Frivolous At Heart

My Zebra Danio had halflings =). I think so? I couldn’t sleep so I added water to my tank, cleaned out the filter AGAIN and saw something I didn’t see months ago… Zebra Danio babies! Not really babies anymore but they were 1.5inches long. I took them and had them in their own floating container so they could eat without fighting for their meal. I hope they live and grow!

My house was built a good five years ago and the builders were careless in placing where the AC vent. I know better now the next time I have a house built! Anywho, I had carpet upstairs and it the vent was on the floor pulling in dirt right through the darn filter! 2-3 months, it would leak from the top down to the bottom floors. O it aggravated me very much! As you can see, I don’t have carpeting anymore. I have hardwood flooring done months ago and to my amazement, now more clogging of the evaporator. Not to mention we don’t use it because it’s the winter time so that could be a factor not put into the equation. Every time it clogs up, I had to remove the metal shroud from the AC unit to clean the evaporator with a brush and a detergent to get it draining correctly!

Not anymore! I’m going to move the AC vent to prevent future clogging of the evaporator and I am also putting a pan underneath the evaporator to save my 1st floor from water damage. I took everything apart to get to the box lying underneath the evaporator:

Here is what I pictured it to be: Moved from the bottom to the top near the ceiling where it can suck in clean air.

I made the aluminum drain pan (19.25×23.75″) so just in case the evaporator decides to be naughty again. I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while now and I have finally done this because currently, I have a lot of free time. I decided to use aluminum because it’s rust resistant. I did not want to use galvanized steel because it will rust with time and the way the pan sits, you’ll notice it would be a PITA to change out. The pan is at an angle so that way any leaks would follow the direction of gravity. I’ll need to connect this into the drain. I should finish this tomorrow. The pan was the only obstacle holding this project back.

UPDATE 01/27/08

AC leaking | AC evaporator leaking | moving AC vent | moving AC duct

I was on the road today and I saw this:

Close up:

Man that must hurt. I bet the car was making a left and traffic perpendicular to it, got it square in the middle flipping and pushing it on the side of the road onto the street. What sucks is that the holidays are just nearing. Christmas & New Year…

Yes, more shelves! I had to install more shelves. First it was only seven rows my sister wanted then she wanted it to go up to the ceiling. Only problem was the AC switches were in the way so I had to move those.

See those switches? Man they were a pain in the ass to move! Well not really, just time consuming because I had to cut into the wall in two places for elbow room to fish the wires through to their new home.

It was fun removing them from their location and relocating! The wires were #6 gauge and was very hard to manipulate! Kind of bulky to work with but it was done none-the-less.

After I was done, I had to patch up the walls and puddy’d the wall up for texturing tomorrow! Yes, I said texturing! If you are going to do a project, do it right or don’t do it at all! Though sometimes I get lazy but that still doesn’t make it okay!

\

I’m done! I wonder how they are going to get their shoes? I had a hard time reaching the highest shelf with that ladder you see in the foreground. Those are some high shelves!
\

moving electrical boxes : moving electrical boxes : patching up holes in walls : drywall patching : drywall texturizing

I use this program so much it isn’t even funny. I find myself using it 5-10 times a day and that annoying pop up telling you to register made me cave in! I ordered the license and thus the pop up is no longer! I was using the free version for ages but I’ve been buying a lot of software lately so why not add another to my arsenal of geekness?

I prefer this over WINZIP because it’s more powerful in my opinion plus it does all that I need. Less file corruption for me when I archive files in a bundle. WINZIP may have improved but I don’t care to try it out anyhow. WinRAR is for me; nice easy and does what I need. Thats really the bottom line now-a-days: can it fulfill all my needs?

Plus, you get all these cool themes you choose from: (I got the Aladdin Theme=))

I get so confused which SATA what plugs into where and looks like how all the time. Technology keeps on changing. Sata 1 came out and it was pretty easy and efficient. Then SATA 2 came out which was basically the same as SATA 1 with only one noticeable difference: SATA 1 had no clip and would “slip” out of its port while SATA 2 had a clip device that would grasp hold onto the port it was stuck in. Here is a photo of what I speak of:

SATA 1

SATA 2

Now there’s eSATA too so we can’t forget about that! They come in varying lengths and the longest I’ve seen is six feet. It’s tailored for external use. Not something I would advise but to each his own. I like internal- safer for my setup. eSATA is the same as above except it was incorporated in 2004 to define the standard transmit and received potential: (wikipedia)

# Minimum transmit potential increased: Range is 500–600 mV instead of 400–600 mV.
# Minimum receive potential decreased: Range is 240–600 mV instead of 325–600 mV.

