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Category: around the house

Busy, busy, busy!

Published April 26, 2010

I haven’t posted anything in roughly 20 days, mostly because I’ve been busy traveling Europe and generally being busy with stuff. I arrived home today, and I’ll post more about that later after I’ve sorted through the photos. Instead I’ll just mention the brief things that my day held:

· Waking at 4:30am UK time to catch a flight. Thus I’ve been up almost 23 hours straight and traveled by a car (on the left and right side of the road), train, bus, and airplane.
· Replacing a hard drive in banstyle.nuxx.net on the way home, as my mom waited in the car. I was very thankful for this, as it kept me from having to drive back to Southfield during rush hour.
· Got a replacement SIM card to put in my replacement Nexus One. My other one was lost / stolen (I’m really not sure which) in the airport on the way to the UK.
· Finished setting up a rigid fork on my Specialized 26″ hard tail, getting it ready to be used as a commuter / light trail bike complete with rack and new rear blinky light.
· Went for a 20-ish mile test ride mixing single track, two track, and pavement. The fork works well and I like it, so I stopped for frozen custard at Custard Spot. I don’t know the distance because the bike doesn’t have a computer on it.
· Washed sheets and showered to remove mud from me, and started other laundry.
· Downloaded all the queued work email so I can begin reading it tomorrow morning.

Now I think it’s time for bed. It was a really excellent trip filled with good friends and lots of nice people, but I must admit that I’m a bit glad to be home.

Sleep will be needed, because I suspect work is going to get quite busy as soon as I return tomorrow morning.

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Macomb Orchard Trail in March

Published March 15, 2010

Since the trails are still thawing and thus generally unridable, a group of us got together tonight to ride the Macomb Orchard Trail from Onyx Ice Arena to the bridge over M-53 and back. Instead of driving up Jon and I decided to leave from my house to add a few more miles on it. The result ended up being 2:41:45 of moving time to cover 37.2 miles, for an average of 13.7 MPH. Peak speed was 24.6 MPH, likely achieved on the hill down from the bridge over M-53, even though there are times when I knew I was above 20 MPH on flat ground with the wind at my back.

Despite being a bit cold and with a 15 MPH headwind on the way out, with particularly chilly spots near the still-frozen low-laying swampy areas, it was a really nice ride. I didn’t eat enough and ran out of energy a few times, but small handfuls of granola and a bottle of double-strength HEED helped with that.

I also gave the aforementioned sample contact lenses a try tonight with some clear-lens protective glasses and they worked out very well. Without astigmatism-correcting lenses my vision wasn’t as perfect as it could be, my eyes weren’t dry and I could see quite well. I’ll wear another pair some other time this week and be sure that it’s not a fluke, but I’m pretty sure that these worked out well.

Now, off to get some more to eat, but only after figuring out why my furnace won’t light.

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Multi-wood Coasters

Published February 28, 2010

After some friends headed to Belize a few weeks ago for some sailing and general relaxing they brought me back this really, really cool set of coasters. With each being made out of four strips of different woods (mahogany, black poison, red wood, and billy webb, as illustrated in this photo) they are quite neat looking. I just added four rubber feet to each and now they re in the living room ready for use. They look particularly great on the tables in there.

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Snow Day II

Published February 22, 2010

Here’s the view from my office as Winter Green II, our landscaping company, cleared the parking lot around my condo. There is now an 8′ pile of snow at the end of each parking spot, and a small strip next to Danielle’s car which I’ll have to shovel off. I believe that we’ve received 4″ – 5″ of snow thus far today.

Good thing my network connection is staying up solidly, as working from home is a much better option than a couple hours of driving through slushy, icy crap.

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Off The Rails

Published February 11, 2010

Danielle’s driver side window ended up coming out of the track at the front, so she wasn’t able to roll it up without holding it. By unbolting the front rail I was able to get it all aligned, but it seems her window has some wear in front of the lift mechanism. This causes the window to settle into place slightly ajar, requiring a gentle nudge to get it into place. If it was easier to get inside the door I’d look at disassembling the mechanism and fixing the bushing (or whatever), but for now I’ve left the window semi-operational.

On request the handle has been left off of the door panel (and set inside one of the map compartments) so she won’t roll the window down without remembering the slight effort required to fully re-seat it. Properly reinstalling the handle will just require clipping it back in place, but I won’t do so yet.

I suspect that this issue happened when the car was iced over and an attempt to roll down the window was made. The window was probably stuck in place and the force of pulling down on it deformed a bushing or some other part in the front of the mechanism, allowing it to wobble the current 1cm or so.

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Snowy Laundry Day

Published February 11, 2010

Working from home on a snow day let me constantly cycle laundry while taking brief breaks from reading and writing documentation. For most of the day from my first 7:30am meeting through now the washer and dryer have been doing their thing, removing skin oil and flakes, bits of food, and other debris from my clothes. I’d been a bit remiss in laundry-doing lately, so I had to do loads for socks, underwear, work clothes, towels/robe, t-shirts, jeans, bike clothes, sheets, rags, and a few other things. The final load, towels/robe, is only now drying. This evening I also decided to donate a some clothes that I haven’t worn in years to the Salvation Army, so I had a full load of those to wash, as few years worth of dust on the clothes likely wouldn’t be appreciated.

The result is this nice, clean closet with everything folded and put away. Socks, bike clothes, and various other bits are in drawers. Now to get some sleep and get back to working in the office tomorrow. This will be nice as I’m not terribly fond of working from home, particularly when the weather dictates the preceding and following evenings also involve sitting at home. I do like my house, but work is a very nice change of venue.

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RedPlum Be Gone!

Published January 26, 2010

Are you one of the millions like me who receive RedPlum physical spam almost daily in your mailbox? If you are, and you too wish to stop receiving the wasteful physical embodiment of e-blasts, head on over to this Valassis Communications page and step through the menus to unsubscribe and avoid the RedPlum processed pork firehose.

Since I receive very little other mail, my daily trips to the mailbox are usually just to pick up this rag and transport it to the recycling box. I’ve also found real mail lost (tucked?) inside of this dreck, so hopefully getting off the mailing list will cut down on lost mail too. Just last month a water bill seemingly never arrived and currently a notification that I’m anticipating receiving from the post office for an international delivery seems quite late. I wouldn’t be surprised if it too was lost.

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More Furnace Problems

Published January 2, 2010

Here’s one of two limit switches in my furnace. This was pulled out while I was attempting to determine why my furnace isn’t working properly. As it’s nice and clean this didn’t seem to be the reason for the problem.

What I’ve observed is as follows:

1) Pilot igniter sparks for ~20 seconds.
2) Pilot lights.
3) ~20 seconds later main gas valve opens.
4) Main burner ignites.
5) Main burner extinguishes, but pilot stays lit.
6) 4-5 repeat three times before blower starts.

After removing this limit switch, looking it over, cleaning its contacts and surrounding area, then reassembling it #5 didn’t occur and the blower started like normal. I’ll listen carefully for a while and see if the problem reoccurs or if more thought needs to be given to the issue.

I’d generally blame the flame sensor, but there isn’t one on my furnace. I’m concerned that this problem may be caused by the controller board dying (capacitor plague?) or some other passive electronic bit slowly failing, leading to intermittent issues. Replacing controllers or gas valves is not cheap, and I’m wary of doing so without knowing that it’ll fix the problem.

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