Saturday afternoon we ripped out the old bathroom door, which was less traumatic than I expected.. Didn’t really do any damage to the walls removing the trim and ripping out the old door jamb/frame. It seemed like everything was going to be peachy, I nailed the small lengths of 2x4 we purchased into the opening to make it a standard-er size, we started attaching the jamb to the frame and making sure it was square, level, and plumb. We nailed it in on the hinge side in two points, and then shimmed it out on the lock side to give it a test run… And the door struck the jamb at the top lock side of the door. Not only that, but I drove the nails in all the way, so we had to mar up the jamb getting them back out. We playedaround with raising the sides and all kinds of things, but no matter what we tried even though the jamb was square/true/plumb/everything it just didn’t matter. We worked on this whole project for about 5 hours and eventually gave up for the night.
Sunday, we procrastinated as long as possible and started anew. We were just about to start when Corinna had the flash of genius to call her stepfather for advice. He is retired now and doing lots of the construction on the addition to her parents’ home in Michigan. We mentioned that we padded out the space to make the opening “the right size” with six short pieces of 2x4. We explained that the old 2x4 that formed the hinge-side of the existing frame was completely cockeyed and we were using shims to correct for it. He provided the (now obvious) suggestion of getting a single 80" 2x4 to run the entire length of the hinge side, and shim that as necessary to make sure it’s plumb, etc. Using one long board eliminates discrepancies in plumb/true/squareness between the 3 separate pieces of 2x4. He also suggested using screws instead of nails, because you have more fine-tuning available by tightening/loosening the screws, plus if you screw up you can easily back them out.
With this knowledge in hand, Corinna ventured out to Home Depot (knowing how much I hate going to that store), got the 2x4, we had it up and shimmed out in 20 minutes, and less than an hour later the door was hung and swinging freely.
So I guess the moral of this story is that installing a pre-hung door probably IS easier than fitting one into an existing jamb if you know what you are doing and do appropriate prep work.
Update: Re-edited this to remove some nonsense sentences (I “repurposed” this text from an email I sent to my dad).
…when the number of times you run into people you know begins to skyrocket. The past few weeks, Corinna and I have either separately or together run into people we know either through work or the film club… This past weekend we were at Six Flags New England, which is 80-ish miles away from Boston, and we ran into two film club members who were there on a date. The odds of that are pretty crazy, especially given how packed the park was. I normally reserve trips to amusement parks for mildly overcast or even rainy days, but the season was winding down and we had to use the discount tickets Corinna got from Harvard, so we pulled the trigger and went on a Saturday. The park was so packed. The shortest wait was for the Scrambler, but pretty much everything else was a 45-60 minute wait or more. It’s really an unpleasant experience waiting on line that long. One of the best parts of the trip, though, was waiting on line for Superman for 60 minutes, getting in the first car due to the kindness of strangers (who wanted to ride with their friends), and after our ride, the ride broke and we were stuck waiting for maintenance to get out of the coaster.. They blamed it on the temperature change, and had it going in about 15 minutes, but I was so glad that it waited to act up until AFTER our ride. If not for those strangers, we would have been waiting to go and probably nervous about flying off into the river or something
Rewinding a little, last Friday a bunch of us got together down at Fanueil Hall for ’s birthday. Drinks and food were to be had, but Corinna and I couldn’t stay out all that late due to our Saturday plans. It was great seeing everyone, as always, and we even had a special guest! As of September 1st, I was able to count the number of times I had seen since he moved to Boston on one finger. And that one time was for 5 minutes. But with the Welcome Back party as well as Matt’s birthday extravaganza, that number has increased by leaps and bounds! Rumors are that he will be at Girard’s Wii party next month as well!
Sunday was delicious brunch at ’s abode, which was awesome. After the brunch wound down, I headed over to the Kendall for my own little double-feature. I caught American Hardcore which was a documentary covering the hardcore punk scene of the early-mid 80s. It was a bit frenetic, which can be expected given the subject matter, but it was great. After that, I met up with the film club to see The Last King of Scotland, which I really wanted to be much better than it was. When I left the theater I was pretty strongly against the flick, but after I settled down a bit I realized that it wasn’t terrible, but it just could have been so much better.
What an awesome weekend in every respect! Friday night had some friends over to watch the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica as well as the Webisodes (worst. name. ever.) , , and Audra all came over for snacks, pizza, and drinks. The webisodes were OK, but definitely not up to par. The premiere was good, although it could have been tightened up, as some of the plot points were a little weak. But it definitely set up for an AWESOME season, imho.
Saturday morning, Chuck arrived from NJ for a weekend visit. We parked his car over at Alewife and headed out to Kelly’s Roast Beef for lunch. We did all kinds of things this weekend, including heading out to the MFA, Summer Shack, flew (and not crashing) my helicopter, saw “The Departed” (was amazingly awesome), and a bunch of other stuff. He left yesterday afternoon and got home safely without any trouble. Totally awesome.
Corinna and I watched Four Brothers last night, which was a steaming pile of crap. I expected an enjoyably trashy flick, but it was just terrible. There were about 3 minutes where I actually enjoyed watching it.
I used Dapper to create something which the world has needed for quite some time.. An RSS feed for The Digital Bits. Dapper seems like a really cool tool, although it took me a little while to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing with it.. I’m really curious, though, to see if it continues to work over the next few weeks… I’ve used a few scrapers before trying to get a feed for the Bits before, but they always break eventually (or right away).
I don’t think I’m really exploiting the power of Dapper, yet, though. It seems it is more intended for scraping sites for crazier “mash-ups”, but for now this is all I needed.
Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren’t even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.
That clearly didn’t happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites (“flipmeat,” in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.
[…]
Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files – pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs – on Yahoo’s Del.icio.us Web site.
This may be considered a spoiler, but really I’m dissecting something that happens in the first 10 seconds of last night’s episode of Lost, and it has nothing to do with the overall plot of the episode, so read it at your discretion.
I was watching Lost last night, and at the beginning a new character pulls out a CD and puts it in the CD player. I saw the cover artwork and identified it as Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues”, but when the CD started playing, it was Petula Clark. A look over at Lostpedia, however, confirms that other people agree with me..
I also noticed that it was a DualDisc, which is a pretty recent technology, and the Heads’ catalog was recently released on DualDisc. Someone over at the ‘pedia, however, said it was a recent Son Volt disc, and I defer to their geekiness. Regardless, both slip-ups seem too egregious, and must have been intentional… What they mean, however, I don’t know.
