My LASIK Experience Part 1

Making the Choice

      I have been thinking about doing Lasik for many years now.  Ever since I was in the third grade I've needed corrective lenses.  Well actually, when I was in the third grade I thought glasses were the coolest thing ever and lied on my eye exam so I would get them (I did feel guilty about that later and confessed, but I fear the damage was already done and while I would have eventually needed glasses anyways, I had hastened the time table!). 
    Since then, my eye sight has been getting progressively worse, but I didn't mind too much.  I had to use glasses or contacts to see no matter what, so it didn't matter if my eye sight was negative 2.75 or negative 5.75 (which is where it's at now).  What I do care about is I tend to wake up in the middle of the night feeling slightly confused and not being able to see tends to freak me out in these instances.  For a long time I wore night and day contacts and that was blissful!  30 days of uninterrupted vision.  Unfortunately, a couple years ago I went to a doctor by a place of previous employment who was lack luster.  They were trying to market themselves at rich trendy people (which is a double strikeout for me), while providing sub quality merchandise.  It was a miserable year for my eyes as the contacts just never seemed to fit quite right.
    Thus, for the past 2 to 3 years I have been unable to wear my night and day contacts.  This year, I finally decided that it was time to get serious about checking out Lasik.  My eye sight was stable and I had the choice of either shelling out for contacts year after year, or make an upfront investment for hopefully 20ish years of not needing glasses (well after 15ish years I'll have to start getting reading glasses I'm sure, but such is the fate of age).
    It was time to bust out google.

 Choosing a Doctor

    The first couple of places I contacted where places I had heard advertised on the radio.  People like Key-Whitman, Kleiman/Evangelista, and Boothe.  Key-Whitman was good, but they require you to come back every year for an eye exam that won't be covered by your vision insurance in order to keep their "lifetime warranty" on your eyes.  Kleiman/Evangelista were good, but too expensive (in the over 3K range), Boothe... well not many people had anything bad to say about the surgery itself, but everyone did say he was a bit of a jerk and when things did go wrong he would avoid you and send you to someone else.  He was very much in it for getting people in and out and gone.
    After a bit of google searching, I found two more options South Western Medical Center (which I ended up not contacting so can't provide any information on) and Dr. Tylock.  After a pleasant talk with one of their finance people, I decided to come in for a "free" exam.  Free in the Lasik industry, for the record, means $150.  They get away with calling it free because if you decide to get Lasik from them, then the cost of the exam is applied to the cost of the surgery. Of course, that means that if you don't want it from them then you're out $150.  It seems underhanded to me, but everyone I called had this exact same setup, so at least it was underhanded across the board!

The Exam

     The exam was a rather quick affair.  I came in and waited for a bit, was taken to a back waiting area and then in quick succession had some photos of my eyes taken, had an eye exam to confirm my prescription, had my pupils dilated, some bright lights to check out the insides of my now dilated eyes, another eye exam, my eyes number, and a cell sample taken from the surface of them.  Then I was charged for the exam, set up a time for the surgery, was given a pair of sunglasses and Amy drove me home.
     Funny story about them dilating my eyes.  The guy said, "Okay, we're going to put these drops in your eyes and they will burn a little" at which point he came in to put the drops in my eyes.  I stopped him and said "Wait, if they're going to burn, why are we putting them in my eyes?"
     He looked a little shocked at this, like "no one has ever asked me this before, they just let me do it".  What he actually said was "We need to dilate your eyes".  Now call me crazy, but that's not actually an explanation.  That is telling me what the burning drops do, but not telling me why we need to do them.  I could tell I was really messing with his flow though and let him do it.  For the record, my eyes burn worse when I get a bit of shampoo in them.  I also found out later, from another guy, that the reason for it was the dilated pupils let them see the inside of my eye better.
     Another one of these moments happened when a doctor said "Okay we're going to put these drops in your eye that will numb them".  Why on earth they would immediately start to move after saying these things without waiting for confirmation from the patient is beyond me.  I stopped this guy again and asked "Why are we numbing my eyes?  Are you going to be poking them?"  There was an uncomfortable silence that yelled "yes" Before he gave a noncommittal answer. 
     Later when he brought the poking stick out and moved towards me without so much as a how-do-you-do? I stopped  him again and said "what is this now?"  I tell you, questions really catch these guys off guard!  I finally did get a straight answer though.  The poky stick was actually a swab stick and it was to take a sample of the cells on the surface of my eye in much the same way as a doctor swabs your tonsils to check for tonsillitis. 

