Here’s this week’s top post:
Broken Toilet
So my toilet has been “under maintenance” for almost a year. When my mom came and visited me last year, she ended up putting a post-it with the words “Do Not Use” on the toilet. The initial problem was the fact that the fill valve didn’t stop at the correct time and small amounts of water will overflow, the big air bubble thing will drop, and fill valve reopens and starts pouring in more water. Once in awhile, it’ll achieve a balance and stop.
At first I wanted to fix it, but whoever designed this bathroom was an idiot. Who only gives 1″ of clearance above the toilet tank, barely enough to take out the tank cover, and pretty much impossible to stick a normal sized hand in:
I decided that since no one really ever uses this toilet, I would just let it sit and do nothing.
However several months ago, I noticed it started leaking again and it turns out there was a small leak in the flush valve. The rubber casing around the opening had begun to tear. Unfortunately my hand couldn’t really reach it and I ultimately just close the main water valve into the toilet.
Flash forward to a few weeks back, a bunch of friends were over to play Rock Band and the downstairs bathroom was occupied. I had to point him to the master bedroom bathroom since the hallway one upstairs was “under maintenance”. That was when I decided I would try to determine how to fix it.
I stared at the problem for quite some time. I saw 2 possible solutions. Remove the wooden board above it or pull the toilet out. Moving forward, it made sense to remove the wooden board above it, however looking more closely at it, this piece was connected directly to the sink table. There didn’t appear to be a simple way to remove the board. I asked around for a power saw, but no one I knew had one. Plus I thought it would make sense to have a carpenter do it.
I decided to give the other solution a try, to pull out the toilet. After unscrewing the main bolts and disconnecting the tank from the water valve, I tried to lift it up. Stupid 1″ clearance. It wasn’t high enough to clear the screws on the floor. Sigh… So I left my toilet in the condition you see above and was planning to get quotes from carpenters. Guess I was too lazy and put that in the back of my head.
Last week, I thought what if I tried to tilt it forward? I might be able to replace the flush valve that way. Unfortunately the tilt wasn’t enough to do much, but that was when I realized that with it tilted, I can now move the toilet out! w00t!
So I took the broken piece out and planned to go to Lowes or Home Depot today and get a replacement. At first I was seeing these flush valve repair kits which looked nothing like mine, but then later on I found the one I needed. It was only $8, cheaper than the repair kit I was looking at earlier.
So I got home and began to do my magic. However, for the love of god, I couldn’t get the existing flush valve out. I kept trying to use the pliers to twist it, but it wouldn’t budge. I was about to give up, but that’s when I noticed that the kit had a piece that went into the bottom of the tank… After reading the instructions, there appears to be a piece underneath that I have to twist off. I should really read the instructions before I attempt to do these things.
So I unscrew the tank from the bowl and flipped it upside down. There was this black rubbery thing which I had no idea what to do. Twisting it didn’t seem to work. Turns out I was suppose to just pull it off, which I found out after a few minutes. Now I see the plastic nut I need to unscrew. Unfortunately I wasn’t strong enough to twist the darn thing off. So I tried to start breaking it, which didn’t work either. I called Derek to ask for help and he said what I needed was a strap wrench (one of those things with a rubber strap that you wrap around the item you want to twist). Derek had one I could borrow, but unfortunately he wasn’t at home, so I decided I would just get one from Lowes and add it to my tool box. Was a bit more expensive than I had expected: $16 for one big and one small. I’m pretty sure my dad would tell me he could get them for $0.99.
Anyway, I get home and twisting it off with a strap wrench was a breeze. I now had the old flush valve completely removed. Installing the new one was pretty easy since it’s just the reverse of what I had to just do.
After putting everything back together, it was time to do a test. After opening the main water valve, it begin leaking immediately. Apparently using just hands and fingers to twist the nuts connecting the bowl and tank did not achieve the tightness that was needed. I turned off the main valve, flushed out the water from the tank, and began to screw all the nuts and bolts tighter with a real wrench.
Time to try again. w00t! No more leaking.
I flushed it a few more times and came back to check on it after half an hour and no leaking was detected. I fastened the toilet back onto the floor and reapplied sealant.
I guess now I know how to fix toilets. And to think I was that close to calling a carpenter or a plumber. But that bathroom designer is still an idiot.
New Bedroom Set
Earlier today, I got a Costco newsletter showing me this bedroom set: Carolina Bedroom Collection for $1699.99. It was really pretty:
Though the $1700 price tag was hard to swallow and it didn’t even include the mattress. What finally help make up my mind was the fact that it would be delivered in approximately 4-6 weeks. My mom, sister, and grandma were coming up to visit in 2 weeks and yah… I don’t have enough beds.
