So as many of you know the Mid-Atlantic region has recently been affected by some unusual natural events.  Last week was The Earthquake of 2011 as I am now referring to it.  Last Tuesday Virginia experienced a 5.8 earthquake that was felt as far north as New York.  I’ve lived in Maryland my whole life and have never felt an earthquake, so when it happened, I was confused for a solid 5 minutes.  I couldn’t understand how we could have bought a house that was so structurally unsound that it was now falling down around me.  After I finished processing what had happened I realized, “I know what this is! I’ve read about it!”  Also, I checked Facebook.  Naturally there were 20 posts from my friends and family all reporting that what we felt was indeed an earthquake and not my house crumbling at the foundation.  The devastation was horrific.

 

 

That’s not really my joke; I stole it from the intertubes.

 

So anyway, after that big event came and went the talk turned from The Earthquake of 2011 to the approach of Hurricane Irene.  What do Baltimorons do when a big storm is heading our way?  Buy all the milk, bread and TP we can fit in our cars.  Being that Kevin and I are on the Medifast diet right now, we had no need for additional food and instead we actually did something useful.  I should say Kevin did something useful. He brought our cars and trash cans into the garages, secured our lawn furniture, and emptied the trailer of debris that could become airborne.  Twenty minutes later he was out of things to do, so we turned our attentions to inside the house, and this is what we got done!

 

We moved our furniture in the Kitchen to protect it from the windows being blown out. 

 

 

Sike!  We moved it so we could do this!  We ripped out the carpet and padding in the living room in preparation for the new hardwood flooring.   Kevin’s been gradually removing the many layers of flooring across the main floor of the house.   We still have to take up at least 2 more layers in some sections.

 

 

After a trip to the dump, I started cleaning up the sunroom while Kevin took down the hideous non-functioning fan/light.  When you turn it on, it just buzzes.

 

 

I wasn’t lying, that thing is ugly right?

 

 

Then, he replaced it with this simple, beautiful, functional new one that I bought for us.

 

     

 

He also replaced the missing latches on the storage doors in the office, as well as replacing 2 outlets that have been unusable and without covers for months.

 

     

 

What did I do other then take pictures while all this was going on you might ask…

 

I made delicious pumpkin spiced chocolate chip pancakes for lunch.  We are allowed to eat them on our diet, believe it or not. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what our girls though of all the activity and the impending storm.

 

So there you have it.  A rainy day of impending doom well-spent. 

 

Storm update: its been gently raining for about an hour with no gusty wind.  If it keeps up like this, maybe you wont be seeing a post about the tree that fell on our house.

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When we redid the kitchen a couple of winters back, we replaced all the appliances except for the dishwasher.  It was only 4 or so years old, the quality was on the upper side of medium, and it worked well.  It didn’t match the rest of the appliances, but it didn’t look bad, either.  The other day, we opened it after a load was done, and the dishes were pretty grimy, still, and there was dirty, standing water at the bottom of it.  I tried to force it to enter the drain mode, but it wouldn’t power on.

 

When I was installing the baseboard, I had foreseen that a difficulty with the dishwasher might arise, and had create a removable panel of baseboard for in front of it.  I popped this out, and using my awesome non-contact voltage tester tool (yellow pencil-shaped thing in the picture below), I verified that the dishwasher was, in fact, getting power.  About 30 mins later, I’d narrowed the problem down to having something to do with the control panel.  After opening it up and looking for any obvious shorts or loose wires, I did a price-check on a replacement control panel.  It’s a bit shy of $200.  We decided that it wasn’t worth repairing, and off I went to the nearest Sears Scratch-and-Dent center.

 

There, I picked up an Electrolux model that was a customer return.  It matches our other stainless steel appliances and has all of the options we wanted.  It retails at $1100, but I walked out with it for $515.  The only negative is that I failed in something I usually excel at.  Dani would say I excel at this to the point of ad nauseam.  Research.  I should have done more.  This model has a lot of bad reviews on Amazon.  I’m just crossing my fingers that we don’t have to join their ranks.  I was in a rush, though, and the price was good.  We had 5 house guests this weekend… the dishes were piling up fast, and hand-washing was becoming untenable. 

