Half-circle skirt redux

Now, once I finished the half-circle skirt for my daughter, my wife liked it so much that she had to have one herself. In this case she wanted something a heavy, dark fabric. Once again the clearance rack at WalMart came through, producing a medium weight black denim at $1.00 per yard. On a hunch that this might prove popular, I went ahead and bought ten yards. Oof. I forgot that denim is heavy ...

Getting cocky after the success of the pink skirt for my daughter, I tried to take shortcuts on this skirt. Naturally, those shortcuts turned into time sinks that stretched the effort far beyond what it needed. First I cut the waistband too narrow, and didn't have sufficient seam allowance to make a good connection. Then I cut the second waistband 2 inches too short ...

At this point I laid my head on the table, took a deep breath, and broke for lunch.

After lunch everything was much clearer, and we got a proper length waistband put on the skirt. There were further challenges such as the elastic escaping from the pins before getting tacked in place, but we got 'er done.

It turned out well, and in fact we received two compliments the night she wore the skirt for the first time. 

Getting assistance

In any endeavour, it is nice to get assistance in your work. However, the assistance I get from my sewing helper is a little less useful than most. For whatever reason, E'la (pronounced ee-la) the kitten is fascinated with the moving needle of the sewing machine. She hops right up and gives it close inspection anytime that I have an unusually long seam.

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Half-Circle Skirt

My first attempt at a circle skirt, this one for my youngest daughter. She loves skirts that twirl, and can never have enough of them. Actually, this is a half-circle skirt.

No pattern involved, after all who needs a pattern for a half-circle skirt?! :-) The fabric was a nice, soft handed pink woven cotton/poly blend that floated well; very important when twirling. It was on the $1 table at Wal*Mart, so I couldn't go wrong even if things did not work out.

Attaching the waistband was one trick I learned, after making the mistake of trying to merely roll over the waist section of the circle on the muslin test item. I mentioned the difficulty to Mom and she set me straight.

Then I learned how to use the blind hem stitch on the sewing machine while hemming the thing. Not the most obvious technique around, let me tell you, but Kate Dicey's page on using the Blind Hem Stitch was a great help!

In the end, my daughter loved the skirt, she can twirl to her heart's content, and it brightened what was otherwise a troublesome weekend as she got over her wintertime cold.

Useless Perforce Error

In my work existence, I support the Perforce Source Code Management (SCM) tool. Occasionally, I find examples of error messages in Perforce that tell you nothing about what is wrong. I will try to enumerate those here as I find them.

• must sync before integrating — One occasion that this message shows up, is when the user is attempting to branch a file, but both the source and destination depot locations are mapped by the client spec to the same client location. This creates a name collision, hence the error. Obviously, this can only happen in a client spec using plus mappings. The solution is to either temporarily remove one of the mappings, or to have a reserved "branching" client spec sitting around that you use just for these kinds of occasions. The branching client would contain a single mapping //depot/... //client/... and be free from collision issues.

End result

Well, in the end it didn't buy me much. You can see the results in the data:


There were no bad side-effects throughout the trial. I never felt nervous, had head-aches nor experienced hot-flashes; all things that other diet pills have done to me in the past.
But, at the same time I didn't appear to gain any benefit either. The weight continued to fluctuate within the same band as before, and the body fat percentage was equally unchanged.
So the conclusion is, for me at least, that Chitogenics does neither harm, nor good.

So far, so good

So far, so good. Three days in and there have been no bad side-effects. Back in 1998 I tried Metabolife 360, one of the formulas then available that used ephedra. It increased ones metabolism by hyping you up to the moon. I am a person that does not get hyped up easily. Caffine usually does not effect me at all; I down several cups of coffee in the morning without a problem. Ephedra, however, was wild. It made me nervous, warm, touchy and gave me bad breath. :-)
This stuff, though, does not seem to be doing any of that. With a couple days under my belt, I am noticing that I am not as hungry as usual. I have not yet cut back on my meals any, but I have been eating the normal amount out of force of habit rather than hunger. I think it is time to rectify that, so today I am taking the approach of eating just enough to get rid of the hunger pangs.
Also, I added one new item to my exercise ritual. I am now doing thirty crunches while holding a 15 pound weight and lying on a 75cm exercise ball.

