Zack of All Trades » House

New Kitchen Table

Zack Williams — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:30:03 +0000

We bought a new kitchen table today. It was on sale, but still a little expensive.

It’s a step up from our previous table, which belonged to my parents for about 10 years before I inherited it. My Grandmother got that one about 6 months ago, and we’ve been using a plastic folding table for a while.

Needless to say, this is quite the improvement. Lionel think’s its a bit strange, as he’s not used to being able to look up through the table at us while we’re eating.

Guys Night – 12/03

Zack Williams — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 17:16:23 +0000

Video Game night this Saturday! Everyone (well, all guys) are invited! We’ll play some video games, hang out, etc. In the past when we’ve done this, it’s generally been mostly Halo or Halo 2 for most of the night, but if people want to bring their own systems or games, we can definitely hook them up – there will be at least 3 if not 4 TV’s available (1 HDTV capable). I have a network set up here, so networked games are encouraged.

Available consoles: PS2, Xbox*2, Gamecube, Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, and tons of games with specialized controllers incluing:

Steel Batallion – Mech game with HUGE controller, foot pedals, etc.
Dance Dance Revolution – two pads, with a ton of songs
Beatmania – keyboard music game (very hard!)

So, the details:

Who: All the guys (no girl cooties allowed!)
When: Saturday, December 3rd, from 6PM – 11PM
What: Videogames, Pizza, and just hanging out.
Where: Zack + Amy’s house
Bring: $4 for pizza and drinks. Bring snacks if you want.

Please post a comment here if you intend to come, so I can plan appropriately for the food (make sure to bring $4!). I’m taking pizza toppings and soda requests too.

Home Server Setup

Zack Williams — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:15:16 +0000

I have some space in the laundry room, so I set up all my server computers in there.

I annotated the heck out of this in Flickr, so click on the image to see what all the parts are, and what they do.

This took me a while to do… I would punch down a few cables, my arm would get tired (the panel is in a very awkward position), then leave it for a few days. Then a cable wouldn’t verify with my tester, so I’d get frustrated and leave it be. But it’s finally done, and I even have the whole top shelf empty.

I’m happy with it now.

Some jerk cut down our oleander

Zack Williams — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:03:24 +0000

So, Amy and I get back from a run last night, and Amy goes around the back of the house to move a plant up to the front yard. This particular plant (a purple heart) had previously been eaten by the javalina that roam around the neighborhood, and we fenced in a bit of the front yard to keep them out.

Then she noticed that someone had cut down all the oleander bushes.

All 8 plants have been cut down, to about 1″ off the roots, and their foliage is just lying there. The cuts are clean, like they were done with pruners.

So, we made a visit to our neighbor who lives behind us and put up the wood fence. It turns out that he had some of his palo verde trees cut through as well a few days ago (we don’t know when this was done, as we were both out of the house on saturday).

(some history – David, our neighbor, planted the oleander before we moved in, and was going to put up a wall, but there was some misunderstanding about property lines, but that goes resolved by the builders. So he put up the existing wooden fence inside where the previous fenceposts were, which put the oleanders between his fence and ours.)

So, I called the police and filed a report. I’m going to call the builders and see if they know anything about this happening.

This makes me mad… it’s just senseless destruction of plants, which are hard to grow here.