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13:08
aaaaaand I'm back!
nice to see this room is so lively when I'm not here.
We don't want to distract you from your work
@NiallC pfft, this is my work!
hmm. is one of you approving my edits? 'cause they seem to be going through quite fast
13:23
That would be me.
But speaking of work... must run.
@NiallC A+ i love the rep building I'm seeing ;)
@NiallC kk! /waves~
14:11
@AarthiDevanathanΨ I thought you had super Chaos powers?
nope no longer
ah, was wondering why you changed to making normal updates rather than the secret ones that don't bump the change time
14:27
@BMitch we only had that power for like a week
alas
@AarthiDevanathanΨ chaos needs its limits
15:22
so our giveaway that we were talking about thursday? they're cool with everything, but I need to choose between making some sort of painting kit or the sander+disks
15:41
thoughts? feelings? opinions? bueller?
16:10
@AarthiDevanathanΨ flip a coin. I'd like a sander+disks myself, but everyone that does work around the house will eventually make use of a painting kit.
sorry, my best friend's cousin's boyfriend's classmate saw me getting preoccupied with other work. And now I'm off to lunch. Or is it out to lunch?
17:10
@AarthiDevanathan, Just came across one of your pending edits. I don't have the rep to access mod tools, but if you point out any pending edits, I can approve them too.
@BMitch really? i don't think I have anything else, just a flag.
@AarthiDevanathan, yeah, they show up as a pending edit to the question when I'm in the question, but they're very easy to overlook.
cool!
:D man i keep learning about these sites.
A bunch of the features at higher levels are partially hidden until you get to the mod level, it would seem. I figure I'll be to 10k myself in a few months at my current rate. Unless someone catches on to my evil scheme and starts moding me down.
17:54
@BMitch i'd maliciously downvote if it didn't hurt me too. ;) jk jk
that's awesome. at my rate, I might hit 1.5k by the end of the year, tbh
@AarthiDevanathanΨ :)
built a shelf to make more room for books and whatnot... looking over my old college notes... oh how i miss Differential Equations
@Michael DiffEq? awww.
a lot of people liked that class. i didn't get to take it, and oh how I wish I had
nobody likes Diff EQ :)
somebody been lying to you :p
false, lotsa people at my uni did.
it was taught by this guy
17:59
you must've gone to a university full of meganerds
@Michael Indiana? ehhh
you must've had meganerd friends, then
or maybe they put something in the water in Indiana
limestone does funny things, or so i hear.
18:12
Recent publications of that guy: "On the global minimizers of a nonlocal isoperimetric problem in two dimensions", "Gamma-convergence and the emergence of vortices for Ginzburg-Landau on thin shells and manifolds", "Bifurcation diagram and pattern formation of phase slip centers in superconducting wires driven with electric currents"
... and that's why i didn't go for a Mathematics PhD
@Michael he's also a phenomenal teacher. really brilliant, fucking smart he is.
18:34
idk after sitting in a classroom, staring at a blackboard for 20 years, i sorta swore off all of that stuff :)
@Michael hahaha fair enough.
terrible way to spend a third of your life
shrug to each his own. School sucked at times, but i have lots of positive feelings associated with things that happened to be tied to school so
sorry... i'm bitter :) AFK!
@Michael /waves it's cool, bitterness happens
19:06
I'm a fan of the reversed handle design so that you just push it into the wall rather than squeezing:
and for a lot of staples, the staple hammer wins every time:
okay staple hammer is possibly the coolest thing ever
It's hard to be accurate with a staple hammer, though.
oh? please to explain.
ps: HIIII @KARL
It's hard to get the staple to go in all the way on both sides unless you hit the surface PRECISELY right on and there are no variations in what you're hitting. I usually use a power stapler, but it took some work to find one that worked reliably. I burnt through two Arrow staplers, and I don't like the T50's magazine design, even though it's the standard.
Hi, Aarthi! What happened to your super chaos powers?
@KarlKatzke only had 'em for a little while, alas
now i'm just a measly <1000-rep user
19:17
D'oh. Well, keep studying, and maybe you can be a 2k point user like me... :-P
laughs studying, asking stupid first-time-on-my-own questions...
I know it'd be on your own time, but you could probably also volunteer with Habitat or something and learn a lot.
