Ness’ Outpost

Sunday we went down to a little restaurant called the stockyards and had brunch, apparently they haven’t done brunch very often but are starting it up on the weekends.

I had a smoked green chili burger with cheese. It was really good.
I need to try smoking some chilies this year in my smoker for use on my own burgers and in my chili recipe. I recently watched a Bobby Flay green chili cheeseburger throwdown which gave me some ideas. Apparently refrying the green chili mixture on a griddle is a must.

Then we were off to the Wychwood seed exchange to try and find some heirloom tomatoes to sprout into seedlings and then transplant into the garden in late May. The place was packed! Probably because they made the Posted Toronto’s things to do this weekend list. There were all kinds of “crunchy” and “granola” types and then us. Grant and Chantelle would be proud! ;)
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This long weekend between a Birthday, family visits, Valentines day and Chinese New Year we were able to do some work updating the guest bedroom.

First I ripped off all the old trim and mouldings in the guest room. Ended up having to chisel off the old door mouldings as they were stapled onto the finished frame pretty tightly (with glue).
Then we did a lot of sanding of the ceiling and walls.
A fresh new coat of ceiling paint went up.
Then a coat of prime went on the walls followed by two coats of paint.
A new dome light was installed to replace the 1970’s style builders light.
Lastly I got to test out the new 18 guage brad nailer and drag out the old mitre saw by installing the new mouldings - which we painted on saw horses in the basement.

Still need to caulk the space between my poorly mitred joints - it probably doesn’t help that the walls aren’t square. Next time I’m going to try to “cope” the inside corners of the baseboards. Then install some doorstop to connect the baseboards to the floor. Fill all the nail holes and call it done.

Then I can set my sights on the master bedroom for more of the same.
I’ll see about getting some before and after pictures up. I think we have some old ones from when we ripped out the carpet.

My back definitely hurts but it is amazing the difference some paint and sweat can make.

Tonight I was picking up some groceries on the way home from work at the Superstore on Dundas and Trafalger. On my way in with my green bins a guy was standing with a shopping cart that had a computer with a touch screen mounted on the handle. He showed me how to flip through the current flyer and how to search for products in the store and off I went.
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I purchased a Canon PIXMA MX860 printer after the holidays during the boxing week sale. I have been looking for a printer/scanner/fax for the house for a while. We’ve lived without one for 3 years but every now and then I want to print or copy a document and it has become annoying enough that I’ve decided to do something about it. A co-worker made fun of me for wanting a fax in this day and age. While I agree with him, every now and then a fax comes in handy - like dealing with realtors.

I was looking for a laser all in one, but the cost of those with wireless network and a fax is north of $400 CAD. Way more than I was comfortable paying for a home office machine.

This device has great reviews - there were a few negatives concerning the print quality but for $100 CAD on sale from Best Buy I can’t see how it gets much better than that.

The big issue I found after unpacking it and loading in the print head and inks is that there is no way to configure the networking of the device from Linux. I had to use the packaged window application to get the device set up on my LAN since I have secured my wireless network. But once the device joined the network I haven’t had any problems printing. I haven’t tried scanning with the Canon drivers (europe location) yet but will up date when I have to figure that out. Sane might already have the drivers set up to go.

For those looking for something to do, you could probably try to sniff the communication of the printer on the USB port. Another thing that would be great is to sniff out the communication of ink levels and other admin tasks between a windows machine and the printer. My install of cups doesn’t seem to handle the feedback.

I haven’t tried the fax, scanner, or media readers yet but the copier and printer work as expected.
I modified our PPD file to do grey scaling by default to save on colour ink. If you want a colour copy you have to change the advanced setting. I can post the change to the PPD file if anyone needs it but you can find them online.

• Canon PIXMA MX860 Print and Scanner Drivers - choose linux and then your language
• OpenPrinting.org Canon PIXMA MX860 Info
• I found this discussion on OpenPrinting.org to be very helpful

My neighbour had an old snow blower in his side yard just sitting there basically uncovered except for a wooden shelf above it. I asked him if it ran and he said it didn’t - I figured that might have been the case as we both were shovelling away last year in the winter and there was a lot of snow last winter. I asked him if it was ok if I had a look at it to try and figure it out. We’d both have a much easier winter!
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Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.

