How NOT to build a wall

[Nate Nagel]

FWIW I have found warming them to make them spray better (in cool weather) I usually sit them in a pot of hot water though

nate

[Robert Green]

For at least ten years, there WAS no formal training in PCs to speak of, but if you read the instructions, the trade mags, BBS faqs and the like AND you had a feel for such things, you could easily learn enough to get by better than most. I've built about thirty machines and fixed God knows how many more. I've ruined a lot of gear, too - but experience gained is proportional to the amount of equipment destroyed (-:. I also got a lot of stuff after the fact - like people blowing a power supply trying to install an AGP video card in a machine without an AGP video card slot. Botched memory and hard drive upgrades accounted for a lot of the DOA's that ended up on my workbench.

If you can do a brake job, you can do a lot of PC repair. The devil is in the details. But what do you do when you've got a new drive that just won't boot no matter what? Or a new CD burner that keeps spitting out coasters (back when blanks were $5 each!)? Or a modem that won't stay on line? That's where skill, experience and good problem solving skills come into play.

(Don't get me started on problem solving skills. We hired a lot of "wannabees" in our IT department because management was unwilling to pay top dollar for really good people. What they didn't realize was that by hiring incompetents to service machines that engineers, accountants, lawyers and others depended on to do THEIR work, net productivity plummeted. It was really false economy.)

You can tell by watching which techies evaluate all the clues first and which guys come in and do a "defrag" as the universal solution to all problems without a single actual thought about what the problem is or how to fix it. It's almost like Dell tech support, gleefully leading people to restore from the system disks without mentioning it would wipe out all their existing data.

The person I am describing was so self-absorbed she would not notice in a million years how a craftsman did their work. She moved out of a rooftop condo at a LOSS at the height of the real estate boom because the roof leaked in the rain. She would go slate blank whenever confronted with something that was "too hard" like condo maintenance, computers, cars or income taxes.

You can say that again. My sister couldn't survive in the modern world without technical assistance from my BIL and my nephew. I think it's genetic because as soon I turned thirteen, I was building, building, building. Fortunately, I had some great carpenters and cabinet makers to watch. That makes a big difference but some people could be watching Michaelangelo creating a sculpture and not learn one thing about his technique.

Let's hope so. I tend to find cluelessness in one area is often a good sign of cluelessness in others. But I think in these cases it's more than that. It's not knowing that you don't know what you're doing. That's a slightly more dangerous sort of ignorance than garden-variety dumb.

-- Bobby G.

[Larry W]

Some of them can write very entertaining usenet posts.

[aemeijers]

Robert Green wrote: (snip)

THAT is a critical ability to have, in life in general, not just home repair, PC repair, or whatever. There is no sin in not knowing how to do something, and I'll go out of my way to help people like that when they ask, or honestly tell them it is outside MY skill set. The ones who try to BS or fake their way through it, not so much.

I ain't proud- for stuff I don't know how to do, I'll seek out someone who does, even when I have to pay for it. And with the passing years, my understanding of the holes in my expertise has become more detailed.

[Rich]

I saw today that Home Depot has just come out with a Peel and Stick Ceramic and Glass Tile. Now thats something for the ages. Right

[Tony]

So YOU bought my parents old house! Try digging around here and there, soon enough you will hit an I beam or a car engine.

[Jack Stein]

I've seen people in the building trades do amazingly bad things, and they apparently knew they were doing it. Your wall builder is just an idiot. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to learn the correct way to build a wall, simple house wiring, basic plumbing and so on.

What I really detest is someone, like my kid, saying "I can't do that, I don't know how or I never did that" My answer is always one of two things, WTF, do you think I was born knowing how, or, damn, I never did it either, I guess we're screwed...

I guess if you are born into a family that pays someone else to do everything, do nothing but go to school all your life, have no friends in the trades or that actually work with their hands, your on your own, and a little initiative can get you in trouble.

[Kurt Ullman]

Which brings up the REAL question.. will he find your parents???

[JoeSpareBedroom]

I have a theory that the internet is behind the pathetic trend toward helplessness. I wonder how many youngsters consider going to the library for a book to help them with a project they've never attempted. Does anyone even notice that there are shelves full of books as you walk into Home Depot or Lowe's?

Reading a book shouldn't necessarily be that much different from viewing the same information on a web page, but for some reason, I think it is. Maybe all the animated ads are too much of a distraction from the important content. I don't know....

[The Ranger]

Amen, Brudda! It's right along with the day I realized my father _was_ pretty damned smart because he knew not only when to ask for help (rather than simply forging ahead) but the questions to ask an expert so he could do it the next time. Now, he knew how to do many things, and did with a level of craftmanship I have yet to attain (he really was the DeVinci of Clan Ranger), but that was the lesson he stressed each time and was finally able to pass on. Know your limits; do it right the first time. (A job half-done is twice done.)

Go ahead and pass me some of that ammo... I hear the Hordes a-comin' over the burm.

The Ranger

[J. Clarke]

If you've got a good library then it's a good resource. But it doesn't take much effort to exhaust most libraries. Searching my local library's catalog on "table saw" gets "Collected Poems of Constantine Cavafy", "Weeds, Season 4", "Under Town", "Boone: A Biography", and "Verses [of Ogden Nash] from 1929 On".

"Carpentry" found a bunch of childrens' books, a few on trim and finish carpentry, and four that might be decent--they've been out of print so long that Amazon doesn't even have a picture of them so I can't tell for sure. Their holdings on that topic are so meager that I'm tempted to cart some of the books that I'm done with down and donate them.

[cshenk]

"Doug Miller" wrote

Snipped but LOL! Best part was no floor anchoring. That was the least fun part of finishing a basement but it's got to be done and done right.

