TechZilla Said…

Didn't get as much done this weekend as planned. I spent half the morning on Saturday running around looking for green plastic lattice for the fence. I did get the posts all notched for the bottom cross pieces and got them all installed.

Since this is my first fence, and I'm designing in my head as I go...there is lots of thought involved. I haven't quite decided the easiest way to resize the sheets of lattice yet. I did pick up a new saw blade that is designed to cut the stuff so it won't melt. Where to do it and how to hold it so I can get an 8 foot long straight cut is the dilemma at this point.

On another note, we have been having trouble getting the dog to eat. Finally we are figuring out that it is not necessarily the food that she is getting. She just doesn't like to eat alone in the laundry room. She does seem to like eating when we do in the liviing room. Who would have thought?

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Well it seems that my origional assessment was correct except for different reasons. The  pellet stove went down again and I was unable to revive it. The repair guy can't get here until this Friday so we have a radiant heater running. I'm thinking it's not quite as drastic as the control board needing replacing but could be. I'm thinking one of the thermal switches went out which is much cheaper. This based on some troubleshooting I did already.

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The FCC is getting ready to auction off the rights to the 700 mHz frequency many of us grew up on watching tv before cable and satellite was available. I could be wrong but I believe sometime in 2009 all broadcasts are required to be digital and not analog by that time. So this could also mean that the face of wireless communications could possibly take a drastic turn depending on who wins the bid and the amount of money the want to spend putting up towers and creating an infrastructure.

I guess they didn't bother to take a survey of households that can't afford cable or satellite and rely on rabbit ears or an external antenna to get local programming. Typical government!

Google and Verizon at this point seem to show the most interest in the auction so far. Time will tell.

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Money has been tight for a few days while we waited for 5 expense checks to arrive. I turn in one every week and usually get at least one a week. This made working on the fence limiting among other things.

Anyway, as the weather is starting to cool down a bit we decided to fire up the pellet stove. It came on for a while and then went off as it usually does so problems weren't noticed...until we needed it again.

I discovered the feed auger wasn't turning and usually that is because of stuff hiding the flame from a photo-electric eye. I checked everything and tried a few things to bypass security systems to get it going temporarily if we needed parts by the time the check came. Nothing worked so we hauled out the electric radiant heater and resolved to just call the dealer after the big check came.

Yesterday while I was driving down the road, I got to thinking that I forgot to check the connection for the wall thermostat. Well, it turned out that I forgot we had by-passed that feature last year. All it took was a little fiddling with the connection and the stove was working again.

The whole project could have cost $75 easily and possibly more by the time the repair guy got done. And of course I was the little womans' hero for 5 minutes.

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As you can see in the pictures, I did make some headway on the fence this weekend.

This picture kind of reminds me of the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz. Believe it or not the top boards and 2x4's along the bottom are almost perfectly parallel. Anyway close enough. I think what is creating the illusion is the slope of the property. The lower board on the far left is actually 4" below the surface and on the far right it/s about 16" above the surface.

Of course in order to get as much as I did get done this weekend, I had to tie up the construction foreman. I took her to the lumber yard a couple times this weekend for materials. On the way back yesterday, I stopped and let her romp in the creek a little bit. Then she did a little exploring. An of course there was the morning walk.

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The week is finally over and probably gonna work in the yard on the fence posts today. I need to cut them off and start connecting the cross braces. I'm just gonna use up some of the materials I already have so I won't get to far probably. I could probably rip a 4x4 in half though. I have a few of those. I hate to do that though because I could also start sinking posts down the alley side of the house.

Here's my progress so far...

I suprised myself and actually sunk these posts in a straight line. The old fence posts were so rotton that I was able to pull them right out of the concrete. This posed another problem...pulling out the old concrete.

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This has been a quite stressfull week!

First the server goes down...hard drive inaccessible..then the workstation goes down...hard drive inaccessible. Fortunately my recovery software said otherwise.

I have managed to get the workstation back up with no evidence of any problems so far. For whatever reason, It was running a little slow..ok really slow so I decided to run chkdsk on the drive. It was in the process of marking a bad cluster and rebooted for some reason. I only lost 2 files which were of no consequence from my favorites folder.

The server still needs to be rebuilt though. I've already recovered the essential data so it won't take that long. I have spare hard drives for both machines with the operating system and essential software pre-installed so I can be up and running actually in about 5-10 minutes. I use them to image another drive and then use the imaged drive for everyday use. Time is money.

The odds that both the machines would go down at the same time is astonomical. Fortunately I have a laptop so I can at least get my work orders in an emergency.

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