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Brian Guy

Web Developer, Writer, Dad, Aspiring Adventurer

The Kitchen Project of Infinite Completion

October 22, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

One of the major difficulties in my life recently has been a kitchen cabinet updating project. It’s almost done, and it is going to be worth it, but it wasted so many hours of so many days when we could have been doing cooler, funner, better things.

These cabinets were once that light brown oak color that was all the rage in the early 90s. They made the kitchen look small and dated. Now it looks open, bright, and bigger. Most of all, it looks clean and contemporary.

kitchen cabinet painting

Now, hopefully, my life can get back to some sort of normal.

Check out my Marcus savings account review at Finance Gourmet.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: brian nelson, home, home improvement, house, kitchen, live and flip

September 11th

September 11, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

It’s become something of a cliche to share your memories of 9/11. However, I realize that I’ve never written mine down, and maybe there is something worthwhile there for my own archiving purposes. After all, we all have our own experiences, and just because mine are not particularly dramatic, nor close to the events of September 11, 2001, they are real all the same.

Did You Hear…

My 9-11 story begins at Founders Mutual Funds. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist anymore, and if it does, it’s as a subsidiary of something. At the time, I was a Senior Microsoft Administrator (or whatever title you prefer. Basically, I ran an office network that used Windows Server and Windows computers with a handful of other IT folks.)

This was in Denver, Colorado, so all of our times were two hours earlier than they are on the East Coast. (Mountain Time, if you want to be specific.) I worked the 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. I was already in the office, but far from the only one. As an investment company, more than a few folks were in because their jobs revolved around what was happening on the New York Stock Exchange.

I don’t remember much about the day itself. I’d have to look it up to find out what day of the week it was. It was wholly unremarkable until the corporate attorney walked into my cubical, across the hall from his, where he had a real office, and importantly, a TV.

He said, “Did you hear a plane hit the World Trade Center?”

I turned around, and said, “No.” — The first odd bit of the day happened here. I assumed this was the beginning of a joke. “Did ya hear…” Instead, he motioned toward his office and walked back.

Flummoxed, I followed him to see a few people had gathered and were watching the TV. There on the screen smoke was coming out of one of the buildings of the World Trade Center. Yes, ONE of them.

There were some news people talking, and some murmurs among those of us gathered there. It seemed like just another tragedy. They happen from time to time, plane crashes, train crashes, a bridge collapse. Just one of those things.

I assumed there must have been a mechanical issue with the plane. There simply seemed to be no possible way that an airline pilot could accidentally fly into the World Trade Center. I mean, sure, they put those red lights on the top, but there’s just no way anyone flying into any of the New York area airports would be that low over Manhattan of all places.

If I had stood there for a year coming up with scenarios of what might have happened, it still would have never occurred to me that someone would have flown an airplane into a tower on purpose.

While we were watching, they showed a replay of the plane crashing into the tower.

Except…

It crashed into the wrong tower, and the other one was smoking.

It took several seconds, but…

It wasn’t a replay.

I watched live on TV, like many other Americans, as the second plane crashed into the second tower.

In that second, everything changed.

Terrorism

The only thing less likely than someone purposely crashing an airplane into a tower in Manhattan was TWO airplanes accidentally crashing into two different towers. Someone really was doing this on purpose.

We stayed in that room watching. I don’t know how long it was, but I do know every one of us had the same thought.

Would there be more?

As the day went on, there were more. There was one at the Pentagon, and one crashed into a field. We didn’t know at the time that the passengers of that flight had found out what was going on and fought back. I like to think that they won, even for a few minutes before the plane smashed down. Whatever happened, they almost certainly saved a lot of lives.

Aftermath

The attacks affected me as an American. I mean, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Other than that, however, I wasn’t that close to the attack or its effects. I didn’t know anyone in the towers, I don’t think I even knew anyone in New York or Washington D.C.

Like everyone else after the attacks I wanted more information. What happened? Who did it? Why? What would we do back?

The answers were much slower coming than it seems now. No one knew right away what would happen. No one knew if this was the start of a wave of attacks. No one really knew anything.

They shut down the stock market for a few days. It was to prevent panic. Nobody wanted to see terrorists triggering some sort of financial meltdown.

Eventually, we got answers, and they weren’t very satisfying. A bunch of zealots, just 20 to be exact, decided they would do something for reasons they thought were justified. It turns out that was it. The entire attack capability of a worldwide terrorist network blown all at once in a dramatic, but futile attack.

