Author: Matt (Page 34 of 41)

An overly metro blog post

01/05/2007 / Matt / 3 Comments

Yah, I’ll admit it. I bought an iron last night. It’s either a sign I’ve grown up, or that the apocalypse will be coming around next week. In any event, if you have a job requiring business or business casual attire, you need an iron. It’s just a fact of life, and I’m over it.

We’ve been using an iron that may have been made 15 years ago that was given to us by Christa’s parents (thanks!) when it was discovered they had more irons in the house than people who iron. It did the job for what we needed if for and life went on.

Last weekend in a spectacular display of athleticism and coordination, Bailey the Cat decided it might be fun to jump the length of the basement and land on top of the ironing board. He made it to the ironing board but didn’t take into effect his 15 pound weight & the laws of physics, so the ironing board, and the iron came to a crashing halt on the floor. The cat was ok, the iron was not.

ooooo, a new iron! After using up all my non-wrinkly clothes yesterday I figured it was time to do some research and pickup a new iron.

When did ironing become so high-tech, or for that matter expensive?? Did you know you could spend $150 on an iron?? For that price it better just do the ironing for me…

After reading some reviews on Amazon, checking some local stores, and pulling out a 20% off coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond, I settled on a $50 Black & Decker Digital Advantage Iron which i got out the door for $40.

I used it for the 1st time this morning and I’ve got to say I should have done this a long time ago. While it doesn’t do the work for me, it makes my work a lot easier. It heats up within 20 seconds, has a nifty digital temperature readout & setting, and steam steam steam!

So if enjoying my new iron is overly metro, so be it.

Welcome 2007

01/03/2007 / Matt / 1 Comment

Well I don’t know what happened, but 2006 is over and 2007 has begun.

We recovered from ushering in the New Year on Monday by watching all of Season 1 of Six Feet Under. Great show!

Unfortunately so far this year, I’ve proceeded to continue getting sicker and sicker daily since coming down with a cold last week, so I’ve been less than excited about being awake in general.

I think the biggest news at this point is that between Christa, myself, & Jacqui, we have all resolved to give a great big group effort to quit smoking. Tonight will be 48 hours as near as I can tell, and since I can’t speak for anyone else, so far so good.

Still waiting on that workout resolution to happen however…

V-Day

12/28/2006 / Matt / 1 Comment

Today is V-Day for the pets in the Adams Ct house. Both Bailey & Monty are going to get a visit from our vet at home. Let me tell you that if you have the opportunity to have home care for your animals, DO IT! The reduced stress for both the animals & myself are so worth the small cost increase versus a standard vet.

If anyone is looking for a vet in the Ferndale/Royal Oak area I highly recommend Dr. Smirnes of Woodward Veterinary Home Care.

Review: Tomato firmware for WRT54G

12/27/2006 / Matt / 0 Comments

Not many people know it, but there are a lot of open source/3rd party firmware projects available for those popular Linksys router/switch/wireless access point/place to plug in wires many people own. To most, it’s just another box with flashing lights you need to occasionally unplug and plug back in when your ISP says to do so or you have internet problems. To us geeks, its a playground!

I’m not a n00b at hacking my hardware with new firmware as I have run DD-WRT (another 3rd party firmware) for over a year without too many problems. Unfortunately after a recent service pack however, my router had gotten very unstable. So when Adam let me know about Tomato, I was excited to try something new. This firmware package stressed speed, a small footprint, and promised QoS management & a bunch of powerful real-time AJAX powered applets & graphs. I was not disappointed!
With very little effort I was flashed and upgraded from one 3rd party to another, and after refreshing the browser after the upgrade I was up and running. The only conversion issue I was was that I needed to reset the wireless settings; no big deal.

The customizable QoS pies have allowed me to fix some pesky problems when running torrents, and overall my little network is running a million times more smoothly; most importantly the semi-weekly router reboot and/or service drop seems to be resolved! Best of all, I now have some seriously dorky stats/graphing capabilities!!

I would definitely recommend this firmware to anyone who might be interesting in tweaking their network that has one of the Linksys WRT routers. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for future versions…

Pantry Project

12/19/2006 / Matt / 1 Comment

I love to start projects. And though I’m not that great at finishing them, starting them is always a blast. My latest project involves one my favorite things: food.

Usually, we make a weekly menu for all our meals and go to the supermarket once a week. We then buy all the produce, pastas, and breads that we’ll will need for the coming week. Sometimes this works out well, but most of the time, we stray from the menu, either by eating at a restaurant or by deciding late in the week that we really don’t feel like what we planned for after all. This results in another trip to the store, an expensive trip to a restaurant, and/or wilted produce and unused items.

Now, we don’t have a big kitchen. In fact, it’s tiny. Matter of fact, one trip to Costco and we’re busting out of the cupboard seams for storage.

So Christa had a brilliant idea last weekend to use an empty area under the stairs/back door landing in the basement as a place for a pantry & additional storage.

Currently the area is filled with random boxes, leftover crap, stuff not touched since we moved in, and 4 inches of dirt, dust, and leaves/pine needles from all the shoes walking downstairs from the back door.

