installing lights

so today i decided to replace the recessed lighting in the rooms upstairs with some dome lights. (the recessed lights didn't actually provide very much light into the rooms they were in.) the problem was interesting because dome lights expect a standard circular light outlet where as the recessed lighting fixtures have their own special mounting bracket. since i'm renting this place i didn't want to make permanent changes like ripping out the existing brackets and replacing them with new ones. (also, i don't have access to the attic space above the lights and it is filled with insulation anyway, so i wouldn't want to dig through that. i ended up cutting some 22 gauge sheet metal to the same size as the recessed mounting fixtures, mounting a standard circular light outlet to the sheet metal, and installing that over the recessed lighting fixtures. then i was easily able to mount the dome lights. here are some pictures of what i did.

photos again... yawn.

are you bored yet? if not then check out photos from the fire arts festival, jujus bday, and my parents recent visit to sf to see our new place.

more photo madness

well, this long weekend i was busy with a bunch of crap. me and ronda rented a moving van to haul what little large furniture we have to our new house. basically a bed, a large table, a futon, and my kegerator. (we also moved some plants, bike, etc.) right now we're still sleeping at the old place on an inflatable mattres with just enough clothes to get by. it'll be nice to actually move into the new place this week.

aside from that we packed more random stuff, cleaned up monstrously large dust bunnies from newely emptied rooms, i read some magazines, upgraded the photo software on my server, and uploaded a the old digital photos i had lying around, mostly from 2004. (right after i got my digital camera but before i setup a web site to host photos.) if you're bored you can now see all my pictures from china and burningman. now if i could just get around to upgading my blog software to something a bit more recent...

mass photo posting

i finally uploaded a bunch of photos. There's pics from when ronda and me went up to sea ranch in march. There's also some pictures of the new house me and ronda will be moving to next month. Finally, today i went to see the power tool drag races. i got a bad sunburn and saw some crazy machines, some of which went REALLY fast. (the monorail and slingshot contraptions both had an average speed over 40 mph so they were really hauling ass when they crossed the finish line.)

shaken upgrade

well, i finally upgraded my home server (shaken). it used to be an old Sun Fire V120 with a 650 Mhz UltraSparc IIe processor. now it's a tyan S2865 dual core 2.6 Ghz opteron system. man, does this baby scream. it was a PITA to move all my existing services over to a new server, but it's nice to finally have a fast and responsive system. it's also nice because i designed the new system to be extra quiet. the old v120 used to put out about 60 dBA, which means that you didn't ever want to be in the same room as the system. i designed the new server to be as quiet as possible and i think it worked out pretty well since when i started it up i couldn't hear it over the noise from the fridge.

makers fair

so today i went to the makers fair. it was pretty cool and there were lots and lots of cool creations to stare at, admire, and talk to their creators about. i also picked up a subscription to make magazine. (because, you know that i don't have enough existing magazine subscriptions or pending books to read.)

same, same, but different

welding class was canceled today so instead of wasting time melting random pieces of metal together i decided to do someting totally different. i brewed some beer. this time it was a wee heavy scotch ale. this is gonna be another beer that has to age for at least three months, so the beer pipeline is really filling up. this morning i also transfered my snowflake smoked porter into a secondary fermenter and i had a chance to taste it in the process. it's really good and the smoke flavor is really noticible. (this is good since i tried the wort pre-fermentation and the smoke flavor was undetectable under the overwelming sweetness of the malt.)