OK, not really…

… no actually we finally had our kitchen island installed! Yay! About bloody time. Installation was originally slatted for Thursday, but that was not with my consultation and I wasn’t available. I re-scheduled for Friday, but got a call the day before telling me that they couldn’t make it… so Monday it is!

All told we are happy with the island and the installation. That being said, we were NOT impressed by the company we went with. Suncrest Cabinets is their name. We found the salesperson wanting both in communication capability (VERY poor English) and his willingness to take the time with us. The installer that showed up also was not impressive. We were concerned about the horror stories one hears regarding home renos, so we decided to be as specific as possible about what we wanted and that we expected a perfect job (and what that meant in real terms). We basically just got a snicker from the guy and a comment about how long he’s been doing this.

We also got negative reinforcement from the guy about our choices of where to put it exactly. It’s one thing to tell the customer your opinion (which we solicited). It is another to make negative comments about the space available after the installation is finished. For the record, we actually foresaw the limitations of our selections and are quite happy with how things turned out! In fact, while the island itself is more dominating than we thought it would be, the space it seems to take up is also less, so on all counts we are quite happy!

Not to mention that this turkey was slack on clean up and frankly seemed most concerned with getting outta here. Well, good riddance. We’re happy as peach with having an island and it’s placement.

And what about Suncrest. Well, if they weren’t the original cabinet makers (to match the existing kitchen cabinetry) we would NEVER have gone with them after the sales floor experience. Needless to say, we shall NOT be recommending them.

Anyhoo, here’s a couple of before and after shots.

OK,

So I’ve been looking into trying to make the picture pop-up box resize to a person’s screen as needed. I think I’ve found something that will work. It’s called Shadowbox (instead of lightbox).

Dad, let me know if the image popup resizes properly to your screen. If it doesn’t I might have to go back to lightbox. Until I modify all the entries, older posts will not display the thumbnails correctly, so do not be alarmed.

The important difference is the navigation is slightly different. The buttons are in the lower right corner, see below…

… hi folks.

After discussing my blog with Dad, I began to wonder why he was having a few problems as I was trying to talk him through the site. Last night, as I was trying to figure a few things out I decided to put my screen to the same resolution as his and everything became clear. I didn’t realize that my pictures where too big for a 1024×768 resolution to show properly.

Until I can figure a way to make the gallery AUTO-size based on what the viewer sees, I’ve decided to make my pictures no more than 500 pixels tall. Sorry to those with larger screens (like my 24″, damnit!)

Also, I’ve managed to simplify navigating from page to page. The links at the bottom of each page were ridiculous and I wasn’t happy with them. I’ve now replaced those links with a page number bar. Here is a sample of what you will see at the bottom of every page:

Please Login or Register to see the link.

The bar is grey. The number with a black block around it is the page you are currently on, with page 1 being the most RECENT entries of my blog. You can navigate forwards and backwards through the pages with the arrows or select the page you want directly by clicking on the page number itself.

Go take a look all the way at the bottom and try it out to get used to it. It is up and running now.

Hopefully this will simplify things for everyone. I also find it looks far more elegant.

Anywhoo, hope to get some more pictures up soon.

RadMan

… one gets projects done.

Couple of things I’ve been working on.

1. Workshop area. I’ve now finished the workbench and have substantially finished the workshop area. The idea is that tools will be hung on the backboard, the the 8 ft long table will give ample room to work on projects. As you can see from all the clutter, I’m still in the process of sorting and organizing.

2. Home Network. I got tired of having the network gear in the house all up in the office. I wanted everything that might need to communicate either with the internet or with the media server to be able to do so at full speed… so I wired the house and pretty much all the wires come to the storage room where the water heater is located. I’ve got the cable modem, router and additional network switch all connected and functional. All I’ve got to do now is finish restoring the drywall. I had to cut a few holes in the walls to run the network cable. All Cat5e.

Cheers!

Hi everyone. I just got an email from my domain name registrar that I should except interuptions in service this coming weekend… so just a heads up!

RadMan