Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

Ray has been tiling the bathroom the last couple of days. It’s starting to look good. Here’s a before and after:

I’ve spent my time sanding walls, and then re-plastering, then sanding. The areas below the front bedroom windows have been heaps of work, but they are starting to look great. And then tonight, Andy started to paint the ceilings - undercoat/primer first, of course.

Since we have to move in on Wednesday, we are going to be busy painting over the next couple of days, and I have to go back to work on Monday. And I’m not sure when we’ll get around to polishing the floors.

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I’m renovating my house at the moment, and I’m going to run some cable to various places. Unfortunately, I can’t do as much as possible, as the box gutter in the middle of the house precludes access to the northern roof space.

Still, I will run cable to as much as possible - since I need to replace some floorboards, a fair chunk of it will be under the floor, including some floor mounted power points, cat5, and maybe some a/v cables.

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One of the things Jaq liked most about our new house was this light:

Unfortunately, it got broken on Friday afternoon.

So, if anyone knows where we can get a replacement glass piece in Australia (prefer Adelaide), please let me know…

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No time to write. Gotta sleep. Here are pics of house today.

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I found a need for a tool the other day - blogsome has a 300k size limit on image file uploads. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have image files automatically resized/recompressed so they are smaller than a certain size…I wonder if this is possible.

I’d like to see this feature in ecto. Rather than just presets, make a ’smart action’, that automatically chooses image size/compression to make the image fit in a certain amount of data.

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I have over 20 categories - not all of them have posts yet, but I think this is too many.

How many categories should a blog have?

I’m guessing 6-9 is about right.

(Of course, each post done with ecto appears also under ‘General’. That doesn’t suck too much…NOT)

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School Holidays begin again. Of course, I’ll be too busy renovating to do any relaxing!

We had the concrete poured for the underpinning, and the mini skip delivered.

Made some good progress this afternoon, though. Got rid of a heap of the vine out the front.

Found two things in there: a bird’s nest, and a dead lizard.

And tonight, I found a big hole behind one of the taps.

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I use Gmail as a repository for all of my email, and a place to look at mail when I’m away from my primary computer. I really like the Spam filter - it generally picks up most spam, but not too many false positives.

Until today. An update from adsense-support@google.com was flagged as Spam.

Made me laugh.

Oh, and I still have 49 Gmail invites left. Email matt.schinckel@gmail.com if you want one.

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I use Google AdSense as a way of trying to make a little spare cash from my blog. I’ve only just started, and I’m still figuring out what ad settings work best.

I just changed from a list of searches/hits to an Ad. Imagine my surprise when it came up with a Gay Blog Site ad: and I have no idea how it came up with this. I am not gay, and I haven’t written anything about homosexuality (before now).

Of course, the irony is that I’m probably going to get more of them now, even though I’ve filtered that one…

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I had to work today, which meant I didn’t get to start working on the house until about 5pm. Jaq was around town doing stuff, so she didn’t do anything before then either.

Today I ripped up most of the skirting boards, and kept pulling nails and staples from the floor. Jaq continued with wallpaper stripping, until the machine exploded. Luckily, she wasn’t holding it at the time, and was not injured.

One of the walls we were going to remove turns out to be a solid wall. We still should be able to do something, but it will change our plan of attack a bit. You can see in the first photo below that there are bessa blocks under the wood panelling.

Also, I’ve drawn up the House Plans, in AutoDesk Inventor. This is only the floor plan, and doesn’t show the different heights, but I’ll work on those when I get the time.

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