And have a lot more questions or answers. ;)
@KarlKatzke Accuracy isn't all that important when your attaching tyvek, tar paper, insulation, and a bunch of other things. But yeah, I keep the gun for accurate stuff.
@BMitch The places where I saw people use a hammer a lot but found it impossible was kraft faced insulation, stapling the faces of the kraft over the studs/rafters.
@KarlKatzke on the face of studs is easy, just keep your aim aligned with the stud. But on rafters (e.g. on the side where you can't get a swing), I switch to the gun.
19:22
@KarlKatzke that would be cool, actually.
I learned half of what I know from my dad, half from Habitat, and the third half from working on my own home
one of these days, I'll learn math, too!
Heh. I learned about half of what I know from my dad, and the balance making mistakes on my own or others' houses.
The 'basic theory' stuff came from Dad, though, and from shows like Holmes Inspection.
Holmes is quickly becoming the forth half of my education
There's so much wrong with stuff you see out there... so many ways to screw things up.
hehehe. Yeah, we had to cancel cable though recently, so I haven't been watching much. (Couldn't stomach spending $100/mo on something I spent maybe two hours a week with.)
Unfortunately, I keep discovering many of the ways to screw things up, but then I'm moving eventually, so this will all be someone else's problem one day.
19:27
hehehehee. Oh, that's so right. That's why I'm still working on the house in College Station instead of just letting go and selling it half-done.
@KarlKatzke selling? rent it out to stupid undergrads -- I mean, rent it out to responsible, upstanding college students
Most of my mistakes are along the lines of not properly leveling each tile or doing a poor mudding job on the drywall. I'm doing the best I can to fix structure where I can. but in a home where interior walls are made out of 2x3s (no, that's not a typo), I've got my work cut out.
@AarthiDevanathanΨ It's actually more complicated than that. Under the loan program I bought my house under, I'd probably need to refinance it.
@KarlKatzke ahhh
@BMitch Ugh. The tile thing I have a decent solution for -- either the LASH system if you're cheap or the Tuscan Leveling System if you intend to do a lot of tile -- but 2x3 walls are a pain in the butt.
The LASH system gets the job done but is difficult to work with and your hands will hurt after setting a couple hundred sq ft. The TLS, given a decent substrate, will produce a surface that could be large-format tiles with 1/16 gap with no lippage and no honing.
... TLS can cost up to $1/sq ft extra though. LASH will only run at most $0.25/sq ft I think.
19:37
@KarlKatzke I don't mind the spacers, but it was my first tile job and I missed the step where you level each tile with the adjacent one, so I have a few high edges
Yeah, that's what the LASH and the TLS are supposed to fix. That's called 'lippage'
@KarlKatzke oh, I see it now. I was having a hard time figuring out what the clips were and figured it was just for spacing. Very interesting.
Nope. In LASH, the bottom of the clip lifts the tile, and the wedge forces it to level with the neighboring tiles.
So if you start with a row of level tiles on an approximately level surface, you can easily set an entirely level floor.
TLS takes it further (typically for pros) because it uses a tool instead of the annoyingly difficult to secure wedges, and the cap is way more stable than the wedge as well.
I think I'll just pay more attention next time I do this. The few times we have tile work at Habitat, they bring in some special tile volunteers
Well, I always prefer a tool to just 'being careful' -- careful takes experience and is still prone to mistakes. I think I spent $120 on LASH for my 120 sq ft kitchen, and $40 of that is the reuseable wedges. The floor turned out almost entirely perfect.
It was a tough room to lay in too because it's not square, and the big patio doors at one end let in a lot of really angular light that would've shown where the tile wasn't level.
19:46
If I buy any more tools, I'll need a bigger house
I think this was the group we used for our local Habitat projects: tpfh.com/index.html
Hehehehehe. I can't fit my car in my garage any more until I build myself some cabinets. :(
Most of my tools fit in a pickup truck though, so I'm hoping to condense things back down once I finish this winter's projects.
:) I built a closet for all my tools, no garage, just a small town house
Yeah, my house is a 1600 sq ft contemporary ranch with attached garage.
anyway, back to work for me
hehe. k
19:53
bonus for you guys:
Woohoo!
they look great
i need to find a carpenter pencil sharpener
cough It's called a utility knife.
