Lumber sizing

I am no expert craftsmen and this drives me nuts. When did 2x4 s stop being 2x4 s? You can head over to Wikipedia and get a run down of 'dimensional sizes' versus 'actual sizes' and a lame explanation as to why that is. Wiki says it has to do with planing and kiln drying. Well maybe, but I am leaning more to hogwash. There certainly is planing involved. I suppose kiln drying would shrink stuff, but you aren't supposed to cut timber until it is dry so shrinkage should be minimal. I suspect is has more to do with getting more boards out of trees and using planing chips for cheapass particle board.

I live in an 80 year old house. The 2x4s actually measure 2 inches by 4 inches not the 1 1/2" by 3 1/2" that you would get at a lumber yard. The trim pieces also measure out to actual inches. I have a number of 1 inch by 4 inch boards, but try and find that in a store !!!. Somewhere along the line it changed. Why can't the wood be sold by its actual dimensions? And why can't they accomodate the 'planing' and 'shrinkage' to result in accurately sized lumber?

I am trying to finish the attic in my house. I am wanting to do the trim in the same manner as the rest of the house. Fortunately the millwork is minimal but all the trim boards have nicely rounded measurements that used to be standard. I shouldn't have to buy a planer for this but I may.

Peoria has a new game store !!!

If any of the few people who read this blog are gamers, Peoria has a new game store. Oddly I had to hear about it from someone in Bloomington first.

For years, Peoria's gaming community has been underserved. We are talking, AD&D, Warhammer, Squad Leader, Magic the Gathering, Munchkin type games. Now, there is the little store in Washington ran by a chain smoking old man, but it is too far, has too little, and the second hand smoke is waaaay too much. There is also a scarey little shop located in the basement of a house, on Redbud off of Farmington road. The Hobbytown in the Grand Prairie shopping area has some stuff but it is limited. All in all the stores all pretty much suck in one way or another.

Well Peoria has a new place with an enthusiastic new owner. Just For Fun is the name of the place and it is located on the corner of Lake and Sheridan. It sits across the street from the Ethan Allen furniture store, next to Ideal Troy (the DQ corner). It is kind of hard to spot at first. Most game stores are.

Inside there is ample space and good presentation. It is a good size for a game store. There are 4 or 6 tables in the back where friends can gather to play. The owner even made a little room for those older gamers who have tots in tow, to have the tots play in. That's forward thinking !!!!

The material inside appeals primarily to the 10 and up age groups. Not all of it is of the geeky sort but you won't find mainstream stuff. One might find some interesting gift ideas.

I picked up a copy of Kill Doctor Lucky by CheapAss games. Should provide some fun at Thanksgiving.

If you are looking for something different... check the new store out, and please.. take the kids too.

Morning Ramble

Well everything is back up and working.

So much to do, so little time. I find myself with so many things I want to say but the words rarely just drip off the keyboards like they do for Bill Dennis or CJ Summers. I am not a journalist nor do I try to be. Long thoughts get conjured but by the time I can sit and write them out, they dissipate into the ether, or the time and the moment have passed.

Lately I have been enjoying the frustrations of dealing with contractors.

The water company buyout that just won't die still rankles me. A good angry rant is brewing deep inside.

France... I have been to France. I know something about what is going on there. Not just because I have been there but Europe is something spent an inordinate amount of time studying in college in futile hopes that I might actually have a career in it. I still read and subscribe to several high brow journals, mags and whatnot. Anyways. The riots may yet prove to be a seminal event for Europe. We will see.

All the events in France recalled my reading of Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance. The book is an interesting read. There are some significant ommissions in his assessment. His prescription, notably conservative, is a bit over the top too. But... his look at Europe is pretty accurate.

Too much Sex on TV? Get over it. The only reason anyone cares is because *gasp* it might be pushing envelopes and *gasp* some puritan types might be getting their panties in a bunch over it. Compared to the rest of the western world, our TV is very tame. No one cares about the sex on tv in Europe. It doesn't stem from a lack a values so much, as it is just... boring. As you get closer to the saturation point, people pay less attention to it. It certainly has little effect on social ills like teen pregnancy. You can't exactly claim sex saturated Sweden is overflowing with unmarried teen mums or that Swedish society is breaking down. If you don't like it, turn the TV off. Duh !! Pick up a smut filled book instead.

Dunlap schools score top ratings. The Peoria exodus is expected to increase.

Tech Tip: If you use SBC DSL, and presumably MTCO too, you can ditch the software they give you. My SBC disc (along with my T-Online disc) went straight from box to bin, never touching the lips of my CD-ROM. I use RASPPPOE. Some guy in Germany kindly made a simple, tight, PPPOE driver for Windows. This thing works like a champ. I have used it for 6 years now. No overhead. No bloat. No SBC spam. If you get it, follow the instructions !!!!! If you like it, throw the man a few dollars. Cable users are out of luck.

