I’m still trying to find some progress pictures but here is the run down on the main floor bathroom remodel. When we first moved into the house, the mainfloor bathroom confused me. The toilet sat up on a raised platform, the sewer vent pipe was exposed, the layout was wrong, no outlets, etc. I can only speculate about the bathroom but I assume it was a “Oh shit we forgot a bathroom on the mainfloor” or the guy was just getting lazy (we’ve been told the original owner built the place himself). The first picture is from the RMLS listing of the house.

They dressed it up as much as they could when the house was on the market. The box was the biggest thing that got to me. Why was the toilet raised up on a box? Did they have trouble getting sewer grade? We wanted to tile the bathroom (pictured above is some fake vinyl tile) but the box would prove to be an issue.

I don’t know what it is but all the good progress pictures I take disappear from the camera. I can assume they are probably often deleted in a fury of trying to snap a cute picture of my daughter when she is sleeping with one of the cats.

We ended up breaking out the toilet platform which oddly enough was not needed. We then jackhammered up the floor to move the toilet a couple inches back and to the left. You may wonder if those few inches made a difference. The answer is yes. Have you ever seen a toilet with a nice 4 inch gap behind the toilet. It looks weird. And in this tiny bathroom it makes a huge difference. At the same time we relocated the sink to the same wall as the toilet.

After the sewer work, we repoured the floor. I pulled the drywall off (seriously some of the poorest mud work I have seen). Wired the room up for outlets, can lights, new fan, etc. While I had the drywall off, I noticed a lot of decay in the headers which ended up being a powder post beetle. After replacing the wood and spraying down for the critters. We drywalled up the room, painted, laid the tile and mounted the fixtures.

When I found this out, I was stunned. We have someone in the office with a Dell laptop that kept complaining about meetings making themselves as recurring. I looked at the issue and figured it was user error. A week later he came back and complained that again a meeting had turned itself into a recurring meeting.

Then I discovered this little gem.

This “bug” affects only Dell laptops with Direct Media.

Dell laptops include an application called Media Direct and this application installs an Outlook add-in called “Outlook Setup Addin” which is causing problems for some users. This add-in supports the Instant Office feature of Media Direct. Uninstall it from Control panel, Add and Remove Programs to prevent the problem with future meeting requests.

Along with causing meeting requests to become recurring, it doesn’t work well with Outlook 2007 and is responsible for at least some of the complaints about Outlook 2007′s slowness and CPU resources spiking.

BAH! Removed the program and no more issues.

I’m way behind on updating the progress of my various projects. We decided to tear into the mainfloor bathroom and fix some nagging issues. These issues being:

1) The toilet sits on some sort of box

2) The Toilet sits way over the legal requirement distance from the wall
3) It is butt ugly
4) vinyl floor tiling
5) No class (see #3)

So we tore the platform out that the toilet was sitting on. Called our journeyman plumbing neighbor over to take a look at why they would have raised the toilet on a box he said “He probably wanted to feel like he was on a throne or the plumber and the contractor had a fight”. Basically he could see no good reason for raising the toilet onto a platform. So we broke out the floor and relocated the toilet (12″ center from wall, as opposed to I think the 18″ center it was sitting).

Anyways, I started in on the eletrical and in a moment of frustration just started beating the drywall out of the back wall when I noticed a flaky dryrotted header. So yeah. Detour. This was suppose to be a quick 2 weekend project and is now turning into something more.

UPDATE: It is not dryrot.  It is damage from a powder post beetle.  Man the thing just turned the whole bad boy to dust.  We’ll be cutting out the top piece and replacing it and then spraying the whole thing down with Timbor.

I think every geek has dreamed of building their own MAME cabinet.  If not then well maybe you don’t dream.  Anyways I decided, ok fine I’m going to build myself a mame cabinet.

Today I picked up the cabinet off a guy from Craigslist, who has close to 60 cabinets and spends his time restoring arcade and pinball machines.  How cool of a job is that?

I’m just going to blog a quick bit about using netstat. The command netstat (NETwork STATistics) will display network connections, routing tables and information on network interfaces. This is a command line tool. It is available on windows as well as *nix. I’m talking mostly about it in regards to the world of windows.

In the past I’d run netstat, use it to show what connections are open and on what port. It also would display the PID allowing me to open task manager and see what PID is using that port. I recently found out that since SP2 on XP (and I’m going to assume Vista). That you can run the following command.

netstat -nob

Netstat -nob will do the PID look up also. Resulting in a display like so.