So after work today, I drove to Costco Home and took the dive and purchased the Modus Furniture 5PC Queen Bedroom Set Nouveau II and PosturePedic Sterlingshire Firm Queen Set I had mentioned earlier. The total came to $2,121.35 after tax + delivery/assembly. The process was simple and the thing I like about purchasing stuff at Costco is that there’s no salesman pressure. My initial calculation was a bit off. I was told delivery/assembly was $129 for first piece + $19 for each additional piece and that the 5 piece bedroom set counted as 5 separate pieces. Turns out I think the person I initially asked was confused and thought I was purchasing 5 separate pieces. Apparently if you buy the entire set, it counts as 1 piece. So after this purchase, I have a little over $100 remaining from my tax refund.
Delivery is set for next week, so with plenty of time to spare. I’ll take pictures when it’s all set up and pretty.
Pidgin
I first heard of Pidgin on Angel-grrl’s blog. At that time I didn’t really think much of it, though I had been thinking about switching to Trillian for some time. Anyway, as I add more and more foreign friends, they tend to prefer MSN Messenger over AIM and now whenever I reboot, I have to start 2 IM applications.
A few days ago, Digg announced a new version of Pidgin was released. I finally decided to give it a try. Some things I was looking forward included being able to talk to people via multiple IM protocols and being able to group multiple aliases together. Some people have 3 or 4 screen names and they end up scattered all across my buddy list, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which screen name to IM. Therefore I decided to give it a try. Worse case, I just switch back to AIM and Live Messenger.
Installation:
The installation of Pidgin went through successfully and I didn’t hit any problems with either Windows Vista or running it as non-admin on Windows XP.
Multiple Clients:
The multiple client support is nice. I got AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and XMPP (Google/GTalk) working, though I don’t really have any buddies on Yahoo or XMPP. I just added them since I had accounts with them. So far, they’re working fine.
Grouping Screen Names:
This was unintuitive to discover (at least for me). Xyon claims it was semi-unintuitive as he was able to figure it out after some time. Apparently to group screen names, you right click one of them, click Expand, and now you can drag other screen names into that group. I had tried creating an alias, tried to select multiple screen names, etc, but none of those worked. Once you know how to do it, it’s simple, but the process is quite tedious.
After grouping, it has some algorithm to determine which screen name you should be IMing based on their availability and idleness. If you want to manually select a different screen, you can so with the context menu or if the IM window is already open, under the Send To file menu. I think the process could be further simplified, but I guess I’m just nitpicking here.
Keyboard shortcuts:
In AIM, to open a new IM window was Alt+i. In Pidgin, it’s Alt+m.
To close an IM window in AIM was Esc. In Pidgin, it’s Ctrl+w.
Not really saying it’s better or worse, but it’ll take some time getting used to.
One thing which I found quite annoying is in certain areas of the UI, when I start typing, a little white box pops up with the 1st letter I hit (i.e. searching for a screen name in my buddy list or searching for a font to use in the Preference window). Only the first letter registers and it just halts and doesn’t really do any searching. It also freezes the window for about 5 seconds which annoyed the heck out of me.
Unicode Support:
This is the biggest set back and may actually be the reason I finally switch back to AIM. Unicode support is horrible in Pidgin. I found this support ticket after searching for a bit: Asian Characters not appearing on buddy list:
Under the normal Windows binary of Pidgin, Asian characters are not displayed on the buddy list. When hovering over a screen name however, the contact window that pops up shows the characters just fine. This happens on Windows XP and Vista.
Reading through the history, there were a couple suggestions such as changing my default conversation font to something that supported the whole Unicode range. I changed to MS UI Gothic from Verdana and now I can see what I’m typing instead of square blocks with 4 0s in it. However, after doing some test with some friends, apparently it doesn’t send it correctly across, which it did fine when using AIM 6.0+.
There was another suggestion of changing the GTK theme, but that didn’t fix it either.
I did find this other ticket which was useful: poor IME support in windows:
I’m not sure it is even possible to programatically set the input method, so I don’t think that remembering is possible.
The closest that you can get is to have the default be the Windows IME input method, which can be done by setting the GTK_IM_MODULE environment variable to ime.
Pet Peeves:
- Buddy Info Window doesn’t disappear – When I was going through grouping screen names together, by hovering above the screen name, the info box would appear, but wouldn’t disappear for some reason. Therefore it blocked a big chunk of the screen, until I hover over the same screen name again and it disappeared.
