Door Issues
The doors installed very quickly, but on close inspection there is a problem with every single one. I attribute this to an excessively busy schedule. It took 5+ weeks from the time I placed the order to the installation. Three weeks in shipping and another 2 to get an appointment. The installation was for one and half days and it only took one.
After this experience I readjust the formula for determining whether I should to the work or contract. I would have considered most contractors better than myself for the simple fact of having done X at least once more than myself. Now, I figure in the cost and time of doing, for example, one or two doors all over again. In this case, the materials was about $1000 and each door at ~$90. Versus the contracted project at just over $2100. Redoing a door would have cost $90 and 2-3 weeks. The project would have cost less. The time is unknown, because I haven’t fixed all the contractor mistakes, which I would have done myself along the way.
Overall, the appearance in drastically lower than I would accept from my unskilled, unacknowledged self. This experience reiterated what Marie discovered when Lowe’s applied her flooring. I’m aghast at the quality of work, which I would never accept from myself. This lowers the value of my home, but the whole point was to raise the quality. A Lowe’s contractor will never work on my house again. Jessica suggested going directly to Pella Doors. If I have another task again I will go directly to the contractor and leave Lowe’s to supplies.
Door Issues:
Back Door
Wood frame that the storm door is installed into and which is exposed to the elements is not pressure treated, cedar, primed, painted, or covered except by a bit of porch.
Trim around the door is the wrong style.
The corners were caulked instead of wood fillered. No sanding, rough appearance.
Guest Bathroom
Door doesn’t close.
Hinges are not inset.
Door handles are not inset.
Office Bedroom
Damage to inside of room around door knobs. Covered in white caulk and around the mis-sized hole for the door knob.
Depending on weather the door rubs along the top.
Hinges replaced with rounded ones leaving a square inset in the door frame.
Hinges are not inset.
Door handles are not inset.
Bamboo Bedroom
Holes not completely drilled for the door knobs. Knobs not installed.
Hinges are not inset.
Door handles are not inset.
Master Bedroom
Door handles are slightly mis-inset.
Master Bathroom
Door handles are slightly mis-inset.
Hinges are not inset.
Fixes:
Back Door
Removed the storm door, prime and paint the exposed wood, replace the door.
or
Cover the wood with treated trim boards.
Remove trim, replace trim.
Fill corners with white wood filler and sand to unnoticeability.
Guest Bathroom
Remove door, chisel out inset for hinges, chisel out inset for door handles.
Office Bedroom
Remove door knobs, sand down around door know, patch with wood filler, repaint.
Replace hinges with square ones to match the house.
Remove door, chisel out inset for hinges, chisel out inset for door handles.
Bamboo Bedroom
Drill out for the proper door knob fit.
Remove door, chisel out inset for hinges, chisel out inset for door handles.
Master Bedroom
Remove door know correct size of inste with a chisel, reinstall.
Master Bathroom
Remove door know correct size of inste with a chisel, reinstall.
Remove door, chisel out inset for hinges.
Pedal Powered Snowplow
This is a great little video.
Installing D..
I would like to tell you about the installers putting in the doors, but my freaking Web Host is blocking the post. Seems the word Door is evil and must be banished.
Doors Installed Tomorrow
The doors arrived yesterday and I’ve spent the past two days painting and staining. Heavy, solid sons of bitches. The installers are scheduled to descend on the house tomorrow and the next day. 7 doors. Screen door plus steel back door. Then 4 bedroom and bathroom doors. And the master bedroom door, very pretty.
The four regular doors look fantastic. No nicks, cuts, scrapes, or other marks. And I sanded them between primer and paint so they are very nicely smooth.
The stained door isn’t even half way to finished, but oh well. They can hang it. I can pull it down, finish and rehang it. Crossed fingers.
So, I’ll be working from home the next two days. Can’t wait till they are finished.
Dual Core 2 Cube?
I have the Cube and Mac Mini laid bare and I think that I could fit two Mac Mini’s in an old Cube case. Two whole computers in a cute little package. This is just an idea. Spitballing.
Take the Mac Mini’s out of their case and they fit in a Cube pretty well. The Cube has lots of extra room in the DVD bay and the big heat dissipating fins in the core are not necessary. Dito for the full size 3.5″ hard drive and video card/logic board. Face one Mini in the DVD slot and the other where the logic board is. In between provide a 2 computer KVM. The bottom of the Cube has to be cut heavily to let all the ports out. The second Mac Mini does not need it’s DVD player, so that makes it even smaller. It would be great if there were a way for both Mini to share a single hard drive. This makes the second Mini unbelievably tiny.