Getting started

For some reason my weight has been going up. Okay, I know why it goes up; intakes exceeds expenditure. That's not my point. My point is that I cannot identify what change has taken place that would lead to such results.
I am an engineer. That means I am way too liable to track and chart things. That includes my weight. And body fat. Body fat? Yes, I use an Marshall Omron Body Fat Analyser HBF-306 to track that. I an Epinions review available of this device, if you're interested. Anyway, I have charts of my weight and body fat going waaaay back, but for the purposes of this experiment we only need fall back to late last year.
Here is the weight chart:

And the body fat percentage chart:

You can't see it from this, but things were pretty stable up until late November. Then we see a jump in weight (though not body fat, oddly enough) over the next month (duh, Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Twin Terrors of Weight Control). Then a gradual decline through mid-February back to the same range as before the holidays.
About this time, our treadmill broke. The motor gave out. I don't think it liked a 200 pound dude jogging on it. Anyway, it quit and for a while I went back to an exercise bike. "A while", like one week. We ended up buying a Vision Fitness HRT X6200 Elliptical Machine.
It took me a while to figure out equivalent exercise routines on the new machine that matched what I had been doing on the treadmill. The routine I finally settled on means I exercise five times a week. Monday and Friday I run an interval program called Sprint 8. This is an interval cycle based on Phil Campbell's Ready, Set, Go! Synergy Fitness. For more information you can visit this page at Vision Fitness. Tuesday and Thursday I do an 80% of maximum heart rate cardio workout. Wednesday is a 70% of maximum heart rate fat burning workout.
Unfortunately, while I was figuring this out, my weight went up. From a running average of 207.5 to a running average of about 211. Worse, my body fat reading showed this to be true weight gain, as my average body fat percentage rose from 19.4% to 21%. Not good, we need to do something.
On the radio I have heard advertisements for Chitogenics featuring Tom Martino. Now Tom is a little over-the-top for me, but I respect the reputation that he has developed. So it lent quite a bit of credence to the advertisement that he would endorse a product. That endorsement set this product apart from the typical late-night TV advertised diet pill. I decided to give it a shot.
It is not cheap. However, I figured that I would order enough for one month, try it, track the results, and write about the experience here. This would help fill the gap of Internet information on Chitogenics. Anyway, I ordered it Saturday May 28th. We will see how long it takes to get here.

Flooring

Now for the big job, putting in 1,000 square feet of flooring. For a couple years I had been keeping my eye on some new products for installing flooring over concrete. Two competitors existed, SubFlor and DriCore. These are two-foot square flakeboard pieces with plastic "feet" to hold them up above the concrete surface.

The plastic feet provide a dead air space under the sub flooring, helping with insulation. The plastic provides a vapor barrier effect as well. In addition, if a minimum amount of water should leak in, the lift of the feet will provide a place for that water to work its way to the floor drain. However, understand that we are talking very small amounts of water! Nothing is going to be much help if you have the Mississippi river coming in your window.
We ended up going with DriCore mainly because of superior distribution. When we contacted SubFlor, we learned that the product was not yet in the local Lowes stores, but would be "soon". What soon meant was not clear. When I talked with DriCore, they also revealed that the local stores did not yet have product, but they immediately put me in contact with a Home Depot in Nebraska that would ship it to me. Shipping was a little high, but I really wanted to use this since I intended to lay down bamboo flooring.
The DriCore instructions actually suggest that you install the product on the floors first, and then build your walls on top of it. That does not work well here in Colorado, since our expansive soils demand the construction of floating walls. What this meant to me was that I had to cut the DriCore to get it through doorways and such

Kind of a pain, and certainly time consuming. However, a jig saw with an aggressive tooth profile cuts both the flake board and the plastic subsurface just fine.
The edges of the panels are tongue and grooved. A simple blow from a rubber mallet would drive the panels together, locking them quite tightly.

