Whee!
April 6, 2004
[Crossposted from
Well, as I’ve done in the past, it’s time for an update with the redoing of the floors in my house.
Category around the house
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April 5, 2004
One other thing… Unless you are an idiot, like me, don’t attempt to screw down two sheets of HardiBacker Ceramic Tile underlayment with a cordless drill. Like me, you will need to ask your dad to run over his corded drill, as it’ll take half the time if you going and picking it up.
I suck. :(
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April 1, 2004
Wow. I feel like I’ve been huffing paint thinner. Well, I kinda have. :) See, I started on removing the sheet vinyl flooring from my kitchen, front vestibule, and laundry room today. The stuff that’s over wood isn’t too bad, but the vinyl on the concrete is a pain. I’ve probably got another 10 – 12 hours worth of work to have the laundry room ready to put the vinyl down. :\
Anyway, if you’d like to see some pictures, click here. Things kinda look weird in the kitchen. I just need to pick out a flooring and order it now. :) Hopefully it’ll be in within a few weeks…
?
January 12, 2004
Has anyone here used Shutterfly or some other similar online photo printing service? I’ve got a number of Library of Congress Prints and Photos shots that I’d like printed, and I’m thinking it’ll be cheaper and easier to have them printed by a service than do them myself.
I’m curious how the photos looked… It seems that I’m able to only upload JPEGs to Shutterfly, but they were able to accept a 4000 x 5000 7MB high quality JPEG, which should look fine printed.
These will eventually be framed and hung up in various parts of my house, bathroom, etc.
What’s really neat is that the LoC has some nuclear reactor blueprints on their site, and printed at 20 x 30 these could look *really* nice in my living room, surrounded with 1940s – 1960s era electronics.
So, anyone tried Shutterfly or any other printing services?
UPDATE: I think I might order a set of four or five test prints from each Apple/Kodak (via iPhoto), Snapfish, and Shutterfly.
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December 9, 2003
So, I did it. I just ordered the parts to rebuild my old PC.
No, I’m not switching away from Macs, it’s just been sort-of mandated that I get a Windows Server 2003 cert by the end of 1Q2004. So, I need a test machine.
It’s not a bad deal… From Newegg I was able to get a AMD Athlon XP2500+ CPU, Asus A7N8X-VM (nForce 2 IGP) Micro-ATX motherboard, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, and a (free) t-shirt for ~$268.
I figure I’ll assemble the machine into the Doggie Case which housed by old high-end PC. It’ll end up on the rack down in the basement, admin’d via Terminal Service / Remote Desktop. One nice thing, it’ll give me a chance to play with *nix / OS X / Windows integration at home.
Oh, I just realized I haven’t done much of an update lately. So, what’s been going on with me? Well, I had a really good time at
Tonight I have to give a presentation in class as part of the final project. I’m kinda nervous, but I generally know the material. My biggest concern is running over time, because I have a lot of info. I’m off work tomorrow, so I’m going to try and get the paper for class done. It’s not due until the 18th, but the instructor asked that we get them in earlier so he has more time to read them. I’m going to try to stay in his good graces. I *think* I have the structure of the paper generally done, I just need to write the actual words now. And bibliography. Whee!
Hrm, yeah, that’s it for now. I’m going to go think about eating the indian food I brought for lunch. Mmm….spicy!
Office!
October 13, 2003
After finally getting my office back together for tomorrow’s arrival of the G5, I thought I’d take some pictures of my office in it’s current state. Click here or on the picture below if you’d like to see some more photos. After I get the G5 in place (it’ll go on the aluminum slab that’s on the rack, but be placed where the G4 cube is) I’ll likely take some more photos, complete with detail of the aluminum stand that I made for the G5.
Click for more…
UPDATE: Whoops… I just realized that this post went to the wrong journal. It was supposed to be in
Desk!
September 29, 2003
This weekend I picked up a new desk for my office. My old one was kinda small, and just didn’t have the writing surface area that I needed. Well, I get the new desk, the O’Sullivan Diplomat from Staples, negotiated down to $109.99. Well, I get it home, get it set up, and while it’s nice and all, there is a decent sized gouge in the top left desk piece. No big deal, but I decide to call O’Sullivan anyway, just to see what they can do.
Well, the end result of everything was O’Sullivan sending me, free of charge, a whole new top piece for the desk. There must be an absolutely massive mark-up on these desks if they can afford to ship a 2′ x 3′ desk piece so that it will arrive “within a couple of days”, to everyone who calls and asks for one.