Either the KVM or VNC could control the other Mini. Which leads into why. This seems to be to be a good background processing machine, like transcoding or running a game VM. The first Mini could be a media center or web machine, where the second one is a game machine. The biggest attraction is the attention it would get. I think a lot of people would like to see two tiny computers inside the case of the previous generation of tiny computers.
Cost is annoying and the biggest obstacle. Say, $200 for a Cube or replacement case then $400-$600 times 2 for the Mac Minis. So, $1400 without cutting and assembling. You can have a good MacBook for that cost. Much faster and better video than the Minis.
Cube Upgrades
Some Cube upgrades this week. I just go through completely dismantling the Cube and even now I’m typing this on the half assembled Cube.
The first upgrade was the hard drive. After some attention and consideration I realized the noisiness came from the hard drive and not the fan. A spare 160 gig drive was surrendered to a 128 gig fate and cloned from the existing one. Unfortunately, it seems that 9.2 won’t boot on it, but I don’t have any 9.2 applications. Small loss. The previous drive was date 120 gig Western Digital dated 2003. The replacement is a Western Digital dated 2007.
The next upgrade was huge. To replace the 500 MHz CPU with a 1800 MHz. This requires disassembling just about everything, pulling off the old CPU in the core, and putting it all back together. Lots of chances to break something, which I was able to succeed at. The base fan was plugged into the DC to DC board and I ripped out the plugin from the circuit board. Oops.
Which brings up the final upgrade. A Panaflo fan was already installed. The CPU upgrade came with another. I removed the old one, cut the connector off, stripped the wires, attached it to the DVD ROM power connector, and crossed my fingers.
Everything came back together and I have a much snappier and quieter Cube. First impressions are surprising. DOSBox works better. Firefox is oddly crapping out. It’s actually slower. PandoraJam just won’t run at all for some reason.
Update 10/27/2008:
The Cube has been running for days and in use almost the whole time.
Firefox is very annoying. It’s significantly slower compared to Safari. I’m also looking into other browsers. FireFox plus Flash just won’t run. So, no Pandora. Except it works fine in Safari, but I lose my AdBlocking.
DOSBox still consumes a lot of resources. This surprises me since the box is about 3 times faster. For Colonization I have to drop the resolution to 800 X 600 and run it windowed. Just too slow for full screen.
The video card runs hot and cool. You can’t always tell. Low resolutions are cooler, but low resolution with DOSBox is hot.
The CPU fins don’t seem hot. Neither does the hard drive.
The GeForce 6200 card needs a slow fan. Preferably, one that blows “backwards”. That would normally be into the computer. For a Cube that is blowing up and out. Any other direction only blows against a wall.
Would the Real National Debt Please Stand Up?
The national debt is around $10 trillion. However, the government has made promises in the forms of pension, retirement, drug benefits etc. totaling $46 trillion more. The two numbers are added together for $55 trillion. Foreign countries like China do not own the debt. It is to our citizens.
..
Cash accounting is what individuals use and most people are familiar with. It counts the difference between cash in and cash out during a given time period. The difference is net income or loss. Done.
That’s fine for the simple finances of most individuals, but in even moderately more complicated situations it can be highly misleading and is easily manipulated. This is because it ignores accruing legal rights to receive income, and legal obligations to make payments, in the future.
As a simple example, say a firm makes a deal in which it receives $1 million from another party today, in exchange for making a legally binding promise to pay $10 million to the other party five years from now. Obviously that’s a loser. Accrual accounting — which recognizes accruing future liabilities and rights to income — reports this truth: $1 million receivable today minus the current value of $10 million to be paid five years from now (at a 5% discount rate, about $7.7 million) shows this transaction to have a net cost of about $6.7 million.
But under cash accounting it is a winner, for only the $1 million of income is counted. The attached $10 million liability is ignored. Sure it’ll have to be paid someday (or the firm will go bankrupt due to it) — but that will be somebody else’s problem. In the meantime you’ve boosted the firm’s profits by making this deal, so you get a raise and a bonus!
Well, that wouldn’t be good. So to prevent such situations the government prohibits cash accounting and requires accrual accounting for all but the very smallest businesses and organizations.
..
I close with words from GAO as quoted in the Treasury report:
The federal government’s gross debt in the consolidated financial statements … excludes such items as the gap between the present value of future promised and funded Social Security and Medicare benefits, veterans’ health care, and a range of other liabilities (e.g., federal employee and veteran benefits payable), commitments, and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support.
