Lazy Hacker Babble

End of Week 4: Starting Foundation Form

hsin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:13:13 +0000

The crew has been working hard to get the foundation ready for next week’s pouring. The pillars have been poured already so those 10-17′ holes from last week are all filled.

The plywood that is there is along the outer wall of the house and the floor will be about 4″ above it.

There were some serious mud that gushed up as the pillar were drilled:

Week 3: Continuing to prepare the foundation

hsin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:10:08 +0000

Week 3 is more drilling for the foundation piers. At 7′, we hit water which means more $$$.

Picture of one of the holes:

You can see that the bottom has a bit of water:

The metal rods that will be put into the expensive holes we’re digging:

End of Week 2: Preparing for piers

hsin — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:07:07 +0000

The ground in the area is what our general contractor refer to as “glop”. Basically, it’s pretty much clay in the ground which is why they required us to put in a pier foundation which is really expensive and ate a big chunk of our budget. This week has been preparing to put in the piers.

Big ‘ol drill bit:

The drilling machine:

Property with trenches with marks of where the piers go:

Obviously, the general contractor is already using my office porch for himself!

Do Engineers Want to Be Lawyers?

hsin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:07:15 +0000

We engineers tend to be well educated and often very confident in our own abilities in and outside of our area of expertise. We often straddle the fine line between confidence and arrogance. How often have we rolled our eyes at lawyers and judges requesting our source code thinking, “Do they really think that they can just pick it up, read it and understand?”

Computer source code is very precise. It has to be so that a computer can process it and do exactly what we instruct it to do. “a = 1″ is precisely what it says. This should make computer code easier to understand then the english language which requires a lot of context. “It’s cool” — what does that mean?!? Those of us in software engineering know that code is not necessarily easy to read or understand because even if the language is precise the meaning can still be difficult to decipher.

Just like programming languages in software engineering, Legal and Politics have their own language. Legal language is especially difficult because even though it uses English its structure and sentences have a precision that doesn’t necessarily match that of common vernacular.

Just like how we know that a lawyer can’t just start an text editor, read the code and be able to understand, how come we feel that we can read proposals and half researched news articles and declare ourselves as experts?

Outline taking shape

hsin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:16:44 +0000

The rough outline of the foundation is taking shape so we should be able to drill the piers soon. Now I’m actually able to stand there and get a better feel for the dimensions of the house rather then just looking at plans on a piece of paper.

Garage workspace

hsin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:50:53 +0000

Here are my last 3 projects and resulting in my new garage work space.

End of Week 1

hsin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:46:08 +0000

Made good progress in week 1. The old foundation has been removed, debris have been removed and the hole for the new foundation is starting to take shape.

Day 1: Demolition

hsin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 02:35:36 +0000

It only took an hour for the excavator to demolish the house, but 10 months of planning, designing and permitting to get to this day:

New workbench

hsin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:20:24 +0000

Recently I’ve started to do some wood working projects around the house as can be seen in some of my previous post (stand, desk). I’ve really enjoyed working on those projects, but the work surface I was using was just two sawhorses and maybe some plywood on top. There are still some projects that I would like to do, but first I wanted a more stable and solid work bench. The cost of good workbenches are pretty high and the main point of doing a lot of the projects myself was to cut down on the cost of buying pre-made items so I decided to build my own workbench.

It took me a couple of weekends because I wanted to make a workbench that can be disassembled easily when I move. Again, I had the lumber yard cut the wood to length and did the drilling myself. It feels really really solid and I left an overhang so that I can install a vise in the future.

Here it is before any finishing is applied:

Here is one of the joints:

I’m still considering what kind of finish to put on it. The wood looks nice so I don’t necessarily want to conceal that, so maybe a clear oil varnish?

NBA Competitiveness

hsin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:55:18 +0000

There’s obviously been a lot of discussions on the Miami Heat’s teaming of Dwayne Wade, Lebron James, and Chris Bosh. A lot of focus has been on Lebron James and how he handled “The Decision” while humiliating the city that adored him, but a bigger question has come up on how this impacts the NBA. Will top players now be trying to form “super” teams? What will happen to the competitive landscape of the league?

I had just read Magic and Bird’s book a couple of months ago and they credited having each other as opponents to pushing themselves to excel and get better. Jordan said as much in his recent comments. We like watching competition and the ones such as those between Magic and Bird was what made the NBA great. While we might enjoy the occasional All Star game, it’s not something we want to see night-in-and-night-out.

A lot of people are going to be watching the Heat next year, but are they going to watch basketball or are they going to watch celebrity players? While some people are criticizing Jason Kidd’s comment, I kind of agrees with him that the NBA might get a short term boost from the Heat but it might not be good for the NBA in the long term.