The Aftertaste

    All things said, the exam was a very pleasant experience.  Despite them being floored by me asking a question, they were extremely friendly, they were clearly paying attention to how I was feeling the whole time and it was obvious that had I been freaking out they would have taken the time to work with me rather than strapping down my wrists and moving this along.  At the end of it, we talked to a guy to schedule my Lasik (which is today in a couple hours!) and he was very nice.  There were no high pressure gimmicks, no pressure to get it done.  The most he did was when I was trying to decide if I could do this today, he said, "if you like, you can schedule it for today and then call us to cancel it if you change your mind".  To follow up on this they actually called me yesterday to confirm that today was going to work out and just to make sure we didn't need to change things.
     Having dealt with very push salesmen in the past (and even at some of the Lasik places I called), I was extremely impressed with their professionalism.  Rather than say I felt I was at a car lot, I felt like I was at a doctors office where he was saying "this is an optional procedure, we can schedule it if you want it, but it's ultimately up to you"

Hopefully in a couple days I can write how the surgery itself went and hopeful it will have been as pleasant as the exam.

My LASIK Experience Part 1

When 1 = 2

(Grandma inspired short story time!)

We thought we were so smart.  We had the universe mapped out and explained.  We knew the life cycle of the very universe itself!  Or so we thought.  There’s so much to say, but so very little time left.  Where to begin explaining all this?

I suppose we’ll start with an example.  At the university where I teach part time as an advanced math instructor, each semester I make sure to run through the dangers of mathematical fallacies in their work.  In the example I start off by letting A=B, then by the end and some liberal use of mathematical principles, specifically using the variables of “A” and “B” to hide the fact that I divide by zero at one point, I end up with the answer that 1=2.  It’s a humorous exercise that’s always good for some chuckles and shocked expressions, but my point is what if you actually based your formula off this?  If you didn’t catch that you were letting 1=2 you could write massively complex formulas based of seemingly legitimate simple equations.  My application for them was to not be conceited and gloss over the basic algebra stuff just because they were in an advanced math class. How ironic that I failed to heed my own warnings! 

What does this have to do with anything you might be asking at this point?  I’m getting there, I promise, but first let’s go to the beginning when I first began to thing that something was amiss.

My first glimpse of the impeding disaster came in the 7th grade during science class.  I may teach advanced mathematics part time, but my passion is astronomy, and it started right in this class.  My science book explained how they had *proof* that the universe was expanding because they could look at the distant stars through a special telescope that analyzed colors and when they did so they saw every star had a shift in it’s natural color towards red.  This proved that the stars were getting more distant from one another.  In fact, the book said, a blue shift, a sign that the stars were getting closer had never been observed!  On the very next page, it told how the Milky Way, our galaxy, was approaching another galaxy and that in a few million years the two might absorb each other and become a single galaxy.

This news stopped me cold.  Oh I didn’t care that someday millions of years after I died the earth might be in peril.  I cared that they had just told me a galaxy was approaching ours, yet there had never been a blue shift, a sign of objects coming towards you, observed.  How could this be?

I should have left well enough alone, I should have continued in my pleasant ignorance with the rest of the world, but I had to have the answers and I charged ahead foolhardily!

I scraped and saved every penny I could from teach and devoted every bit of free time I had to building a series of small drones that would fly into deep space out beyond our solar system and perform high speed tests approaching and leaving one another at various angles.'