Onward with my day

Don't like what is on the radio?

Yeah... my PC is back up. No hardware changes... yet. No new software... yet. Clean installs always run much better.

Moving on...

As I reinstall stuff, one rediscovers some charming things. Winamp is a beautiful MP3 player. It is independent and its basic functionality is FREE. It is on every install I do. But that is not what I wanted to point out.

There has been some local interest in podcasts and internet broadcasting. The good folks at Nullsoft make a server, called Shoutcast for streaming onto the net. It is FREE too !!! The rub is bandwidth. The more people you let listen, the bigger the pipe you need and must pay for.

One set of stations I like dipping into are the SomaFM channels. Groove Salad is very nice. Totally eclectic. They have some bits on how they are set up and point to some copyright issues that might be of interest. They are publically supported through donations. No commercials !!!

With some hardware cleverness one can get this to feed to one's stereo, but I don't have the toys for that yet.

Adobe Acrobat 7.05

Having trouble getting Adobe Acrobat 7? Download manager not working? Download managers blow. FTP for the win !!

Hit it

PC Dilemna....

When your windows install finally say goodbye, it is a good time for an upgrade... usually. Installing hardware later on, never quite works as well as you would think, especially if the change is significant. Some hardware pieces cause more problems than others. Windows just does not take well, the removal and change of hardware. Performance tends to decline despite the new faster toys. So, many times it is best to do it when you are going to have a fresh install.

To upgrade or not... that is the question.

I currently have a SCSI320 harddrive. It is past its 5 year warranty and making funny noises. Yeah I know somebody is going to go wtf. Once upon a time SCSI was pretty bleeding edge for harddrives, they had the highest capacities and the highest speeds. Being a gamer, this is important. SCSI also had an advantage in that you could string along a whole succession of harddrives, making upgrades easier and allowing you to keep using old hardware. No more. I had hopes of converting, maybe, to Serial SCSI but the spec seems doomed. It is three years late and Adaptec seems to be quite ill. SATA is coming along nicely, making SCSI much less appealing than it might have been in the past, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper. Only problem is, my motherboard does not have a SATA interface. I am not about to buy up some fossilized EIDE harddrives.

So this probably means I need a new motherboard. A new motherboard will mean a new CPU and new RAM (likely but not necessarily). AMD seems to be the way to go now. AMD recently overtook Intel in volume in some markets. This is good. The board I am eyeing is an ASUS A8N32-Deluxe.

Oh... just as I am stuck with a mobo with no SATA, it also only has AGP x4. The standard has changed and now its all heading to PCIEx16. So... a new graphic card. *sigh* There is nothing wrong with the card I got, it is 'current' but it is AGP.

The sound card is getting old (SB Audigy2). The thing with sound cards, is there rarely is anything wrong or dated about the hardware (usually). The problem comes with the drivers. Creative Labs often conveniently stops issuing updated drivers for its older cards. This leads to them not being 'compatible' with advancing DirectX/OpenGL standards. This naturally encourages people to buy new ones, in a market dominated by Creative. Most motherboards come with a sound chip built in, but they too suffer from lack of driver support and tend to suck in general. I think my soundcard has crossed this driver threshhold. Bas***ds!!

DVD-Roms... I have two (Plextor) in my system. I like having two. It is best if they are identical. Silly me, in a rush a few years back, only updated 1 of the two. The older one has had problems for some time. It is not reliable. It needs replaced. But.. I can't get a second of the newer ones because, they are no longer made. Ah progress. I can probably get by with what I got, but I won't like it. Plextor makes an SATA version. On the upside, DVD-ROMS are pretty cheap these days, even the top tier ones.

bleh... I want a new laptop too. It really is out of date. Pentium2 600mhz... nuff said.

Why all this fuss? Some people spends 100s evens 1000s of dollars on their cars Buying rims, paint jobs, stereos, hydraulics, whatnot. My PC is my sports car. I build my own. My last major PC upgrade was 3 years ago.

*pulls out paper*

Dear Santa,...

Bah !! My PC crashed...er well my Win 2k install died.

Hurray for Knoppix Live CD !!!! Bypass that harddrive entirely.

What to do what to do... Hmmm

Reinstall Win2k?

or... go to XP/2003 ???

or... ditch M$ entirely and throw Linux on ???

Tried repairing the Win 2k install... its totally f^&*$d. Even the original install disk don't recognize what is left. The culprit, Civ 4 !!!!!!!! Wait until it is patched before you get it. That SOB blue screened me three times and it felt like memory leaks were the cause. Bad Bad Bad... The blue screens finally destroyed part of the boot sector.

*sigh*

Well I got Knoppix in the meantime. Just slip it into the CD-Rom, reboot, log into the DSL and I am off.

Linkage: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/

Other Live CDs exist for other flavors of Linux. They are a great way to try before you actually convert.