Category: Jake

My parents, for many years, have always given us gifts of labor (my parents working, not hiring anybody) and materials for projects around the house that we are tremendously grateful for. My dad’s a contractor, and is good at a lot of things and does the bulk majority of the hard stuff (with my mom just making sure he keeps on task). Just the same, they helped us get this giant shed in our backyard moved to a better place so we could lay down a patio in its place. They helped us put up crown molding and paint our bedroom. They’ve helped us with a bunch of little things around the house.

The thing is, they’ll say they’re going to do something, and we have no idea when it’s actually going to be done. This isn’t a problem, generally, as they’re being generous, and we’re in no hurry for things. What usually happens is that they’ll just randomly call, out of the blue, and decide they’re going to come over and work on it. That’s what happened yesterday…

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As of next week, I’ll be basically getting my paycheck from three different companies here in Sunriver. It’s a long story, really. While the first company linked will be the ones actually signing my paycheck (like usual), I’ll be doing a crapload of work for the other two as well, and I need to track my time appropriately so that my employer can make sure things are billed out appropriately.

Does anybody have any suggestions on project and time tracking software? I have access to the various Microsoft products (Project, for example) and the time tracking functions in Quickbooks. I’d prefer something that would either integrate with either Outlook or Quickbooks, as I work in both of those quite a bit (preferbly Outlook — haven’t really had a chance to play with Quickbooks time tracking functions, but I have them here if need be).

Anybody have any suggestions? Cheap is always good, but free is even better.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been nursing a bit of a cold, chopping a bunch of wood so we could actually keep warm during this nasty cold weather (I think we might have gotten up to 17 degrees today), and been recopying data back to my laptop that had to be repaired. The laptop’s all back and happy and nice, the wood’s been chopped (and I got some ordered, too, as we’re basically out, and our furnace sucks), but my cold’s still sticking around. I’ll be getting some Nyquil down, and then I’m off to bed.

Meanwhile, I have been adding some new features and cleaning up some stuff over at BendBlogs, so be sure to check some of those out (and I have found some more sites that I plan on adding over there at some point).

…I have a MySpace profile here. I didn’t even bother to setup an account until Snarky posted theirs and I didn’t want to be the last blogger in Central Oregon to have one (since everybody else already seems to have one). So if you want to add me as a friend, knock yourself out, but don’t expect me to ever post anything remotely useful on that page — I have this site for that (of course, that’s assuming that something on this site is remotely useful, but we just won’t have that discussion).

I’d like to talk to them.

Our washing machine has been back flowing and spilling water out of it’s drain on a fairly regular basis lately, to the point where we just keep a towel down there so we can actually get some laundry done. We tried putting Draino-type chemicals down there with no luck, and when I tried to run a snake down there, I couldn’t get very far, just hitting metal. So I thought I was just hitting a really bad angle.

So tonight, I finally got fed up, called my father-in-law (who does a lot of landscaping and irrigation plumbing) over and we tore the wall open so we could get to the pipes. Sure enough, we thought, the trap for the line before the drain was very tight and probably was having a problem with the water flow, so it was getting backed up (and that’s also what we were hitting with the snake). We went down to Lowes to get some new pipes, told the old nasty (and nearly 30 pounds worth) of steel pipes that were in there, hooked up some much easier-to-work-with PVC, and before we hooked it up, my father-in-law ran his snake into the sewer drain about 20 feet, hopefully clearing up anything that would be causing the backflow.

So we hooked it all back up, and I sent my father-in-law home as he was exhausted (he was at work early this morning). We ran a load, and water still came out of the drain. Ugh…back to the drawing board.

Plumber I am not, so plumber I will call. Anybody know anybody good and fair priced or related to one that could help a guy out?

I wish I had a few extra bucks so I could either a) Build My Own DVR or b) Sign up for Tivo (or for the DVR service through the local cable company). Why? Because I’m really sick of trying to record shows on tape.

Now understand, I hardly watch any TV. But there are two shows that I don’t like to miss: House and Monk. (On a side note, I really hate how Fox seems to enjoy putting four weeks between new episodes of House and instead puts up that obnoxious American Idol crap.). Friday night was a new episode of Monk, but the kids were sick and I had been up nearly all night the night before, so my wife and I decided to tape it and watch it later this weekend. So I programmed the VCR and went to bed.

So yesterday we fire up the VCR, play the tape, and get 10 minutes into the show, and the tape gets totally unreadable — no sound, and barely any video. So we clean the heads on the VCR, and it didn’t help — the tape was toast. I fast forwarded through the episode, and it came back so you could actually hear it about five minutes before the end, which didn’t do us any good.

So my next purchase when I’ve got money to blow? I’m getting a DVR, dangit. I probably will build one, as I like having that kind of customization ability (and I already have a TV tuner card I could throw in there). Meanwhile, if anybody has last Friday’s episode of Monk on tape (or digitally) that I can borrow so I can watch it, please let me know (e-mail me at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com).