Day 104 – 2010

Design Tip for curtain rods.

Let’s say you want to put curtains up above your sliding glass doors to replace the boring vertical blinds but you don’t want to spend a lot of money on the curtain rod (yes they are expensive and never long enough).  Wooden once, 96” long, cost somewhere around $80, smaller once which extend out to up to 120” run about $40-$50.

Go to your local hardware store in the plumbing section and get a 1.5” or 2” ,or whatever thickness you want,  PVC pipe.  Find the end pieces you want as well as the rings (they sell them up to 1 5/8”).  In the wood trim, chair railing section you will find the hangers ( most likely you need to drill a hole in it, if you don’t have the tools, find a carpentry shop to get it fitted to the thickness of the PVC pipe).  Next go to your arts and craft store and get the matching plastic paint.  Cut the PVC pipe and spray paint it.  Total cost less than $50 for a curtain rod YOU like.

---

A couple of days ago I mentioned the speeding of Police Cruisers.  Happened again today in a 35 per mile zone. Me 35, him who knows …

on the site strip but on the cell phone…

---

Here is a cheap way to advertise.  Letter stickers at Staples, total cost $4.69, impact: priceless.

Here is the outlook for today:

Finished painting my living room, it looks great.  However, it was a balancing act to get to the middle walls because of the vaulted ceilings.

BTW

Programming One of my favorite things to do for the last 25 or so years.  It is a huge challenge to visualize code, yes there are visual programming tools out there, I use MS Visual Studio (FREE even if it is NOT WYSIWYG) or SeaMonkey (FREE)   for HTML layouts.  Ever since I switched to aspx, Visual Studio is indispensible. There are many (too many) experts on the internet with tips and tricks, etc. All of them are valuable resources since the approaches differ.  This is also a problem if you are doing some research because of the volume of suggestions or solutions (ASP101 has been my favorite resource for a long time now).  I found a good tip yesterday which made a lot of sense, then I tried to use it and discovered that even fifteen rows of code can have several bugs in it, in this case one of them was a simple misplacement of the end quote “/”.  I remember COBOL (kids read all about it, it is a historical artifact), one forgotten period and you were hunting for hours.  Debugging is much better now and mistakes like that are easily found. I want to get into iPhone or iPad programming, perhaps my HomeOrganizerPortal program will find use there. The apps are the ones who drive that whole phenomena of the ixxx generation, and there is no end to it. Although many apps turn out to be just a waste of time, they are cheap to try and spawn off more ideas of usage.  It is somewhat a joke that at $.99 for a piece of software people are complaining about this and that irrelevant to providing feedback to the developer -  functionality and debugging are the key words in getting it right the first time.

Quit smoking progress Day 7.1:  Still not getting the hang of it :{ but it is getting less I’m down to 7 a day.