 

Before I removed the old one, I turned off the dedicated breaker for it and disconnected the power feed in the electric box on the dishwasher.  After turning off the water feed to it, I then had the joy of sucking out all the nasty water still inside with my ever-venerable shop-vac.  In my last entry here at the ol’ blog, I mentioned that I had inadvertently caused ashes from the fireplace to spew skyward and cover most of the surfaces in the family room, causing cleanup to take far too long.  Knowing I had a shop-vac full of ash, I emptied it outside and removed the filter before sucking up water.  Apparently I wasn’t thorough enough, though, because as soon as I turned it on, ash blew out of the thing all over the kitchen floor. 

 

Pain. In. The. Ash.

 

You may have noticed in the image above of the old dishwasher that it is sitting up on some 2x4s.  This is because all of the cabinets in our new kitchen sit 3” off the ground.  I talked about why we did this when I installed them.  Because a dishwasher has feet at the front and the back, it's kind of hard to get one pushed in correctly when the surface isn’t flat.  I was having trouble getting the new one in, so I quickly whipped up some 2-by-4 base-extensions to sit perpendicular to the existing cabinet base.  It made the whole process much easier.  The white pex visible in the picture is the water feed for the as-of-yet-unpurchased-or-installed pot filler above the stove.

 

 

With the new bases in place, I wired in the new dishwasher and connected the water feed and the drain line, then pushed it in.

 

 

It’s a much more pleasant experience loading and unloading a dishwasher that sits higher off of the ground.  I cannot over-recommend this to fellow tall people.

 

 

So the new dishwasher is in place.  It’s Dani’s job to get the sticker residue off the front and get it all nice and shiny, and I have still have to reinstall the baseboard panel.  The first test load worked well, so here’s hoping our luck holds.

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The first time Dad visited us in our new house, we were walking around together talking about the various things we had plans for.  One of the these was a desire to remove the carpet and the vinyl flooring underneath it in the living room/TV room and replace it with matching hardwood to what we found under the carpet in the family room/fireplace room.  At this point, Dad did a very smart thing.  He pulled out one of the AC vents and inspected the edge of the existing hardwood flooring we hoped to match. 

 

 

“Well that’s not going to work.  Your floor is too thin”.  Indeed it is.  I had just assumed that a house build in the mid-30’s would have a 3/4” thick floor, but for some reason, this is not.  From one perspective, this is a relief.  I don’t have to feel bad about tearing it out, since it is too thin to refinish.  And I don’t have to try to match it, now, either.  On the other hand, though.. it just feels awful to tear out an old floor. 

 

I found an odd lot of some 3/4” thick Brazilian Koa (it’s not really.. they just call it that) at Lumber Liquidators.  It’s full of some damaged pieces and lots and lots of short pieces.  I’m a tad nervous about it.  That is an understatement.  The truth is, though, that we can’t really afford to do what we really want to do.

 

 

I really like the look of wide plank mixed-width flooring.  This is white pine.  It’s grown, harvested, and milled right here on the East Coast.  But at $6-9  sq ft, it’s not in our near (or not-so-near) future.   At $2.45 a sq ft, though, we could swing the cost for the nearly 1200 sq ft of the stuff we bought from Lumber Liquidators. 

 

I decided to rip up a chunk of the flooring in an out-of-the-way corner so that I could transfer all the new flooring into the house. 

 

 

Ugh.  This process is not fun.  I did find this on the bottom of a few of the flooring remnants. 

 

 

 

So now I at least know a little bit more of the history of my current flooring.  After a few hours of work, I had a section cleared, de-nailed, and cleaned up.  The next morning, a friend helped me unload the trailer and get it in the house.

 

 

 

 

A few days later, I attacked another section of the floor.  These nails suck.  I have spent enough time crouching and shuffling about the room to qualify as an Old Bay Crab. 

 

 

When I was done, I cleaned it up with my venerable shop vac.  Which may have been pointed into the fireplace when I turned it on.  And may have then sprayed fireplace ash all over the whole room.  And consequently the cleanup may have taken about an hour.  sigh.

