After our initial folly with the bedroom door, I’ve fixed four other doors by doing nothing more complicated than replacing the old strike plates with new ones.
It sure is nice having doors that dont come open when the central AC kicks on and the air pressure in various rooms of the house changes.
Ever since we moved in here, the master bedroom door hasn’t closed well. Sometimes you’d have to shut it a couple of times before the bolt would latch; sometimes you’d have to pull upwards on the knob after closing it before it would latch. This was a combination of an original strike plate, a replacement doorknob installed by the previous owners, and a few coats of paint since 1957. Today I decided to fix it (one of those “I’ll get around to it eventually” things).
I checked and tightened all the screws. They’re fine. I take out the strike plate and look at it – wow, a previous owner has taken bits out of it with a file to try to make a replacement knob/bolt fit. Unfortunately, their modifications aren’t working with the current knob.
We went to Lowes, and picked up a Dremel rotary tool kit and two replacement strike plates. Got home, and I realized that one of the new strike plates would work just fine if I chiseled out some wood from the bolthole and moved the strike plate down about an eighth of an inch. Tried it, and closed the door. CLICK! it latched. We didn’t need the Dremel after all.
We then installed some felt pads in the door frame to keep the cats from “bumping” the door at night and making it rattle in the frame. Tested the fit of everything, made sure the bolt would latch. CLICK! yep!
… until we tried to turn the knob again to open the door. Something inside the knob went SPROING, the knob was turning, but the bolt wasn’t moving.
After all of our effort to make the darned door close properly, we were now trapped in our own master bedroom because the door wouldn’t open.
Fortunately, I still had my tools (hammer, couple of screwdrivers) on my side of the door. After about ten minutes, we managed to completely deassemble the doorknob assembly, and got the bolt pulled back from the knob mechanism (otherwise we would have ended up just pulling the hinge pins). Off to Berings we went, to buy another doorknob kit.
Got home from Berings, and I went to install the doorknob. I used the new strike plate that I’d already installed earlier in the day. Then, I realized that the hole in the door was about an eighth of an inch too small for the new doorknob mechanism and casing to fit! Out comes Mr. Dremel and a grinding/sanding bit. Lots of sawdust later, we have a working bedroom doorknob that opens properly from both sides, with the door padded so it wont rattle in the frame when the cats try to get in.
We really just have no luck with doors.
My Norelco T760 beard/mustache trimmer died. The charge ran out, and now it refuses to take a new charge (even after leaving it plugged in overnight).
At least it’s only $20 for the next-better model. I’ve not found a beard trimmer that I like better.
At 12:20, we walked out of the Borders at Westheimer and Gessner with a copy of the latest Harry Potter book.
Rather painless overall, I’d gone down there this evening after work to reserve a copy, and all we had to do at midnight was wait for the first batch of fifty people to go ahead of us (we were #63).
A couple of years ago, I was a big fan of Adriaan Tijsseling’s Ecto blogging client software. Some interface changes and a required paid license (after I’d already donated quite a bit when it was freeware) soured me on it, and I switched to using MarsEdit or just posted using the WordPress web interface.
I decided to see what Ecto looked like nowdays after hearing of a recent update, and all I can say is “WOW”. Everything’s back in a single window (like I like it), the interface is great, functional, and beautiful. I’ve just paid the very reasonable $17.95 for a permanent license, and will be using it for my posts to SunHELP, MacHELP, FiftiesHouse, and this weblog in the future.
2007 UPDATE: In the two years since I originally made this post, I’ve become a regular customer at EPO, Electronic Parts Outlet, here in Houston. You can find their website at http://www.epohouston.com.
2009 UPDATE: Houston now has its own Goodwill Computerworks store, but I’m not really impressed with it at all compared to the variety of bits, pieces, and parts that were available at the Austin location.
Orignal post follows:
The only bad thing about Houston is the complete and total lack of electronics/computer-parts surplus stores (at least that I can find). None of my coworkers know of any decent ones either.
In Austin, there was Discount Electronics and Goodwill ComputerWorks. Houston appears to have nothing similar, which is strange considering how much larger than Austin it is.
I’m really impressed to see the White House press corps grow a set of balls. Bravo.
Once again, the Internet proves just how small of a world we all live in. Got an email tonight from new neighbors two blocks over, who found my contact info via the Users Near You feature of MetaFilter. Neat, eh?
I finally got the GPS working, so I went running around the neighborhood tonight. I’d spent the day home from work sick in bed, and just needed to get out and get some fresh air.
Here’s the result. It seems that MacStumbler’s features are nice, except for when you want actual correct GPS coordinates listed in your logfiles along with the access points you find. It displays the correct data on the screen, but not in the log files it writes out to disk. Tomorrow I’ll give iStumbler a proper try now that I’ve got the GPS issues resolved.
Got bored and did my first wardrive tonight. I’m still having GPS issues (I think it’s the GPS, not the software), so I didn’t get GPS coordinates – but in a quarter-mile square area (Gessner/Westheimer/Richmond area), I found eighty-five wireless access points.
I’m using some Windows software on my AMD box to reset and re-init the GPS for an initial fix, and hopefully will be able to do a proper ‘drive with locations and such tomorrow, using iStumbler instead of MacStumbler.
