What you did today

[LadyCrimson]

After seeing them in the stores many times, I decided to buy one of those cheap air-activated hand warmer packets out of curiosity. Took it out of the package. Shook it. Waited. Shook it some more. Shook it like I was shaking chicken pieces in a shake n' bake bag. It finally started feeling vaugely warmish, so I put it between my shirt and my bare belly. But unless I put pressure over it, I can't even tell it's there...it does work ok for a short while placing it between top of slipper and top of sock-foot, but it's not even as warm as a purring cat. I am disappoint...my life has been rendered meaningless now.

 

*goes and cries in a corner for lost dreams of using hand warmer packets to stay alive in case I'm ever caught in a freakish, sea-level, California blizzard with no firewood...what, it could happen*

[Tsuga C]

...I decided to buy one of those cheap air-activated hand warmer packets out of curiosity.

There are high-quality chemical hand/foot warmers on the market that work very well, some almost too well. I guess you get what you pay for.

[WDeranged]

Yeah my mum has a chemical hand warmer that's scarily good.

[LadyCrimson]

These were the type that use carbon, iron, salt, and other dry ingredients. HotHands brand. I have a feeling that pricer ones wouldn't be all that much better. Maybe I just have skin made out of clay - either that or my skin temp is hot enough I just don't notice. Haven't tried the crystallization ones, and I'm sure actual fuel types would work very well.

 

edit: they're highly rated by most users on Amazon, which I find odd. I guess I have literal thick skin.

[Raithe]

"Give a man fire, he's warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life...."

[LadyCrimson]

So close, yet so far.


Also:

"Hey sweetie...think it might be time to mow down the cat jungle."

 

(...told ya we're not yard people...)

[ShadySands]

Booked a trip to Tallinn for me and the missus. Was hoping to do a day or two layover in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Helsinki but we found some flights that were pretty much straight through (on the cheap) so we went with that instead but we'll still probably do a day trip to Helsinki since it's not far. I'm pretty excited as I've never really been to Europe, I've flown through several times but never seen anything other than half a dozen airports.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Spent the day nursing a hangover. Nothing like NWN2: MotB and pizza to bring you down from a night of hard drinking.

[Gorth]

Booked a trip to Tallinn for me and the missus. Was hoping to do a day or two layover in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Helsinki but we found some flights that were pretty much straight through (on the cheap) so we went with that instead but we'll still probably do a day trip to Helsinki since it's not far. I'm pretty excited as I've never really been to Europe, I've flown through several times but never seen anything other than half a dozen airports.

Tallinn isn't really the first thing that springs to mind when planning a trip to Europe...

 

That sounds like me and Los Angeles. I've been transiting through the airport several times, but would love to stop and spend a week there some day

[ShadySands]

 

Booked a trip to Tallinn for me and the missus. Was hoping to do a day or two layover in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Helsinki but we found some flights that were pretty much straight through (on the cheap) so we went with that instead but we'll still probably do a day trip to Helsinki since it's not far. I'm pretty excited as I've never really been to Europe, I've flown through several times but never seen anything other than half a dozen airports.

Tallinn isn't really the first thing that springs to mind when planning a trip to Europe...

 

That sounds like me and Los Angeles. I've been transiting through the airport several times, but would love to stop and spend a week there some day

 

My wife is from Estonia so we are going to go spend about 2 and half weeks there and hopefully a couple other places. If it was up to my wife we would be going to France ...or Oregon. I'm just happy getting out of the house

 

Edit: I'd also really like to go to Denmark

Edited March 26, 2013 by ShadySands

[LadyCrimson]

Figured out how to extract/sort all the sound files from Borderlands 2. Some people were having trouble with the various posted methods, so I had to try it. Because I could. I have no use for those files, outside of listening to music pieces and funny quotes but still...for some reason it's kinda fun to do it anyway. Maybe because I'm a geek.

[Malcador]

Figured out how to extract/sort all the sound files from Borderlands 2. Some people were having trouble with the various posted methods, so I had to try it. Because I could. I have no use for those files, outside of listening to music pieces and funny quotes but still...for some reason it's kinda fun to do it anyway. Maybe because I'm a geek.

And now you have good source material for cool ring tones!

[Gorth]

Not 'did', but about to 'do' when I get home form work. To boldly go where no Gorth has gone before. I'm going to take my PC monitor apart, rip out the PCB and bake it in the oven. Recipe's found on various hardware forums suggests 8 minutes at 200C, then left to cool for about an hour. That's going to be interesting

[Nepenthe]

Booked a trip to Tallinn for me and the missus. Was hoping to do a day or two layover in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Helsinki but we found some flights that were pretty much straight through (on the cheap) so we went with that instead but we'll still probably do a day trip to Helsinki since it's not far. I'm pretty excited as I've never really been to Europe, I've flown through several times but never seen anything other than half a dozen airports.

 

 

Hmpf, too bad I just moved out of Helsinki. When are you coming by?

 

 

Me, I'm recovering from the spectacular weekend (sad how rare they are these days), trying to get some sensible work done before I go do the non-speaking tv lawyer part, ie. go frown at a cop while he questions my client. With my attaché case on my lap.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Nepenthe

[LadyCrimson]

Not 'did', but about to 'do' when I get home form work. To boldly go where no Gorth has gone before. I'm going to take my PC monitor apart, rip out the PCB and bake it in the oven. Recipe's found on various hardware forums suggests 8 minutes at 200C, then left to cool for about an hour. That's going to be interesting

Wait ... what? What for?

[Rosbjerg]

 

 

Edit: I'd also really like to go to Denmark

 

Well Tallinn has a lot of Danish influence, so you're basically killing two birds with one stone .. I've heard that Tallinn means "The Danish City" in the original language of the area.