Including these items, the federal government’s fiscal exposures now total more than $46 trillion, up from about $20 trillion in 2000. This translates into a burden of about $156,000 per American or approximately $375,000 per full-time worker, up from $72,000 and $165,000 respectively, in 2000…
..
I close with Stephen Colbert’s words
President Bush. Great President or greatest President?
Living Wage Rant
The total life cycle of any activity needs to be taken into account. For environmental issues, this means what do the constituent parts of a device return to and how. For human health issues, this means do the employers provide adequate pay and benefits to see that a full time worker never depends upon the government for benefits.
This isn’t about coddling, or freeloading. It’s about reducing the tax burden on everyone, because we are not supplementing low paying jobs with tax money through medicare or outreach programs. Things cost more, but taxes are less and people are healthier. Minor injuries do no become expensive major injuries. The only beneficiary of the current system is the employer who pays less in the short term and shares the long term health costs with his customers and employees through the tax roles. The real beneficiary is one who can seek relief from the taxes too and avoid the health cost entirely and take advantage of the worker completely.
A living wage isn’t just good for the individual, it’s good for the whole society. Costs are more easily accounted for. Workers feel better about themselves, reducing the chances or risky behavior like drug use and spousal abuse. In turn reducing the crime rate and the taxes involved incarcerating people. Government doesn’t have to manage as many people in payouts, reducing the 30+% premium on government distributed health benefits.
It is societally criminal to allow people to be paid a wage, which is not capable of support one’s food, home, and health. We have more resources and abilities than ever before in our known history. Why shouldn’t every full time worker have a home of some kind?
Government health benefits like Canada or Europe have decided to Medicare everyone. It’s great that they all have good benefits, but this supplements unhealthy industries and provides no incentive that would cause them to improve their health management attitudes. For example, coal companies could stop “requiring” respirators in the mine. The respirator is a cost to the company. The health problems aren’t.
Everyone should be cared for and companies should pay for it. The beneficiary of the employee’s services should pay for them. That includes the degradation that certain professions bring on the human body. Professional ball players are supposedly compensated for the gladiator style punishment inflicted on their bodies. Is there any less on plumbers, waitresses, roofers, or delivery men? Does anyone think these are easy jobs?
Adjusting Saddle Height
How do you know what the correct height of your bicycle seat is? Listen to your body. Avoid injuries.
…
Once you’ve used one of these formulas to get your saddle within a safe range, listen to your body to determine if you need to make small adjustments. Conventional wisdom says pain in the front of the knee indicates a saddle that’s too low, and pain in the back of the knee indicates a saddle that’s too high. This has been consistent with my experience. Many people may find their saddles were too low prior to using these methods (Rivendell’s Grant Petersen says 80% of the riders they see have their saddles adjusted too low). If you’re one of these people, give yourself time to adjust to the new position; it will feel strange at first, but in the long run you’ll be doing your knees a favor.
from Eco Velo
Nickel and Dimed
I started this audio book today. It had me wondering.. What if the Congresspeople who approve the minimum wage rate had to live one month under such a wage before they could vote on the issue? This applies to a number of issue; medicare, medicade, social security.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
Update 10/21/2008:
This a short book. The audio book is about 8 hours. The author moved to three different areas of the country where she worked and lived for a month; Florida, Maine, and Minneapolis. In Florida, it was waitressing, Maine was working in a corporate Maid shop, and Minneapolis was Walmart.
She was able to scrape by in each locale, except Minneapolis, where it cost about $50 a day to live and work in the area. When she exceeded here reserve she quit and went home. This was due to a lack of low income housing around 2000. I can attest to this by the comments from co-workers who lived there at the time.
Everyone should read at least some of this book.
Where’s the Sun?
Man, it’s tough getting up in the morning when there’s no sun outside. At 7:00 it’s just barely up. Can’t we time change out of this aberrant Daylight Savings thing already?
DOSBox
So, I was looking around for old games that would play well on the Mac Cube. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck and the Cube’s new 1.8 GHz (replacing .5 GHz) CPU is on the way. The Cube stands at a turning point in Apple history. It can play OS9 or Classic games and OS X games. It is 8 years old so anything that worked on it when new is long since abandoned now.
