Freddy vs Jason

We went to a Halloween party yesterday dressed as Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees. There were a lot of other great costumes there. My favorite was the Black Widow and Fat Thor couples costume. We all hung out in the back yard snacking and talking until the power went out and the wind got furious, forcing us to move inside the house.

CleanTalk Anti-Spam

I've been using the paid edition of CleanTalk Anti-Spam on the Absolute Anime Community Forums for three weeks now and am still very impressed. Spam posts have been completely eliminated and spam registrations have been reduced to almost nil. There used to be several spam registrations a day which I would have to spend time cleaning up every couple weeks, but now I've only see two that have occurred in the past three weeks. Such a time saver! The three year subscription I got was only $19.44 so totally worth it. I would recommend it to any forum that is besieged by spam.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Double Feature

Thursday night Treese and I went to see the premiere of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot which was a Fathom Events double feature along with the first movie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. It was a lot of fun. There was an intro by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, an intermission between the two movies, some interviews and behind the scenes stuff afterwards, and finally an outtro by Kevin and Jason. We thoroughly enjoyed both movies and it was helpful to see the original before seeing the new one. I think I actually liked Reboot better as it had more emotional stakes than the original. As expected there were a ton of cameos and it was fun spotting the usual players found in many Kevin Smith movies. These films definitely aren't for everyone but they were right up our alley and I'm glad we went.

Ceiling Fan & Roof Work

On Monday I installed a ceiling fan in Treese's home office, one of two ceiling fans we scored for free over the weekend thanks to Craigslist. One was white, the other brown, and both were in very good condition. I installed the white one and disassembled the brown one to box up for storage. I figure I'll use it to replace the ceiling fan in the gazebo at some point since the weather has not been kind to that one. It's the first time I've been in the attic since we had the new air conditioner and heater installed, and it was quite a mess up there. They left an empty cardboard box, cut zip ties, old metal bands, a bunch of tape scraps, PVC pipe scraps, and more. They also broke the light bulb and the face plate for the light socket/light switch combo. I understand being exhausted after a hard days work in the attic but they did come back a second time to finish the job, and a third and forth time to run tests so seems like they could have cleaned some of it up. And also let me know that they broke the face plate and light bulb so I could have replaced them.

Yesterday I had a handi-man neighbor, Dave, come by to help me with my roof valleys and gutters. He brought a friend with him who did the gutters while he did one of the valleys and put some tar-like stuff around the seals of the various pipes that come out of the roof. I watched how Dave did the valleys by using a crowbar to push the tiles along the valley back in place before using his air blower to clean them out. It was similar to how I cleaned the valleys except I didn't know about pushing the tiles back up. That only gets the very center of the valley clean, though, so at some point we'll need to have a professional remove the valley tiles to really clean the metal area below.

I also trimmed the branches of the tree that was spanning over the roof, the one that squirrels like to use to jump on the roof. I was able to get most of them thanks to my long branch saw. Then I worked on fixing the storm door. It was slightly slanted and so would scrape against the the edge when closed. Dave helped me re-align it, using the same screw holes in the metal frame but angling them away to create new screw holes in the wood. It worked great but then I noticed the storm door frame was pulling away from the wall at the bottom because the bottom of the metal frame was being pushed out by that lip of the regular door frame on the ground. I either needed to take the whole storm door off and shift it up a smidgen or cut off the little bit of metal pushing against the lip. I chose the latter as it seemed easier and thankfully it worked. The storm door is now flush against the wall and closing properly.

Blast from the past

I have successfully restored most of the forums, topics, posts, and user accounts that were lost in the great server crash of 2013. The restoration was no easy task, and merging into the existing forums was even more difficult but it seems to be working okay. More details can be found in the Blast from the past: pre-crash forums restored... mostly thread.

Speaking of the past, my friend Conor sent me a couple pictures he found of me that he had taken back in the mid-to-late 90s sometime. I was so skinny with huge glasses! I completely forgot that I used to have my desk angled like that instead of flat against the wall. I'm not sure of the exact year the pictures were taken, but it had to be at least 1995 because that looks like Windows 95 or 98 I'm using on my computer and I have a Power Rangers Falconzord on top of my monitor which was released in 1995. It was also before 1999 as that's when I moved to Redding. Can you find any more clues in the pictures to narrow down the year?

Cats vs Solar Torch

When I went outside this morning I noticed one of the solar torch lights we have along our walkway was just laying on the ground without its plastic post. It was right in the spot where we had it posted in the ground but the post that holds it up was nowhere to be found. I was confused, thinking who would want to steal a short plastic pole for a solar torch and not the light itself? So I went back through the security camera footage and at 12:49am two blurs zipped across the screen and plowed right through the torch post. When I ran it back at normal speed I saw it was two cats running full speed, one chasing the other, with the lead cat crashing through the solar torch so hard that the post flew into the nearby bush and the torch top fell right in place: https://youtu.be/z7aWxQ1JHfE

We were finally able to get American Home Shield to send out a different company for a second opinion on our air conditioner. They sent Cold Snap Air Conditioning, who arrived this morning. He found the same valve leak that JR from Service 1 found but after fixing that he did a test with nitrogen and also found a second leak in the condenser coil which Service 1 didn't even bother to check. He also concurred with our assessment that some of the duct work needed to be replaced. He then smelled a gas leak which he was able to confirm and get fixed. So we were very happy with his service.

HP Laptop Keyboard Install

I installed the backlit keyboard in my HP laptop this weekend. What a chore that was! I used my soldering iron to melt all the plastic rivets, carefully prying up the metal back plate as I went along until I could lift it enough to have access to the underside of the keyboard. I then had to melt more rivets so that I could pry up the keyboard. When I put the new backlit keyboard in I found that there were three notches which did not line up with the plastic pegs on the laptop. Argh!

The backside of the keyboard is metal so I couldn't just use scissors or a utility knife to cut out notches, and my tin snips don't offer the level of precision I would need, so the only option I could see was to cut off the plastic pegs that didn't align. There wasn't enough room to get even a small utility knife in there so I cut them with nail clippers and then filed them down the rest of the way with a metal nail file. Once I put the new keyboard in place I made some new notches with hot glue. I also used hot glue to recover all the plastic rivet tops I had melted away. I had tried spreading the plastic out with the soldering iron to make new heads but it just wasn't working.

I spent pretty much the entire day on this keyboard replacement and am happy that I got it done and it worked. This keyboard feels much nicer than the original and has a backlight so I can see what I'm doing even in low light. The whole process soured me on HP, though. They could have used screws or plastic clips but no, they designed it this way on purpose. Not cool, HP! I'll definitely think twice about purchasing an HP laptop in the future.