Weird…
:)
August 28, 2003
Ahh… Tonight I went to my first day of college. Ever. Tonight’s class was HIST-2000 (formerly HIST-200) which is all about the history of invention and technology in America. Tonight’s class wasn’t anything special, just a hand-out of the class syllabus, a schedule, things like that. The class seems interesting, and judging by the students, shouldn’t be too hard to pass. There were a bunch of fresh high school grads, a couple older people, and me. It seemed like there are a few other twenty-something students, but they didn’t really stand out.
After I got back home I decided to start in on staining wood again. I applied the second coat of stain to all the table tops and bottoms and one set of the legs. That leaves only eight more table leg sets to receive their second coat of stain. After that comes the top coat… This will be the hard part. I think I have a plan, but we’ll have to see how it works out. It’ll likely involve eight or ten separate sessions of urethane application. That’s a lot. At least it’ll be worth it in the end. Tonight I took a test piece of oak that I had stained and then applied four or five coats of urethane to. I let my intentionally very wet glass set on the surface. No ring. Then I dropped the corner of the glass from a height of about five inches. Slight dent, but no cracking. Obviously the parawood would dent a bit more, but what I was looking for was a lack of cracking. The only test left is a very hot bowl or mug of tea. If this passes the test, I might forgo the glass surfaces. If not, all horizontal surfaces will have custom cut pieces of glass fitted to them. It ought to be nice to finally be able to sit in my living room, listen to music, and have tables to set things on.
:)
July 20, 2003
Wow, tonight was definitely a night of getting work done. Let’s see what got done:
– Shuffled hard drives in the file server (\\golgotha). There was a 20GB as /var/storage and a 40GB as /var/storage/Audio. The 40GB is now /var/storage and a new 80GB is /var/storage/Audio. All data shuffled over intact.
– Installed a DDS-1 drive in \\golgotha to augment the DLT and handle small nightly backups.
– \\golgotha uses smbtar to pull a copy of my email, cookies, favorites, and chat logs off of my desktop (nuxx) every night at 3am and once on the first of each month, creating nightly and monthly archives.
– \\golgotha dumps the database for thefest.org‘s bbs at 2am, using a nightly/monthly scheme.
– Golgotha takes the files from \\nuxx and the various important files from \\golgotha, including financial and website stuff, and backs it up to DDS drive.
– Wrote scripts to back up the various important directories on \\golgotha to DLT (eg: /var/storage/Audio, /var/storage, /var/storage/Video) and created appropriate tape sets.
– Hooked a second UPS to the network rack down in the basement. The previous single UPS couldn’t handle more than a 30 second load.
– Put a second coat of paint on the trim around my living room and hallway. Also patched a couple more nicks and dents in the walls that I found.
Wow, yeah, quite a busy night. At least I got stuff done for once. hehe. Tomorrow afternoon I’m supposed to head over to my sister and brother-in-law’s house and show them how to hang moulding up around rooms the same way I’d done it. It’s not hard, it just helps to have someone to show you.
So, yeah. With that I think it’s bed time. Well, in a minute… I need to finish watching this backup script run manually, then I’ll add it to root’s crontab and things will be good.
… — …
July 16, 2003
Ahh. Got the bit of patch trim around the moulding in the halls done, also installed the new smoke detectors.
I think that the next project after the living room painting will be to build a L-shaped desk that allows me to face the corner while using the computer. I’m still not sure if I want a freestanding desk or if I want one that hangs on the wall. The freestanding desk has the advantage of being movable, should I ever want my desk elsewhere. The on-the-wall the desk has the advantage of providing more leg room, possibly easier cable management, and just looking cooler. I still don’t know how I’d hang the desk on the wall, but the more I think about it, the more I wish I could weld nice steel supports and epoxy coat them, then place a nice glass top on the desk. If I go with the hanging-on-the-wall desk, I’ll likely end up with something wood, supported with metal (steel or iron) braces, with a plastic laminate on the top. If the stand-alone desk is built, then there will be two end panels, a center support in the corner, and cable management hangers. Well, I guess we’ll just have to see what ends up getting done… This project is probably a month out at this point.
What does everyone think, though? Free-standing desk, or one that hangs off of the wall? I’ve had my desk in it’s current position for the last ~2 years I’ve lived here, and I’m pretty happy with it here. The only way I’d move it is if someone moved in here or something.