I should have grown suspicious when my lab was ransacked twice, and then seized by the government as suspected terrorist activity but I was too blinded to see the signs!  I went underground and through various secret donors completed my work for a fourth time.  I hid my drones on various private shuttle flights and waited patiently for the data to start coming in.

At first everything was going exactly as expected, as they approached one another there was a subtle blue shift and as the departed there was a red.  I wanted more though and so I sent them out farther and farther from one another and that’s when everything came crashing down.

None of the data made any sense anymore.  The drones were suddenly impossibly far from each other, then right next to one another. They couldn’t seem to travel in a straight line towards another it was if they thought they were headed towards each other then on the next signal find that they had passed each other or one was headed off into empty space.

Then they started slowing down.  The data showed their engines were running at the same speed, other drones could see the light from their engines, but they weren’t moving as fast as they should have and their internal time stamps were becoming corrupted often being weeks too fast or too slow than they should have been.

It wasn’t until I saw a picture of one of them suddenly being crushed when I realized what had happened.  Most people, when they think of space think of nebula and stars, galaxies and great distant planets, but the truth of it is most of it is black emptiness.  In this darkness with no light to absorb there is no way to see a black hole.

My little drones had flown right into a cluster of these behemoths each one having found a perfect balance pulling at and being pulled by surrounding black holes.

I made a new batch of drones, these equipped with delicate sensors to detect the slightest pull of gravity and sent them out mapping the space around our solar system.

We are surrounded.  There is no danger from them, oh no, they are in perfect balance.  Some of them are large, and some no larger than a penny, but we are surrounded.  It was then I realized that all our great knowledge about the universe was built on mathematical fallacies!  We thought we had mapped out the life of the stars, but it is a lie!  Black holes don’t just suck in matter they bend light itself.  All our constellations, the nebula, they are nothing more than the light of our own sun in its life being bent and refracted back among the black holes until they eventually find their way back to us.  The great white giants are just our own sun whose size and color is being distorted like a fish under rippling water.  All of our great assumptions built up about life in the universe were nothing more than bad math built upon an improvable assumption to give us the illusion of superiority, of being learned!  Those red shifts we see are just the result of the black holes stretching our the light as they bend and contort around the large black holes, or as the light is diffused by passing to close to one of the micro black holes.

It worse though.  So much very worse.  You see black holes distort time as well.  We are caught within a bubble of time being bounced and bent all around us keeping our sun forever young while the rest of the universe, vast and untamed, ages and dies all around us.  How many eons have passed the quiet earth by while the rest of the species of the universe grow smarter, while they war and rage against one another?  While their own suns die out?

What might a race who has survived to the very end of the universe do to keep from going quietly in that last night?  Might they learn to navigate the cluster of black holes that have kept us safe and isolated thus far?

And what might such a race do when they arrived in our time locked bubble and find such an ignorant and undeveloped species as ourselves.  A species that stands between them and a sun kept forever young locked in time?  What did man do to undeveloped species it encountered on its unending march of progress?

The government knew, they tried to stop me from finding out to let me live out my life in comfort and peace, but now my devices have let me see the truth too.  The north star isn’t a star at all.

We thought we were so smart, but in the end all our great knowledge was built on the belief that one equaled two.

When 1 = 2

A D.I.Y. Kind of Post

(Edit: For those following my wife's pintrest, the under cabinet lighting is further down) Last month I needed to get the leaves mulched up in my yard before the warm weather started down here.  Unfortunately, the choke cable on the lawn mower was crimped at some point and the cable wouldn’t pull the choke far enough back to actually rev up.  If I got down there and pulled it back then the choke would sit far enough back to go, or at least it would until I hit a bumpy spot on the ground and the choke would jostle just enough forward for the engine to die.

My dad taught me a lot about repairing broken things rather than buying a whole new item.  But as I was looking at the cost to buy a replacement cord another lesson rang true in my ears.  Don’t be afraid to make it yourself!  A silly little cable would cost about $50, but I could buy some guy-wire and cable clamps for $5 and do it myself.