Hold on, what the hell are convenient fees? USF is full of BULLSHIT. Ironic their football team is ‘The Bulls’. It’s bullshit!!! Students who pay for tuition get crushed with this fee. First USF rapes you for parking every year, then they enforce this new fee for paying tuitions online. WHAT THE FUCK? You suck USF. Yeah i’m a student and I’m saying you FUCKING SUCK!

30k-40k +++ students hmmm lets say 60% pay for tuition online and the rest pay at school. So thats 24,000 who pay online x 10.00 fee = 240,000.00. I don’t see how the convenient fee applies here? Why is it such a convenient? O, because you don’t have to get inline to pay. Now the line is going to increase. You would think you pay them this much money that they could get more minions to shorten the lines… It’s convenient to pay online but they don’t have to necessarily charge for it. It’s freak’n automated for crying out loud.

You know… I wonder lately why newer laptops roll out with all the bells and whistles but the manufacturers hide the harddrives so inconspicuously. You would have to remove the whole front or bottom of the laptop to get to the harddrive. What reason? I don’t know! No wait, I do know!!! They want you to bring it in for repair and or services and charge you an arm and a leg for labor!

Before, they had harddrives conspicuously hidden on the side of the laptop or on the bottom with a plastic/metal cover shroud over it. That was easy to access and easy to upgrade harddrives at will. Not now-a-days. The reason why I bring this topic up is because harddrives are prone to failure within many years of service and sometimes they just die at a very early stage during their service… What the hell do you do if you have harddrive failure? Opps, got to take it in because I can’t get to it or I migh void my warranty… How long does warranty process these repairs? Weeks! When do you need your lapper? You want it NOW dammit: not three weeks later!

If you are like me, whom restore their systems quite often… Why? Well it only takes 5-8minutes to restore my system with Norton Ghost… Does lappers allow you to do this efficiently? NO. Why? Because they come pre-installed with some type of operating system (XP or Vista for example) and all these systems that are pre-installed, will only restore to one partition… Here is a typical harddrive setup for lappers:

If you take a look at the above photo, you see that you only have one partition in lappers… I like to have two partitions; one for your operating system and the other to make backups of that operating system. The reason is because sometimes your lapper decides to slow down and or act flaky and instead of losing everything with the restore disk (newer lappers don’t come with restore CDs dammit), you can restore it from the Norton Ghost (Ghost) file. Do you see that EISA partition? I call it the ghost partition because you can’t see it. That partition is the restore partition and it is required for the system to operate (some manufacturers).

The way I setup my partition is this: You need two partitions (excluding the EISA partition), one 30Gig and the rest the second partition for full system backups. In order to do this, you are required to take out the harddrive to first backup the system using Ghost. Then make the two partitions, then do the restore. The logic behind this is because the lapper comes with the pre-installed operating system with all drivers; you can’t use the restore disk to install a new operating system on the 30Gig partition because the OEM restore disk won’t allow it. You can do this without removing the harddrive by reinstalling everything and that requires a new operating system to be purchased.

If you have a lapper, I highly recommend this type of partition setup for efficiency. Nothing beats a system restore that can be done in less than 15minutes. Norton Ghost is a life saver! Harddrive failure, virus, wacky systems etc- all pay tribute to a quick system restore. If you don’t have Ghost, you obviously are quite brave!

FYI: Sony & Toshiba Lappers do not require the EISA partition. IBM Lenovo 2005–? requires the EISA partition. I know this because I have had to do it with dozens of lappers for friends and family. My newest trail was with a Dell Vistro. I gave up because I wasn’t going to take the lapper apart to get to the harddrive… The harddrive is hidden somewhere within the shell. Not worth taking the risk of voiding the warranty!