John's Random Review

About 5 years ago, we redid my office.  Well, now that there’s another little being on the way, my office is transforming back to bedroom form. So i had to update my office again. This time, there ended up being a little… well, consolidation.  An entire room of stuff is now in this:

Over the years, “Nerd Central”, as my office was once known, has slowly gone from 3 computers, 2 monitors, 2 printers, a television, surround sound receiver, a small mixer to manage the sound output to one set of speakers, and a huge random assortment of other electronics down to just a single desktop computer and xbox with a single monitor and computer speakers, and the 2 printers (one inkjet, one photo)

and now that setup has been slimmed down to pretty much the bare essentials.  computer, monitor, printer, and 360.

Since this pic, some books and other assorted stuff fills in the empty shelves, but its working well so far.  When I work from home, I can pull out the shelf above the keyboard, put the laptop there, and plug it into the monitor and network, and use the laptop keyboard and mouse separately from the desktop.  It would be nice to have a usb+dvi kvm switch so I could use just one keyboard and mouse…It also looks like I could get a much bigger monitor to fit inside there, that would increase my productivity immensely!

There’s also a small shelf up against the wall (behind that door) that has some other assorted stuff, including the photo printer.

The nice thing is that when it is all closed up, it looks rather clean.  I’m sure it will get a lot messier inside, but at least I can close it up and keep little people fingers away from all those tempting buttons and blinking lights.  At this point, it doesn’t lock, so I’m thinking about adding a little lock to the top, so that Easy can’t open it up. 

I also had to go back into the crawlspace yet again to run cat5 to that wall so that I have wired network access there. Wireless is fast, but it isn’t gigabit fast like everything else wired in the house.

So where did everything else go?  Over the years, a lot of the “headless” stuff, like the webserver and the home media server have migrated to the garage, where the fiber comes into the house.  The old CRT television was recycled years ago.  A bunch of the books went to my office at work, I’ve kept some, recycled a huge amount, and have 2 stacks to go donate either to the library at work, the library, or whoever will take them.  A lot of the other stuff is still in the process of being thrown out or being recycled. 

About the only thing we don’t have a plan for so far is the huge collection of bobble-heads we have.  There are shelves along two whole walls that are full of mariners, brewers, and assorted other bobble-heads.  There hasn’t even been space for the 2 we’ve gotten this year!

I don’t know what it is, but every time Laura and Easton leave for a week, I end up doing some project that consumes all of my free time, and half of my sleep!  I finally have some time to sleep in and relax, but no;  I do a woodworking or home improvement project instead.  Last May it was redoing the stairs.  This year it was a cabinet for the theater room for dvds, games, books and things.  We couldn’t use a floor standing one, as that corner of the room has an electric fan forced heater that requires clearance space.  So the cabinet had to be a wall mounted one.  Sounds like a project!

Friday night planning session. just me, some notebooks, a tape measure, and a roll of thin mints.  the little notebook is my construction projects one, the big notebook is one I do other stuff in.  The metal template is for drawing phone software user interface elements, but I was mostly just using it as a ruler and straight edge.  I originally designed it without a center divider and having fixed shelves, so I’m glad I slept on it before starting it.  I think this way turned out a lot simpler.

The carcass, and the face frame on top.  The carcass is 3/4” birch ply, the face frame is whatever oak home depot had.  the back cleat is cut at the center at 45 degrees to make it a “french cleat”.  You screw one half of the cleat onto the wall, and then other half of the cleat gets attached to the cabinet.  that makes it super easy to install and remove.

tongues and grooves! grooves and tongues! this always takes forever to set up, but once everything is ready, things go pretty quick.  Getting the dado at the exact right height to make those tongues exactly centered and the right size took forever.

done!  the windows are plexi, with the back sanded to make them semi-opaque.  The inside of the cabinet is stained, the outside painted “sweatshirt gray”, the same color as the walls of the theater room.  We decided on the gray color, as it would hopefully make the shelf blend in and seem smaller than it is, instead of black (to match the other furniture) or white (to match the trim.) Painting is always my least favorite part of these escapades.  I’d much rather be doing the rest of the project than any of the painting.  I used to dislike staining things, but now that is sooooo much simpler to me than painting.  And I think that most of the stains smell better than latex paint, too.

