anyone have a recommendation for a concrete sealer that can limit the buildup of ice in the winter?

or, atleast, reduce its adhesion ?

maybe an epoxy ?

Funny you should ask that... We were just discussing that --- diy.stackexchange.com/questions/15375/…

saw that - the water getting into cracks made me look for another answer

For me, the solution is to shovel it before I drive over it. Involves waking up early sometimes.

If I can get about 50% of the asphalt exposed, the sun will typically heat it up enough to melt anything I can't get off.

But you're in Buffalo, so you get a lot more lake effect snow than we do here in Toronto.

idealy yeah, shovel before driving, but i leave at like 530am for work :(

i'll put 5 coats of sealant on the concrete if i have to; short of tearing it out and adding the radiant heating coils

Heated Driveway

If it's not too deep, you can run the shovel and make tire tracks, and get the rest later.

wonder if an epoxy would work better

its not so much shoveling the snow that pains me - its that the ice sticks to it and is difficult to remove

if the surface of the concrete wasn't so pitted, the ice would have less surface area to adhere to

@lsiunsuex If the surface isn't rough, it'll be really slippery in the rain.

@Tester101 That is several levels of awesome.

then we'll go sledding down it! :)

I just hate the winter; short of moving to the desert...

Just redo it in Terrazzo :P

I'm amazed how little I've seen Terazzo done lately

my friends father does it commercially - love terazzo

You usually only see it in malls and subways.

schools and companies here

Yeah, schools and hospitals.

idea! would be a good project to do on my patio to go with my brick pizza oven! already a concrete floor

ehow.com/how_5121324_lay-terrazzo.html you add the marble in after you pour it. didnt know that

my biggest problem with doing something like that in a house would be how permanent it is i think

its one thing to remodel and bust up tile floors after 10-20 years if the styles change

how, do you remove terazzo? that must be a nightmare

It's essentially concrete. You'd need a jackhammer. And disposal is a pain.

i guess i would question how to remove the terazzo without destroying the concrete slab

like the floor in my kitchen ! :)

it was so un level (90 year old house) in the 1 corner we ended up building it up 1.5 inches with concrete board to account for the sag

the tile may come up fine if someone someday decides to change it, but the rest is almost solid concrete on top of the sub floor

When it's time to do my kitchen, I'm ripping out the subfloor and going again. It's Pine boards under plywood, under linoleum, under wire mesh and concrete under ceramic.

we had 7 layers of floor in the kitchen when we gutted it. pergo, vinyl, hard wood, etc... they put everything in the house. swear to god i saw a layer of carpet in it

when we redid it, we left the wooden planks, wire mesh on top of that then concrete board, then the tile

A layer of carpet? In the middle?

Good god!

I begin to question the sanity of this house's plumbing...

@TheEvilGreebo I agree. Don't people PEE IN THE SHOWER? I'd want that to go straight to the sanitary sewer.

Some people pee in the shower. Some think its disgusting.

Personally, hey its a drain, it's running water, it washes off, what's the big deal?

Plus, I'm saving water.

thats true

And everyone has thrown a Vomit-covered drunk into a shower.

Doesn't someone usually announce new 10k arrivals?

Because Steven hit 10k!

Ooh, speak of the devil!

finally! now I can stop answering questions :P

for the record, I don't pee in the shower! but have definitely put puker-mcgee in the shower

We need to ask about this in the next moderator election. It's far more relevant than Robertson v. Phillips

agreed!

@NiallC. You have never been more wrong.

being a canadian I obviously favor robertson though

Actually, @Tester101 is correct with torx, but they're still a bit rare.

you don't usually find torx on large screws, only small electronics. and lets not forget our friend the security torx!

what are those damnable little triangle screws that they use on happy meal toys?

I found some nice brass coloured lag bolts at Lowes. 6", with a 1" dome head.

Triangular huh? Never seen those I think

They were perfect for the exposed connections on my deck. Torx!!

@TheEvilGreebo Wikipedia says their TA screws

TA meaning "Total ***wipe" ? ;)

totally annoying

does anyone here actually own a posidriv screw driver?

@TheEvilGreebo yes

Trademark that

Actually, I bet that drilling out a TA screw could be considered a violation of the DMCA.

DMCA?

cover band of Run DMC ?

WALK THIS WAY. talk this way.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Forbids breaking of security devices

Since when is a screw a security device?

@TheEvilGreebo proprietary screw heads...technically could be considered a security device

safety maybe

can't agree with security

@TheEvilGreebo I agree, but some of these morons who prosecute these things might not be able to tell the difference

Friggin programmers and their friggin Camel Case in titles!

camel case in titles?

