friedkitten.com - insanity included.

It's been a long and stressful past couple of days, but I've managed to get through so far. Friday started very early and consisted mostly of waiting and sitting around in the hospital, but I was fine with that, I had taken the day off with that exact purpose. Saturday was filled with taking care of my girl, shopping, a school dance performance and visiting a brand new kid. Yes, I became the proud godfather of a small girl. J&M looked thrilled with their new daughter, and they should, she looked absolutely stunning :)

Just grabbed a bunch of paperwork that needed attention - purchasing and ordering stuff is fun, paying for it a bit less - and as such paid for our trip to Egypt, and paid for the insulation job that was finished two weeks ago. Couldn't find any other bills, so stopped paying right there, grin.

I should look into the best time frame to make this years pension fund deposit though, as I didn't do it right at the start of the year as I normally do.

My last day off from work was spent well I'd say : went to Vlissingen this morning and spent the day at the beach with the girl and kids. It was quite foggy when we arrived - we couldn't even spot the water from 5 meters out - but it cleared up nicely and around noon the sun broke through and started burning fiercely.

Applied plenty of sunblock and so far it seems I didn't burn too bad. Hope the slight red color will turn into a tan over the next couple of days.

That's it for now, gonna log and see if I can find all the gear I need to head back to work tomorrow.

Someone is drilling about a hundred holes in my house as I write this entry, hence the reference to cheese. They'll - at least I expect them to do so - also fill those back up afterwards, once they're done insulating the cavity walls. This relatively small investment should pay off quite well over the course of time, with ever increasing energy prices. I'll never be able to make the current house a Low Energy House, because to do so would require extensive changes, which are realistically only possible when taken into account while building.

The cherry on top of the cake is the fact that 42% of my investment is paid for through various local and federal government grants.

In case anyone is interested : Pluimers Isolatie.

Cheese, cake... could it be that I'm slightly hungry? Off for a bite!

Should have been in bed hours ago, but spent too much time listening to vkgoeswild at vkgoeswild.

Don't blame me if you spend a couple of hours listening to her work the piano like she does :)

I am probably the owner of the best insulated shutter enclosures (DIY that is) in the country, after finishing up today. It's been a long day of hard work, but sure enough it'll pay off I guess. I had to rip the current enclosure to shreds because someone deemed it necessary to use screws and nails randomly, to cover them up, before finishing off with a layer of paint. Sure enough that left me with no clues to find out how it all was built, let alone take a well thought through approach for disassembling it.

While closing off the cavity walls - which was the point entirely - I replaced the EPS insulation panels (Styrofoam) dating back from the 70's (I'm just guessing) with 40mm Jackodur XPS (extruded polystyrene foam) panels, which should give me better insulation value and a tighter fit (the old panels were sort of thrown in there, whereas I sealed everything up nicely).

So, what's left to do tomorrow? I have to get a large wooden panel, which I'll cut to the right size so I can build a new enclosure. Seems all to simple when compared to today's demolition derby, grin.

Note : using a circular saw inside is a bad idea. I'll be eating dust for weeks.

I just finished taking down the first shutter enclosure because I'm having my cavity walls insulated next week. In order to prevent the insulation material from just falling through, those need to be closed up. Had I known all that upfront, I'd have asked the guys that installed the new windows last year to close the cavities up as well, but I didn't. Which makes for quite a bit of work to do myself now.

One more to go...

Note : a combination of PU foam and regular silicon sealant on your hands makes quite a mess. Don't know yet how I'll ever get these clean again. It can always wait for it to wear off, lol.

About two weeks ago I ordered a new DC jack for the laptop of my partner, as it clearly was broken. How did I know that for certain? I took the complete machine apart and took a look :)

Well, yesterday the part finally arrived and today I headed over to dad to see if he could help out replacing it. I guess I could have done it myself too, but I lack the proper tools and the experience, and working on a couple of hundred dollars piece of sensitive computer equipment may not be the right way to practice. Anyway, two hours later the DC jack was replaced, the secondary fault in the power adapter wiring has also been isolated and fixed and that machine is back in working order and now charging up. Thanks dad!

On Sunday I picked up my own new machine and promptly installed a ton of updates for it. One of them being a new BIOS upgrade, which is something that I've' done quite a few times already in my life. Always a bit of a risk - if it fails, you may end up with an very expensive brick instead of a computer - but I decided to go ahead anyway. It's better to lose one when not that much data is on it, opposed to brick it when it's full of data.

Sure enough the BIOS update went without a hitch, the machine rebooted - which was expected - and then... it promptly entered the BIOS setup again and complained about a reading error, no matter what I tried (/me shits pants). Erm... yikes! OK, so that didn't work, although when exiting the BIOS setup, the machine boots as expected. Weird? Yes, weird.

Ok, second reboot, same thing happens, it enters BIOS setup mode again, complaining about a reading error - even though it is showing the new BIOS version as being installed (old version : 1405, new version 3506). Well, let's do it again and see what happens, right? One new BIOS update later (same 3506 version) the machine is working perfectly, no more complaints about read errors etc. Good!

Only thing left now is to get rid of the AMD driver complaining about a .dll being missing on startup - AMD driver updates are always crappy - but that's the least of my concern. Everything works nicely and fast too, so I'm happy. I'll look into the driver issue some day :)

Note : for those of you that got slightly worried about last post, don't be. April Fools day 2012, you know? I'm not moving to Canada just yet.