Home Improvements: Kitchen – Day 2

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 @ 9:58pm

Turns out that tiling is taking much longer than expected, but it’ll be worth it in the end; I’m sure of it. I decided to forgo the tearing up the linoleum and just even out what was left.

Was finally able to start to lay down the backer board in the early afternoon:

The (future) Laundry Room

This was/will be the kitchen:

The (future) Kitchen

After a long day’s work I have about 2/3 of the kitchen backer boarded and glued, so hopefully tomorrow I can finish and maybe begin to lay some tile. It’s a grueling process but I know that the tile will look good in the end.

Adventures in Home Owning

Monday, March 22nd, 2010 @ 9:40pm

I am now officially a home owner! After several long weeks of waiting for everything to come together the day has finally arrived. Taking advantage of the housing credit, low interest rates, and buyers’ market I settled on a nice 3/2 home. Sadly, even after closing today I feel like I spent more time at Home Depot & Lowes than I did in the house.

I’ll try and put up some other pictures later, but in the meantime I’ve started work on the kitchen:

Za Floor

Needless to say, I’m having second thoughts of tearing up the linoleum. I was planning to pull up the linoleum to place down tile, but I’m having second thoughts given the strong attraction the linoleum has to the floor. I’m considering just leveling out the portions that have been removed and then placing the tile directly over that. A good nights sleep should help me decide one way or the other.

UAB Community Band Spring Concert

Monday, March 8th, 2010 @ 10:10pm

I am again participating in the community band this Spring, and if you enjoyed our performance this past Christmas I highly encourage you to join us again on Sunday, April 18th @ 3pm. I don’t have any word on the venue yet, but I’m assuming it is in the Jemison Concert hall again at the Alys Stephens Center.

Some of the repertoire of which we’ll be playing are:

  • Beau Ideal – Sousa
  • Emperata Overture – Smith
  • Chorale Fanfare – Bimm
  • Elegy for a Young American – Lo Presti
  • Broadway in the 90s – arr. Higgins

It’s a fun selection of pieces – all of which I enjoy playing, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing; so please join us if you have the time.

Blog: From Drupal to WordPress

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 @ 5:37pm

You shouldn’t notice any major changes on the front end other than a few minor enhancements, but I’ve switched over from Drupal 6.9 to WordPress 2.9. When I first moved to Drupal from Coranto a little over one year ago I quickly mashed together a template. This move has allowed me to completely re-write the site to make it cleaner overall.

The major things that you should know is that my rss feed has moved from /rss.xml to /feed. The old link will still work, but I recommend you update it just in case. A few old links may be missing here and there, but all posts, pages, and comments have been moved over from Drupal. If you encounter any other weird issues, please leave a comment.

Migration

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 @ 2:48pm

Just a short notification. My host will be shifting servers around sometime tomorrow so there may be a small period of downtime both here and at scurker.com. I don’t foresee any major issues, but should anything adverse happen you have been forewarned.

New Portfolio

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 @ 8:10pm

A few days ago I revamped and relaunched my portfolio. The new site is now built upon WordPress and should help expand the type of content I put on the site. The new launch also includes a blog which will be completely separate from this blog. For friends & family, don’t worry; this blog is sticking around. I’ll be able to post about mumbo-jumbo like “jquery, javascript, css, php” over on my portfolio’s blog while keeping this one on things I find purely interesting (and non portfolio related).

If you have any remote interest in web design, or the things I post over on my portfolio, please feel free to add my portfolio’s feed to your favorite RSS reader.

Dolphin Emulator @ 720p

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 @ 11:45pm

I’d tried the Dolphin emulator a while back, but wasn’t able to get it configured to run somewhat smoothly until recently. I finally have some decent screenshots of what Nintendo Wii games could look like in 720p (click on the images for the full image).

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

I was able to get NSMB Wii running at a somewhat consistent rate, usually around 40-50 fps. NSMB appears to be a good game to start with, since it is supposed to run pretty well on most any system with at least a 2 Ghz processor.

nsmb1

nsmb2

nsmb3

nsmb4

nsmb5

I tried a few other games, but didn’t have much success. Little King’s Story had graphical glitches galore, Super Mario Galaxy looked fantastic, but ran slow (i.e. 5-15 fps), and Mario Kart Wii did run, but had a few glitches and was a sub-par frame rate for a racing game (20-30 fps).

First Person Tetris

Thursday, January 14th, 2010 @ 7:08pm

If you’re of the queasy persuasion, this game may not be for you. A rather interesting “spin” on the old classic if you’re up for the challenge!