I used a small scrap stick to keep from hitting the panel edges themselves. I figured that the blows could not be helpful for the tongues!

You can see some odd panels up against the walls on the edges of the room. The instructions called for a 1/4" gap between the edge of the drywall and the edge of the DriCore. I accomplished this gap by placing these scrap bits of 1/4" hardboard as shims.

Basement - Bamboo planks

After the DriCore, I began installing the bamboo flooring. I purchased the planks from BuildDirect, who had the best prices I could find. You had to purchase a minimum order of 1,200 square feet, but that was about what I needed and the cost, even with shipping, was 30% less than the local supplier.

Bamboo is available in two colors, a yellow that is similar to maple, and a brown that seems like a dirty white oak. Bamboo is too dense to stain well, so they create the dark brown color by heating the wood until it begins to char, then stopping. They call this "lightly toasted" treatment carbonizing. However, that word apparently doesn't translate well from the Chinese.

I installed the bamboo with an air powered flooring nailer.

The work went pretty fast, this was the results of the first hour
.
The highlight of this bit was for my daughters. The boards were small enough that they could help lay them out for Daddy, a task that they loved.


But by the end of the day, they'd had it!

Hey, this place is looking finished!

How to create an "airbrushed" look

How to create an "airbrushed" look

1. Load your image into PaintShop Pro
2. In the Layer window, right-click on the image and select "Duplicate"
3. With the new layer selected, right-click in the Layer window and select "New Mask Layer", "From Image", select "Luminance" as the Source and then OK.
4. Right click in the new mask group and select "Merge", "Merge Group"
5. With the merged mask layer selected, go to "Adjust", "Blur", "Gaussian Blur". You will need to play with the amount of blur to get the effect you want. It varies based upon the size and pixel density of the photo you are dealing with as well as the strength of the effect you desire. For the six megapixel images from my Canon 300D I like to use a radius of 6. Enter the amount you want and hit OK.
6. If you stopped here, the image looks out of focus. That's really what the airbrush technique is all about, reducing the sharpness to smooth out detail in a photo. But, lack of sharpness is disturbing to the viewer. The trick is, only certain important areas need to be sharp, to give an impression of good sharpness overall.
   When it comes to photos of people, we look at faces. In particular, we zero in on eyes and the mouth. Sometimes our attention may be drawn to other spectacular accessories, such as jewelry. We need to keep these elements sharp, while retaining the pleasant smoothing blur in all other regions.
   To accomplish this, make sure you are still on the blurred layer and select the Eraser Tool. Choose a round shape, a size appropriate to the areas you are working with and a hardness of about 30. Zoom in to help you maintain high precision. Carefully erase the blur in the areas of the eyes and lips.
7. Now return to the layers menu. For the layer with the blurred image, select the Opacity slider and move it down to around 65%. This will reduce the impact of the blurring until you end with just the impression of smoothness.
8. Inspect the photo. Determine if there are other elements of the picture where blurriness is detracting from the composition. In those areas use the Eraser Tool again to wipe out the blur effect.

This article adapted from information posted to rec.photo.digital by Tom Nelson. See the original article here

Lights

The light fixtures that we had purchased were installed next. Here is the guest bedroom

and the bathroom

You can see that the toilet has been set and the bathroom counter installed as well. The rest of the basement lights were standard can lights.

Painting

Before laying the floor, we needed to get paint on the walls. The library was made a dark green color

while the media room went with a lighter green

Note that the funky orange color above the fireplace is not a paint color, but rather the glow of a tungsten worklight in the library. The bathroom also had a second coat put on its walls

The guest room color is peach, but there's no picture because it was getting late and I was tired of the camera.

Bathroom floor

One of the things I signed up for was laying the tile in the bathroom. Now, this was something that I had never done. In addition, as usual, I decided to make my introductory project more difficult by getting artistic and laying things on a diagonal.
Before I laid tile, I wanted to get the majority of the walls painted. Here is where my young daughters finally got to help, although we ended up running out of paint before we were done. Since it was New Years weekend the paint store was not open to get more.