Here it is attached to the choke on the engine.  I pulled the old damaged wire out of it’s tube and reused the tube to keep it looking nice

And here it is attached to the choke bar.  I figure I’ll have to tighten the cable again by the end of the year but for a tenth of the cost that’s a price I’m willing to pay!

Next up on my DIY list was my kindle (Edit: here's a link to the instructable I made for this DIY lighted Kindle case).  I like to read in bed for a little bit before going to sleep (a trait I inherited from my mother), but I can’t keep the light on or else Amy can’t fall asleep.  I’ve been using a battery powered reading light, but I don’t like how quickly the battery dies (it’s two of those watch batteries CR2032).  I wanted one of those lighted kindle cases that use the Kindle’s battery, but they cost $60!  I already had a light and a case though, so why not make my own lighted case?

First up was the issue of actually getting power from the kindle.  Located on the back of the kindle (4th Generation) are two metal pads.  When face down the one on the left is the positive terminal and the one on the right is the negative (which means when face up, positive is on the right and negative is on the left) I tried a couple methods of interfacing with them before I realized that they were recessed.  A quick dollop of solder fixed that issue!

Next up I measured and hot glued a couple metal bars to the case to connect with the kindle’s metal pads.  I added some solder where they would connect to make sure I had a good connection and soldered my power wire to the correct bars (the white cable is the positive one and the bare, copper, cable is the negative)

On the other end I drilled a hole into the battery chamber of the reading light and soldered the cables to the right terminals.  I had to come back latter and add a resistor because the light was much too bright.  It turns out the kindle puts out (by my estimation) 55mA but an LED needs more like 20mA.  This made is shine extra bright and would eventually decrease it’s life span.  Besides Amy couldn’t sleep with it because it was so bright!  The resistor dropped the current to a nice dim, but very readable level.

Here’s the finished design all light up and spiffy

Tucked away and off for normal use.

Last up on my DIY shelf was some under cabinet lighting (Edit: Here's a link to the instructable I made for this with better instructions).  Amy let me know that there just not enough light under our cabinets.  We turn the microwave under light on, but it’s just not enough sometimes.  See?



It’s not too dark, but just dark enough to make seeing hard.  Especially since you end up standing between the counter and the light source. So for Amy’s birthday, we decided to get her under cabinets lights.
Our cabinets are rather shallow on the bottom so unless I wanted a bunch of florescent lights jutting down all over the place I needed to find a better solution!  The answer came in the form of LED lights.  I had wanted to make my own strip using very bright LEDs but it turned out it was cheaper to buy a premade, waterproof LED 5050 light strip with 3M adhesive tape on the back by far than it was to make it myself. ($6.50 for a 1 meter strip ain’t bad!)  I measured it out and decided to give myself some wiggle room and got 2 meters worth

LEDs can’t be run of 120V AC power though, these strips need 12V DC.  I though about making my own convertor, but decided to let a professional do it and just bought an $8 AC->DC adapter off Amazon.  It takes 120V AC and turns it into 12V DC (up to 6 amps, which is more than I need for this, but it gives me the option of having up to about 6 meters of light strips if I ever chose to expand this out.)



My next issue was how to turn them on.  I really wanted a light switch to turn them on and off with but I have tile backing all around the cabinets!  Fortunately, there’s already a light switch that controls a florescent light above the sink. I cut off the power cord from the light and redirected it above the cabinets.  Then I cut off the plug from the adapter and twisted them all up together with a cable twist cap in a junction box neatly our of sight.

The two white cables on the left are the power in and power back out to the florescent light and the single black cable is the AC cord to the adapter.  As a side note, this is all really safe as I both knew and tested to confirm that turning off the light switch 100% killed the power to this cable.  I didn’t do anything with power running.



