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Category Archives: Home Life

This is Never a Good Thing

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Yeah I’m going to probably be offline tonight.  I left work about an hour early because the wife called…  I won’t say what exactly happened but there was a large amount of water that was dumped into our laundry room.  It was not a failure of the washing machine either.

By the time I got home the wife had most of it cleaned up.  Some of the awaiting laundry soaked up a good majority and acted as a barrier to the far side of the room.  However it got into the carpet outside the laundry room and it appears it got behind the furnace though in very minor quantities.  What isn’t comforting though is I found two holes that head into the crawl space that were not thoroughly sealed.  The wood I could feel felt damp.

I have baked  the wood dry with a hair dryer, as well as dried out all the floor molding.  The wife is continuing to hit everything with more heat to help dry it out.  The faster the better. 

I have the thermostat set to 90 to try and help dry things out further.  The humidity in the house is slightly higher than the usual 20% and that’s thanks to the weather.  The humidifier is off and the temperature is rising quite rapidly in the house.

I suppose this is a good time to mention, I’m not a heat person.  I hate the heat and much prefer the cold.  As I say, I can always put on more clothes but there comes a time where I will either be arrested or have nothing else left to take off… both of those occur at the same time interestingly enough.

I will say this has confirmed my plan that if I ever build a house, the washing machine and by proxy utility sink will have sloped concrete floor with a central drain.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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Picked up the mail tonight and on the top was this…

ITT

I have a BSEE from a four year university, my focus areas were DSP and Power Systems.  Where did they get my info, and why do they think I need one of their certifications?  I just started laughing as I read it, and continue to laugh every time I see it.  I actually ended up with an awesome job before I even graduated, and I had offers outside the area too.  Not only was the job I took awesome, it became even more awesome recently, however due to the disclaimer I shall leave it at that.  The only thing I can think of is they want me to get an MBA which makes me want to laugh more.  I have a couple other professional goals on my plate, after which I will go an get my masters slowly (if I feel it still worth it).  My masters however is going to be in another engineering field.

Good news and Bad news

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First the good news, Guess who’s coming for Boomershoot this year and staying at my place?

Oleg

Now for the bad news.  My goal this year was to manage at least one blog post every day.  This was to hopefully improve my ability and to decrease the amount of time it takes me to make a post; practice that’s how it’s done.  However I may end up blogging a little more on home projects or quick links than thought out posts.  The reason being is I have a couple projects that I figured would be handy for Oleg that have now been confirmed as being something that would be helpful.  Thus for the next many weekends the project for above ground storage in the garage, as well as reorganizing and storage of stuff in the shop.  The goal is to have everything in the shop properly stored, and everything in the garage cleared out by end of March.  This also includes moving all my shop tools currently living in my garage.  Due to conflicting schedules though most of this work is going to be relegated to the weekends.  I don’t run power tools at home by myself, it’s a great way to end up dead.

In the mean time here’s a couple pictures that Oleg took last year at Boomershoot.  If you think my face looks pink, you should have seen it the next morning.  I had second degree burns all over my face.

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Well I finally did it

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I finally got a twitter account.  I did it after I discovered that Windows Live Writer will automatically post to twitter with a link to the blog post.  If you want to follow me great, if you don’t, I really could care less.  I might post something from time to time, or a random though, but honestly whenever I think of twitter this is what I think of:

No I will not be posting anything like that.  It took me this long because I couldn’t find an app easily for my Blackberry.  I finally found OpenBeak.  My issue with finding an app is because I have a standard 8830 instead of one of the newer gen smart phones.  Every time I found an app it would stop and say it was incompatible.  No I won’t be upgrading, why because I don’t want a camera.  Why so stingy on the camera requirement I hear you ask.  Well where I work the camera results in me leaving it at the front desk while I’m at work.  Now I’m paying a huge phone bill for a smart phone that isn’t with me most of the day.  My response to that is F-Off.  By the way, I like my job a hell of a lot more than any freaking phone.  If I had the money I’d buy one and hack it to remove the camera, but alas that can be used on guns and ammunition instead.  You have to have your priorities.

