October 1, 2006 :: Itch, itch, scratch, scratch
I originally posted this yesterday, so that Sian could see the little bit of progress I made. Now I reckon it's time for me to add some text and make it public. Because I KNOW that y'all are just sitting there refreshing the page every 10 minutes saying "When is he going to update again?!?!?!?"
uh huh.
Yesterday was quite a day. I woke up at 5am and putzed around until about 9am or so. Then I started working on the house. Briefly. My friend Chris had called the day before asking if I had a spare hard drive laying around, which I did. He said he'd send Bri over to pick it up. So, around 11am Bri came over. Bri has bronchitis, a really bad cold, the flu or something. She insisted on helping me with the house. She has also apparently helped me with battling good health. Yeah...I'm sick today.
So, we worked on the bedroom until about 2:30pm. She went home then, leaving some of her sick germs with me. While she was here, I managed to get the wiring for the bedroom lighting done while she put up insulation. We had to leave briefly to go to Black's and buy another roll of unfaced R-13 for the walls.
As for the insulation and the wiring...
I don't know if this is an approved method or not, but this is what I am doing. I have installed one layer of R-13 unfaced insulation in all of the exterior walls. The wiring is added next. Then I will be installing a layer of faced R-13 insulation over that. As you can probably guess, my walls are not built with 2x4s. R-13 is typically 3.5 inches thick when fully expanded. My studs are a little over 5" thick. With the two layers of R-13, there is some compression of the insulation of course. Ideally, I should probably have used R-11 and R-13 to do it the way I have, but I doubt that the 1.5-2" of compression is going to affect the R value much. And, since the wiring is encased in the insulation with the outer layer unbroken, I'm sure it more than makes up for the "sin" of insulation compression. lol
One of my main concerns with the insulation, aside from heat retention, is sound. Greencastle has become a noisy place. Or so it seems to me. Must have been those 5 years I lived in Wyoming. There are 3 cars in the neighbourhood that drive by going "boom boom" at all hours of the day and night. One of them has broken 2 panes of my remaining 1838 glass; that's how loud it is. Since it isn't legal to shoot cars, the massive quantity of insulation is also being used to help keep that noise outside.
You'll notice in one of the pictures that follows this lengthy narrative that one of the walls has drywall on it. Yes, I still believe that drywall is evil. All I will say is that all will become apparent one day soon.
So, after finishing up for the day, I got cleaned up and got on my semi-faithful computer to await the arrival of my beloved. Why is my computer semi-faithful? Because it let me down. Some might say it was my own haste and temporary stupidity that caused my PC to abandon me, but I still blame it on the PC.
My PC had gotten very loud. Very, very loud. First, let me tell you about the suspect. My PC was, of course, built by me. It's almost 2 years old now, which makes it the oldest PC I've owned in a long, long time. The case is an aluminum window case with LED fans, cold cathodes, and such. It is painted with metallic green automotive paint. The motherboard is an MSI Neo3. It has both an AGP slot and a PCI-Express x16 slot for video cards. The video card I was using was a 256MB nVidia 5250 PCI-Express card. The processor is an AMD Athlon64 3400+ (754 pin), the memory is (2) 1GB sticks of Geil PC3200 DDR. The power supply is some no-name 550watt 24-pin thing with a 120mm LED fan in the bottom, and a built in fan controller. Other bits and bobs include: (2) 80GB SATA hard drives, a 250GB Western Digital SATA hard drive, a "Nu" Dual Layer DVD burner, a Samsung 52x CD-ROM, a Nexus fan/cathode controller, a Foxconn (HP) card reader, a 4-port internal router card, and a Chaintech 7.1 channel audio card. So, there are the vital stats of the offender named "Catbert".
Catbert
Catbert lit up
The noise, I discovered, was emanating from the tiny little fan for the northbridge. All of the fans in my computer, and it's the smallest one making the noise. So, off to the evil empire....erm....Wal-Mart.... I went to purchase a can of air. Can of compressed air in hand, I blasted out 6 months worth of dust and dead bugs from the guts of my PC. Starting it back up, it was noticably quieter. For about 5 minutes. The fan noise returned, louder than before. Off to my treasure trove of computer parts I went. I returned with a shiny new passive heatsink (no fan) for the northbridge. At the same time, Sian got online. A quick debate. Do I shut down and replace the heatsink in a responsible manner, or do I talk to Sian and replace the heatsink while the PC is running? Uh huh. I chose the less intelligent of the two options. I believe the conversation with Sian went something like this: "Hi baby." "Howdy. Attending to a minor PC emergency here. Back in a second." "Ok." [Computer: ZAP! Pftht!] Larry: "Shit!"
