Hiding today in a Starbucks, i…
August 20th, 2009Hiding today in a Starbucks, instead of doing real work I’m remotely fighting fires…
Hiding today in a Starbucks, instead of doing real work I’m remotely fighting fires…
My hiding spot (to get work done) at work was just found by an SDE on my team. Guess it was his spot to…..
Off to see the Chiro doc, so she can put things back in place my son keeps messing up. Just the cost of being a dad…
@stevestroh2 congrads!
Got to work late for a Monday, need to start the TPS report for last week. Wishing I could say, “all is well, now move along.”
The iPhone dock mounted in Pathfinder. I’m very happy with how it turned out. http://alturl.com/zabz
I’m so happy about finishing this little project. Since getting my iPhone, I’ve had a real problem when listening to it in the car. A long time ago, like more then five years, I spent a bunch of money on the first car stereo system to come out which ‘talked’ to your iPod. Basically you jack your iPod into this cable and you can control it from the car stereo. (Plus the audio is routed through the car system) I loved this setup, it works great and I’d go crazy without.
So there is this small problem, when I had it installed I figured the best place was for the iPod to go in the console between the seats. So you’d get in, connect the iPod and close the lid of the console. This works great until your iPod is your phone and you need to answer the phone or make calls.
The bluetooth headset more or less takes care of the answer the phone part. You can answer the phone with the little button on the headset, but there is no way to make calls. So I started the quest to find a way to bring the iPhone out of the console, but not give up the connection to the stereo.
After some searching of the Internet tubes, I found this place which sells docks for the car and custom mounting brackets. I had to hold off install the dock until I had a chance to re-route the iPod cable from the console to where the dock was going to be mounted. So Saturday I spent most of the afternoon disassembling the car, so I could move the cable a couple feet. Once the cable was moved, mounting the dock took all of 30 minutes and presto, I had a dock for my iPhone in the truck.
Couple things still need to be done, the cable for the dock is still hanging out in the open. This will get caught on something eventually and pulled out of the dock. I couldn’t find any zip tie mounts today, but I’ll order some online tomorrow and fix that problem. The other problem is the size of the dock cable. Since the iPhone uses 5volts to charge and my system was wired for the old 12volts iPods, I have this big adapter between the cable and the dock. It is really nice to have the iPhone charged when in the car, so I’m going to deal with how stupid it looks.
My Pathfinder is starting to look like the inside of the Space Shuttle with all the screens and gadgets. But I actually sort of like that. :-)
So a couple weeks ago I got up from my computer desk to go to bed and noticed the shelves above my radio desk looked bowed. I initially though my eyes were playing tricks on me, because they couldn’t bow and still have the brackets in the wall. Upon further investigation I discovered that the center bracket had started coming out of the wall, when I noticed it the bracket was about a 1/2 inch out of the wall.
So I quickly yanked everything off the shelves, which was actually quite a bunch of stuff. I did a postmortem on the installation of the shelves, I found my mistake. (I actually built the shelves myself, sort of custom install for the space) I had used 1.5inch screws to attach the brackets to the wall, but I didn’t account for the fact that the brackets takes up about an inch of the screw. So there was just not enough screw in the wall for all the weight.
The next day I took a look at the desk and decided that I might as well yank everything off the desk since I had already pulled 2/3rds. The benefit is that I get to put the desk back together with a little more insight into how it will be used, before it just sort of “grew” into the current configuration. I was really having a hard time figure out cables, all the coax runs were twisted together and in general it was a mess.
So improvement number 1 was adding another bracket to hold the shelves up. It should enable the shelves to hold more weight, when combined with the 3inch screws I used to re-attach all the brackets.
Improvement number 2 was mounting the power strip on the wall, a foot or so above the ground. I also mounted the 12v rig runner strip even farther up the wall. (This is how I power all the radios) These two things moved off the ground will make a huge difference to the cable mess. Simple to-do, don’t know why I didn’t do it before.
Improvement number 3 I’m not so sure about, but decided to-do it anyhow. About half the runs of coax into the house were for the HF radios, which all ran to a coax switch. I’ve always seen these set ups in the fancy shacks where the coax switch was mounted to the wall, close to where the coax came into the shack, so there was only a single coax run to the HF radios. So I mounted my coax switch to the wall, right above where all the coax comes into the house.
I have started putting stuff back together, but stopped because I still don’t have a tray installed under the desk. I’m hoping by putting one of those cord trays under the desk, that I can keep most of the rest of the mess off the floor. I have had a problem finding one that I like, but supposedly Ikea has one. I just haven’t gotten down there yet.
Life has been busy as of late. The weather was super nice, turned horribly hot and then started acting like fall was here with massive rain. Today we are back to normal August weather and I’m liking that.
So a couple weeks ago I got a call from one of the preschools we contacted like two years ago when we were hunting for a new babysitter for Isaac. At the time we were politely told that there was a waiting list and maybe by the time Isaac was ready to go to High School, there would be an opening. (Well maybe not that bad, but we had all but given up hope and forgot about them) Well it seems the changes in economy have loosen up the slots and they had an opening for Isaac if we were still interested.
This actually comes at a great time, because I’ve been really getting tired of the 45 minute commute in the morning to drop Isaac off and get to work. His current sitter is wonderful and we love her, but she lives in the opposite direction of where Rosie and I work and there is just no good way to get there. So what should be 15 minutes turns into 45 minutes. This summer with the entire greater Seattle area under construction has made the commute even worst.
So the timing of all of this was interesting, because the school was shutting down for there summer break in a week and if we want him to start at the beginning of the school year, we had to quickly run through a transition process to get him use to the school. So in the course of a week, Rosie and I both went with him for half a day, then on last Friday I dropped him off for a “real” half day, where I left. This seems weird unless you have kids and then it sounds great. By Friday Isaac was a excited about going and other then a little concern when first going in, was totally fine with me leaving him.
So August 31 Isaac starts “school” at the Cougar Mountain Montessori school. It is going to be great for him, because he doesn’t get enough playing with other kids. And Daddy get a big chunk of morning back and much less stress.
Traffic is already nasty on I405 north, screwed up and got on, now can’t get off.