- Doesn’t know monitor boundary – When I align my buddy list to the left of my monitor, getting buddy info windows would have part of it off the screen due to some centering rule.
- Unable to synchronize settings – After doing all my alias groupings, apparently there’s no way to synchronize this information with another system, without manually copying over the settings files.
Cute Cat Animation – Sequel
Thanks to Hjo3 for telling me a new cat animation is available:
Hey, BTW, a sequel was just posted yesterday.
A hungry cat resorts to increasingly desperate measures to get indoors.
If you miss the original cat animation, check it out here: Cute Cat Animation
I also wanted to point out the fact that if you append &fmt=18 to the back of a YouTube URL, you’ll get higher quality video. According to RayAlome, the 2 settings for the fmt tag are &fmt=6 and &fmt=18, increasing the quality and resolution. You can find out more information about these flags at: Higher Resolution Videos on YouTube and YouTube Tests Higher Resolution Videos.
Regular:
Video Resolution: 320×240
Audio Sample Rate: 22050 Hz&fmt=6:
Video Resolution: 448×336 (higher encoding)
Audio Sample Rate: 44100 Hz&fmt=18:
Video/Audio Format: MP4 (H264 with AAC audio)
Video Resolution: 480×360
Lychee Jello Cup
So while drinking my 3rd bottle of Lipton Green Tea with Citrus, it finally hit me what it reminded me of. Previously when I mention it reminded me of ice pops was due to desperate measures. The taste was so familiar and my brain was aching to make an association, and it finally did, but even after that, I wasn’t too sure that was what I was looking for.
When I popped open my 3rd bottle today and I took my 1st sip, I knew exactly what it reminded me of: Lychee Jello Cups
They also go by other names such as Lychee Pudding, Lychee Jelly, Konnyaku Jelly, Konnyak Jelly, etc. They’re those little jello cups that have a small chunk of fruit inside it. It started out with Lychee, but later on, other fruits like grapes and mango were also added to the variety. I believed coconut was also involved, but I forget if that is true or not.
Apparently it was later recalled due to chocking hazards.
Here’s some pictures of it:
(from The Gluttonist)
(from A Lot About Nothing)
Weekly Top Posts (2/24/2008 to 3/1/2008)
Here’s this week’s top post:
- How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com
- 4 Free Xbox Live Arcade Games
Windows Update Error: 80070490
Free AutoCheck Report (Similar to Carfax)- LeekSpin
- Haloid
- Missing Codecs in Firefox to Play Video in Gallery2
- Hacking the Linksys WRT54GL
- 2-pin 3-pin Power LEDs?
- iTunes Album Views
I’ve switched from page views count to unique page views count for the ranking. Nothing else too interesting this week.
Lipton Green Tea with Citrus
So Costco had a coupon for this month for Lipton Green Tea with Citrus and I’ve decided to give it a try. The idea of mixing citrus (orange and lime) with green tea was an concept that didn’t originally sit well with me. I’ve had fruity teas before. They were okay, nothing spectacular, and I’d prefer just regular tea or with honey/milk+sugar. Anyway, since it was on sale at Costco, I decided to give it a shot. I got to try one today and boy was it tasty.
It had a very familiar taste, which I couldn’t quite get ahold of. I went through ice cream flavors and even started thinking about Capri Sun flavors, but nothing quite hit the spot. Honestly, the citrus taste really overpowers the green tea taste, but you can still taste a hint of the green tea. Finally after hours of contemplation and many sips of the drink, savoring the taste each time, it finally it me. It reminded me of those popsicle juice sticks my mom would purchase at the Chinese supermarket when I was small. I can’t exactly describe it further besides saying they’re sticks filled with fruit juices (probably non-natural) and you freeze them and then you suck on them. I tried searching for any image, but couldn’t find any. Here’s my quick attempt at drawing one:
Update:
Thanks for Ungsunghero for pointing out those things are called ice pops:
Random Cell Phone Photos
Since I was transferring bedroom set photos off my cell phone, here are a bunch of random ones I decided to upload too:
Shopping (Un)Luck
I must have the worse shopping luck ever today. So I get up early today (yes, 12pm is early for a Saturday) to go get my haircut. The place I like is all the way in RTC (Redmond Town Center) and they’re only open till 2pm on Saturday and closed on Sunday.