 

 

 

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A while ago, I was at our old house preparing it for some new renters.  I had the large house fan on, and it started clicking.  Obnoxiously.  I knew the soon-to-be tenants would probably say something about it, so I needed to fix it; might as well do it right away.  So I climbed up and precariously perched myself on the banister and started taking it all apart.

 

 

Here I’ve got the blades off.  They come off very easily.. just a couple of rubber-lined large-headed screws per blade. 

 

 

 

With the blades removed, I took off the face plate and then the glass cover.  Still no sign of anything broken.  At this point I’m starting to scratch my head a bit.

 

 

So I took every last part of this thing apart.  And guess what I found.

 

 

Stinkbug.  A stupid faced stupid Stink Bug.  Ugh.  These things get everywhere!!  Apparently it had died, got all hard and dried-up, and stuck it’s dead-self in just the right spot to go click-click-click-click as the fan spun.  Awesome.

 

I don’t know how they’re getting in, either, man.  I feel your pain.  We need a support group.

 

After that ridiculous unplanned and unwanted project, I needed this.

 

 

I’ve been on this quest since our trip to Ireland in May to find a place that can serve and correctly pour the perfect pint of Guinness.  So far.. meh.  I’ll keep you posted.

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The exposed ends of the cabinets and of the island were always intended to be stone veneer.  I’ve priced out the cost for the amount of stone I would need and it’s about $500.00.  There always seems to be something better I can spend 500 bones on. 

 

Last Fall, Dani’s employer decided that she no longer wanted a large display unit in the salon.  She said if I would get it out of there, I could have it.  The unit was made entirely of reclaimed barn wood, so I jumped at the chance to snag it.  I disassembled it and brought it home, and stacked it under the car port to keep the weather off of it.  I figured since it’s super-old barn wood, it would do just fine.  That did not turn out to be the case.  When I moved it earlier this month, this is what I found:

 

 

 

My awesome barn wood had been eaten.  Pretty thoroughly.  About 30% of the surface area of all the wood had been badly marred by some kind of beetle, I think.  I found oblong-shaped empty eggs in these holes.  I had intended to use this wood to make some really nice furniture for the living room, but that option was taken away.  Dani had a bright, idea, though.  Maybe this would work for the ends of the cabinets in the kitchen.  So here is my usable barnwood.

 

 

 

Although I couldn’t find a single bug anywhere on or in the wood, I bug-bombed it anyway.  Then I used my compressor to blow out any remnants of anything that might be in those holes. 

 

After a quick photoshop to see how it would look in the kitchen, I decided to give it a go.  I cut some pieces and dry-fit them, and I was liking it so far.

 

 

 

So I cut the rest of the pieces, spray a few coats of polyurethane over them, and used my nail gun to put them in.  Here’s the results.

 

 

 

 

I can’t say that I’m head-over-heels in love with it, but I do really like it.  It fits the rustic motif and, here’s the best part, it was free.  It cost me zero dollars and about 3 hours time to cut, clear-coat, and install.

 

One more thing off the list for the not-yet-done-kitchen.

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I am about to geek out. You have been warned.

 

A co-worker of mine clued me in to this house bill that just came out of a committee recently.  Here is a blurb from the news story about it:

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored…. To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

You can help fight the bill by letting your congressman know you oppose it.  An easy way to do so would be to use the form on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website.

 

Now, the mere insinuation of that level of data being kept about me got me into a bit of a sour mood.  Sure, it will probably (if it passes) be put to some good use.  But even if I totally trusted the government not to misuse this data, I certainly don’t trust that some random hacker won’t come along and pilfer it from my ISP and put it to some nefarious use.  So I decided to do something about it.

 

What’s Happening and Why You Probably Don’t Like It

In layman's terms (that means my geek friends can’t critique me for over-simplifying this), your ISP provides you with your all of your internet services, like web-surfing.  When you go to a website, your computer asks your ISP “Please take me to this website” and your ISP goes and finds that website and delivers it to you.  Your ISP could potentially keep a history of everything you ask it for…  every site you visit, and everything you type or click while on that site.  What it can’t keep a history of is encrypted traffic.  So once you go to your bank’s website, for example, you’re computer and the bank create a secure, encrypted link, and the ISP can no longer “see” what you’re sending and receiving.  It does still know how much you are sending where, and that’s still a lot of information.  What this bill would do is force the ISP to store all the data; the easily-readable unencrypted data (the majority of your browsing) and whatever information they have on your encrypted communications, as well. 

