Installing a Deck?

Kathy's been thinking of putting a deck in the back yard. (that is, getting me to put a deck in the back yard.)

The past weekend, we got our air conditioner condenser moved from the back yard into an ideal sheltered spot in the front, so we've freed up a good size chunk of space in the back. The backyard is a nice, regular shape that would easily fit a nice deck. I wonder how much of the yard I should cover with the deck?

The only thing that worries me a bit is how stable the ground is in the backyard. It tends to be a bit on the muddy side, to be honest, the drainage there isn't that great. Our patio stones there shift pretty drastically in the winter time and spring time. I've been wondering about how I can improve the way the water drains away from our backyard, and it looks like we will probably have to cut away part of the widened driveway to do it, since that's the direction the water wants to go in. We never really had any problem with the drainage until we widened the driveway, and it looks like that is the culprit. I wonder if it's something I can do myself, or if I'll have to hire someone to do it.

Childproofing our stove

Connor's been a bad boy. Well, a curious one anyways. Recently he's getting curious about the dials on our gas stove, and he's tall enough to reach them and twist them. The existing safety mechanism is a function where you press the knob in a tad before you twist it, but Connor's already able to defeat that by default, the way he reaches up for the dial presses it in already.

So I went online to check out what sort of babyproofing is available for stoves with the controls on the front. I'm surprised by the number of products that only prevent kids from reaching the range top, and not the front dials, happily displaying on their packaging how the kid is prevented from grabbing a pot, where they are totally ignoring the dials right next to their hands. Hmph.

I ended up picking up one of these from ToysRUs, with the intention of mounting it in front of the knobs, but there wasn't enough space to mount it in any spot.

It's probably better to just fence off the whole kitchen area. While I love the open concept kitchen we have, I'm always seeing more reasons why a kitchen cooking area should be a separate room unto itself.

It keep out:

• Curious troublemakers like kids and pets
• Backseat driver types who keep picking at your cooking techniques

It keeps in:

• oily smoke, fumes, and odours - especially when you fry fish.
• noise from the ventilation fans (plus I'm pretty sure an enclosed space makes the ventilation process a lot more efficient)
• excess heat from baking or making soup/stews

In the meantime, we've just detached all the knobs, but its a bit of a pain to have to plug them in each time we want to use the range.

edit - Its March 30th and the knobs are still all detached. We've figured out how to unlock and twist the posts to different positions, so we don't even put the knobs back on all the time. :D

Allen.

Kitchen Backsplash

This weekend past, we decided to put up a kitchen backsplash. I went to the local Home Depot and picked out some tiles and supplies, which cost less than I'd thought, and started working on it on Sunday morning.

This is how it started off - I moved things out of the way, laid down some newspaper, and sandpapered the wall a bit to let the wall give a bit more grip for the mortar adhesive backing.

I have a cement mixer attachment for my drill, that I'd originally bought to mix tar for my driveway. It made short work of mixing the mortar, and the actual process of attaching everything to the wall went pretty smoothly.

Here's the tile cutter - I had to get pretty handy with it to cut 3/16th inch strips of tile for the top edge of the backsplash. I had hoped that the tile would fit exactly after allowing for the spacing, but no such luck.

I had to clip a few tiles so that it would fit around the power sockets and phone socket. This nipper tool was actually more difficult to get the hang of than the tile cutter. I ended up cheating a bit - instead of cutting L-shaped pieces, I cut 2 rectangles instead. Not really too noticeable.

All the tiles are up at this point - I used the extras to extend the backsplash down a bit on the back of the stove - I didn't go all the way down since, well, it's not a part of the wall that we ever see.

After the tiles had some time to set, I mixed up the grout and applied it. These pictures are after it's been applied and the excess had been wiped off with a wet sponge. The lighting is a little bad, it was late and I had forgotten to turn the flash on.

Once the grout had some time to start drying, I applied caulk to the outside edges at the right end and the area behind the stove.

Here is the finished result, as per the top of the post. :D


It was kind of a tiring job, especially since the space I could work in was rather limited. I whacked my head on the range hood a couple of times pretty hard as well, but oh well. The results are pretty decent for something we suddenly decided on, on the weekend. 4 hours for the tile cutting and setting in the daytime, and an hour for the grouting in the evening, and a little more time for caulking and putting everything back together before the day was over. The only part I'd not thought of was the power sockets becoming inset on the wall after the tile was added, but all I had to do was remount the sockets and it turned out all right.