In the end, they got nothing. In fact, they lost their safe haven in Afghanistan and most of their leadership got hunted down and killed. These days, your average terrorist is lucky if he can get a bomb into a police station in a country far away from here.

As Sam Seaborn would later say on the West Wing, terrorism has a zero-percent success rate. There are still troops in the Middle East (more of them, in fact), and the U.S. is still America. We just have a few more flags. I’ve always wondered how little imagination one must have to decide that the best use of one’s life is to give it away.

So, today, 17 years later, we remember. So do I.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: current events, news

Granite Countertops Live and Flip

July 23, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

Once upon a time, we bought a house. Not just any house, but a house in the suburbs. That was a mistake. I still don’t have a Chinese food place that can deliver. Even if I go get it, I’ve tried a dozen places and none of them really meets our needs. This is in contrast to having family arguments over which of the three or four Chinese food places we liked to order from when we lived closer to town.

The reality is that we moved for our children, and while I don’t regret that, I’m not sure the benefits we thought they would get are all that used, or valuable, which brings us to the live and flip.

Fixing Up the House To Flip It While We Live Here

Traditionally, the way you flip a house, is that you buy a house, then spend a few weeks or months making highly marketable improvements, and then you sell the house for a profit, covering both the purchase costs and the improvement costs. Most of the time, you don’t even move in.

Check out my SoFi review

We, however, are not going to move right away, despite not loving our new home. Don’t get me wrong, we have plenty of square footage, a family room down in the basement, and plenty of rooms and an office. It’s nicer newer construction. However, we know this isn’t our “permanent” home, or even a 10-year home. So, we are fixing it up, with an eye to both making it better for us while we live here for the next year or two, and making it sell better when we leave.

Which brings us to today.

Flip To Granite

When we moved in, the countertops were beige tile. Basically, the owner before us bought the house from the builder and took the base options for pretty much everything. The result? A beige, oak cabinet kitchen. That’s not really our jam, so we are painting the cabinets white (Yikes! What a pain!) and having the tile countertop replaced with granite.

The granite guys are here right now. Like many construction workers they seem like hard-working, earnest men, but they don’t speak much English. That isn’t an issue, except that removing tile is a fairly destructive process and neither of them has the means to reassure me about what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

So, I’m hiding in the basement and hoping everything goes smoothly.

beige tile counter top
Before…

You can see my Acorns app review over here.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: construction, home, home improvement, house, kitchen, live and flip

Self-Help for Regular People

June 27, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

You know what the world needs?

More self-help/self-improvement type advice in between ‘you are beautiful, just believe in yourself’ and ‘suck it up, buttercup’.

I saw a book titled You Are A Bad Ass and picked it up. The intro talks about: Are you tired of the usual self-help, then this book is for you.

Yet, here I am, half-way through, and it’s all

  • Stop the negative self talk
  • When you think something bad about yourself, turn it around and think something positive about yourself
  • Trust your intuition
  • Believe you can
  • And so on…

Check out my review of Acorns

As you can imagine, I’m underwhelmed, and maybe feeling a little bit had, since this is EXACTLY the same as the usual self-help book. The only difference is that this one has a curse word on its cover. SHOCKING!

Self-Improvement for Me

The problem, I guess, is that I’m not some sad sack sitting alone on my couch wishing I had a girlfriend and a job that I’m not really qualified for, but really want.

I’m a regular guy, with a wife, a couple of kids, a nice house in the suburbs, and a job that pays the bills, and I don’t hate. Maybe, no one thinks a guy like me needs any self-improvement, but the truest thing I know about myself is that I COULD HAVE done better. That I SHOULD BE doing better. And, that I WANT TO BE doing better than what I’m doing right now.

Check out my Credit Karma review

Of course, wanting something and doing it are two different things, and that’s where I need some motivation. Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t hate myself. I don’t hate my life. I’m not sad. I want a way to kick it up a notch. I want some tips, some oomph that I’m missing, a trick or two, and yeah, maybe some encouragement.

In some ways, I suppose I already KNOW what to do, what I need is a new way to get myself to do it, because the following things (that you find in every self-improvement book) are not working, and have not worked in the past.

  • Positive thinking
  • Visualizing myself doing things
  • Writing lists of various kinds
  • Scheduling time with myself in my calendar
  • Daily affirmations
  • Journaling
  • Those charts where you keep track of how many days in a row you do stuff.