You can’t see it, but the sides and center have shelf pin holes for adjustable shelves.  I had to buy a jig to do that, so the jig and the self centering big that went with that were the one new tool I ended up buying for this project.  I kindof wish I would have gotten the shelf pins that have the fancy sleeves, as the holes aren’t super clean in the plywood.  Next time

here it is, installed.  I still have to make some shelves to go into it, but that’s just a bunch of straight cuts, and maybe some biscuits.  If I’m feeling fancy, I might use the router to route little slots for the shelf pins to fit into so the shelves can’t slide out.

I might also have to find some super rough sandpaper and scuff up the windows a little more, as from the picture above you can still mostly see into them.  With the overhead lights off (they’re on for the picture), you can see a lot more than normal, but it’s still a little too clear. 

I also have to find some hardware for the doors.  I was originally looking for knobs the same size/shape as our entertainment center, but since this cabinet is a different color, it doesn’t need to match exactly.  With the really tall doors, it might need some thinner, taller pulls instead of knobs too.  we’ll see what I can find around… With the area in the corner, I’m thinking about putting some hooks/hangers on the left side, to hang xbox/ps3 controllers or something in that hidden space between the cabinet and the wall.

After a hardware disaster, corrupted backups, professional data restoration, a hardware upgrade complete with more hardware failure (somehow a new power supply i bought at FRY’s was DOA!), everything is mostly back to normal. Everything is running on newer builds of php and mysql, with 4x the processing power and 4x the RAM. I’ve seen mysql crash a few times already, though, so we’ll see how that goes.

If you see somethinng missing or broken, let me know!

Back when i wrote the post about building a pantry, i said that i thought i had used every tool i owned for that project…well… for this project, i used every major tool i own except one: my miter saw. I would have used the miter saw if it had a sharper/newer blade. And if i had a better place to use it than on the floor. And if I had a better one. For the closet doors project, I even bought some new tools that i didn’t have before!

Before:	After:

For more details and more pictures, follow the jump! Read more…

A follow-up on the previous post, where Dad, Jimbo and I built a new deck. After a couple days of rain and some crap falling out of the trees, we realized that the spacing of the deck boards was a little too close. In some places the gap had basicly closed and the boards were touching. But the bigger problem is the crap that falls out of our cedar trees and firs. it was already getting stuck in the cracks, and basicly becomes impossible to get out. So this weeend, Laura and i redid all the decking. well, not all, because the first board stayed where it was, and one board about 2/3 way we didn’t move at all.

Before	After

You can’t really tell much from those, but its much better!

Recently, Laura took a couple weeks of the summer to travel to Australia with her mom, because her dad had to be there for work. While she was in Australia, my dad and brother came out to WA to help me build a deck. Or, more precisely, my brother came out, and we helped my dad build a deck for me.

Before	After!

For more pics and stories, follow the link!
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I built my first thing over the last couple weekends. I use the term “built” very loosely, as in this case, “building” meant routing one edge of a piece of oak, painting it, and screwing some brackets into the wall.

I was originally going to make the brackets, in fact i used the jig saw to make one, but then couldn’t find any keyhole anchor things that were the right size, and while looking for those at home depot, i found metal brackets that match the brushed aluminum style of other stuff in the office.

Having the table saw was nice though, as it gave me a large stable work area to clamp the piece down to route it! So now i have a nice shelf on which to put my growing collection of bobbleheads. 4 Favre’s, 3 Ichiro’s, 1 Cecil Cooper (another on the way!), 1 Yount, 1 Uecker, 1 Sexson, and 1 Dwight Shrute.

Click the pic to go to the flicker page for my bobblehead panorama shot. Here’s a link to the whole set with a couple other pics.

Since the FIOS guy was going to have to, in all likelihood, drill a hole in the wall to install our super high speed innerweb, we were going to have to move everything in my office. Since we were going to have to move everything in my office, we decided to paint my office, too. Once the office was mostly empty, we saw how horrible the carpet was, so we looked into redoing the floor with new carpet, or maybe some laminate floors. We settled on some blue colors to match the world map on the back wall, and some “hemse” laminate “click” flooring from IKEA. To see how it all went, follow the link!

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With Xbox Live, you can get yourself a snazzy little “gamercard” for your website/whatnot by inserting a little html. XFire has the same kindof thing with their “miniprofiles”, but i like the look of the live version better, so i did a little hackery.

Specifics after the jump! bonus points if you know what “famous person” HiroProtagonist is. :p
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