Windows Live Writer

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So during the conversation with Joe last night some other things came up including Windows Live Writer.  My blogging lately has been a little lighter than usual because I’ve gotten tired of fighting Word 2007 and getting my images and video embedded.  Often this would result in me doing A LOT of work by hand.  It’s not difficult but time consuming.  Well, as late as I got home last night I went and grabbed Windows Live writer.

Setup was a breeze, for the most part.  My issue was a bunch of features I know my blog supports, but Writer doesn’t see them?  Quick search of the internet reveals there’s a Windows Live Writer plugin for Drupal.  Drop it in, enable, BAM everything is working.

I must say this is the ultimate is WYSIWYG editing, even more than that, it doesn’t do the weird formatting problems that word would do when posting through the BlogAPI.  Both of the previous posts today have been through WLW however I didn’t let it go fully hog wild.  I normally would post a draft and then do a final review before sending a post live.  The one thing I have discovered that doesn’t seem to be working correctly yet is the meta words that I tie into every post.  Categories are working correctly, but alas the important tags for the search engines are not.  At least that is a very simple and easy thing to take care of.

One thing I absolutely love is how easy it is to use pictures from online, including from other services such as flicker.  I however have a photography blog where I post hobby pictures I’ve done.  Tied to that site I run a Gallery for putting my pictures on.  To make life easy I prefer to just upload all my pictures there.  WLW makes that cake to do so.

Hopefully this wonderful little tool will allow me to write more blog posts in the evenings now.  If you haven’t tried Windows Live Writer I highly suggest you give it a spin.

A picture of the hill at the Boomershoot site I took yesterday.

Winter on the Palouse

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Winter arrived for me and the wife just prior to Thanksgiving this year and has yet to leave. This past Thursday we had yet another significant snow fall but with the catch of high winds. This resulted in much of my yard being devoid of snow, yet my drive way and sidewalks in decently sized drifts.

Yes that snow next to the truck is up to the running board. Opening the door caused snow to be scraped off the top of the drift. Clearing the driveway was fun because the drifts were big enough to have to be slowly cut off.

I will say though, that 44 inch blower for the lawn tractor thus far has been a life saver. When I get to the far side of the driveway it actually takes a couple passes because it’s so deep as well. While yes, the snow can be annoying, I am willing to put up with it for the following couple reasons.

There’s some more of the senic pictures I took today here.

Palouse Car Show – 2010

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I discovered late last week there was going to be a car show in Palouse yesterday. Being the amature photographer and absolutely loving classic cars I decided I would pay a visit. I took over 1000 pictures (literally) over the course of the day.

I spent all day today processing what I could and working on the photo gallery. While most would say just post all 1000 photos, thing is a lot of them are three shot brackets for HDR work. Also each weights about 10 megs a piece since they’re in raw format so I still have to process them to make them smaller and in a publicly useable format. If you had a vehicle at the car show, and you see a picture of it in the Gallery feel free to contact me. I would love to update the info with your exact year and model and put any other info you’d like.

Note all my work is under the creative commons license. Feel free to display it just attribute a photo credit to me, only conditions are no alterations and no commercial use. If you want to do either of those, contact me and we will work something out. I’m not a dick, but I did spend time doing all this work and commercial use dictates I should be compensated.

I did get a lot of really good photographs, I’m dropping a few of my favorites here as well. The family BBQ joint I frequent was where I discovered the car show. They informed me because well, they were catering it, and I often show up Saturday night.

Since the whole crew was there, I must provide a picture of TGC. She’s the real reason I like hanging out with Mike and Laurel. She provides hours of entertainment for a much lower price than TV service. Even the replays on Laurel’s iPhone the next day are awesome.

Overall the day was an absolute blast and it appears that everyone had fun. Doc Brown even showed up with his Delorean.

We even unexpectedly ran into other familiars like Lyle.

And here is one last parting image I was working on today. (Note I’m only though about the first 250 images.)

I will probably be going to the Clarkston car show end of this month, as well as Hot August Nights. If you’re going to be there and would like me to take pictures of your car, contact me. Time for a break!