Category: around the house

nuxx.net Update

April 9, 2004

Just FYI, bornslippy.nuxx.net is back up. I didn’t get a chance to dig around in it much, as I wanted to reboot it and used a ‘ssh root@nuxx.net reboot’ command to make sure it happened right away. With things being as flappy as they were, I wanted the box downed and back up. As of now things are working great again… I guess I’ll just have to continue to monitor it as the day goes.

Maybe it’s time to set up something to alert me if it fails to reply to pings for more than a minute straight or something.

Oh, and this…

Click for more…

I got the tile cut and stuck down in the vestibule. Thanks to an angle grinder with a diamond wheel and a tile saw, it was nice, even though it was a bit wet and messy. That’s all right, though… It’s done right.

Oh, and this part of my house is officially the ‘vestibule’. It seems that the definition of foyer is more applicable to a large space. Vestibule fits much nicer…

Now I’m just doing laundry. All my laundry. See, part of stripping the floor of the laundry room requires me to soak it down with paint thinner. I’m not going to run a gas dryer in a room full of mineral spirits fumes. Oh, and I also need to tile underneath where the washer, dryer, and laundry tub are, so they have to be moved out of the way regardless.

With any luck I’ll have ceramic tile laid down in the laundry room by Monday night. Whee!

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.

Continue reading: Click here for more…

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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…

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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 ‘s birthday party on Saturday. I was initially hesitant to go, but I’m glad I did. Last night I had an issue where the lamp in my office burned out, and there are no replacement bulbs available. So, two CDs and two trips to Lowe’s later and I had it retrofitted to house an outdoor halogen spotlight. It seems to work well, and will now accept any standard base bulb. And it looks good. I would have just bought a new lamp, but it’s really, really hard to find silver and black torche lamps. They all seem to be nappy black/gold, straight out of 1985, or they have a pricetag upwards of $50. Too much for me.

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!

around the house computers moved from livejournal

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 . Sorry about that…

around the house computers moved from livejournal

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…

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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.

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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.

around the house computers moved from livejournal