Paul Kimbrel's Musing

Joe and I got the roof of the carport done today. That’s a huge item off the “to-do” list.

I’ve been up late the last several nights with Ben (and, yes, I’ll get some pictures up here soon), so I decided to break out the ‘ole Star Trek movie series my family got me a year or so back. There’s some seriously cool stuff in there, but I have to note…

Star Trek V is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

Ugh. Cliches out the yin-yang. Almost makes Jar Jar tolerable. To its credit, though, it does have one fantastic line…

What does God need with a starship? - Captain Kirk

It’s been a crazy few days, but we final got home with our new little guy, Benjamin. Once I have a chance, I’ll get a picture up here…

I finished wiring the last bedroom last night. And it was a pain ’till the end. I was on my belly in the corner of the attic in black soot, drilling through two petrified 2×4’s with a right-angle drill and a dull drill bit with sweat running into my eyes. It’s hard not to cuss under such circumstances.

But we got the hole drilled and wire ran, and now the entire house is on modern wiring.

Hallelujah!

Well, I just played a video game for half an hour and found out something interesting… I didn’t like it! I spent bunch of time trying to build a character only to be killed in an instant. Wow. What a complete waste of time. Of course, I always knew video games were a complete waste of time, but now that time is especially precious to me… it’s a real waste of time. I’m finding that I really have no more desire to play any sort of video game. I used to be a hardcore gamer. What happened? I guess I just grew up or something.

And I’m listening to more classical music.

Man, when you hit 30… it’s all over (ha ha - I know, it’s just beginning).

I’m starting a project to build a rotor system to track amateur satellites. Just have to prove my geekhood I guess. I’ve created a sub-blog to chronicle my adventures in engineering that, frankly, I’ve never done before.

I’ve already taken a bunch of pictures and am ready for my first post, but it’s late and I hear a little boy screaming upstairs (Me? Sleep? Yea, right…). So it’ll have to wait till tomorrow…

Here’s the link:

http://www.paulkimbrel.com/rotor

When we bought this house, I found it astonishing that it was recommended we get a smoke detector not just on every floor… but in every sleeping space. I really felt the pinch when I started remodeling and found out that, per the build code, all my smoke detectors had to be wired into the house’s wiring and interconnected. Well, I finally got them all wired up and I truly feel that it was worth the effort. We feel much more secure now that we have a smoke detector in almost every room.

But I always felt that installing carbon monoxide detectors were overkill. I mean - how many people have really died from CO poising?

Well, yesterday, it was almost my family.

Tonya called me at work and towards the end of our conversation, she mentioned she had a headache. She thought it was the front moving through ahead of the rain. I didn’t give it much thought. But then she said that Eli woke up and was acting like he had a headache. She thought it was the weather for him, too. But for some reason a vision of my hot water heater popped in my head. Then she said Clayton woke up nauseous and pale. That’s when I started to panic.

See, when the previous owner of our house had the hot water heater put in, whoever did it cut a corner and left the old vent hood in place. Newer water heaters already have a hood in place and don’t need an extra one. They just left it because it meant one less pipe to cut. I recall a contractor mentioning to me that I should ditch the extra hood to prevent exhaust from escaping into the basement. I put it on my “to do - sometime” list and forgot it.

Well, that hood would not leave my mind and I had Tonya dig up the carbon monoxide detector. Yep, we had one. It was one that plugged into the wall and kids never left it alone. So we put it on the shelf. She plugged it in and a few minutes later - it went off.

So they went shopping for a bit in the clean fresh air while I came home to figure out what was going on. I cranked up the hot water heater to get it going and held a mirror up to the exhaust hood. Sure enough - it got foggy immediately. My “to do” list got a quick shift.

My father-in-law, Jim, came over and helped me pull and replace the extra hood with a piece of pipe. It was a quick job and we saw an immediate result. The mirror didn’t fog up and we got good suction up the hood.

And we now have four carbon monoxide detectors throughout the house.

The moral of this story…

If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector - get one! If you have one carbon monoxide detector - get another one! Don’t mess around with this. When I think about what I could have lost, it scares me to death.

Well, I just took the plunge on IE7.  I just wanted to get rid of the yellow shield on my system tray, really.  Well, it’s all slick looking I guess and I’m sure those tabs a gas for people who like tabs (not I).  But the address bar really bugged me.

Why, oh why?

Every application with a menu bar since the cave man first clicked “start” has been at the top of the window.  EVERY ONE!  Why, all of the sudden, is the address bar at the top?  What sort of innovation is that??  Well, poop on it.  I want my menu on top.

Well, I did a bit of Googling  (as I’m sure you did if you’re reading this) and I found how to move the menu up.  Well, actually, move the address bar down.  6 of one…

If you’ve never used “regedit” or you don’t know anything about your registry, get used the menu bar where its.  Don’t do this.  Please.  And don’t blame me if you screw it up…

First - close all your IE sessions.

Then go into your registry editor (”Start->Run” and type “regedit” and hit enter - but I’m sure you know that).  Dive down into the HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ InternetExplorer \ Toolbar \ WebBrowser key.  Right click on the right hand side (where the keys are) and add a new “DWORD” key.  Call it “ITBar7Position” and give it a value of “1″.

That’s it!  Now, this isn’t perfect.  I also had the Google toolbar for IE and the address bar wound up ABOVE it (rather than below it).  Sheesh.  Why they couldn’t just make the address bar a toolbar like it was in IE6, I’ll never know.

As some of you may know, we got hit by lightning July 3th. What an ordeal that turned out be. Fortunately, our insurance covered the hit and we were able to get everything that was fried replaced (minus our deductible). Computer, router, TV, printer… even our furnace was damaged.

But, oh, the printer… We order a printer through a Amazon that was identical to the one we lost. It was through an Amazon 3rd Party and the printer was billed as a new printer. However, when it arrived, it was a very, very used printer in horrendous condition. After calling the company that sold me the printer a zillion times (with no - read: no returned calls from the company), I had to issue a charge back on my Visa.

Thank God for Visa…

Well, the charge back finally came through and were able to get a new printer. I went to the store (Office Depot) this time. That way I knew what I was going to get. It’s an HP Color LaserJet 2605dn. Awesome printer. It’s a color laser jet and has a duplexer so we can print both sides with ease. And it takes up a much smaller foot print than our other printer. And it’s much faster, too. 10 ppm color!

A few morals from this story…

1. Always use your Visa! They offer some of the best consumer protection out there…
2. 85% positive is lousy enough feedback to avoid an Amazon 3rd Party Partner.
3. When calling a company on a screwed up order - log every person you talk to and every date and time you called.
4. Never order the last printer of its kind - there’s always an newer equivalent for a better price.
5. Oh, and always unplug your electronics and cable connections during a lightning storm. Even if you live in town!

Fortunately, we’re back in shape after the whole ordeal. But I really don’t want to go through that again. I still have a piece of junk printer taking up space in my basement. Another month and I can pitch the thing.

I just got the newsletter from my web hoster, Dreamhost.  They have multiplied everyone’s disk space by 10.  And they doubled our bandwidth.  Sooooo… I have 200 Gigs of hard drive space and over 2 terabytes of bandwidth.  To boot - they’re increasing my space 1 gigabyte a week.

Crazy…