My favorite book in the Wren Hollow Elementary school library was The Gadget Book by Harvey Weiss. I must have checked it out a hundred times during the second and third grade and tried to build most of the half-practical projects it detailed. The best among them was the burglar alarm. It used wooden blocks, a door hinge, and a strip of metal to make a simple normally-open contact switch. It was the first electrical work I ever did and almost certainly shaped my interests and career path.

This one's dumb. We've got the same trash can that everyone who shops at Target has. The inner removable pail is handy for keeping spills from pouring out the foot pedal hole, but its air-tight nature creates quite the vacuum when you're trying to pull the bag out.

|http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr=1-11/qid=1169524414/ref=sr_1_11/602-0868447-3796659?ie=UTF8&asin=B000JT7N7A|

After ripping the handles off yet another Glad bag trying to get it out of the pail I went to get a drill to poke an air hole in the bottom -- leak proof be damned. Next to the drill I saw a piece of 3/4" plastic tubing, which I ran from the top of the inner pail to the bottom.

Years ago I had a bad movie viewing experience I can't actually recall at Har Mar Theater in Roseville. As an experiment in how rumors spread and as mild revenge I decided that every time someone mentioned the Har Mar Theater I was going to let them know that once a rat ran across my foot while I was watching a movie there. It's not true, but I figured it was a story that people would pass on to friends.

This weekend I put in a Honeywell 360A whole house humidifier. The instructions said it should take an hour, and it only took me four. Nothing went wrong, which what you hope for when a project means cutting holes in your duct work, tapping into your water, and some wiring. Now when we wake up our throats don't hurt.

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Update: If you don't tighten down the compression fittings on the water supply line it will let go and you'll drain water into the floor drain all night. d'oh

If things have been a little sparse around here over the last year or so it's because outside of work the bulk of my organizational and creative energies have been going into the planning of our wedding.

The wedding was this weekend, and everything was spectacular. Photos and details can be found on the wedding website.

I've come away from the wedding planning experience with this advice for guys: Don't bother helping; no one but your finance/wife will believe you've done anything, and she's already in love with you.

We've got an old lighting fixture for our front porch, which we didn't want to replace with an ugly motion light. I tried putting a socket adapter in-line with the bulb, but it wouldn't fit in the globe.

More time spent staring at the lighting offerings at Home Depot turned up a workable, if convoluted, solution. An external motion detector sends a wireless signal to a replacement indoor light switch, which then turn on the external light. To make what should have been a ten minute project even sillier, I should be able to control the remote switch from the home link button in my car. Heh.

When I don't post here in a while it either means I'm not building anything new or that I'm too busy to write about what I am doing. This time it's the later. Not that any of it's been exciting, but almost all of it involved using a saw, which totally counts.

Gwin, our eldest cat, has always kicked toys into the basement sump for the joy of watching humans pick them out later. Milo, on the other hand, likes running into the muddy sump and then running up stairs. To keep the cats and their toys out I built a little wooden frame to fit and covered it with chicken wire. It's ugly but functional.

This weekend was full of discoveries involving ivy and stucco and removing the former from the later. Summarizing them we have:

1. Don't. Keep them away from one another. If you have a stucco home and your neighbor plants ivy secretly poison it.
2. If there is ivy on your stucco, just leave it there. Removing it is not worth the pain.
3. If you do remove the ivy, remove it completely. If you pull it off and plan on getting the residual debris later, you're going to find it's dried to a state where it can no longer be pulled off in strands like it can be when green.
4. If you've let residual ivy dry to the point where it's brittle, plan on a day full of power washers, long handled brushes, and ladders. Try to drink a lot. Expect to repaint.

There's a purchase agreement in place for the condo, and it's time to organize the moving extravaganza. Saturday, June 17th at 11am moving helpers generous with their time will find everything pre-boxed, wrapped, stacked, and ready. Half the stuff will be going to Salvation Army down the street and half will be moving from 580 N 2nd St. #120 to 330 E 50th St. I'm renting a large truck (and possibly selling off a good fraction of the furniture in advance), so with luck we'll be on to the beer and lots of food portion of the afternoon after just one short trip.

After moving into the house I started a series of small home improvement tasks. Some of them have genuine safety reasons but many happened only because changing things demonstrates residence. Here's an incomplete list of things I've done:

• added a ceiling fan to the bedroom
• rewired the doorbell with modern wire so it doesn't ring everytime you walk past the dining room heat register
• added shelving, a phone jack and power outlets to create a server corner
• added appliance-grade outlets behind the stove and fridge (rather than the ungrounded lamp-grade extension cords running through holes in the floor they previously had)
• added a motion light to the break-in-ariffic back yard
• cleaned out the gutters (I knew there's a reason I got that condo)
• replaced the rotting wiring for the basement lighting

|https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/datacenter| |https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/motionlight|