TCP 127.0.0.1:2599 127.0.0.1:2598 ESTABLISHED 7568
[firefox.exe]

Of course yours will be a longer list. So in summary.

* Bring up your command line

* run netstat -nob

* HOORAY enjoy all your information

I get a lot of different smartphones thrown on my desk to be repaired. Today our CEO came in with his Sprint Mogul (which is pretty slick of the HTC series. A lot more refined than my HTC 8525). Anyways it is performing an endless reboot. Since I can’t get into the OS of it, there isn’t much I can do. So I figured I’ll do a hard reset.

So I fire up google and look for information on hard reseting the Sprint HTC Mogul. Well I’ll be damned if there isn’t really any clear information. I did end up finding it but I had to load the pdf from the sprint site. So here it is in texty blog goodness.

Hard Reset
You can also perform a hard reset (also known as a full reset). A hard reset should be performed only if a normal reset does not solve a system problem. After a hard reset, the device is restored to its default settings — the way it was when you first purchased it and turned it on. Any programs you installed, data you entered, and settings you customized on the device will be lost. Only Windows Mobile software and other pre-installed programs will remain.

To perform a hard reset:
1. Press and hold both softkeys on the device. Keep these keys pressed, and at the same time, use the stylus to lightly press and hold the RESET button on the bottom of your device.
NOTE: I had no idea which of the many keys were considered the soft keys. They are the two buttons above the phone control buttons.

2. Release the stylus but keep the softkeys pressed when you see the following message on your device screen:
“Do you want to erase all user data and restore to manufacture default?”
3. Slide open the hardware keyboard, and press R to restore to factory default or press X to exit the hard reset process.

Note:
Your device will be set back to factory default settings. Please ensure any additional installed programs and user data have been backed up before a hard reset is performed.

There you go. Hard reset on the Sprint Mogul.

I don’t know what it is but I turn on sticky keys about once a week. It always happens at the worse time and the effect of being crippled by the sticky key loop is well, crippling. Turning off sticky keys is actually not very straight forward once it is turned on. Hit shift 5 times then window comes up and says to disable sticky keys hit cancel. Easy enough, click cancel. It is still on.

Here is the solution

TO TURN OFF STICKY KEYS HIT BOTH SHIFT KEYS

Just a PSA.

I was visiting with a neighbor last night and we got on the topic of cycling. Actually we talked about the fact that the STP (Seattle to Portland) ride was this weekend. I talked about my one experience riding the STP. So he told me the bridge pedal was coming up and we should do it. All he had to say was that I could ride my bike across the marquam bridge (My arch traffic nemsis).

So today I dusted off my bike, gave it a quick tune up and went for a Ride. I have until August 18th to get ready. I’ll put it this way, I may have road 210 miles for the STP, but that was 8 years ago!

I got some work to do.

I tangoed with Vista on a new workstation batch we ordered at work. About 10 systems came in during a period where Dell would ONLY ship this line with Vista (they’ve changed this now). We ended up returning half of them and with the others formatting them back to XP using the OEM licensing structure. Why? Half of our software didn’t run on Vista and when we contacted our software vendors they said they had no plans in making Vista compatible programs for another year. Also the performance decrease for no actual gain (except the window flip interface in aero… *yawn* how *cute*). Basically people seemed a little ticked off at microsoft for this stunt.

My own workstation was one that I kept Vista, mostly because I didn’t have time to format it but I figured I’d be supporting it soon enough due to Microsoft’s strong arm tactics of forcing OS downgrades. One thing I noticed right away was telnet was missing. For the life of me I cannot figure out why one would disable the telnet protocol except that the stock telnet always sucked and maybe, just maybe a trojan could use the telnet app to reach out to something else (doubtful since a trojan will normally bring its own payload).

Anyways here is how one can enable telnet in vista.

1) Goto Control Panel

2) Click Programs (the renamed add/remove programs)

3) Turn windows Features On/Off

4) A window interface will pop up. You’ll want to scroll down this and select ‘telnet client’ and then select Ok.

Telnet is old, it is insecure but it is still used plenty day to day for testing things. Is the pop server responding, sure let me telnet in and check the banner.

I lasted about 2 months on vista then formatted back to XP

This is hard for me.  This is hard for me to let go.  This is hard for me to embrace something like wordpress with all its widgets and web 2.0 goodness.  This is hard for me to embrace something that I didn’t code myself.