Matt Shelton

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• View Mobile Websites in Windows with Safari 4 Developer Tools

links apple, delicious, google reader, links

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Turn a Hoodie into a Laptop Bag [Clever Uses]
  Why bother buying a laptop bag if you’ve got a hoodie?

links delicious, google reader, links

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Fixing network Priority in Windows : Win7 Update
  I was having a terrible problem with what almost felt like QoS when at a hotel this week. My GMail persistence was terrible, but my VPN tunnel traffic to work was fine. Turns out that each of my network adapters was in the opposite order it should have been. I re-ordered them and things felt a LOT more even-keeled.

links delicious, google reader, links

The fun homeownership never ends. And why should it? I know not.

After doing a bunch of work in the kitchen this past November, we ran into one snag: the new stove would not sit flush against the wall. This wall happens to be an exterior wall; with almost any brick house, there’s not a lot of room behind the drywall and this is no exception. As a result, the power receptacle, which fit snugly underneath the previous stove, causes the new one (with two ovens, hence the clearance difference) to sit out about 3 inches.

This doesn’t bother me one bit, it does, however, annoy my wife. And as everyone knows, low WAF is bad. She’ll deal with it fine in the short term, but I know that at some point I’m either going to have to figure out how to make that stove sit against the wall, or order a really thick piece of matching backsplash to fill the gap.

I had a couple of hours to kill on this cool and windy President’s Day, so I started disassembling the non-functional kitchen in our finished basement. The functional main level kitchen is right above it, and the stove wiring runs down into the basement, so to get a good look at it, I had to take out a couple of wall mounted cabinets. Who doesn’t like demolition? Nobody. Everyone likes taking things apart.

I had previously noted that the 6 gauge wiring from my panel to the stove dipped down below the top of the exposed drywall in the basement, and then reappeared going straight up a few inches back. This made no sense to me unless there was a junction of some kind in the wall, and I was certain that couldn’t be up to code. I filed this mentally, and didn’t think about it again until today… Two cabinets into my demolition, I notice this perfectly lovely portal in the wall:

A sudden memory flash… what could possibly be in there?

Yep.

Apparently, when you “upgrade the wiring” in a house, and some of the circuits are too short, or too hard to get to, you can put a big ol’ junction box in the wall to marry old wiring to new wiring. I’m certain that you’re supposed to make sure that said junction box is accessible, but perhaps whomever did the wiring didn’t communicate that to the same people who put a not-to-code kitchen in the basement of this house?

Maybe?

Of note, this did answer my question as to where my doorbell transformer was located. Two mysteries solved!

geek life home, wiring

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Bacon Cheese Turtleburgers Ground beef pattie topped with sharp…
  Ok yes, eating one of these would likely increase one’s body fat. But they look so cute, and probably taste fantastic. I may need to break these out during grilling season.

links delicious, google reader, links

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Cuttin’ Glass and Taking Names Ever looked at a wine bottle to admire its shape, color, or translucent qualities?

  Yep, me too. This looks like a neat project to make some decorative and/or fun glasses.

• Delete Your Account Ever want to delete a rusty online account but don’t want to navigate a maze of unfamiliar preferences to do so? If you’re drowning in social networking, blogging, and other sites, web site Delete Your Account shows you how to extricate yourself painlessly.

links accounts, crafts, delicious, design, diy, glass, google reader, howto, links, reference, social, web2.0

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• How To Set up a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 If you have a netbook and would like to upgrade it to Windows 7, you may be wondering how to do it without a clunky external DVD Drive.
• LackRack – Eth0Wiki This is an incredibly cheap alternative to buying a network rack. I may need to employ this for wiring the house, centrally locating a NAS, etc.

links delicious, google reader, hacks, howto, ikea, links, network, rack, software notes, to-do, tools, usb, windows7