@lsiunsuex whatTheHeckCouldHeBeTalkingAbout?

"I Is Have Problem With This, Can Help Me?"

Link?

we have programmers in here? anyone wanna gimme a quote?

@lsiunsuex "to be or not to be? That is the question. Whether tis nobler...." that's the kind of quote you were looking for right?

one of my websites i built, we have inspirational quotes in the footer, so i quoted Harvey Dent from batman as an easter egg

@lsiunsuex nice.

I will admit, that since I use C# as my primary language, I tend to capitalize all nouns.

i need an ios / android programmer - i could do it myself but don't have the time and i have some money to freelance it out - figured i'd offer it to "friends" also

@lsiunsuex no experience for me there. I'm a vb.net/asp.net guy

dude, asp.net ? say its just a hobby please

vb.net - ok - quick and easy. but asp.net is the devil

@lsiunsuex lol, nope that's my paying gig... we don't deal with much in the nitty gritty of asp.net, just use it for serving pages

well, if it makes you money

I hate VB. But I won't hold it against anyone. I much prefer C#, as I come from a semi colon rich country.

@lsiunsuex meh, I'm the junior guy on a very well established project. My boss did most of the hard work, we just maintain and continue to add features.

@lsiunsuex What are you advocating in it's place?

in place of asp.net ? i'm big on php

php is my day job and side work bread and butter

me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design

@ChrisCudmore iDon'tSeeWhyThat'sAProblem

c# is solid also - i've done some work in that and i'll probably end up writing a windows mobile app in c# when ios and android are done

@lsiunsuex Are you confusing ASP.Net with ASP ?

possibly ? (don't use it) asp.net is for web right?

@TheEvilGreebo Yeah... That's the ticket! I still maintain a few ASP pages for my company and I can't stand it.

asp.net is web application with a .NET backend - so its backed in any .NET language

@lsiunsuex asp = ancient garbage asp.net shiny newer much better

ASP is classic ASP which is HTML and vbscript on the server

still, the stigma of running a production windows server gives me the chills

thats not a stigma, that's simply a religious bias on your part

The ASPX model is pretty much the WinForms model, but webified. It makes converting a windows form to a web form pretty easy.

@ChrisCudmore pretty much

my day job i've had to go through PCI-DSS compliancy and the windows servers are always more prone to vulnerabilities than my linux ones

C# is pretty much Java, with properties, and delegates instead of listeners.

@ChrisCudmore tru dat

though I do agree, apache is much more robust than IIS

Billy Hollis said the C# rolled the best of VB and Java into one language.

so in other words - Java ;)

<- says the ex VB programmer

One thing I don't like about C# is how they're VBifying it

No, VB really did a good job rolling a common windows interface into the language as opposed to all the COM crap you had to do before.

introducing "var" - one of the worst things you could mention about VB was variant... and the only time you really need var is with linq queries but now its becoming everyones only variable type

true but that's not C#, that's the CLR

I'm not a fan of LINQ. It's like mixing two languages together in the same file. I tend to use classic ADO and do the heavy lifting in sprocs and table functions.

you can do the same stuff in COBOL.net if you're so inclined because its all simply layers above the CLR

Is there a Brainf*ck.NET?

Linq <> LinqToSQL

soulsphere.org/stuffage/bf.net

@ChrisCudmore someone's written it

linq is just a query syntax - if you're going against, oh, an xml file or an excel spreadsheet it lets you work with them all the same way

I'd love to do some of my enterprisy stuff in BF and then quit.

linqtosql is the linq tie to Sql Server - and I'm not a huge fan either

and I prefer not to use the SQL query syntax style of linq, I prefer the object style

@ChrisCudmore that would be both cruel and unusual.

collection.Where(condition).Select(elements) not "from c in collection where condition select elements"

But they'd hire me back as a contractor at ridiculous rates.

It took me too long to get decent at SQL to then have to reverse the grammatical structure to do it in LINQ.

But I'm at the point where every app requires 4 languages. SQL, HTML, C# and Javascript.

Which gets tiring.

@ChrisCudmore it's the truth though. sub in vb.net for C# and you have my job requirements

never heard javascript actually referred to as a language until a few weeks ago - thought that was funny - they were hiring just a javascript programmer

@lsiunsuex that's just silly.

i was like just javascript? every website i've built i needed to do the html / css / javascript / php / mysql design and slice the psd myself

I forgot CSS in the list. That's 5!

@ChrisCudmore oh yeah, can't do web w/o CSS now

was nice to IE10 render my websites almost identical to a recent version of firefox and didn't require its own css file

CSS violates the #1 principle of design: Make the common, easy.

So why do we need to keep throwing ghost divs in our pages?