The offending Northbridge fan
What followed was me firing up my laptop as quickly as I could, taking the PC off of the desk, putting the laptop there, and hooking up one of the monitors, the keyboard, and the mouse before continuing my conversation with Sian that night. I was rather distracted though, as I spent much of the night looking online for a new motherboard.
So, for a week I used first my laptop and then an old Dell Dimension 2100 that was laying around. I was used to speed though, and had to get something done fast. Being broke, a new motherboard wasn't an option, really. So I started playing. The computer would boot up, but there was no video. So I removed the video card. Not having any PCI-Express video cards laying around, I stuck an old-style AGP card in the other slot. PC booted up and had video. w00t! That was all it did though. No OS came to bid me welcome. So, I deleted the OS from my Linux hard drive and installed it again. Linux would boot up fine, but no Windows XP 64-bit Edition was to be found. Oh, it was there on the hard drive, but it wouldn't load. Wasn't even an option. So I reinstalled GRUB. (GRUB is the bootloader for Linux...it gives you your choices for which OS you want to run: Linux or Windows)
So, I did a repair of Windows. Nada. Then I deleted Linux again and installed a new copy of Windows on that drive. Success. I then "repaired" the original copy of Windows XP64 on the 250GB drive and moved the PC back over to the desk. I started thinking about it though, and decided since the PC was essentially hosed at the moment, I might as well install regular XP (32 bit) so that I could actually use some of my peripherals and programs. See, 64 bit XP doesn't support 2 of my printers, Adobe Acrobat, any web cam I've been able to find, Ewido anti-spyware, or ANY free antivirus program. So, back to regular XP I went.
And that is where I am now. In case you're wondering, there is NO heatsink or fan on the Northbridge right now, so the PC could possibly die again at any time. The board is already fried, though - the PCI-Express slot is dead. So, I'm just taking it one day at a time until I can afford to replace the motherboard.
Anyway, after that lengthy sidetrack, I'll get back to the events of my day yesterday. At 9pm, after stopping for a 4-pack of Guinness at the local seller of such things, I drove to a very green Italianate house a few blocks from where I live. The house is owned by "Lollipop" - a member of the message board here on TOHJ - and her husband. It's a very interesting house, and I've always loved it. The previous owners were....erm...."odd". The exterior is green. Completely green. Walls, windows, window trim, gutters - even the fence - is the same, glossy, shade of green. The interior is still grooving to tunes from the 70s. To say that the previous owners had absolutely no sense of what is appropriate for an Italianate house and what isn't would be the understatement of the century. Think "cheap wood paneling painted with 'antiquing' paint", yellow...wait....
YELLOW walls, yellow shag carpet (immediately removed by the current owners), yellow cabinets, yellow light fixtures, etc. Oh, and turquoise too. She loved turquoise almost as much as she loved yellow and green.
The young couple that owns this house has their work cut out for them. However, they DO have quite a bit to work with. The original, gorgeous staircase for example is complete and unmolested. (Not including a closet added under the stairs which can be easily removed) The trim seems to be mostly complete, the windows are original and in good repair, the floors seem solid and looked to be Oak, and there didn't seem to many walls that didn't belong. They got a very good price on the house, and the electrical system was upgraded before they bought it, and termite damage was repaired.
They're also quite fun to talk to, so I hope to spend more time over there. It would be nice to have a couple with similar interests that Sian and I could visit with. I'm looking forward to it, really.
Perhaps they'll let me take some pictures of their house and I can post them here on the site. I'm sure most of you will see the hidden beauty of the house, as I do.
So, that was my day yesterday. I returned from their house at 1:30am. I went to bed around 3am, making it a 22 hour day for me. I didn't wake up until almost noon today, of course. Since I'm now sick, I don't know if I'll be going to work tonight. If not, I might just be able to do a little work to the house.... I'm not THAT sick.
Now, for the pictures from yesterday...
Look! Part of a wall!
Look! Pretty, new insulation!
Look! Pretty, new wiring! (LOL!)
More insulation, and a bit of wiring.
A whole wall of insulation.
The new wiring for the ceiling fan - not connected yet, of course.
Stuff everywhere. Outlet boxes, in this case.
My new, pretty drill. It's Neon Green! I love TSC.... $39.00 for the drill and two batteries. Works great, too.
