Surround Sound Debug

For some reason, this keeps happening to me. I must be doing it wrong. But I’ve either been too stubborn or too distracted to find the better way to do it. I’ve installed surround sound wiring into my abodes at least five times (twice in my bachelor days at two different apartments , and thrice …

If a tree falls in your backyard…

A few weeks ago, a mighty wind blew.  It toppled a portion of one of our blue spruce trees, nearly destroying my neighbor’s garage and power line.  So it, and its brethren, had to go. I was sad at first, these trees being at least 50 years old.  But I warmed to the idea of …

Cabinet child lock

My 1-year old is a curious kid.  She prides herself in breaking into highly secure bank vaults, er cabinets.  In particular, she’s taken a liking to our buffet which houses both china and liquor (neither of which are kid-approved items) behind two toddler-level doors.  So I had to come up with a way to keep …

Aluminum trigonometry

I ran into an interesting trigonometry problem a few weeks ago, when I was working on the cable pole installation.  The problem was simple enough: extend the pole such that the trash trucks wouldn’t snag it, thus ripping it down.  But the real question was: how tall must I extend it to get adequate clearance?  …