I guess maybe I need to dig deeper, and maybe come up with some of my own ideas.

Then, I’ll crank out my own self-help book, and it will be called:

Self-Improvement for YOU (No, not you. Buy the book next to this one) — If you still buy it, then you’re my kind of people.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: self-help, self-improvement, whining

Windows 10 Update Breaks PC

June 14, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

If I’m being fair, it’s been years since I had any trouble with a Microsoft automatic Windows update. But, when it happens, boy it sucks.

In this case, I just got back from a 12 day vacation in Florida (Disney World, Universal Studios, and a few days at a beach house.) I turned on my computer, and it was bogged down and unusable. This is par for the course when Microsoft decides my PC needs an update. It hogs the bandwidth, and it hogs the hard drive downloading, and it makes my PC all but useless. I suppose I could configure something to fix it, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

This time, however, it jacked up my computer in a way I can’t seem to unjack.

Windows 10 Update Breaks DNS

The good news is that I’m a computer professional. Yes, my mortgage paying job right now is freelance writer, but I used to be a high-level systems administrator, and I still do a lot of IT stuff in the form of programming and web development. That means that USUALLY I can fix whatever goes wrong with my PC, even if it takes a half-hour of Google searches to find the answer.

But, not this time.

This time, my main work PC — and only my main work PC — are showing connection to the WiFi, but no internet connection.

system restore error

This isn’t entirely true, because I can ping internet addresses like 8.8.8.8 and others. That means that I have internet connectivity, but the DNS is not resolving names, which basically means that the internet is connected, but useless.

Now, the weird part is that I have several laptops and dozens of Amazon Fires, Galaxy Tablets, phones, iPods, Echo and Echo Dot, and the like, and they ALL still work completely fine. It’s just my WORK computer that is messed up.

So, now I’m spending all morning running ipconfig commands and netsh commands and trying new adapters, reinstalling drivers, and changing DHCP, and DNS, and static IP addresses, and everything else, but NOTHING is working.

I’ve tried resetting the Network Settings. I’ve turned off the Windows Firewall. I’ve uninstalled MalwareBytes, and so on and so forth. Nothing is changing. My WiFi icon show connectivity but with an exclaimation point that means no internet access for me.

Now, trying to do a restore to pervious system restore points is generating errors as well. I’m pretty upset, as you can imagine.

Back to it. If you want to make me feel better, go check out my Acorns review on Finance Gourmet. Maybe I can earn a little extra dough.

Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: brian nelson, dns, microsoft, networking, windows, windows10

Rockies 5K NOW!

April 18, 2018 by Brian Nelson Leave a Comment

I just found out about the Rockies 5K, a 5K race that ends with you getting to run a lap on the warning track at Coors Field.

This is about all kinds of awesome, except there is just one problem. I’m not a runner. I’m not in shape, and the thing is in like 12 days. I just found out about it, so there at least this isn’t my usual problem of procrastinating. This my other problem of randomly deciding I want to do cool stuff, without having a good way to do said cool stuff.

This whole thing is happening so fast that I’ve already been working on it for 3 days, but this is the first post, and I have like daily posts in my head, so I’ll have to backdate them.  In the meantime I have to improvise my own 13 Day Couch to 5K program. I’m behind because I did have my usual procrastination problem with my taxes which I just finished a few hours ago.

I guess I could have had an extra day because of a glitch at the IRS, but I found out about that too late. It’s just as well, I need to run tomorrow… probably twice.

Realistically, I should just wait until next year, and I might. We’ll see how these next 10 days go.

The good news is that I’m not some sort of “check with your doctor before starting an exercise program” out of shape. I mean, I’m 45 and haven’t run, worked out, or seen the inside of a gym (unless you count belaying my kids at the climbing gym) in months, but I stand most of the day at my job, I’m not THAT overweight, and I am a an absolute master at carbo-loading.

So, let’s do this thing. I’ll try and catch up here, and I’ve set the alarm for 6:00 am tomorrow. Yikes!

Downloaded Runkeeper so I can see how far I can already run.

And besides, how cool would this be?

rockies 5k run on the field

Actually, for next year, I’ll try and get fast, then it wouldn’t be so crowded.

Wish me luck.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: colorado, colorado rockies, cool stuff, denver, exercise, running, sports

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