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Our Best Bites: Single Serving Pie in a Jar I like pie, and what could be better than single-serve pie?
• Build A Book Nest This looks like a cute idea for a "books I’m reading" bookshelf that wouldn’t be too hard to build.
• Cool Tools: Toto Eco Drake I’ll have to remember this one for whenever I can cobble together the money to remodel our bathroom. This looks like a smart way to get a strong flush using less water.

links baking, bathroom, books, delicious, google reader, home, links, pie, snacks, to-do, toilet, woodworking

I’m on a serious book-reading roll this month. I promise I’m calming down now, because, well, the next book on my plate is The System of the World…

After my mom saw that I was reading Jesus For President last fall, she thought I might like this one by Donald Miller, the sub-title of which is Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. The authors of Jesus for President footnote Blue Like Jazz a couple of times, so I was already familiar with the book by reference.

I have a hard time deciding which one I like better, to be completely honest. On the one hand, Jesus For President was a hard-hitting look at Christian discipleship in a time when we find ourselves pulled more and more toward secular positions. It made me feel a bit bad about times in which I should have been a better follower of Christ, and guilt can be a powerful motivator!

On the other hand, Blue Like Jazz makes me feel a little more normal about feeling bad. Miller is a fantastic personal story teller, and his insights into his own spiritual growth are engaging, enlightening and motivating. One of the underlying themes is learning to love (God, others, yourself), which Miller introduces as being like learning to appreciate Jazz music – he didn’t like Jazz until he saw someone playing soulfully with their eyes closed, and then he loved Jazz. Being able to accept the forgiveness and grace that comes with salvation and a personal relationship with Christ is parallel to loving yourself (and everyone else).

He also spends a good amount of time recalling events from when he was auditing some classes at Reed College. I have an extended member of the family who went to Reed, and I’m now suddenly very interested in asking him about some of the more sordid events which supposedly take place there. I don’t want details, mind you, but an additional perspective would be fascinating.

There’s one story that sticks with me after turning the 181st page: Miller was part of a small group of Christians at Reed (a certain minority on one of the most secular campuses in the country). During the annual Renn Fayre celebration, the group put up a “confession booth” in the middle of the campus. Rather than accepting confessions, which was likely to cement them as the negative stereotype many viewed them to be, they did the confessing. They confessed their sins, the sins of the church and of Christians at large. They moved people and were changed by the simple experience of saying things like “Christ tells us to feed the poor, and I know I haven’t done the best job of that.” and “Christ said to love your neighbor, and I’ve certainly had a bad attitude when I’m woken up by loud noises from next door.”, etc. This sounds like such a profound experience.

Now that I’ve thought about it a little more (ok, the span of a few paragraphs), I did like Blue Like Jazz more. A little, anyway.

books Christianity, habits, reading

This was on sale for about two bucks in the discount bin at Barnes and Noble. It looks interesting. And short.

It was both of those things. This could easily be the end of my post, but I actually liked the book…

At 181 pages, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an incredibly quick read. Mohsin Hamid pens this tale in the first-person, speaking to an unidentified individual (who we are led to believe is a journalist) at a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan. This story of a young Pakistani coming to America and finding both academic and professional success only to reject it all and return home within five years is quite compelling. It’s not thrilling, and I make this point singularly because one of the praise notes on the cover is one that makes this book out to be some amazing work of thriller fiction, when in reality it’s not all that suspenseful. In fact, most of “the next page” is fairly obvious, even if it is an interesting story.

Hamid expertly weaves the theme of “fundamentals” throughout the book, and I have to believe that this was the purpose behind the title, using the oft-spoken phrase “Islamic Fundamentalism” as a mental trigger to engage the reader. In fact, there is almost no presence of said fundamentalism in this book, save the last dozen or so pages. Instead, the narrator experiences different aspects of fundamentals throughout this story: the life of an immigrant in America, the academic talents which propelled him into the business world, the business acumen which gave him professional success, love with a woman who was fundamentally unavailable to him, and then the return home to his family in Pakistan.

I really liked this $2 discount book, and I felt a bit insulted for the author that Barnes and Noble was practically willing to give it away.

books habits, reading