Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

Except for some touch-ups, the first room is done. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

Now that the rains have passed, Coyote Lake dried up again. There's only a tiny pond near the dam at the north end of the lake Remember: No fishing from the docks!

Fresh paint. Carpet gone. Laminate flooring almost done. Darkness and wind make it unsafe to work with the table saw and finish the flooring tonight. The wall base boards are left to do and then the first room is completed. Need to find a place where to paint the base boards without getting all kinds of debris into the paint. I hope the wind dies down by tomorrow. With other commitments this week, I don't think I'll get the second bedroom done before I need to go back to work next week. Oh well, that's what weekends are for ...

I've grown tired of the uneven Wifi performance at our house. The access point is in the garage on one side of the house. Wifi is ok in the adjacent rooms, but breaks down often if there are 2 or more walls between the access point and the device. In the past, I have used a pair of 54Mbps Netgear WG602v2 802.11g access points in wireless bridge mode. They worked ok in the previous house, but never really lived up to that performance at our current place. A replacement Netgear WNR2000v3 N300 access point worked better for a while, but wasn't really that exciting either. On top of that it crashed every couple months A couple days ago, when the WNR2000 crashed again I've had it, and ordered some real hardware to resolve the wifi issue once and for all. The Ubiquity Networks Unifi AP-PRO arrived today. This enterprise-level access point is marketed to companies and businesses as a lower cost alternative to the Cisco's of the world. I've read in reviews that the setup is...

The ballast is glued down , so on to the next step: Fill-in scenery. Cover up existing track and scenery elements. Then apply glue and DIRT. A short while later with the glue still wet. And the same angle with the signal box back in place. As I cover painted plywood with actual scenery over time, the views become more and more satisfying. Next up: Finish the ballast in the curve, and then move on to weeds and bushes.

  [Hallelujah Paper posts] Down at the club tonight, I started out with working on the south turnout, but then quickly turned my attention to the north yard ladder when Dave pointed out that my nicely arranged and spiked down turnouts don't actually meet the SVL standard of 2 inches separation between track center lines. Oooops. A little while later I had fitted a short spacer-piece and went on to drill the hole for the throw bar. Only to discover that it was right above a cross-member of the bench work. Oooops. Attempt number 3 resulted in a usable turnout with the right track spacing. Here's the view with the first storage track spiked down. I put down some paint on the ramp I built last time and let it dry while I messed around with the turnouts on the north-side. Superintendent MikeF declared the south turnout installation to be acceptable for the main line, so I went ahead and soldered the turnout in place, added the frog wire (still need to work on doing this in a way th...

Uh oh, that car looks overloaded ... Yes, the load is heavy. 500 square feet of laminate flooring. Across the top are 12ft long wall base boards. They barely fit into our Toyota Sienna much to the surprise of the guy at the warehouse where I picked up our new floors. I'm not going to be bored for a while ...