For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?

The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.

As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.

Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.

We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.

I took our Ariens mower out of the shed last week to give her some love. We inherited the mower from Laurens Dad when we bought the house. It had sat in his garage for at least 3 years as their backup mower.

I took the blade off, sharpened it, cleaned the spark plug and air filter and put them back in. Then after a lot of pulls on the recoil starter it finally sprung to life with a sputter and didn’t sound right at all. After a few minutes it cut out for some unknown reason. I of course didn’t do the proper maintenance to put the mower to bed for the winter so I was hoping this wouldn’t happen.

Every time I tried to mow the back lawn when I got to the corner and turned the mower it sputtered and died. If I tilted the mower forward a bit it sometimes saved the stall and ran but that is no way to mow a lawn. I figured it was bad gas from sitting all winter but I had topped up the tank with fresh gas so who knew. At this point I had the oil hot enough to do an oil change so I did that too but I knew it wouldn’t help the problem. Oil won’t make the mower stall unless it’s way too full which the machine wasn’t.

Some internet reading suggested I clean and inspect the carburetor (where gas and air mix before being combusted) and possibly rebuild it. I didn’t even know where the carburetor was so I had to download a bunch of manuals. I started with the Ariens manual for my mower serial number 911014. But mowers can have multiple engines installed on them so I had to go get the engine serial number to look that manual up too. It was a Tecumseh TVS120.
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We had in a contractor to install the outdoor BBQ natural gas lines needed to fire up the new BBQ. I had assembled the BBQ two weeks ago — yes, I got excited. Lauren tells everyone I’ve been sneaking out of bed at night to give it hugs and kisses. I cannot confirm or deny that accusation.

When we first tried to start the new BBQ I had some problems getting the BBQ to ignite with the electric starter so I used a match and she gave a big poof and we were cooking in no time. A quick half hour on high to burn in the new burners and grill was all she got last night. It’s also a good idea to heat everything up to sterilize the firebox and to allow the oil I put on the cast iron grills and smoker box to impregnate the metals and burn off the excess.

Tonight after refereeing the first meat hits the grill. I’m thinking something with lots of grease like hot Italian sausages is a good “seasoning” meat to get the flavorizers and grills up to speed quickly. The smoker box needs another coating in oil as it is raw cast iron unlike the grills which are porcelain coated.

I’m excited. This weekend I’m going to try out the rotisserie.

Last night was a windy night. Gusts of up to 100km/h and 25mm of rain were forecast and yet still people put out their trash and recycling bins the night before.

When improperly packed - perhaps haphazardly as is the case in our house - the empty cans, paper and junk fly around the neighborhood. Even some unstable garbage bins were flipped if they were placed out in the open where the wind can lick at them all night long. Since our house is located at the end of the street we have a huge fence line that collects this stuff if the wind is blowing out of the East.

If you have to put out your refuse the night before, stack your blue boxes so only the top one has items exposed to the wind. Put a sturdy cardboard box upright against the windward side of the box blocking the wind and forcing it up and over the cans, paper and everything else inside the box. Better yet, invest in a large clear garbage bag or two and use it if your recycling bins are overflowing. These ideas may not work in hurricanes, but it’s better than nothing.

At least compost is too heavy to be blowing around.

The hot water tank that came with the house was a rental. It’s > 15 years old so we had it replaced today.

Scale and other nasty stuff can build up in those tanks depending on the hardness of your water. After 15 years it was time to swap it out. By keeping the rental contract Direct Energy replaced it for “free”. That’s part of what the rental cost pays for over time.

We looked at the on demand instant water tanks but the venting would have cost a fortune. The location the tank is plumbed in for gas and water access is on our shared wall of the semi-attached. There wasn’t a good place to punch through for venting on one of our outside walls.

The new tank was moved slightly to allow better access to the furnace burners which meant a change in the venting. Now we have a better slope of the horizontal pipe to help make sure we don’t have a carbon monoxide event. The old vent had the horizontal run to the chimney almost parallel to the floor which came up in the home inspection.

Now I need to insulate the hot water pipes in the house. The run to the bathroom isn’t too bad, but the run to the kitchen is easily 30 or 40 feet and it takes a while to vacate all that pipe to get some fresh hot water flowing.

Hot showers for all!