[The Ranger]

We have several public libraries close enough that my daughter-units can bike easily enough to most of them. I've donated books to each over the years and it's not that they don't have an over-supply from willing patrons. It's the resources to bind them for shelving and use, catalog them, and then put them out so they get used.

Tangential thought: I watched one mom put a book back because it was "old and a hard-back" (I asked because I knew the book was a good read.) It didn't have a cover sexy enough to hold her daughter's attention. Gahdferbid the story do that...

If your local library has volunteer hours, find out what you can do to assist them in getting their back-logged books out on the shelves. If it's like our system, you'll have to go through _some_ training but once you're in you can make a difference.

The Ranger

[DGDevin]

Oh geez don?t get me started on Dell. I bought their top-of-the-line XPS model less than three years ago, when the motherboard recently expired I learned a replacement from Dell was double the cost of anyone else's motherboard. So I got a local shop to build me a new machine that stomps all over the old Dell in performance and isn't full of grossly overpriced proprietary hardware.

Perhaps part of the problem is that industry is encouraging cluelessness with plug-n-play products that come with one-page instruction manuals and warning labels that there are no user-repairable parts inside. Schools have largely abandoned industrial arts classes--that doesn't help either. So we end up with gazillions of people who have never had to use a screwdriver in their lives because they've never been asked to, hanging a picture on the wall would be a triumph of tool use for them. Of course there are opportunities there; our local family-owned hardware store runs classes for women who want to learn basic home maintenance skills, so they get $60 a head from the students and pick up loyal customers at the same time--that's smart business.

[DGDevin]

Oh yeah, that's why I hired a guy to do the plaster in our bedroom rather than make a mess of it myself. I also hired somebody to refinish the hardware floor, although having watched it done I'd be prepared to tackle that myself next time. The stuff like baseboard and painting and redoing my wife's closet I did because I figured I could.

BTW, if you want to get on your wife's good side, design and build her a new closet that increases her clothing storage capacity by 50% in the same closet--that's Eggs Benedict for breakfast for quite some time.

[cshenk]

"Robert Green" wrote

Grin, first one I did had to match an older house. 12.75 inch. It was a replacement due to termite damage of a semi-structural wall along a stairwell (with closet underneath). Original followed the steps and we wanted to match to the undamaged other wall wood of the closet. The stairs were actually falling down on that damaged side so had to use metal supports (the sort where you twist to rise until hit it right). Major pain in the ass with leveling everything. Mom also insisted it be cedar to match the other side and we had to have that special ordered because they hadnt crossbarred shorter lenghts on the original wall and we needed over 10 foot

3x6 pieces for the stretches at the top end.

We were in a small town and had to order from Charlottesville VA (about 1 hour drive away). I still chuckle about the guy driving up and asking Mom for her husband. She saw the wood and told him, 'oh, thats for Carol. CAARROOLL! Your wood is here!'. I'd slept in late and came trotting out in my PJ's with a level in one hand and a muffin half eaten in the other. He didnt stop laughing until I showed him exactly why I had rejected 2 of the pieces. He gave Mom his card after I took him inside and showed the specs I needed for some of the floor beams and 10x2 oak flooring replacements in the far bedroom.

Lets not embarass anyone with my age then. Just say, young enough to come trotting out in my PJ's (girly snicker) and old enough to grab a level.

[DerbyDad03]

Apparently the "force fit and let friction take over" practice is not unique.

I just removed a bi-fold door in an old house apartment that my moved into.

The bi-fold doors were shorter than the original door opening - by a foot - so they install a new "header".

They screwed the header (an unpainted pine board) into the jamb on the dumb end of the bi-fold and forced the pivoting end into the opening.

I guess if you're going to do a job half-way, you might as well do that half wrong.

[DGDevin]

My wife and I have done that. They accept donated books for two reasons: either they sell them to raise money (if they don't need/want them on the shelves) or in some cases they'll put them in a library binding and circulate them if it's a title they'd like to have (but currently cannot afford to buy). We've had a lot of use out of our local public library so we don't mind giving them books we no longer have room for. And it doesn't matter how many bookcases I build, they're always instantly full as soon as they're in place.

[Gerald Ross]

snip

When we were building a house in Texas the builder came every afternoon to check on the framers. He had a big red marker and would look down a wall then would put big X's on the studs that stood out. The framers would take these out and replace them with straighter ones.

We moved to Georgia and had planned on building again. We visited one builder at a job site and noticed that about 1 out of 3 studs were out of alignment. When I pointed it out to the builder he said, "the sheetrock will straighten them all out." Then we visited a finished house he had built. The walls looked like snake tracks. The sheetrock had not helped straighten them. We marked him off our list.

[cshenk]

"Robert Green" wrote

Same here. BTW, if you want to see what BBSes became:

telnet://shenks.synchro.net

The problem is they teach everything but problem solving.

Saw that just last week. Ship had slow response to the desktop for application the person was involved in. Server groom didnt fix it. It's obvious why. They kept assuming software but didnt ask questions. The application was blindingly fast when run direct in ADP.

1- is it slow everywhere or only some computers? 2- do those same slow computers also have internet web access slow downs? 3- Does it happen only in port?

1a- check switch, specifically fiber degrade to servers. Signal loss do to that last hurricane evasion damaging end points

2a- almost sure to be signal loss. This time, in and out of switch needs a TDR 3a- Last ship complain? Check peier and pier cable 3b- No other ships at same pier with issue, check pier connection on ship and fiber swap in radio 3c- No others with same issue, first time for a long time using port or starboard connector, check connector.

Instead, they groomed the servers and switches for software and were mistified at the slow-down.

The answer BTW was 3C, first use in 2 years of port connector and the caps corroded with salt. Pier connection and cable were fine. I was groaning and laughing at the same time.