Brian Guy

Web Developer, Writer, Dad, Aspiring Adventurer

Granite Countertops Live and Flip

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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.

Self-Help for Regular People

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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.

Windows 10 Update Breaks PC

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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.

Rockies 5K NOW!

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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.

HEIC Files and Stupid Computers

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So, I have a TON of photos from our recent Japan trip on my camera. I need to get off my lazy butt, go upstairs, and get said camera so that I can offload the photos to my computer where they will be usable for me. Until then, I took a few photos with my iPhone 7 Plus, and I have that in my pocket, so I was going to use one of them on my previous post. However, it seems that Apple decided to start using a file format for pictures that nobody else uses, not even Photoshop.

— Check out my pros and cons of Acorns review.

Make HEIC into JPEG

Usually, there is some sort of right-click, or import feature, or something that lets me quickly and easily deal with strange file formats. Unfortunately, in the case of HEIC photo files on Windows 10, there is no built-in support for Apple HEIC file formats.

heic file format himeji castle
This photo was originally an HEIC file when I got it off my iPhone. I had to jump through some hoops to turn it into a JPEG file for the internet.

I figured maybe FastStone, my favorite image viewer / editor for easy tasks, might work with HEIC files, but nope. This is a bit strange considering HEIC file format is apparently open source, so it shouldn’t be rocket science to incorporate support for it.

Turns out, it’s the MPEG people, and they are such a pain in the ass about licensing, which is why this is all such a kludge.

Interested in a review of Zelle?

A bit of research finds an online converter that I can use for a few photos here and there before Microsoft support for HEIC rolls out in an update sooner or later. (Apparently, it is already there in the March build for beta preview folks.)

I suppose the support in Windows 10 will open up the ability to support the format on Windows 10 applications and we can get back to work instead of messing with picture file formats.

I guess it’s better than the old days, where tech adversaries deliberately did not support other platform files and formats, as a way of trying to force you to use their product instead.

Japan Trip

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We just got back from a Spring Break trip to Japan. It can be tricky traveling on long-haul trips like that with kiddos, but our kids love being on the airplane, and know how to entertain themselves when necessary. Add to that the fact that we’ve been traveling with them (San Diego, Florida, New York, Disneyland, the Outer Banks, etc…) since they were wee little ones, and they are used to it.

Japan marks the first time we dragged them around to cultural sights over and over again (although there were several of those in New York as well). They did remarkably well.  Of course, Japan helps with cool castles, big impressive temples, and trains and subways, which they like even better than airplanes!

Travel Japan with Kids

I’ll be firing up several in-depth articles about traveling in Japan with kids, as well as general kid travel advice over at my parenting website, so look for those in the coming days (weeks?).

My main advice though is to take plenty of fun stuff. Don’t use the trip as the time to train your kids not to use electronics too much. And, make sure that when you are planning your trip that you include some fun stuff for them, even though that might take a bit of time away from more “serious” sites.

Check out this look at Credit Karma.

Also, don’t hesitate to point out what you think is cool about things you are seeing. Don’t forget, your kids don’t have the historical, cultural, and artistic context that you do. For example, at the Tokyo National Museum they have several Rodin sculptures outside. My kids were excited to recognize The Thinker, but knew nothing of the Burghers of Calais or the Gates of Hell sculptures that were also there, and weren’t all that interested.

However, when we pointed out details like how realistic the hands look, the anguish on the Burghers faces (and why there were so upset), that sculpture grew more interesting. After talking about the Gates of Hell sculpture one kiddo spent several minutes analyzing whether those people were getting out of hell through the gate, or if the gate acted more like a window that people could see into as a warning.

The other kiddo was very interested in the process of bronze sculpting and the fact that because of the way that kind of sculpture works, that the Rodin works we saw in New York were just as “real” as the ones they had in Tokyo.

Art doesn’t care how you look at it, as long as you look.