Some people still love the games for the Color Computer (1989), Tandy (early 1990’s), and DOS. Just look at the Atari game packs containing the greatest hits of the 1980’s. It’s funny how many more clock cycles our CPUs had compared to even 5 years ago. This computer has two complete CPU on the same space. With that much power you don’t need a Commodore 64 your can run it on any machine with an Emulator.
An Emulator is software that can make the code inside the Atari cartridge, floppy disk, or CD think it is running on the original, old system. This is horribly inefficient. There’s so much speed available you don’t even notice. In fact, most Emulators let you slow down, because the base computer is too faster and certain actions depended on the old timing.
In my quest for Mac games I discovered my old favorites. Games that ran in DOS the year I graduated high school and entered college. The Emulator to run them is DOSBox. It’s an open source project and it has the wonderful feature of running on Linux, Windows, and Mac. There is a text file that contains all the settings. It emulates a number of old Sound Blaster era sound cards and CGA and VGA era video cards. These devices were pretty low quality. The video especially is about what you would get from your standard TV.
Many games from this era have been abandoned or discontinued. If you are lucky you can find a download online. Some have been removed and others are available. Most of these games are 1-3 floppies or 1-6 meg. Most of us get more than that in email everyday.
My favorites are Colonization, the original, which has been remade very recently and is due out in a Mac version. And XCOM: UFO Defense. One more that I find tempting is Master of Magic and maybe Master of Orion. It’s hard to believe that these games are just as fun to play. The sound is marginally acceptable. The video is disastrously atrocious by today’s standards. The game play, the way the elements are balanced and the layout of the action screens, is much better the modern games.
Some other notables are Jagged Alliance and it’s sequel, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games. Jagged Alliance 2 and it’s variations are worth playing too.
So, if you’re interested in getting back an old game check out DOSBox for the DOS games and look up how to play the Win95 and Win98 games in Vista and XP. If all else fails you can download VMWare Player for free, track down an image of a Win98 install disk, and create a gaming VM. That’s what I did.
Business Objects QaaS Utility Part 1
Recently, I got the chance to break some new ground. Very exciting since I used to do this weekly and now it’s more like annually. Business Objects has the ability to provide web services to report data. With Xcelcius to create the pretty bar graphs and pie charts this results in simple dashboard like summary of data that just about anyone can understand. Data like what are the most likely body parts injured, how much do those injuries costs, and what are the most expensive claims on those injuries.
The design flaw in Business Objects toolset for making these web services is flexibility in copy a query from one database, called a Universe (someone’s got a big head), to another database. Each customer is in their own database. So, we want to copy a standard set of queries from the Demo database to the Client’s database. The Business Objects tool makes you rewrite the web service when you move it from between databases.
This can be a time consuming process. Let’s say you have a dozen queries for a client. It takes 5 minutes for each query. And you sign up 50 clients. 12 X 50 X 5 = 60 hours. This is Development’s time and excludes errors, which would take hours more. So, nice feature, but not production ready.
Let’s say you could copy a query from one database to another in 5 seconds and use a tool that anyone can manipulate. Now, it takes 60 minutes of a Business Admin’s, Project Management’s, Customer Service implementor’s,.. time.
That’s the tool. How to copy a Business Objects Web Service query from one Universe to another.
Hydroplaning
Hydroplaning or aquaplaning by a road vehicle occurs when a layer of water builds between the rubber tires of the vehicle and the road surface, leading to the loss of traction and thus preventing the vehicle from responding to control inputs such as steering, braking or accelerating. It becomes, in effect, an unpowered and unsteered sled.
Hydroplaning also affects aircraft tires in contact with a wet runway and rollercoasters on a wet track.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroplaning_(tires)
on Sheldon Brown
Even with automobiles, actual hydroplaning is very rare. It is a much more real problem for aircraft landing on wet runways. The aviation industry has studied this problem very carefully, and has come up with a general guidline as to when hydroplaning is a risk. The formula used in the aviation industry is:
Speed (in knots) = 9 X the square root of the tire pressure (in psi.)
Here’s a table calculated from this formula:
Tire Pressure Hydroplane Speed
Miles per hour Hydroplane Speed
Kilometers per hour
P.S.I. Bars
120 8.3 113 183
100 6.9 104 167
80 5.5 93 149
60 4.1 80 129
40 2.8 66 105
Notification: Fire alarm in the Amarillo Customer Service Building
The Fire Alarm was triggered in the Amarillo Customer Service Building this morning. The Amarillo Fire Department is on scene and has investigated the building. They have determined that this is a false alarm and are allowing colleagues to return to the building.