Only thing left to do is to put a sealant on the grout in a few days, and it'll be complete.

Cheers,

Allen.

New Car Stereo

I picked up a new car stereo - a JVC KD-R810. It was on sale at Best Buy, $250 marked down to $200 in one of their weekly specials. They always have some model or another on sale.

It's the first aftermarket one I've ever bought. Mainly, I bought it to get a USB port so I can listen to music on USB. This should replace the pile of unlabelled CDs in the car with a a single USB stick! (though it's likely that I will wind up with a pile of unlabelled USB sticks later.)

The secondary thing (which interestingly enough, is probably the most expensive component of the stereo) is a Bluetooth audio setup, so I can use my Blackberry in the car hands free.

I've never done any sort of installation like this myself, and I didn't like that I had to disconnect/reconnect the car battery. The last time I did something with the battery, I got some nasty sparks flying. I figured I'd let the Best Buy do the install. They finished the job in about an hour's time and showed me that all the speakers were hooked up correctly using the fade and balance controls. They demonstrated how it plays mp3s off of a USB stick. The tech couldn't figure out how to do radio presets so I guess Ill have to figure it out later. The rear USB cable sits in the glove compartment, and the microphone is sussed in the top middle of the windshield. It's pretty nice work I think.

They also said they can undo the install to put the factory radio back in for free, if I wanted to, such as if I was selling my car etc.

The install cost $70, the price of their USB/microphone deck install, and the only additional item I needed was some Corolla-specific wiring. So all told, about $300.

Anyways, looking at the unit in the dash now...

The unit sticks out of the dash a bit which I'm not used to - the old unit fit flush in the DIN slot. I'm also supposed to be able to change the colour of the displays and dials seperately... however a 2002 Corolla doesn't have a coloured lighting scheme unless you consider white lights on plain analog dials and plain liquid crystal displays some sort of theme. Maybe I'll just set the colour to white. :P

I can't seem to see the display when I'm wearing my sunglasses, what's the deal with that? Why is the protective cover polarized?

The bluetooth setup went pretty smoothly, you set a PIN and off it goes to sync with your phone. The voice dialling works very nicely. I hope the calls are clear too, but I'll have to find out later.

Its time to go root through my music collection. :D

Allen.

Banana Bread

Somehow the entire summer's slipped away, and I haven't blogged anything... or baked anything either! So I decided to bake a banana bread cause we had some bananas that were starting to hang around a little too long. I was intending to use the last 2 very ripe bananas, but Kathy decided to eat one, not realizing I was going to bake them. I was left with just one banana.

Anyways, I looked around the internet looking for a quick banana bread recipe, and generally they are like this:

350 degree preheated oven

dry stuff:

• 2 cups of flour
• 1 cup sugar
• a teaspoon each of baking power, baking soda, cinnamon
• half a teaspoon of nutmeg.

wet stuff:

• 2 eggs
• teaspoon of vanilla to make the eggs more pleasant
  
• half cup of butter (I used veg oil instead of butter)
• 2-3 very ripe bananas on the verge of fermenting into banana liquor.
  

Mix all the dry stuff in one bowl, mix all the wet stuff in a second bowl, then add the dry to the wet, and mix them all. I have this vague recollection that I'm not supposed to over-mix it or it becomes like chewing rubber. Put this in an oiled baking pan in the oven and let it bake. Typical time is about 45 minutes. Check with a toothpick or a chopstick lanced through it's heart, if anything sticks to your stick, it's not ready, bake for another 5-10 minutes.

Since I was short a couple of bananas, I just added a little extra oil and some water to shore up the moisture content, I didn't really measure. I probably didn't add enough.

Here's some pics of the end result:

after baking for an HOUR

Shiny...

I think I need a smaller pan or a bigger recipe, stuff always looks kind of flat coming out of it.

Looks good, tastes good, but a little bit on the dry side cause of the missing banana. Blah!

New Computer

Instead of crossposting from my games blog, I'll just point you there.

• New Computer
• New Monitors!
• Details
• and most importantly, Pictures!

Allen.

