I don’t have a whole lot of money to throw around right now, but there’s a solid-state Acoustic 120 bass head for sale on Craigslist right now. We had one of these in high school, with a matching 2×15″ cabinet, and I remember it blowing the paint off the walls at volume 5 or so. Eventually I’d like to build a nice retro bass cabinet setup, but it gets further down on my list as time goes on. Besides, I’m more concerned about my acoustic guitar, which has developed a nasty buzz at the second fret on the two middle strings. It didn’t sound this way in practice on Tuesday, and it’s not like I’ve used it to drive railroad spikes since my lesson, so the phantom buzz is disturbing. I hope I haven’t broke my guitar.
I decided instead to go for a tax writeoff and buy a copy of Leopard, as well as brokering the purchase of a new MacBook for my Mom, who is limping along with an old Pismo and wondering why she’s out of room on the hard drive. 6 gigs won’t get very far these days. She’s getting a sweet little setup and I am gaining the ability to troubleshoot her machine remotely, which will save us many headaches down the road.
Now that I have a fancy-fangled iPhone, I may need this info: Five email addresses for converting documents. Say you have a Visio doc not readable on a phone: email it to one of these addresses and it will be returned as a readable PDF file. Sweet!
I love beer. It has been well documented in picture, story, song, and interpretive dance that the Idiot enjoys a cold frosty beverage after a long day in the sun, a stout by the fireplace on a wintry day, or a crisp pilsner with his sushi. I have entertained the idea of brewing my own beer for years now, but due to my other commitments, jobs, and hobbies, pursuing the thought has taken a back seat to other things. It was with excitement, then, that I accepted an invitation to learn to homebrew with the new father of the Scout.
After cracking a hefeweizen and adding some lemon, he stepped me through the process carefully, explaining the methodology and the purpose of all the tools laid out in careful order on the counter. He’s been brewing beer since 1998, and has careful notes of each of his batches, from ingredients to alcohol content. After boiling the water and adding the wheat, we sat and chatted as it cooked. It’s pretty striking how may interests we share, from old trucks to home renovation to camping.
After an hour’s boiling time, we added the beer to a tub of cold water and made plans to reconvene in a week or so for the bottling process. Meanwhile, I am taking baby steps, looking into a kit of my own. Plastic fermenting tub or glass bottle? Red Irish ale, Raspberry wheat, or Oktoberfest lager? The mind reels at the possibilities (and the mouth waters).
Whew, is anyone else relieved that McCain has a commanding lead in the Republican Primary after Super Tuesday? I mean, given the alternatives?
Here’s a transcript of a video Lawrence Lessig (Wikipedia entry) made explaining why he’s choosing to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. While I think it may be just a wee bit naiive, I find myself agreeing with his conclusion.
While not completely vanquished, I’ve got some basic chord changes down pretty good now. My fingers aren’t as handicapped as they once were, and the muscle memory is developing well, to the point that I can go to the D chord without thinking about it—a HUGE improvement. I have “Boys Better” down pretty well, and the changes are clean enough that if I miss one finger I can still fake it.
I looked for some new songs to learn, first thinking that “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here” by Weezer would be good, until I found that the main figure is all power chords. “Just What I Needed” is pretty straight-up, but there are some odd B chords in there that make life interesting. I settled last night on that song and “Radio Free Europe“, which features the tricky F# and B chords, as well as some others I’ve already learned in reverse order.
Probably the biggest thing now is just to keep practicing so that I’m not clamping down so hard on the frets, which leads me to miss notes and make playing painful. I put a good bit of time into it this past week, so I’m feeling pretty good about this afternoon’s lesson.
One of the things I’ve loved about this leaky, creaky house we’ve called home are the warlbledy wooden windows it came with. Apart from the panes that have obviously been replaced due to baseball impact or misadventure, they all have the lovely bubbles, waves, and imperfections that mark century-old glass. Unfortunately, they also suffer from a fatal design flaw: The weight pocket on each side of each window is an open cavity which leaches our warm air outside.
Today I finally got the chance to install two Pullman window counterbalances, the first of what I hope are the solution to this problem. I’ve had them since early December but haven’t had the time to put them in. Here’s how I did it.
Seen here is what I have to deal with throughout the house: wooden casements hung with rope and pulley. Some are rope and some are chain; some windows have a mixture, and some casements have been opened to reattach the weights.
First things first.
I scored and pulled the sash stop molding off the window, exposing the whole front of the window and the nails securing the metal guide on each side. After I carefully pulled the nails along the front side of the guide on each side, I was able to coax the entire bottom sash forward, away from the casement, and put the guides to the side. After some convincing, I was then able to pull the rope out of the channel on either side of the sash (each side was secured with a toothed flooring nail, difficult to remove) and put the sash aside.
Now, here’s the first roadblock. As with everything else in this house, nothing is easy. Lots of other windows I’ve seen have had pulleys installed with visible and accessible screws for simple replacement. Why should ours be similar? As you can see above, there was nothing on the outside of the pulley that hinted at how to remove it. After some exploratory prying and bending, I was able to remove the left-side pulley and found that it was designed to be pounded in with a hammer at the factory, and held in place with teeth on the top and bottom.
Knowing this, it was then simple to bend the top and bottom of the casing and insert a long screwdriver to bend the teeth back. After that, the second pulley popped right out.
Of course, the hole left behind wasn’t large enough to fit the new pulleys, so I had to enlarge them vertically. I made three holes with a drill bit and then used a shiny new 7/8″ wood chisel bought specially for this job to clean up the hole. I did some test fitting for the body of the pulley and then chiseled out a mortise to countersink it flush to the casement. It’s ugly, but with a coat of paint, it’ll clean up well—I have to figure out how to make a rounded mortise with the next one.
Fun with fibers
Next was the boring part. Knowing I wasn’t going to pull the wooden molding off each window, I needed to find a way to get insulation into the cavity. These days, it’s possible to rent a machine and blow fiber insulation into your own attic (why anyone would want to do this themselves is a mystery to me) so I knew I could find the fiber on the consumer market. After some searching, I found it at at the local HD in a 20-pound bag, with the brand name Green Fiber. The nice thing about this stuff is that there’s no fiberglas in it, which makes it easy to work with. I made a wide funnel with some paper, taped it to the casement, and spent the next twenty minutes stuffing insulation into each cavity.
I predrilled holes and put both pulleys into place. From here, it was the reverse of what I’d started with: I attached each pulley tape to the channel of the sash with a sturdy wood screw, then slid each metal guide into the channel on the sides of the sash. Carefully guiding the whole thing back into the casement, I nailed the guides back into place and replaced the blind stop.
And there you have it. The window is in place, and the tape is just about perfect for a counterbalance—I’d say another added pound of pressure on each side would be perfect. It’s too warm outside right now to determine if it’s actually insulating or not, but we’re getting back down below freezing later this week. Total installation time was about 3 hours, but I could probably get that down to 2, maybe an hour and a half, if I could find a good fast way to get the insulation into the cavity. I’m going to do a test with my shop vac on reverse to see how well it might work (and how messy it might get). At $25/pair, window pulleys are a much cheaper alternative to replacing each window with vinyl, so I’m hopeful it will work.