@lsiunsuex applause

And this is why we keep seeing table layouts -- It makes it relatively easy to get three equal length columns.

@ChrisCudmore yeah, I think it's going to be a long while before people completely abandon tables.

matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm

And this is why -- All the layout divs are confusing.

Golden rule for CSS - When in doubt, throw a div at it!

Yay more divs

@ChrisCudmore I like table layouts. But then I am not that great at html in general. I'm a middle/back tier guy

I would love to delegate the entire user layer to someone else. It's finicky. Let me play with cool algorithms.

trying to teach my wife basic php - then she can do all the shitty repetitious work i hate doing

Does she programme already?

no

everyone needs to learn something new in their lives though :)

Have fun.

I this where I link codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-to-code.html

I don't mind if they learn how to code. I just don't want them to actually write code.

hate when lifehacker.com and the like run those articles

The problem is that most introductory courses create the "Freshman who knows it all!"

It takes a 4th year student to understand how much he doesn't know.

dont see doctors and lawyers running around saying everyone should learn to represent themselves in court or whatever

And then hang out on Math.stackexchange.com for a while to feel really small.

i've actually been taken to small claims over a website and even over that, i got a lawyer

But we all have a basic understanding of law and medicine. We also realize not to dabble in it ourselves.

We have people who are total code illiterates. Some exposure would be nice.

Hell, they made me take philosophy and economics and a Lit course.

@ChrisCudmore heck, I feel miniscule on math.se and I have a minor in it

My math was all applied. Mostly calculus.

I did three years of Civil Eng before switching to Comp Sci. So they wrote off my math requirements. Missed a lot of number theory.

blah, college

There's a point when you realize that Civ Eng is sewers and roads, not buildings and bridges.

@ChrisCudmore I spent 3 years in a liberal art school's pre engineering program before I realized I had to actually start making money at some point and switched to CS...

Now that I'm paying for contractors to do my basement, It looks like I should have started swinging a hammer out of high school.

finishing basements are easy. my father and I did his

It's a time issue, not a complexity issue.

@lsiunsuex I'm glad you didn't include the word well in the above.

My guy studded the entire basement in one day by himself. Would have taken me forever, and he had the experience in handling the design issues that crop up.

"Finishing a basement WELL is not easy" would be appropriate then ;) Cannot tell you how many BAD finishing jobs i've seen in my rentals

not just basements mind you

easy meaning it took us 2 months but easy none the less

time always plays in with day jobs

He's giving me sanded drywall. SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED will help me paint, and I'll do the engineered wood floor. (already laid the tile) Then he's coming back for the drop ceiling and trim.

everything has a process. once you get that down, its easy. takes time, but its easy

vapor barrier on exterior walls, make sure the studs are strait and spaced properly, electrical x height from floor, etc...

@lsiunsuex Yeah, it's having done it before, and hopefully watched someone do it right.

And not having to wait for an answer on DIY.

Conference call.

Back later.

Trim work isn't all that easy IMO. I mean getting it done right. :)

some shit, yeah, hire a contractor. i considered removing a load barring wall from my kitchen, called a contractor for a quote (wife won and we didnt), replacing the main electrical panel of the house - yeah, probably "easy" but probably should let a pro do that

And ask my wife how easy mudding joints is - she cant get a smooth finish to save her life

You're calling it easy only by dismissing the most important part - the learning

programming is easy too once you learn how to do it

yeah, once you learn, its easy

but even then some of the physical skills aren't as easy as you might think - finishing plaster work and quality painting, etc. I suck at painting, for instance :)

(though thats party by choice cause I hate it)

finishing plaster is not easy for me

hate it and have stalled finishing up a spare room cause of it

i put to much on - take to much off. takes me 4 or 5 coats to remotely finish a room properly and even then i'm plastering once i've primed to fill a gap i missed or trying to sand through primer cause i missed something

yeah, anything that has a qualitative answer to "is it done" I am not good at

the last coat i put on the spare room think it took me 2 hours - and the room is 12x11 feet

mudding, painting, etc

painting i'm ok but i wont edge - the wife has a steadier hand for that.

she does it with a brush, no tape - comes out perfect but it can take her 2 to 3 hours also

Plaster should take 3 coats - generally no less

4-5 isn't too bad

try a big damp sponge for your finish coat next time

i never sand until the finish layer, just knock down any ridges

i've heard that

i've started using dish soap in the plaster also to reduce air bubbles - its helped

interesting, i haven't tried that trick

makes it a little smoother - i prefer not to mix the whole 5 gallons, just what i'm working with. just a few drops

i'm constantly saying, "I should mix my own mud". but I never do

thought about that - i only really do these full room guts on vacation time and time is always of the essence

but now her sister and boy friend are coming in labor day weekend so i figure i may as well finish the room and they dont have to sleep on the couch / air matress

she can sand while i finish the electrical, another coat hopefully (i sand between coats) prime and paint. a week left ish

if I pull a shelf out of a closet because we're redoing it, and the previous people painted with the boards in place, so there's a ridge of paint on the wall where the board used to be, should I just sand that out, or is there a better method?

