{nule.org}

Well, back here I promised to post after shots of the new kitchen. I tried to match them up with the before shots fairly close. I tossed in a few bonus bathroom shots as well (didn’t think to take before shots there – trust me, it’s an improvement). I need to do something about the plywood mounts I made for the air conditioner. I my try for some thick lexan next year to mount it in, or at least paint my plywood mounts.

http://nule.org/g2/v/RandomThings/KitchenAfter/

Side by side comparisons

I fired up the gimp and made some medium sized comparison shots. Please click the thumbnails below to enlarge.

By the way, the house is of an unusual all steel construction, interior and exterior walls, ceilings and roofs. They were made in the late 40s and early 50s by the Lustron corporation. Much more information is available at the Lustron connection and there’s even a documentary. Unfortunately, some owner covered the original exterior of the house with aluminum siding and shingled roofing. I later decided to upgrade the windows, and now the floors and kitchen (which weren’t original anyway) as well as the bathroom. Yes, we designed, built and installed the kitchen and bathroom ourselves.

Outside view of our house

Well, AT&T dropped from orange to yellow on my fail scale and actually got our DSL and local phone working (how about the cellphone, huh, AT&T?) So to reward you for your patience in listening to me complain I present you with two more chapters of the Java tutorial. We’re getting dangerously close to doing useful stuff with Java here. All great fun.

I have been thinking how to expand this tutorial, and I have two ideas so far. One is to delve more into best practices, like, shall we say commenting our code and how to do it right in Java? Or perhaps using ant and organizing our projects. The other idea is extending things to start to cover enterprise class Java. That could be interesting as lots of people will tell me I’m doing it wrong.

Oh well, when you have a job designing enterprise apps you can tell me I’m stupid (and you’ll still be wrong). All good fun, kids.

Just so you know, your fail advisory level is at Orange.

Thanks AT&T. You didn’t quite manage to get my phone and DSL moved Monday in the AM as you promised, but you have assured me that you’ll let me know why you fail so badly by late Wednesday night. I’m so glad that you’ve been allowed to become a monopoly again with no accountability at the same time as your customer service has slipped to well below the crappy watermark set by Ameritech back in the dark days of 2000/2001. Oh, and my freaking cell phone isn’t working right either. DIAF, thanks.

In other news we did get moved successfully to the new place. I’m really happy with how things turned out, and the move went better than planned, thanks, actually, to a u-haul screwup (speaking of customer service… at least u-haul gave me a huge discount and an extended rental when they didn’t have the truck I reserved available). I won’t have new pictures of the house renovations up until the DSL is working at home again.

Lastly, I scored a Wii. Wii! They really are as good as the hype. I’m considering a ‘review’ style entry covering it later, we’ll see how time works out with that. Now if only my DSL would come up again, so I could update it and download all the fun online toys.

Hey, AT&T – in case I forgot to mention before… DIAF.

P.S. I probably won’t manage to update the Java tutorial, or anything else here again before the DSL comes back, by the way. Sorry about that, but I’ll get caught up again soon, I promise.

P.P.S. AT&T has gone from suck to blow. They canceled my repair ticket, telling me “it’s done” and after convincing them I still don’t have dialtone, they created a new repair ticket, resetting me back another day. FAIL.