Archive for December, 2007
Friday, December 21st, 2007
I have a certain affinity for threshold moulding. I am not sure why. I think because maybe the first time I put some in, it looked good. Maybe it’s because I got lucky and matched the color stain I picked out to the floor…the first time. Who knows, but I do.
Anyway, today was the day to install the threshold moulding for the kitchen entryways. There are two of them, one about 30″ wide and the other about 70″ wide.
Yesterday, I picked up two oak theshhold mouldings from Lowe’s. They were about $10 and $22, respectively. I thought that was a little expensive, but who am I?
Today, I cut them to their proper lengths and drilled holes in them for the screws. I have to use screws this time because the tile is already installed. I really didn’t feel like smacking large finishing nails into the floor about an inch away from the new tile. That’s all I would need…me hitting the tile with the hammer or the vibration from the impact of the hammer hitting the nail head loosening the tile. Geeesh.
There were some extra steps I had to take to install this moulding. First, I had to cut a slice off it. This moulding is tapered on both sides, with about a quarter inch step on the edges. Since we installed half inch cement board, instead of the quarter inch stuff, the floor is a bit higher than it would’ve been. I had to take that into consideration with this moulding. I cut about three-quarters of an inch off of the whole length of the board, so the edge would sit flush with the tile.
Also, I had to drill holes through the moulding, so the screws could slide through. That was easy. The hard part (which I learned during the bathroom install) was to drill out a tad bit more with a larger drill bit, to countersink the screws, so they lay flush with the moulding. I did this with a little tool I made.
I grabbed a scrap piece of windowsill that I just cut. I put the drill bit that I was going to use, in the gun. I measured exactly how long the scrap piece of wood should be if I wanted the drill bit to stick out just enough for a tapered countersink hole in another piece of wood. Then, I cut the scrap wood to that length. See the photo above. To drill the holes, I just kept the bit through the scrap wood and went around drilling where the screws were going to go.
The tool worked perfectly. I stained, polyurethaned and waited for the moulding to dry. Then, I screwed it down to the floor.
Everything worked out just grand.
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Friday, December 21st, 2007
My FeedDirectory.US (Feed Directory) website has been receiving an enormous amount of spam submissions for some time now. I felt that the scope was too wide for a site like that, so I reinvented it as a blog directory. The new website is called “Blog Directory - BlogLeeg.com” and will have some very strict rules. There won’t be many of them, but they will be strict…
Rules
1. For a submission to be approved, it must be a blog.
2. For a blog to be approved, it must be good.
I think those are fair rules. So, if you have a good blog, please feel free to submit your feed to the Blog Directory.
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Friday, December 21st, 2007
Well, the floor is done. Yesterday, the tile guy came back and did the grout. That went fairly quickly. He took about a half hour to finish up.
The grout is ivory color, but went on kind of dark. My sister and I were talking about grout the other day. She did her kitchen tile by herself, which is gutsy. She was saying how you can’t have grout darker than the tile, because when you first look at the floor, your eye will see a big grid and not the tile. That gave me a little concern when I saw the grout go on darker than ivory. Then, the grout started drying and I remembered that the grout gets lighter as it dries.
So there it is.
Today, I have a bunch of stuff to do. I have to seal the grout, cut the threshold mouldings, stain them, clear coat them and move an outlet. There is one that will be buried by a cabinet. I am going to move that up so we can use it. After that stuff is done, I have some plumbing work to do. Paul might need to help me with that.
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Official Firefox 3 Beta 2
Firefox 3 Beta 2 has been officially released over at Mozilla. [Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.
Researchers Extend Lithium Ion Battery Life 10X
Yes…I mean that if your laptop currently gets 2 hours of unplugged life, these would get 20 hours. Holy Schmoley!
73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs
“…94 percent of US computer users have never tried a web based productivity suite. More than 20 percent say they’ve at least heard of Google Docs or other suites, but have still never tried them. And only 0.5 percent of users say they’ve replaced Microsoft Office with an online office suite.”
Switching to Linux: Desktop environments vs. Window managers
Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time. Pretty easy until you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install? Do you know? Do you care? What in the blazes is a desktop environment, anyway? How is that different from a window manager?
For 2008 expect more Linux applications
The big technology trend of the current day is the merging of markets — mobile, desktop, server, online — into one big all-you-can-eat application buffet. Nothing serves that buffet, at every level, as well as Linux.
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
In an unexpected surprise, the tile guy was able to come over a few weeks early to install the kitchen floor. I greeted him with open arms. Anything we can get done early, the better.