heat gun!

probably sand it out - i've only used a heat gun on painted wood surfaces

make sure your properly ventilated - the fumes are killer

you know, I tried one of those before, but on wallpaper, and it did not work well at all

I'll probably just get the RO hand sander

if the ridge is significant enough i'd probably use a painters knife and try to knock it down first

then sand it

or that

yeah, it's chunky enough that sanding is just going to drive me nuts, I'll find the putty knife

if the previous owner painted walls with shelves in place, i'd probably just gut the entire room cause other shit is probably wrong also - BUT - i'm a crazy f' and thats how i roll

@Aaron You might have to do a quick skim coat with drywall compound afterwards, just to even out any spots where the paint peels too much.

@aaron there's a painting tool that holds a razor blade, useful if you get paint on your windows. Would be sharper than a putty knife.

You'll probably want to skim coat where the shelves were anyway, since there won't be x layers of paint under them.

I can't remember what they're called though.

@NiallC. its the same tool they make for removing wallpaper

@NiallC. isn't that just a scraper?

its like a long putty knife but a razor at the end, not a dull edge

@NiallC. It's a paint scraper

Yeah, google "razor scraper" to get lots of links

@Aaron is it plaster and lath underneith or drywall ?

Wow, yours are much fancier than mine. I think I paid about $1

@lsiunsuex it's just the closet I'm looking atnow

@lsiunsuex don't even get me started on wallpaper

wallpaper is the devil

They make cheap plastic ones too

we bought 2 wallpaper steamers and spent a week taking out wallpaper from 3 bedrooms, 3 closets, and the dining room

@BMitch slick

hot water mixed with fabric softener on wallpaper - best thing since sliced bread

@lsiunsuex Plaster and lath

Fastest way to remove wallpaper, is to knock down the wall.

^ like

C4 to the rescue!

step one to any removal task: set charges.

It's also a bitch taking nails out of plaster

did they wallpaper the ceilings also?

i thought that was awesome - who the f' wall papers a ceiling.

People that want to put some cute finish on any wall should first have to remove it from somewhere else.

@Aaron I'll pull a wall down before I pull wallpaper if it's that bad

@Tester101 Yup!

@BMitch I'm a fan of peel and stick borders and wall decals

thinkgeek.com/product/a6d0

@waxeagle One of my first projects was removing 1' square copper colored mirrored tiles that were glued onto a wall.

@lsiunsuex no, no wallpaper on the ceiling (shouldn't that be called 'ceilingpaper'?)

@lsiunsuex excellent

Glue was showing through the tiles, and pulled off the paper off the drywall, what a mess it left.

@BMitch yikes, I stick with things that are designed to be removed

amazon.com/RoomMates-RMK1586SCS-Classic-Stick-Decals/dp/…

had i known i was gonna gut every room of my house, i'd have bought a much bigger house for the same price that needed a lot more work.

@lsiunsuex lol. I'm happy I bought something that doesn't need that kind of work...

mostly because I don't have that kind of time/energy

i do a lot of freelance work - day job pays the bills and lets us live comfortably - freelance goes to gutting my house / toys / vacations... i dont consider my freelance a job - its a bonus - when i have it, great, if i don't - ok. just sayin - don't think i'm rolling in it over here lol - i just work my ass off 8 days out of the week

@lsiunsuex I do a small amount of in home tech support for a couple of people..at this point it's beer money

dont let it run your life. you'll never stop

i skip dinner with my parents cause of deadlines, work through weekends even though i vow to never work sundays. sucks sometimes

but, on the other hand, 1 freelance job is paying for our vacation to vegas for my wife's 30th so...

@lsiunsuex ick. I'd like to get some side programming work, but yeah I like my life right now, more money would make things easier, but it wouldn't solve any real problems

@lsiunsuex nice

learn php :) always looking for someone to through a project i don't want to do at

my friends are all salesman - only programmer i know does java

Just found out my client is putting all data into Access after the entire process has been completed by hand.

No idea what access is capable of.

I'd freelance it for her if it wouldn't make me responsible for the entire IT infrastructure at the company for the rest of eternity.

@waxeagle Those twins in your gravatar?

@ChrisCudmore nope. cousins 2wks apart

mine is the one with the mean right hook :)

@ChrisCudmore sob