Thinking about Computer Upgrades

(crosspost from my games blog)

My computer had been acting a bit sluggish recently so I figured it was time to wipe the OS and reinstall it. However, the system kept bluescreening my Vista install. I couldn't get around it with whatever BIOs setting changes I had available, so I decided maybe it was time for this hardware to retire. I mean, I'd run it since about 2005. I figured I could at least save the CPU, which was a decent dual core AMD Athlon II 64 x2 4800+, which was a Socket 939 like my wife's single core computer. But when I installed the CPU on her system, it started crashing too. Also, putting her CPU in my system revived it.

It looks like my CPU had decided to go loony.

So, it was time to start thinking seriously about upgrades.

My system is at the point where if I buy a new CPU, it would start an avalanche of upgrades:

• Another motherboard with a modern socket to fit the CPU, since Socket 939 is obsolete.
  
• New RAM memory as well since my old DDR 400 is not viable for the new CPU/mobo.
  
• New power supply to match the sockets on the mobo and video card (why are they 6pin and 8 pin now instead of 4pin and 6pin? sigh)

The only things that I would be able to salvage would be my video cards, hard drives, case, and fans.

Each of the 4 new components - mobo, CPU, memory, and power, would mean $100 for a base model or a $200 for a future proof economical model, or even more for a hobbyist model. (Hello $400 motherboards and $700 CPUs) So I would be spending somewhere between $400 to $800 for the parts.

Those prices are fairly reasonable, however the problem is - what should I get? Or more accurately, which motherboard should I get? Everything hinges on the motherboard.

I want to have full bandwidth for my 2 video cards. SLI or not, I want it to have 16x1 PCIe for EACH card. Often, the data path is one 16x1 that they break down into 8x1 for each card. Thus you get reduced performance for each of the cards. I mean, you get more performance than a single card, but probably nothing like if you have 2 cards each with a dedicated full PCIe path. However, there isn't really a lot of data that I've found that tells me just HOW much bandwidth my video cards use, so I'm not sure if I REALLY need this or if I'm just being a hypochondriac when I think that 2 card SLI isn't running much faster than 1 card.

As a side note, I do want to run a 3 or 4 monitor setup someday. Probably not tomorrow though. The price of an ideal minimum bezel 3x1 monitor setup seems to be just under $2000 right now. I could get some regular widescreens and plug them in but I dunno how that will be. Plus, gaming - 3d games performance is geared for 1680x1050 or 1900x1200 screens, not... 3600x1900 or 4800x1900 screens. I would probably have to turn every detail off and it would probably still bring my video cards to their knees. Sigh. eyefinity gaming, which would handle it, would cost another $550.

I want it to support 3 Gb/s SATA, or even that new 6 Gb/s SATA and USB 3.0 However, I don't have any devices that go anywhere close to that sort of speed. I've always bought the best bang for the buck kind of drives usually. These still rate way higher than my bottleneck CPU and RAM though, so I'm not too concerned about that part of it. I definitely want it to have eSATA since I have an eSATA/USB2.0 HD dock. Especially since 1.5 Terabyte drives cost like $100 now. Currently I plug it in through USB2.0 and it's pretty slow - workable but.... slow.

I want the SATA jacks to NOT get covered by my video cards. My current mobo has 4 SATA jacks - and half of them are covered when I put in the primary video card. Is that on purpose? I mean I could understand if it was the 2nd card that covers the jacks, meaning you should either run the 2nd card OR 2 extra SATA devices due to bandwidth restrictions, but why is it under the FIRST graphics card?

Anyways, this means I am still looking for a good motherboard. Nothing really fits my criteria right now except maybe a 790FX or a 780n board, but those are like a year old now, shouldn't there be something newer/better?

Here's my two best bets right now (with google links):

• GA-MA790FXT-UD5P (crossfire)
• ASUS M3N-HT (sli)

In the meantime, I bought a used Athlon 64 x2 3800+ CPU for $35, my mobo claims it peaks up at about 100 degrees Celsius when running. :P I don't know if the CPU is bad or if my mobo sensor is bad, haha. It's still working, I mean, but I dont really have much hopes for it's longevity.

Allen.

btw, ebay is selling my old dead Athlon x2 4800+ CPU for like $200! That's crazy!