Here’s a shot of the ac adapter.  AC power comes in from the left and DC out to the right.  If you can't tell, this is basically a laptop power adapter, all that maters is that it puts out 12V DC and can supply enough current. I cut the end of the cable off the DC side and wired my cables to it.  I bought some red (positive) and black (negative) wires from Lowe’s for $10 total and wrapped them up in some white tubing from Fry’s Electronics for another $8 to make them look pretty against my white cabinets.



After connecting to the power supply, I sent the wires down behind the cabinets.  Conveniently, I had an empty space behind the cabinets where they met in the corner so I didn’t have to drill through the cabinets themselves!  I had 3 sections I wanted to light, so I sent a strand to each section.  This picture shows the white tubing I put the wires through



Once I finally got everything said and done, here’s a picture of the LED strip turned off under the cabinet



And here it is lit up.  You can tell they put out a lot of light.



Here’s the kitchen with no light and the curtains down (it’s around 2 PM so it’s pretty bright in our backyard)



And here’s the same area with the LED strip lit up!  The picture doesn’t really do it justice it looks *amazing* and since it’s so low profile, you can’t see the strip under the cabinet and the wires are nailed in place with some wire holder so you can’t see them either!



Here’s a picture with the lights turns on and the rest of the kitchen lights turned on too.  It really shows how bright these strips are!  I probably should have bought a “cool” white color instead of a “warm” white and the cool white is more of the yellow light that we’re used to and the rest of the kitchen uses, whereas the warm white (or pure white) has an almost blue tinge to it.  Still after a couple hours to get used to it, it doesn’t really make a difference.



Here’s one last picture I took.  It’s after dark with all the lights in the house turned off except for the light strips.  They are *really* bright!  And coming in at around $40 where other solutions I’ve seen cost $100 for just one cabinets means that the average I saved on these three projects is something around 85% the cost of buying pre-made items and doing them myself!

A D.I.Y. Kind of Post

Going once, going twice, going.. wait what where'd it go?

For those in the forum over on the Raspberry Pi site, this is one of the Admins Abishur

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, these are strictly my views about the launch and should not be viewed as a reflection the opinions of said foundation.

Today the Raspberry Pi, a $25 credit card sized, low powered PC announced that they had two resellers that were officially accepting pre-orders… except that one of them wasn’t? And the other one went down for “scheduled site maintenance” shortly after the Raspberry Pi Foundation made its announcement. So what on earth happened?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) decided a long time ago that the fairest way sell the boards were on a first come first serve basis. There have been a lot of people claiming that this was an idiotic way to sell a product, as an individual who did not get one of the boards I disagree with this assessment. First come first serve is how it works for Microsoft, for Apple, for Sony, and for Nintendo. It’s how it works every time you walk into a grocery store or department store or even every time you drive up to a gas station.

One alternative suggested, that I know of, has been to do a lotto where members were chosen at random to be able to buy a board. This has *several* glaring issues.

                 1)   You’re no more likely to get a board with a lotto than first come, so everyone would still be complaining (let’s face it, the biggest whiners are not whining because they truly believe this to be unfair, but they didn’t get one)

                 2)  Which list of people do you use? Twitter subscribers, forum members, mailing list subscribers? In any of those cases it’s highly probable that there are people who have joined it multiple times with different e-mail addresses; as such they would get a double (or triple!) chance of winning making the lotto unfair.

So the RPF worked all the details out with Premier Farnell and RS Components two rather hefty UK electronics site. Here’s where the failure happened, despite ample warning and planning on the RPF’s end, for some reason the sites just plain ignored the warning. I can’t stress how much I think the RPF did everything they needed to in order to facilitate a smooth launch. They created a very simple static front page with all the information we’d need, they gave the suppliers a good warning, they were up and ready to answer questions via twitter (keeping the strain off their servers in order to make sure everyone got a fair chance to see the announcement without crashing their server).

Where things did break down is that neither Farnell nor RS took the appropriate steps to handle things. They should have given the RPF a link taking customers straight to the Raspberry Pi (R-pi on the forum) product page and made sure that page was cached to reduce strain on their server. They didn’t and as a result their sites crashed under the traffic (Farnell tried to disguise it as a "scheduled site maintenance but we know the score now, don't we?).

