-eating DIY grin on my face.

This is pretty good news for anybody in Third Level who wants to stretch their budgets. Amazon is now offering grants to enable free use of their Cloud Infrastructure.

When I entered college in 1978, the state of the art in campus computing consisted of a room full of IBM 029 Key Punch machines, an IBM 370 Model 168 mainframe, and job queues where my card deck would wait for hours in order to get a few seconds of precious CPU time. Today’s kids have it a lot easier, first with desktop PCs and now with cloud computing providing them access to as many CPU cycles and as much RAM as they need for their class projects and research.

Our new AWS in Education program is designed to allow the academic community to take advantage of the Amazon Web Services for teaching and for research. Educators, academic researchers, students, and student entrepreneurs from all over the world can apply for free AWS usage credits in the form of teaching grants, research grants, and project grants. Read on to learn more about what we’ve put together.

More importantly the small print says Amazon offers :

Solutions for university administrators looking to use cloud computing to be more efficient and cost-effective in the university’s IT Infrastructure

Jeff Barr  confirmed to me by email today that these grants are available to Irish Institutions.

Go apply.