nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category around the house

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June 22, 2004

Well, it seems that it’s time for liquid-related repairs. My car is currently over at Belle Tire at 23 Mile and VanDyke having it’s water pump replaced. See, this morning I went to go to lunch, and there was a good sized pool of DexCool beneath my car. I checked the coolant levels, but everything seemed all right, maybe a tad low. Went to lunch, came back, parked in a different spot. While driving, the temperature never got above normal, and there was no low coolant lamp lit.

After work, again, no apparent coolant leak. That’s good, so I headed home-ish, with a stop to get my oil changed and tires rotated. A few minutes after sitting down to read, the service guy told me there was coolant steadily flowing from the water pump.

Well, that was it. I guess the leak was my car… So, I called my parents and was able to procure a ride home from the shop. I’m also in the process of making arrangements to get over to the shop at noonish tomorrow, when the work is scheduled to be completed.

So, a bit of cash later, and I’ll have rotated tires, a new water pump, new coolant (for the second time within the supposed life of DexCool), and fresh synthetic oil. Should be about… Oh… $300 or so, when all is said and done.

Now it’s off to disassemble the outside faucet and retrieve the washer, so that I can pick up a new one tomorrow. Yay!

around the houseautomotivemoved from livejournal

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April 25, 2004

[Crossposted in .]

It’s been a little while since I wrote an update about this, but my kitchen flooring project has progressed nicely and I’ve got some more pictures to show.

· Kitchen floor, all grouted. Just waiting for another day of curing and sealing.
· Kitchen floor, from start to finish.
· The whole gallery of all the stuff I’ve been doing to the kitchen and related areas.
· Obligatory before and current photo.

I’m just waiting for the grout to cure for another day, then I’ll get the sealer applied, moulding installed, and move the appliances back in. Whee!

Oh, and the grey boogers from the dust in the air when mixing grout is just squicky. (Although when working with wood they are whatever-type-of-wood colored, drywall is white, etc.)

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

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!

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

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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. :(

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

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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…

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

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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.

acquired thingsaround the housemoved from livejournal

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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 housecomputersmoved 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 housecomputersmoved from livejournal