They should have made it very clear on how to order from a different country. I live in the US and spent quite a bit of time between time out errors of their site crashing trying to figure out which version of their site I needed to order it from. I actually set up an account on RS’ site only to realize post ex facto that I was on a UK only version of the site. I’m told that they’ll contact us in order that we expressed interest on their site (that might be my misunderstanding something though), if that’s the case and I’m one of the lucky first ones, will I be able to get it shipped to the US or will I lose my spot in line so to speak?

Making matters worse for some reason RS had the bright idea to not start accepting pre-orders today. They decided that they would just see how many people were interested in it and start selling it “later this week” RS *should* have told the RPF about this, well I guess the truth is that RS *should* have actually taken pre-orders like they told the RPF they were going to. Instead we’re all walking around on pin and needles wondering when they’ll start accepting pre-orders on the stoke they’re about to get.

Now I stayed up late last night fully expecting to not get an R-pi. I figured midnight would hit, I’d run to the store, click on the link and while setting up an account have them sell out. I was okay and prepared for that. I was, however, not expecting to spend 2 hours trying to make it to either site only to discover that they were both sold out and based on the number of pre-orders, expecting it to be April before I could expect my Pi.

Poor RPF, y’all have my complete sympathy in all this! Y’all have done nothing but act with intelligent business sense, how horrible to have that screwed up by distributers who frankly I’ve come to expect much more out of! Still, I, like so many other out there, am placing my bets on still being able to nab one of the boards from RS’ initial stock! *sigh* oh well, I’ve waited 9 months for the thing already that’s nothing compared to the 6 years the RPF has been working on this!

Hope you guys (Liz, Eben, David, Gert, James, Jack, et el) are enjoy a well deserved break after all this fiasco! Y’all have been really quite brilliant through all of it!

Going once, going twice, going.. wait what where'd it go?

DIY “Smart” Power Outlet

A long time ago (a little over three years ago), I wrote a post about how I modified my PS2 with a hard drive and some software that would let me back up games I owned to a hard drive.  The benefits being I have my entire game collection at my finger tips, as well as it saves the dvd laser (an extremely costly replacement if it ever goes  out).

Well I found a way to do this same thing with my Wii!  Rather than having an internal hard drive (or SD card in the Wii’s case), it uses an external hard drive attached via USB.  As a side note, the Xbox 360 has this feature built into its system rather than unfairly punishing its client base by saying such software should be outlawed.

Anyway, soap box ranting aside, I have it all set up in my fireplace shelf I set up (as seen in my last blog entry).  The only issue is that I really like the curtain my wife made and it’s a hassle to move it back and flip on the hard drive when EVERYTHING else is automated.  I even used a special type of remote (JP1, a subject I’ve also talked about previously) that I programmed the elaborate sequence needed to turn on the various devices in my entertainment system.

I could have left it on all the time but A) That’s a  waste of electricity and B) The external hard drive enclosure I use is passively cooled (it doesn’t have a fan on it).  It get’s a little toasty in my fireplace shelf and having the hard drive on for a couple hours makes it hot to the touch, so leaving it on 24/7 seemed like a very bad idea to me. 

So I began to search for for a power strip or outlet that would automatically turn on when the Wii turned on.  I was able to find some eventually, but they all cost in the range of 30+ dollars.  That’s when I decided it was about time to get out my DIY tools!

I knew my basic idea, I want my hard drive to turn on with the Wii, but the Wii doesn’t really have a lot of external outputs that I can work with… pretty much just a pair of USB ports really.  Well thanks to my job with Prime Controls, I’ve learned a lot about relays and there in was the solution to my dilemma!  I set out to purchase a Solid State Relay that would activate whenever USB voltage was present (or for those who care about the technical side of it.  I needed a SSR that would output a range of AC power that included the 120V AC put out by your every day home power outlet, and whose triggering input voltage covered the 3-5V DC power provided by a standard USB plug.  I know technically USB puts out 5 volts, but I didn’t want an under voltage on my USB to mess up my whole project.)