So I plan on tackling this project in a few steps:

Clean, sort, and toss anything sitting untouched since the move that is still under the stairs
Close in the steps leading into the basement to prevent the dirt/grime buildup in the pantry area
Curtain or close off one side of the stairs to hide all the junk from my office area
Decide on purchased pantry storage unit that will fit the area or build shelving

Step 1 should begin within the next few weeks. I’ll try to stay updated with pictures as I go along.

Before | 12/19/06

Real-Time IRC Hockey

12/13/2006 / Matt / 3 Comments

Last night was one of those dork-out moments that ~~I enjoy~~sneak up on me altogether too often, and Christa even had the ~~nerve~~presence of mind to point it out to me in front of COMPANY! Just because I’m sitting in front of the TV with a laptop laughing out loud and typing furiously on IRC while watching hockey and screaming at Hasek for not blocking shots does NOT make me a dork. Seriously. It doesn’t. Really.
…

The Detroit Redwings and the Ottawa Senators played for the 1st time in over 3 years, so we had a little trash-talk session over IRC during the game with the folks from Ottawa on #Vinylvortex.

Detroit lost 3-2, so here’s to 3 years of grief from the Canadian friends…

Pump It Up!

12/11/2006 / Matt / 1 Comment

This weekend I tackled a project around the house which I’ve been meaning to do since we moved in, because despite living near 8 Mile we both didn’t like our ghetto humidifier drain we had in the basement (ie. a bucket).

I finally worked up the courage to install a pump and about 30 feet of tubing to get the run-off from the furnace in the middle of the basement to the sink in a corner.

Minus a slight miscalculation of the amount of tubing I’d need, the project went off without a hitch. No more bucket emptying for me this winter!!

4 Way Stops

12/08/2006 / Matt / 0 Comments

As a public service for those of you driving in a car and are unsure of how a 4 way stop works, I have posted the accepted method to navigate this type of intersection.

At a four way stop (or three way stop) every vehicle must come to a complete halt before proceeding one at a time across the intersection, regardless of whether there is any other traffic in sight or not, and also regardless of whether the vehicle is making a turn at the junction or not. If two or more vehicles draw up to one of these junctions and stops, waiting to proceed across it, then they should proceed in the same order in which they arrived. The first vehicle to arrive is the first to proceed, the second vehicle to arrive is the second to proceed, and so on.

If two vehicles arrive at one of these junctions at precisely the same time, so that it is impossible to tell which arrived first, then in theory the vehicle on the right has priority. However, many drivers are unaware of this rule and there are complications due to all the possible permutations of turns. Therefore in this situation in practice most drivers negotiate by polite non-verbal communication (hand waving, etc, but for obvious reasons beware of extending one or two fingers, which might be misinterpreted). Drivers almost always give way to each other until one graciously accepts and proceeds.

It’s December In Detroit…

12/07/2006 / Matt / 0 Comments

…and everything is gray and depressing.
And then I read this piece from the Metrotimes, and it all makes sense…
There is one overall theme in the article; the love-hate relationship most people have with the city.

Yet, there’s also something glorious about this city, something that you can’t find anywhere else in the world. This city’s people have a tremendous spirit, a driven sense of self, a grittiness and determination that comes only from having to haul your ass up from the bootstraps every day. Detroiters are tough, but they are true, genuine and passionate.

But the incredible people who fill this city aren’t enough to keep me, or my fellow expats, here. You need things like, oh, basic city services. Roads that don’t crumble. Being able to walk out to your car in the morning without wondering if the windows will be broken this time. That all wears down on you after a while, and eventually it can become a weight too great to bear any longer.

Having lived here for a few years now, I am proud to say I have that Detroit spirit. It’s that spirit that will get me places in life. But with the good of living here comes the bad. I can’t complain and shouldn’t say we are struggling. We own a home, can afford to heat it, we both have cellphones, 2 pets, etc… But when it comes down to it, we’re just getting by. We just can’t seem to break ahead. We both live paycheck to paycheck while we both know a better job would relatively easy to find in cities better off economically.

But yet I am sad even thinking about leaving.

Why do I feel like I owe more to this city than I have ever gotten from it?
Maybe I will finally have enough, and reach that point in my life that I just can’t take it anymore like the author.
I’m kind of hoping sooner than later….

Oakland Wireless Update

10/02/2006 / Matt / 0 Comments

I posted about this last October and haven’t heard anything about the project status in months.

Wireless Oakland, a first-of-its-kind project to blanket all 910 square miles of the county with a wireless signal, remains months behind schedule nearly a year and half after the project was announced by County Executive L. Brooks Patterson.

Originally the pilot towns — Troy, Birmingham, Madison Heights, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Pontiac and Wixom — were to be online by mid-March. In February, MichTel officials said the system would be running by June. But only small sections of Wixom and Pontiac are receiving the service.

Apparently MichTel, the company contracted by the county is blaming some engineering hurdles they had to jump.

Huh? They better get jumping, the timeline said the end of 2007 for the entire county to be covered, and as of this moment approximately 3000sq ft are all that’s covered…