I used 1/2" spacers to separate the tiles. In retrospect, I think that 3/8" would have looked better. One-half inch is just a little too wide a grout line. But, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I learned a lot though. Grout is hard on your hands ... wear rubber gloves when laying the stuff. My fingers had no feeling in them and it tore the skin up something fierce by the end of the project. A manual tile cutter works pretty well, and I ended up breaking only a single piece in the course of the work. However, small diagonal cuts are tricky, and tile nippers are very useful for cleaning up the bits that do not cooperate.

Merry Christmas

So, what is with the dislike of the greeting, "Merry Christmas"? I understand that some feel it is inappropriate to use, since the recipient of the greeting may not accept the Christian viewpoint. However, do you seriously look for everyone to adapt themselves to you? Or is it more appropriate for each of us to adapt to each other?
I have tried to think about this by considering how would I react to receiving a greeting of "Happy Hanukkah" or "Plentiful Kwanza". I am not Jewish, and I do not accept Dr. Maulana Karenga's alternative holiday. Never the less, if I were to be so greeted I would not subject the greeter to a long discourse about my objections. Nor would I reject their attempt at greeting. Such an effort on the part of another is an expression of blessing, originating in their specific world-view, and intending to communicate friendliness and hope for the future.
What could be wrong with that?

Framing Complete

By December 3rd, the framing was complete.
You can see through the main archway into the media room and through to the archway that opens the library.

Here we can see the framing for the fireplace. This ended up not being the final location for the fireplace. After the framing was in, Jonathan realized that the joists above were not wide enough to pass the 10" flue that the GEM-36 model fireplace required. A quick scramble led us to move the fireplace into the media room, a solution that I actually like better anyway.

Here we're looking into the guest bedroom.

Chocolate Muffins

My daughters love muffins. My daughters also love chocolate. Oddly enough, when I went out to search for a muffin that was all chocolate I had a hard time finding one. Thus, I went on a mission to learn more about muffins! This was the result.

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 tbls baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbls cocoa powder
1 large egg
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup cooking oil
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder. Add the chocolate chips to the dry ingredients. Blend the egg, milk and oil together and add them to the dry ingredients. Mix very gently until all the dry ingredients have been moistened. Spray muffin pan with cooking spray and divide the batter between the cups. I use a cookie scoop to make this easier. Cook the muffins. The time needed depends on the size of muffin cups you used. The smallest size takes 9 minutes in my oven, the medium (cupcake) size takes 12 minutes and the largest takes 15 minutes. Check the muffins with the toothpick test if you are in doubt.

Start the project

So the summer began on a sour note, I was laid off from Hewlett-Packard. But, by Fall a new job with Qualcomm was in hand, and the severance from HP opened up the opportunity to finally finish the basement.
When we built the house in 2000, we had always planned to finish the basement to provide additional living space. We wanted a library, a media or television room, a guest bedroom, maybe some storage and a shop for my woodworking. The bursting of the tech stock bubble meant that the stock options we had hoped would be available for such work were under water, and so that plan had lain in limbo. However, now we were ready.
We attended the 2004 Home Improvement Show at the Larimer County Fairgrounds, initially just to see if there were any new ideas available. However, on a hunch, I took along some of the plans we had for the basement project. There were three home improvement outfits attending, and I ended up talking with all three. Each took a copy of the plans and offered to get back in touch soon.
Jonathan Brooks with Home Improvement Express was the first responder, and ultimately the general contractor that we chose. He offered a couple ideas to refine the plans, worked with a couple of my own unusual ideas and seemed the most flexible of the three. Additionally important, he was willing to work with me providing some of the work myself. We had enough money to have most of the project done for us, but some of it would have to be DIY to make budget. I ended up taking care of:

• Painting
• Laying the tile floor in the bathroom
• Laying the flooring throughout the main living spaces
• Installing and painting the moldings