Thursday, November 8, 2007

Cabin Update

Jeremy just pointed out that I never wrote about what the engineer had to say. On the whole it was great news! The holes through the foot of the scissor trusses (in the great room) don't need to be repaired, nor do the holes in the diagonal beam of the bonus room trusses, nor do the holes in the porch trusses. Basically the only holes that need to be fixes are the ones in the 2x10" bottom beam of the bonus room trusses which totally makes sense since they form the joists for the loft floor. The fix is easy too (though time consuming). Basically I have to pull out the wire and re-route it (which means that I'll have to replace some of it) then I need to cut 4' "scabs" out of 2x10" boards and center then over the holes nailing it in place with 10d nails 3" "on center" (OC). I'm trying to find a time when I can get down again to do the work. Hopefully sometime during the middle of next week, but if not then I'm thinking that the Friday after Thanksgiving, I might make it down with my Dad and Brother-in-law.

Don't know if I mentioned it, but the roof is done. However, the siding is pending. The guy I'm having do that work broke his foot and is out of commission for a bit. No worries really since it's not blocking anything else.

The septic system is supposed to be installed any day, but contractors have a bad habit of saying they'll do something on a given day/week and not doing it. I need to call them.

Also, now that the leaves have fallen the view is great (though pictures don't do it justice)... I'm definitely going to have to have a chainsaw party to clear out some of those little trees that block the view other parts of the year.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

First Leopard Complaint

I installed Leopard yesterday with an "Acrhive and Install" installation (it basically moves everything over to a /Previous System folder and then does a clean install). Everything went pretty smoothly and I'm more or less up and running as before except with the new features.

Here's my first big beef... There is a new feature to the dotmac integration that synchronizes system settings/preferences. That new feature adds a little "rotating arrows" icon to the menu bar and periodically trys to sync with your dotmac account. I don't have a dotmac account and I didn't particularly want one. HOWEVER there doesn't appear to be a way to get to the configuration options for dotmac without first entering in account information. So I ended up having to get a dotmac trial account so that I could get to the "Sync" tab in the dotmac configuration which allowed me to make synchronization only manual and to remove the icon from the menu bar. Now I'm stuck with this bogus dotmac account that I'm sure I'll be pestered to upgrade.

As I wrote this, I've uncovered a second big beef... I used a "PC keyboard" hooked in through USB to my MacBook. It appears that Apple apps like Mail, iCal, etc. no longer recognize the Backspace key as "delete on character backwards" and the "Delete" key does what it traditionally does on a PC ("delete one character forwards"). I'm gonna have to fix this (or get an Apple keyboard)...