Fun And Excitement With Shower Pan Liners
I wrote perviously about how the shower in the master bathroom had leaked. Now that I have researched the issue more, I understand more about how shower floors are constructed. The original floor was constructed as a "mortar bed" and it was not constructed correctly. It was missing the bottom membrane. The mortar was placed directly on the cement floor. The membrane that was installed was brittle and too far under the top layer of mortar. Finally, there was no strengthening agent, such as chicken wire.
I didn't want to repeat what I considered a poorly engineered design so I looked into solid surface designs. Royal Stone produces a 48x48 solid surface pre-made floor that resembles stone (think Corian). The normal price is about $900, but my drain is not in the location of the pre-made floor so I would have to order a custom made floor. Since they would have to made a new mold for my application the price would be about $1600 at the cheapest. That's way too much to spend on just the shower floor.
I then found Tile Redi products which are a thick plastic solid floor that you can tile on directly. Cheaper at $679 (not by much), but not in the size I want and the drain hole isn't in the same location.
Now I'm back to the mortar floor shower floor as the replacement. Considering the price and how a proper floor is suppose to be built, there should not be a problem for the new floor.
Taking The Master Bath Back To The Studs
About a year ago most house remodeling projects came to a halt. Costs got a little out of control and I ended up with some large credit card bills. I've eliminated those bills and am ready to start back on my projects. I didn't waste any of that money, it was just a bit too much to spend at once. I now have this radical new idea that I will call "planning and budgeting" and I will apply it to projects going forward.
A quick recap on this project, the house was a foreclosure. Though not trashed, it was pretty dated and in need of remodeling in several places. The master bath showed signs of leakage in the shower. It's pretty clear that it's been going on for a while, it had leaked into the adjacent bathroom and into the master bedroom.
The demolition is about 99% complete. I intended to get a good amount of this bathroom completed this winter. I've got a basic plan put together, but that's a post for another day.
100,000 And Going Strong
My 4x4 Ford Ranger reached a milestone today when it reached a 100,000 miles. I'm happy to say I'm the original owner, purchasing it new in 1996 (it's a 1997 model) with something like 27 miles on it.
It's been a good truck, disproving to me that american cars can be well built. It's not without out it's share of problems. For the last few years I've had a terrible vibration in the vehicle. I've taken it to Don Chalmers Ford who diagnosed it with need tires and shocks. I agree that tires can cause some bad issues with it but they weren't the problems I was having. I could tell it was a front end problem especially since there was sever cupping in the front tires. I finally took it to Bob Turners who correctly diagnosed with needing front new springs. They weren't even able to properly align it, it's strange that Don Chalmers didn't figure that out, even though they charged me $90 for a vibration analysis.
I've not heard of spring going bad, but since they have replaced them the tires wear properly and it rides a thousand percent better. Perhaps more people need them and don't realize it.
I'm experiencing a breaking problem and I suspect the front right (and maybe left) rotors are warped and need replaced. It will be the first time that any such work as been done on this vehicle. Meanwhile my coworkers are telling me how their brand new Nissan need rotors right after they bought it. Other than that there's been a few minor things, some emissions related thing need replaced a few months ago and some and a few issues with a electronic 4 wheel drive switch.
The engine runs as strong as it did the day I bought it. It doesn't leak anything or burn anything it's not suppose to. And the gas mileage is about 15 mpg, not great but near what it did when I got it (and not bad for a 4x4). Thanks Dad for showing me how to take proper care of a vehicle. With luck, I will have it for another 100,000 miles!
Live Pigeon Cam
Unfortunately, I have some pigeons living on my patio. That's unfortunate because 1) They crap all over the place, 2) They have a nest with a egg in it. I cannot bring myself to get rid of them with the egg there, actually it's their second one. Had I know about it before they laid it I would have done something about it.
To get something useful out of of the situation I have set up the pigeon cam. Running off my 500mhz first gen iBook, a iSight and EvoCam you can watch as the butt ugly baby is born (and believe me, they are ugly). Click on the image to see a 640x480 image. I will be adding it to the side bar as well. I'm also working on a time-lapse.
I've seem the mom and dad birds do some weird things so I will try to point them out when I see them. Also check out this MetaFilter post, who knew people ate them?
Update 06/01/05 3:44 PM: I wanted to mention that the picture updates only when there is movement, But EvoCam still seems to struggle to upload to my iDisk. I've also put in the link to the timelapse movie but doesn't seem to be accepted by QuickTime in the browser, it works fine when I view it from the finder.
Ski Tracking
The hardware in question is a Palm Tungsten T3 and a Globalsat Bluetooth GPS receiver. Since the battery life of the T3 is somewhat undesirable I purchased a Palm Power To Go from eBay, but due to a mix up on the sellers part I received DocsToGo instead. This trip was going to have to work with just the battery in the Palm. The battery life of the Globalsat has been reviewed at close to 8 hours which is plenty for a day of skiing.
The software is Cetus GPS, an excellent freeware GPS that describes itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of GPS tracking and field data collection". It doesn't do maps which is fine because I need it's logging feature, that writes the position data to the memory card.
THe rig is pretty simple, I tried to put the GPS somewhere near the top of my body (one day I wore a shirt with pockets in the sleeves that worked really well). I pared the Palm and GPS and set up the software to run. Cetus GPS will keep the Palm on and running as long as it's getting a signal from the GPS receiver. I turned down the brightens on the screen to the lowest settings to save battery life.
The only real problems I had was the GPS receiver would take some time to get a sat lock, much longer than it takes me here at home. Not sure if that's due to trees or whatever. The palm and GPS receiver sometimes lost each other, which I didn't notice till I was done with my run, with the palm securely locked up in my pocket it wasn't easy to get to. Next time around I'm going to try to find a way to mount the GPS receiver to my helmet or make use of the external antenna port. I then want a way to put the Palm on my chest so I can easily open my jacket and get to it.
To generate a map I used a website called GPS Visualizer which describes itself as "An on-line tool that creates SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) maps and profiles from GPS waypoints and tracks." I cannot tell you what an excellent tool it is. The website allows you to upload native cetus track files in pdb (palm database format), no conversion needed. It gives you more options than you would ever need to generate the maps and the author only asks for a donation! If you use it, send him a few bucks. The only problem I had was needing to install the Adobe SVG browser plugin. Once installed it worked just fine on Safari. I had tried other MacOS native programs but they all required that I converted my cletus track files and then they didn't even work with the converted files. What I would really like is to be able to play back the runs, showing a movie like interface that I could download into iMove.
Shown are several runs (not all complete) that had the most interesting looks to them. The original maps are huge so I shrunk them down and increased the scale text in the upper left hand corner. As you can see in the speed map I got up to 36MPH! Improvements to my rig should allow me to record the entire day without interruption.
