We’re back from New York State from my cousin Jenny’s wedding and it felt good to sleep in my own bed again. Thursday was consumed mostly by travel. Friday we caught up with Mom, Dad, and Renie, and that evening we all gathered at a house on the lake for the pregame party with family who were already in town. The festivities went long into the night, although I bailed out an hour earlier than the diehards. Saturday morning I was drafted to get up early and help set up the tent (all that college catering experience came in handy) and between about six of us we had the venue ready to go by 11AM.
Jenny got hitched in a vibrant green field next to a stand of corn, which provided a lovely backdrop for the ceremony. It was presided over by Uncle Brian, who did his best not to get weepy. When the vows were over we hit the bar and the party was on.
Any good wedding has food, dancing, and cake, and the best ones have fireworks.
A couple of years ago, I got obsessed with finding a large-format laser printer for our home office, and I bought a used HP ColorJet the size of my Jeep off Craigslist. A few months earlier I had the opportunity to horsetrade a Xerox Phaser 790 from a consulting client, so for a short while, we wound up with two huge printers at the house. I couldn’t get the HP to print reliably with fluctuations in humidity and temperature (whenever we opened the office windows), so I decided to bring it into work where it sits in a dry, A/C-regulated office. It’s been a workhorse ever since, printing design flats on 11×17″ paper every week. The 790 was also sensitive to humidity, although the prints we got were richer in color, and after I brought it to the office and cleaned the fuser drum myself, the output cleared up.
Last week my client emailed me to ask if I would be interested in his Phaser 7300, a circa 2004 large-format unit he was storing in his basement. I remembered the quality of output it was capable of, so I quickly agreed to come and pick it up. It’s a big SOB, weighing in at about 160 pounds, so it’ll be tricky to get in the house, but not as hard as the HP was. And it’ll be a great replacement for the B/W unit we’ve got which is refusing to load paper correctly (and which requires a print server to be available to OS X machines). Perhaps the biggest problem will be where to fit the damn thing.
Ooooooh, this scratches a couple of my particular OCD itches: This Guy Turns OCD Hoarding Into Amazing Photos.
I took my laptop on vacation to be able to offload photos from my camera, figuring (rightly so) that I would be snapping away as fast as I could fill the memory card. Along about Wednesday OS X told me my hard disk was almost full and that I needed to free up some space. I ran OmniDiskSweeper and found that my two biggest space hogs were my iPhoto library and Steam. I’m not quite ready to give up Portal and Half-Life, although I haven’t played either in 6 months, and I’ve still got photos from the latter half of 2011 on this drive, so I focused on the obvious.
One of the issues I’m up against is that I had Flickr and iPhoto connected; doing some research I learned that simply erasing files in iPhoto also removed their counterparts from Flickr. So I followed some steps to disconnect the app from the service and it worked painlessly.
Next, I had to manually go through all the photos in 2012 taken with the D7000 and update their EXIF data to 2013 (I’d set the date in the camera wrong) so that iPhoto would refile them in their correct folders. Tonight I’m backing up the 2013 photos to my archive drive and tomorrow I’ll nuke all of 2011 and 2012 on this drive, which should net about 25GB of space. I think it’s time for a 1TB drive in this thing…
One of the things I pulled off the junkyard Traveler last weekend, almost absent-mindedly, was the door rubber from both sides. I wasn’t even thinking about it when I first saw the truck, but as I worked around and inside the cab, I realized it was in very good shape. I’ve been looking for something to cut down on the door rattle on both sides, and having the air leaks plugged when the traveltop is on would be fantastic. I’ve got a set of rubber that came with the top I bought in the spring, but that’s all in one piece and I don’t want to cut it. This set looked great except for a few spots where it had deformed, so I didn’t feel bad about chopping it into smaller sections. I put a vertical strip down the A pillar from the top of the windshield to the dogleg and cut another vertical piece for the B pillar. The lip along the floor is still intact in some areas but there isn’t enough to justify covering it, so I left it. The driver’s door closes perfectly, but the passenger door, which has always been problematic, refuses to shut at all now due to the way it’s hung– inboard and toward the rear of the truck. The rubber is too thick between the edge of the door and the bottom of the A pillar. At some point I’m going to have to adjust it to fit better if I want door seals.
I ordered a set of thin stainless locknuts from Fastenal before our vacation and they arrived today. The replacement hardware I installed on the soft top bows works great, but the locknuts were just a little too fat to let the threads on the bolt reach the nylon, so they kept rattling themselves off. (Brian H. found this out the hard way on our way back from Mt. Airy this weekend). The new set works perfectly, allowing the bolts and bows to move freely but fasten tightly.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
In 1976, a guy tried to jump the St. Lawrence River in a yellow rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. He didn’t make it, but the story is awesome: The Devil at Your Heels. (via Bangshift)
Bennett and Brian were headed up to pick over a Traveler in a junkyard in Mt. Airy today, so I tagged along. It was already gone through pretty well, but after a few hours of effort, we got the right inner fender, driver’s door, power steering pump, and some other goodies off it. I grabbed the starter, a hub assembly, the oil pump, both valve covers, some decent door rubber, and a very clean headlight switch, among other things. Now we need to figure out how we’re getting the engine from Brian’s house to my garage.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.