The only catch was everywhere I looked all the SSRs ran in the 20 dollar or more range.  All things considered, I suppose that’s not too bad a price, but it’s more than I was willing to pay.  If it would cost me $20 to do it myself, there’s not much point in not shelling out an extra 10 bucks to buy a fancy pre-made one.

In desperation I went to Fry’s Electronics, only to be met by a trio of dumb stares from clerks who had never even HEARD of an SSR, and they all work at a desk literally 5 feet from the relays!  Fortunately, one of the workers referred me to an electronic shop called Tanner’s Electronics.  I WILL be remembering this place.  It’s pretty much what radio shack and Fry’s both started off as before they ditched the small electronics and knowledgeable employees in favor of over priced wires and minimal wage high school kids.  It’s AMAZING.  They had what I wanted for 8 bucks.

So I spend some time assembling it all this evening.  I took one of the many printer USB cables I had lying around and cut off the printer end to provide triggering power for my SSR (it tells my relay to turn the switch to the on position).  Then I repurposed a computer power cabled to provide the AC power to the outlet.  I opted for a single outlet rather than a whole power strip because I didn’t need a whole power strip taking up space.

Here’s a photo of the final set up.

You can see both the AC plug and my USB cable.  They go into the first box where I have the SSR mounted to the lid of the box.   I had heard that SSRs need a heat sink to work without over heating so I’m using the box to act as a heat sink.  I also applied a good amount of thermal paste between the box and the relay to aid in getting rid of heat, but so far it doesn’t seem to generate much heat… but the amount of power I’m pulling down it is pretty small so I’m not too surprised.  Finally, the last cable goes from the SSR to my little outlet box.  Anything plugged into those outlets will only turn on when power is going over the USB cord.  Which of course means if I ever wanted to, I could just plug a power strip into one of the outlets and have my very own “Smart” power strip.  Total project cost?  Under $20 if you had to buy all the stuff I already had on end, for me I think it cost under $15  (and it was only that much since I had to buy the two enclosures rather than fitting it all into one box).

DIY “Smart” Power Outlet

On Shelves and TV Mounts

Wow, long time no blog, huh?  Much of the reason is because I’ve started a new job with a place called Prime Controls.  We program PLCs (the things that controls pumps and stuff at water/wastewater plants, oil rigs, and even Dr. Pepper!).  It a completely new field to me and its taking a while to get into the swing of things.

But enough about that!  As the title says this is about shelves and TV mounts.  Amy and I have constantly been working on the TV location since we moved into our home.  The only place for it really is on the fireplace, but there are lots of things in the way there. 

So the first thing we did was take the mantle down.  It protruded far away from the wall meaning the TV had to sit on the very end of the TV stand.  One good push from the cat would knock that TV right off to its untimely demise.

With the mantle gone things were good for a while.  The TV could sit far back on the stand and was safe from curious cats.  But the area itself  still created a lot of clutter.  Wire were strewn all about, the stand itself was large and detracted from the natural feel of the fireplace, it just didn’t work for us.

Ideas were tossed all around, we considered knocking a hole in the wall next to the fireplace and making a recessed shelf area where all the equipment could sit so we could get rid of the stand and mount the  TV, but we didn’t want to do anything so drastic to the home.  It didn’t really seem like the kind of thing that was good for the resale value of a home one day. 

Suddenly it came to us.  We already can’t use the fireplace because the TV is in the way (and because we had covered up the hole with Plexiglas to cut down on drafts), so why not build a shelf in the fireplace to hold the equipment?

But no no, it wasn’t enough to just slap some wood in there and call it a shelf, I wanted to maximize the space available to me.  So I talked to a co-worker (and the guy who got me this job), Colin, on how I should cut the wood to get it angled right (he’s been doing a lot of wood working too, so I knew he’d know) and lo and behold, this is the final product!

