This Weekend
Posted by Jeremy on July 14th, 2008
What did I do this weekend. Well, first off I replace the front brakes on the ole ‘Woo. I had new rotors for her to, but the caliper mounting bracket bolts weren’t budging and considering I was on an incline, I felt it not wise to attempt to use too much force.
Also, I learned how important it is to ensure the jack you bought will fit under your car.
And also, I learned that the previous owners of the vehicle stole the lug nut wrench and the jack handle.
Which meant I had to use the only tool left, a screwdriver, to raise the car’s own jack. No, it wasn’t really fun.
I was actually disappointed the brake pads had as much left on them as they did. I was hoping my soft brakes were the cause of next-to-no pad left. I was wrong - but in a week or two I’ll tackle the rear brake pads and rotors - hopefully those are the ones causing the issue. The guy at Napa, in a super casual glance through a hole in the rim assured me that “Yeah, they’re shot”. So if you can’t trust that, who can you trust?
Then, on Sunday, I went through all of my computer parts and electronic packratting. I managed to go from 4 large plastic bins down to 2. I threw away a lot of things, some of which were:
- 17 computer power supplies (Out of 19, I kept the 2 AT ones for use as bench power supplies)
- 5 cell phones of varying age, the newest being about 5 years old
- 11 hard drives, with a combined storage total of 9GB!
- Batteries for a laptop I don’t have any more
- Batteries for several cameras I don’t have any more
- Easily 300 feet of coax cable alone - plus about 200 feet of misc cable
- A ginormous box of obsolete electronic devices from a local school district. A lot of Mac gear.
- 2 complete PCs, not anywhere near powerful enough to do anything of much use these days.
I also have something like 35 12 foot long brown extension cords.
All of this is part of my “One Project, One Trip” mentality. If I have a project to complete, I’ll buy the main parts of it and anything else I think I need but don’t know if I have.
So I think I’ll start making a home inventory system for the office. Keep all my cables tagged and organized. Same with the tools. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well make it web enabled, so I can query it from Home Depot and see that yes, I do have a 25 foot long S-Video cable. And if I’m going to do all that, I might as well throw my barcode scanner into it, so I can just scan things when I get them and know what they are right away.
Ain’t technology great?
I’ll have some pictures of the brake action later, but forgot to take some of the cable action. However, I will be taking timed pictures of the move out date, so I can make a neat little time-lapse movie about it.
Anyway - big move happens this Friday. And I think we’ll be ready.