 

What I Did About It

I’m cheating.  The bill only applies to ISPs (Internet Service Providers).  So if there is a way to have someone else fetch and return your traffic for you, and deliver it in a secure, encrypted channel, then all your ISP will see is the link between you and this mysterious 3rd party.  So I created a 3rd party.   Amazon has this group of services called Amazon Web Services (AWS).

 

 

If you have heard the phrase “in the cloud” from someone in reference to the internet, then this is sort of what they were talking about.  Simply put, Amazon has a crap-ton of computational power and storage capacity, and they’ve made it available to the masses to do things with.  The user doesn’t really know where these things are being done.  It doesn’t really matter.  All that matters is they are being done somewhere and that the user gets the results.  Hence; cloud.   I made this…umm… helpful picture to demonstrate.

 

 

Amazon charges per-hour to use their cloud resources to do these things.  But their entry-level stuff is free for a year; and even after that, it’s pretty inexpensive. 

 

I created a Ubuntu EC2 instance and set it up as a proxy using a public-key encryption to authenticate me and my VPN sessions. 

 

The simplest way to explain that is to say that I now have my very own computer running at Amazon somewhere, and I have an encrypted tunnel to it from my computer.  Now, when I ask to go to a website, my computer tunnels that encrypted request through my ISP and asks my computer in the cloud to go find it for me.  It uses Amazon’s resources to find the website and deliver it back through my encrypted tunnel.  Here’s the catch… Amazon is not an ISP.  So they don’t have to keep logs. 

 

For the down and dirty on how I did this, I cannot overstate how awesome this guide is.  It’s written for mac-users, and I use windows, so I had to download OpenVPN to use instead of Tunnelblick.  I added it to my startup folder so that it starts when I log in.

 

I hope this explanation-sans-guide is helpful.  Protect your privacy!

 

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I’m sleepy and I have to work this weekend, but I’ve been busy this week, and want to share at least one thing with you before bed.  About 8 months ago, the chain connecting the handle of the toilet to the flapper at the bottom of the tank broke off at the flapper.  Here’s a diagram to illustrate what I’m talking about.

 

 

My “solution” at the time was to use this.

 

It held the chain remnant to the flapper and allowed everything to keep working.  But it rusted away, and then fell off the chain.  Time to fix this properly.

 

Dani and I try to be environmentally conscious whenever we can be.  I’ll admit it’s not as often as we should be.  I picked this up at Home Depot for about 20 bucks.

 

 

The instructions did a pretty good job of explaining how to install this, so I’ll skip re-doing that here. 

 

Here’s the tank before removing the old flushing mechanism.  Note the dangling chain. 

 

 

After removing all the old pieces and dropping them in the sink, I started installing the new stuff.

 

 

 

The new one has this j-tube that is supposed to keep gunk (like the gunk that is visible in the picture) from forming at the bottom of the tank.  We’ll see.

 

After installing the new hardware, I put the new button on.

 

 

My tank wall was too thick for the included plastic washer-nut.. if I used it, there wasn’t enough space to attach the internal button mechanism.  I ended up using one of the thick rubber gaskets from the old innards to act as a spacer and I’m depending on the internal flush-button mechanism to hold the button in place.  So far, so good.

 

 

 

Everything is hooked up and the tank is filling.  After putting the top back on, we look good-as-new, with a fancy new button sure to confuse friends and family.

 

 

For those not in-the-know, this has two buttons on it.  The smaller button is for flushing liquids, and the larger for flushing solids.  Using the smaller button conserves water, and is a better option than the old “If it’s yellow let it mellow” adage.  That leaves rings, people.

 

Oh, and I don’t want to hear anything about the empty TP holder, there.  It’s stupid.  Who can reach back there?  Nobody, that’s who.  We have it on a shelf instead.  Don’t like it?  Don’t poop here.

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