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I was hoping to drop by Evergreen Autoglass afterwards to get my rock chip in my windshield patched. However when I get there, it’s now an empty shop with the sign: “We have moved, please call this #.” I called the # and it turns out they’ve moved to Monroe and won’t be open till Monday. Unfortunately I’m not willing to drive all the way to Monroe to get my windshield repaired, but apparently they offer mobile repair service for $25 more ($15 for the rock chip repair and $25 for the mobile service, totaling $40). I could’ve probably found another place, but being lazy and the fact they did good jobs the previous 2x, I decided to take them up on this offer and scheduled for them to drop by my work place on Monday. Yes, my car’s windshield appears to attract rocks like a magnet. I’ve gotten 3 rock chips since I moved to Washington.
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Next I did my weekly Costco run (more Mexican Coke!). I was also there to pick up some windshield wipers, since apparently mine were starting to tear. Looking at the chart, it showed:
01 Civic D.S. 20″
01 Civic P.S. 18″
I had previously measured my windshield wiper blade and it was about 21″. I looked down and found out that D.S. = driver side and P.S. = passenger side. I didn’t think they were 2 different sizes and didn’t measure the passenger size. Worse of all, these windshield wipers came in packs of 2s. So there were 2x 18″, 2x 20″, and 2x 22″. Did that mean I needed to get 2 18″s and 2 20″s? Why the heck aren’t they selling in singles when many of the cars on that chart don’t have the same length blades on each side. Since this was Costco, I decided I would just get a spare for later on. When I get home, I find out that the measurements they gave me were incorrect. The passenger side is actually 20″. So I decided I would install the 20″s and return the 18″s. But wait… apparently these blades which listed my car’s make and model don’t actually fit the stupid hook. I tried jamming it in and even tried to ply apart the hook to make it wider. I finally gave up after 30 minutes or so.
I started researching online and it turns out that people don’t actually recommend replacing the entire blade, just the rubber insert, and those cost like only $6 a piece at Honda dealerships. I gave my Honda dealership a call, but unfortunately their service department that sold it was closed and won’t be open till Monday. Grrrr.
I then remember I still had my previous windshield wiper inserts that I had removed and they were fine when I removed them. I went digging through my car parts box and found them. I replaced the inserts and now my windshield wipers are working fine again. Looks like I don’t need new windshield wiper inserts after all. I’ll be returning the windshield wiper blades to Costco, probably next week.
———
I finally started searching for a new bed/bedroom set. For those who know me, I’m not that big on furniture as all my bedrooms are pretty bare and I still sleep on my twin bed I had in college (or I may have exchanged it with my brother’s twin bed). Anyway, my mom’s been telling me to get a dresser since I still store my undergarment in my suitcase. She said I also need more beds for when they come visit me, they’ll have a place to sleep too. So I’ve been meaning to check out beds and given that I went to the Kirkland Costco today, I dropped by Costco Home. I was surprised by how expensive these bedroom sets were. There was really only 1 set I liked at Costco Home and it was $1099 excluding the mattress. The mattress I liked (Sealy Posturepedic Sterlingshire Firm) would cost another $699. Who knew mattresses were this expensive! Delivery included assembly and that would cost an additional $129 for 1st item + $19 for each additional item. The idea of spending my entire tax refund on a bedroom set did not sit well with me.
I then dropped by Dania Furniture (another couple blocks away from Costco Home) and I was much more fond of their designs and the bedroom sets were relatively the same price as Costco. The ones I liked ranged from $800 to $1100, but they weren’t really a mattress store and only carried Simmons. The mattresses were also scattered all around the store so it was hard to compare. The few that I tried didn’t really feel that great and their mattresses were more expensive than Costco. However, I didn’t want to order just a mattress from Costco and be charged $129 for delivery. Delivery at Dania was only $75 for everything, but assembly would be an additional $20-30/item.
I’ve checked IKEA awhile back and they had some decent designs. I should probably drop by there again. Also, if anyone of you have good suggestions on which stores to check out, please do let me know.
Argggghh… That’s why I hate furniture shopping. I’d rather spend my money on toys and electronics.
Update:
So after contemplating it over the night, I’m thinking of just going the Costco route since it’s the path of least resistance. I’ve uploaded the pictures I’ve taken with my cell phone:
Costco Home – Modus Furniture 5pc Queen Bedroom Set Nouveau II:
I’ll probably end up getting this set.
Dania Furniture:
I really like this set ($1049 for Queen / $1099 for King). The image of the bed shown is a Full size, but they offer it in a Queen size too. I’ve given up on the King sizes since King mattress sets apparently cost $250-300 more)