Although I've honestly stopped using wooden carpenter's pencils, and switched to a refillable plastic one.
20:11
@KarlKatzke :(
I always seem to fracture the lead in the wooden ones no matter how I sharpen them.
Sorry. :-P
@KarlKatzke nah it's cool
okay that's cool
just go sprinkle those at construction sites
or hand them out at Habitat or some homeowners' club
20:16
@Michael really?
well what else are you going to do with them? :P giving them to us would sorta be like preaching to the choir :P
@Michael well yes but
i figured you lot could hand 'em out for me.
hah... how many do you have?
oh :)
hmm out of curiosity, what's DIY's budget?
20:25
yes.
laughs
just kidding; we have about seven grand left, i think? not all of it is earmarked yet.
ic
i had an idea :P
maybe people could like... do a reno or whatever
and then you could send them a DIY.SE.com yard sign saying that the public could come view the reno
and maybe have little things like the DIY.SE.com pencils and doodads inside
so like 50-100 people would come in and pick up DIY.SE swag
hmm.
that's not a bad idea.
and maybe the homeowner would get like a $50-100 Amazon gift card for their trouble :P
i'm on a solar home tour here in like 2 weeks
hopefully going to have 50+ people show up
it's an all-day event thing... ppl just show up and take a look
You could use Mind Controlled tiny ants to distribute the pencils!
anyways it would just be like a DIY.SE version of it :P instead of solar
20:32
It would only work for those of us in good neighborhoods. I don't want the folks around me traipsing through my house.
well it depends on where the reno is
like if it's a patio, they'll never step foot in your house
@Tester101 idc what that asker said, that was totally a dupe
but yeah... you can restrict their movement pretty well usually
hmm. i'll bring it up on thursda
*thursday
unless you're afraid of them bringing a gun into the house lol
20:35
I'd be more afraid of them stealing my gun!
Then shooting themselves, and suing me.
It might be a good idea though, for other folks.
Send some signs to @BMitch, and ask him to plop them in front of a habitat house (after SE sends in a donation, of course).
@Tester101 heh.
20:41
@Tester101 apparently there is also a parasite that turns the ant's butt into a bright red ball that it sticks up in the air, and birds eat it like they would a berry
@Tester101 I can always drop a handful in the pencil bucket, those things move around like water flowing down a river, you never end up with the same pencil you started with
no one objects to free supplies on a habitat project
we have aprons from home depot
label some hammers and tape measures and I'm sure they'd take those too
@BMitch how about some DIY.SE Tyvek you can wrap the houses in.
@Tester101 lol, that would get covered up, very limited advertising window
Well, can't imagine anybody would want DIY.SE siding.
pfft it'd be blue.
What about sponsoring a diy.se habitat house though?
Usually they have signs up in front of them, right?
20:48
signs are around, but some only come out for the photo-ops
that's probably out of our budget
the thing with aprons is that everyone gets one in the morning and wears it around all day
they end up in the pictures
Send Jeff and Joel down to a habitat house to help out, and make them put up a sign while they work.
The instructions are typically to grab an apron, tape measure, hammer, pencil, and other supplies
@Tester101 they would, but someone needs to double check that it's level when it's done
20:51
@Tester101 that's the hard part -- different coasts, busy schedules....
@BMitch oh god
That's what happens when you read the blueprints upside down. Could happen to anybody.
Especially sysadmins.
every time I see this building, I wonder if Habitat helped build it: cryptome.org/eyeball/tsa-series-03/tsa-series-03.htm
that's right by Dulles airport
20:58
lol
okay i'm out. /waves
sysadmins wouldn't build it upside down, they would just make it more complicated. every door would have 3 knobs.
and the back door would only open for them.
sysadmins would only let you in the lobby
Yeah, we'd only let you in the lobby. The doors would be invisible panels in the wall, but if a sysadmin walks up to them and says "simon says let me in" then it'd open.
(See mouseover: xkcd.com/149 )
you would have to have the password
and five wrong passwords = removal from property
... and depending on if your sysadmin likes you, it's either through a chute that routes to the outside of the building at the loading docks, or it's to the sewers via an industrial grinder.
21:04
and there would need to be a little robot that follows the visitors around to see what rooms they're most interested in
No, that's Google's headquarters.

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