He came over around 9:30 this morning. He called beforehand to see if I minded using 1/2 inch cement board instead of 1/4 inch. I didn’t mind, because the thicker stuff is stronger. The lumber place he goes to was out of the 1/4 inch board. The 1/2 inch board created more of a step, but the floor moulding will take care of that.
Here are some photos for you…
This is the before picture I took this morning, completely empty and fully swept.
This is us putting down the cement board on top of the thinset mortar. I say “us” because I helped him bring it into the house, lay it down and nail it into place. Yes, I got to use the power nailer. I am now somewhat of a legend around here. It was quite fun. I like the nail gun.
This is just a fancy view of the previous shot. Feel free to print this out for your scrap book.
This is all the cement board down and nailed in. I did all the nailing after the second piece. Yes, I did that.
This is the partial installation of the tile. The two doorways weren’t exactly square, so he had to do some fancy work. This is where the project would’ve turned into a mess if I was doing it alone.
This is the finished tile install, minus the grout. He is coming by tomorrow to do the grout.
The tile seems a bit lighter than I remember, but I think it will work out nicely with the cabinet color.
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
I didn’t even know they had these. They must be new.
I was just reading a story on Yahoo! about CFLs and the new energy legislation passed by the senate yesterday. Apparently, regular incandescent light bulbs are going to be phased out by 2012. I guess that’s a good thing if they figure out the mercury issue. They will. Sometimes, it takes a little force to get things going.
Anyway, I was wondering what they were going to suggest for everyone’s dimmable lights. Well, they make dimmable CFLs.
Did you know that?
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Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
I went outside last night to chisel out the cars. They were covered with ice. I got on all my old snowboarding gear…jacket, snowpants, mittens, etc… I was as warm as a bedbug on the floor of an overheating pickup truck.
I started up both cars and let them run for a good long time. I didn’t think I was going to get them uncovered. Then, I saw a little speck of water and I had hope. After a while, I had thawed both cars out completely. I had to use a pick ax to move the cars out of their initial parking spots. I was even sweating a little bit.
Today, I went outside to try to fix up the driveway a bit for the tile dude. He is going to need some space to work out there. He needs to cut some boards and mix some thinset. It should be interesting. I got a nice area cleared out down to the gravel. The sidewalk is still about three inches higher than normal, but I threw some driveway gravel on it for traction. It was pretty warm today, so some of the mess melted. The sun does a good job of hitting the dark gravel and melting whatever is around it. Tomorrow is supposed to be around 45 degrees, so the ice should melt even more.
I tried my old driving back and fourth along the driveway trick. It didn’t work out too well. I almost got stuck once and then the car just drove on top of the ice. That didn’t do too much good.
This afternoon, I had to run out to the store. I backed up all the way to the street. I made the mistake of stopping while half way out into the road. I gave it some gas and felt the car sink into the ice/snow. I had to get out of the car and bolt downstairs for that damn pick ax again. I got the car out quickly, but it would’ve been embarrassing to be “that guy” to the cars driving by. Luckily none did.
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Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Well, I recieved my Seagate 250GB FreeAgent Desktop Drive today. I am still wondering about that little drive they installed with my computer. What the heck is that thing for?
Anyway, this one is 250GB, which should be good for a while. I mean, for around $79, I feel pretty satisfied.
Right after I got it, I pulled it out of the box. I plugged it in and immediately installed the software, which was already installed on the drive itself. I went through the motions and it was all done, just like they said in the product reviews. I set up my system to run full system backups once per week and did my first one today manually. It was very easy. One of the concerns with this external hard drive is that there is no on/off button. There isn’t. I read one review where the person said there is. They are on crack.
Everything seems fine with the drive. There is the faint yellow strip light going down the drive and not much sound at all. It took an hour or two to do the full backup, but that’s a bunch of stuff to go the a USB cord. If I run into any problems, I will let you know.
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
Oooh, how exciting!!! I thought he was going to come to install the kitchen floor after the new year. This Wednesday is a pleasant surprise. Good thing I finished up all the floor sanding over the weekend.
Now, if the kitchen people would just call…
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
The UPS man just handed me a little package…Adobe Photoshop CS3. That was very nice of him.
I am trying to upgrade most of my software before the end of the year. I have been doing a pretty good job of it. I just installed the program and resized one photo and used some filters. Everything seems pretty similar to my old version, which is nice. I am sure there are loads of new features…most of which I will never use. The reason why this upgrade is nice is because it works well with Windows Vista. My last version came out way before Windows Vista did, but it still worked. I figure this new version will do me just fine for about another ten years.
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