Yes, I packed it to the hilt with electronics!  But the best part of all, it Amy made a curtain for it to cover it all up!  So with the TV mounted it now looks like this:

  Yes for whatever reason when this house was made 30 years ago they put the fireplace off to the right instead of centering it.  We decided to center the TV on the wall rather than over the fireplace.  It’s hard to tell, but off to the left, behind the wedding photo is a little white cord cover that is filled to capacity with wires.  All in all, Amy and I are quite pleased with the way it turned out, it really brings our living room up to a much more modern condition and feels… adultish rather than college dormish.

On Shelves and TV Mounts

Does Anyone Else Hear the Sound of Water?

This Super Bowl weekend brought the following things:

1) An embarrassment to Jerry Jones as his ultra elitist stadium failed to have enough seating for everyone he sold tickets to (not to mention all the sound, and operations issues)

2) An embarrassment to Texas as our power grid couldn’t handle the influx of people and cold weather at the same time

3) The sound of rushing water and an impromptu lake forming out in my garage

That’s right, when the weather finally warmed up on Sunday, Amy and I were shocked to find that a pipe in our garage burst.  Fortunately, it was not attached to the water heater, but rather it led to a faucet in the backyard.  I had placed one of those nifty faucet covers over it, but apparently it just wasn’t enough to protect this poor little guy.

When we finally discovered the leak it had accumulated about 2-3 inches of water in our garage.  Thankfully, our garage is a step or two lower than the rest of our home so the only thing that got wet was some concrete floors.  After turning off the water to the house and sweeping the water out of the garage I discovered some interesting things.

The first was that the previous owner of this home clearly experienced this problem as there was replacement piece of drywall covering the exact location where the pipe had burst.

The second was a reconfirmation that the previous owner of this house, was not the handiest of men.  That or he always got his repairs done by the lowest bidder, which in this neighborhood is about 10 minutes east, you’ll find a group of very handy, hardworking men who will work dirt cheap all standing outside a gas station starting at 6 AM, and then bought sub-par parts for them to work with.

Here’s a picture of the pipe that burst. 

Now I’d like to point out that the shiny silver pipe in the wall is the faucet I purchased to replace this broken pipe and faucet.  I had to cut off the pipe at the elbow and sweat on a new piece (thanks again Mr. Pait for teaching me how to do that!).  Here’s a picture of the burst  pipe after the fact.

If you can’t tell, that pipe is paper thin, it’s really not the kind of pipe you should use in a location that is going to have to endure cold temperatures, but you could probably get away with it if you at least put some insulation around it.  It only costs 2 bucks for a six foot long section of copper pipe insulation, come on!

Regardless, in its place, I’m putting an anti-freeze faucet.  The concept with this faucet is that every time you turn the faucet off, it empties the pipe behind the faucet preventing the pipe from bursting from the cold (If you don’t quite get it, just google “Anti-freeze faucet)

Unfortunately, since I had to cut off some of the pipe, things didn’t quiet connect.  So I just brought the faucet inside the garage for a little bit until I have a Saturday when I can solder on a little extension.

The final thing Amy and I did this weekend was to take the mantel off the fireplace.  We have our TV there and the mantel is just in the way.  We were hoping to place it higher on the brick, but it turned out that rather than being attached via mason screws, they had actually replaced a layer of brick with wood and nailed into the wood.  So we decided just to put it into the attic until we leave the home or we decide we want it back.

We also decided that we wanted to prevent our cat from crawling into the fireplace, but didn’t want to shell out the bucks for a some sliding glass doors in front of it.  Amy mom’s had the excellent suggestion of putting Plexi-glass to cover the opening, a trip to Home Depot later and here’s the results!

(For those interested, other fun home projects Amy and I have done include putting lights in the attic, putting on a water heater blanket, and if the weather get’s warm and dry enough for us to finish it, rain gutters)

Does Anyone Else Hear the Sound of Water?