Archive of posts from 2024

Lessons Learned

I’ve made tons of mistakes in putting in the footings. Here are a few of the lessons I learned.

Back Stairs

The back stairs on my house when I bought it were made of wood. Over the years, the wood has rotted and they were starting to fall apart. The best picture I could find of them were from 2020 and is below.

Welding Practice

I have wanted to learn to weld for a crazy long time. It just seems to be both a cool and useful skill. I bought a cheap welder years ago and have been playing around with it off and on. I finally decided that in order to really learn to weld, I need a project. And my project is going to be rebuilding my back stairs. I am on vacation from work and have finally gotten started working on them. I spent days digging holes for footings, buying bags of concrete, mixing the concrete and trying to make the forms, etc. Today was a very rainy day. I couldn’t really mix and pour concrete to make my second footing. Instead, I decided to take some time to practice welding so that when the time comes, I’m a bit more comfortable with it. I have some metal tube cutoffs that I could play with, so I did.

HP Color LaserJet 5525dn Broken Network Port

At work, we have an HP Color LaserJet CP5225dn printer, which I love. Last year, our network card stopped working. I bought an external print server that sort of worked. For computers where the printer had already been set up, it worked ok. But new windows printers couldn’t add it properly because it couldn’t reach the printer to get the settings. As an example, it would say it was a black and white printer instead of color. And there was no way to override these settings.

Hello 2024!

Life is good! I want to remember this all the time. I really have no complaints and feel very lucky.