Yearly Archives: 2004

Raleigh St. Augustine Grass

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Master Gardener Walter Reeves reports St. Augustine grass is becoming more popular in Atlanta. He mentioned a “Raleigh” variation that is supposed to be more cold tolerant.

St.Augustine Grass

Raleigh St. Augustine grass was released by the North Carolina Experiment Station in 1980 as a cold tolerant, SAD resistant strain. Raleigh is finer textured than Floratam and develops a dense turf much like the Texas Common strain of St. Augustine grass. Raleigh is also more shade tolerant than Floratam. But, unlike Floratam, Raleigh is not resistant to lawn chinch bugs.

Gas Pipe Is In

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GasTee.JPGDanny and I installed a new gas line for $75 in materials. This included two new pipe wrenches! It saved us so much money, I gave DC a $50 tip for helping out with both his brains and brawn.

This photo shows where we tapped in, replacing a 6″ link with a “T”. The other T’s heading back go to the water heater and dryer.

This photo shows the elbow hanging above the mudsill going up through the kitchen floor.

GasElbowOnMudSill.JPG

Danny did all the work behind the narrow space of the stove. (He’s taller than me and weighs the same, so I’m not sure how that worked out.) The valve is currently in the off position with a temporary plug screwed in for extra measure.

GasValve.JPG

One thing that made this project possible (besides Grant and Ted telling me I could do it) was being able to get the new stove’s installation manual off the internet before buying it. That is how I knew I had a 7″ high x 15″ wide x 3.5″ deep space to install the valve in the back left corner. Kathy and I wonder how the expensive plumbers would have known that. Maybe it is an ANSI standard.

Now playing: Bloody Well Right from “Crime of the Century” by Supertramp

I Wish Someone Had Told Me

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This is a request from two friends. I’m not sure I’ve written this kind of advice to my own kids, so it is going to take some work. However, the easiest one for me was #3. Feel free to reply with comments, and I’ll pass them on!

Dear Family and Friends,

Our son, Kevin will be turning 13 years old on December 22, 2004. He will become a teenager, beginning the transition into adulthood. In today’s world, being a teenager can be very challenging and sometimes overwhelming. We would like to help prepare Kevin for this exciting transition from childhood to young adulthood, and we are asking for your help in doing so. We would like to provide Kevin with a keepsake of a treasury of messages to live by. A book of words that he can look to for inspiration, advice, love that will help guide him on life’s journey.

We would be most grateful if you would help contribute to this book by writing something, drawing a picture, sending a family recipe or favorite photo or postcard. Some ideas are: 1) Tell Kevin, the most important thing(s) you ever learned; 2) The three (or five or ten) most important qualities a man should have; 3) Some thing(s) you wished that someone had told you when you were 13; 4) A special memory you have of Kevin; 5) What you wish for him; 6) A favorite quote, poem, prayer, or song and why it is special to you; 7) A top ten list of the things you love in life and why; 8) What you believe about life.

These are only suggestions, please feel free to add your own ideas. You can send your contribution to us via e-mail or mail by December 10 (late arrivals will still be accepted). We graciously appreciate your time and effort in making this keepsake book for Kevin. Young people today need positive influences in their lives. They need reminders that they matter and that others love and believe in them. Thank you for helping to make a difference in Kevin’s life.

With love and gratitude,

Andrea and Jim

Comments welcome!

My Yahoo Robot Friend

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When I logged into my.yahoo.com on my birthday, I spotted this subtle, friendly greeting at the top. It’s good to have friends in the Yahoo I.T. department.

YahooBirthday.gif

Now playing: Remember The Tinman by Tracy Chapman

Gas Piping

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Two plumbers came by on separate visits today to give us a quote on installing a gas valve in our kitchen so that we can get a new gas stove/range. (Currently have electric.) One quoted $475 and the other quoted $525. There is a gas pipe running under the floor where the stove is today carrying gas to the dryer. It is probably 12″ away from where we need the valve to be. That’s a lot of money for a little bit of pipe.

Grant thinks I should try to do it myself. So does this guy….

Moving A Gas Pipe

And here is an article on flexible piping.

Firewire and FlowerPower

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Nicole’s FlowerPower Mac had a CD drive running OS X Jaguar (10.2). Our iMac 17″ Flat Panel came with OS X Panther (10.3). I was troubleshooting a problem she was having with her keyboard, and decided to upgrade her system. The problem was, the Panther install was on a DVD, and the Flower Power only had a CD Drive.

I searched far and wide using Google trying to figure out how to boot up the contents of the DVD on her Mac. You can’t just copy the files over. Can’t boot off a network-shared drive (without a Mac OX Server.) The DVD contents are way too large for a CD. I don’t have an external drive.

Then I ran into the concept of using Firewire to connect two Macs. One Mac can be set to boot up in “Target” mode by just holding down the letter “T” when booting up. I was able to start up Nicole’s Mac in target mode, then connnect the new iMac via a Firewire cable. The FlowerPower Mac’s hard disk acted just like a second hard drive on the newer iMac, so I was able to set Nicole’s hard drive to be the boot drive for the iMac. In the photo below, the 17″ flat panel iMac is using the FlowerPower’s hard drive to start up, so it looks like the FlowerPower Mac is inside the iMac. (The FlowerPower’s screen is showing the Firewire icon meaning it is in target mode.) The glowing blue Firewire LED makes it all look cooler.

Mac17-and-Flowerpower-Use-Firewire.jpg

I was able to use the new iMac’s DVD to upgrade Mac OS X on the FlowerPower Mac. Apple is always building unexpected but useful things like “Firewire target mode.” (It is really like built-in SCSI in older Macs…. which was advanced for its day.)

The other cool thing about this photo is that I recently learned how to use the manual mode on my digital Cannon. This allows for an otherwise impossible shot like this where the screens would be overexposed because of the dark surroundings.

URI vs URL

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I’m running into “URI” more and more in tech talk space.

URI = Universal Resource Identifier (in)

URL = Universal Resource Locator (out)

The hip initials are “URI” explained here.

I predict “the people” will keep “URL” alive. People like to talk a little geek, but not this much. A conversation I heard the other day: “No, that’s an e-mail address, what you need is the URL. URLs don’t have ats in them.”