But if you ever swing by Copenhagen be sure to say, I'd be happy to give you some pointers on what not to miss.

[Gorth]

 

Not 'did', but about to 'do' when I get home form work. To boldly go where no Gorth has gone before. I'm going to take my PC monitor apart, rip out the PCB and bake it in the oven. Recipe's found on various hardware forums suggests 8 minutes at 200C, then left to cool for about an hour. That's going to be interesting

Wait ... what? What for?

 

As mention in the monitor thread in Skeeters Junkyard, it turned out that the culprit (the new, constant screen flicker) wasn't actually my gfx card, but my traitorous monitor failing me. Some googling around showed it was a common problem with that particular model (bad design and shoddy manufacturing quality), so it's mostly one of two things. Bad (i.e. cheap) capacitors or the soldering on the scaling logic chip becoming brittle and loosening up. My symptoms sounds like the latter. General cure is to heat up the PCB enough to melt the metal and get it to "re-attach" itself to all legs on the chip. Some use heat guns, most use an oven. Usually easier to do if you remove the PCB from the monitor

[HoonDing]

Somebody slow down Earth's rotation please.

[Gorth]

****!... ****!... ****!...

 

Bloody engineers at Samsung got the "bright" idea of pouring some kind of liquid plastic (not really, but the same consistency) over the connectors on the very PCB I wanted to heat up. No way I could detach the cable without break the connector beyond repair. Ah well, got the monitor assembled back to its previous state. Can see something on it, but the darn flicker is driving me insane >_

 

I'll never ever voluntarily or knowingly buy a piece of equipment with a Samsung logo on it. If I ever waver, I'll have to go back and read this post as a reminder.

 

Time to save up for a replacement monitor.

[Raithe]

Got woken up early in the am, and ended up laying there dozing in and out. Not quite asleep but not quite awake.. was very hard to actually push myself out of bed this morning.

Now I've got a day of figuring out all the small things I've forgotten about that need to be dealt with/picked up before I fly out to Mexico thursday morning..

[Malcador]

Got up on time, went back to bed and woke up late. Also misplaced my watch, now have to go through the entire day with this annoying knowledge that it's not there. Hope I didn't lose it, but if I did, well I still have another one to fix.

[LadyCrimson]

****!... ****!... ****!...

 

Bloody engineers at Samsung got the "bright" idea of pouring some kind of liquid plastic (not really, but the same consistency) over the connectors on the very PCB I wanted to heat up. No way I could detach the cable without break the connector beyond repair. Ah well, got the monitor assembled back to its previous state. Can see something on it, but the darn flicker is driving me insane

 

I'll never ever voluntarily or knowingly buy a piece of equipment with a Samsung logo on it. If I ever waver, I'll have to go back and read this post as a reminder.

 

Time to save up for a replacement monitor.

That sucks. Seems like companies try harder and harder all the time to make things unrepairable like that.

 

Hubby's been constantly fixing these older ViewSonic LCD's for a client's office the past year, as a small side favor/thingie to do (that's not his main job, heh). They keep going "bad" a few at a time and it's the same thing every time ... one of the capacitors I think. So he removes/solders new ones on. Cheaper to pay him a little to do that, at the moment, than replace the whole load, I guess (not they won't do that eventually). Never heard of the other thing/oven baking, tho.

[Gorth]

Hubby's been constantly fixing these older ViewSonic LCD's for a client's office the past year, as a small side favor/thingie to do (that's not his main job, heh). They keep going "bad" a few at a time and it's the same thing every time ... one of the capacitors I think. So he removes/solders new ones on. Cheaper to pay him a little to do that, at the moment, than replace the whole load, I guess (not they won't do that eventually). Never heard of the other thing/oven baking, tho.

Yeah, I could try the capacitors. A ready made "capacitor kit" (one of each capacitor) for this particular monitor on ebay is $16 plus shipping. That's how endemic the failure rate of this supposedly "flagship" Samsung monitor is

[LadyCrimson]

Heh, that's pretty bad. For that price, worth trying before buying seems like.

 

On a tangent, hubby's soldering iron broke. He got it used from someone a long time ago ... who got it used from someone else. It was one that was super-expensive when it was new back in the early 70's probably, the "built to last" sort, and hubby was very upset that it finally broke. He loved that thing. He's looked around and bought a new mid-priced one, but of course thinks it sucks...the past couple weeks it's him going around mumbling "everything's a cheap piece of **** these days."

[ShadySands]

 

Booked a trip to Tallinn for me and the missus. Was hoping to do a day or two layover in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Helsinki but we found some flights that were pretty much straight through (on the cheap) so we went with that instead but we'll still probably do a day trip to Helsinki since it's not far. I'm pretty excited as I've never really been to Europe, I've flown through several times but never seen anything other than half a dozen airports.

 

 

Hmpf, too bad I just moved out of Helsinki. When are you coming by?

 

 

Me, I'm recovering from the spectacular weekend (sad how rare they are these days), trying to get some sensible work done before I go do the non-speaking tv lawyer part, ie. go frown at a cop while he questions my client. With my attaché case on my lap.

 

The trip is from July 21st to August 6th but I'm not 100% on when we'll be in Helsinki yet. I want to go overnight or maybe 2 nights and my wife just wants to do a day trip

 

 

 

 

Edit: I'd also really like to go to Denmark

 

Well Tallinn has a lot of Danish influence, so you're basically killing two birds with one stone .. I've heard that Tallinn means "The Danish City" in the original language of the area.

But if you ever swing by Copenhagen be sure to say, I'd be happy to give you some pointers on what not to miss.

 

Thanks! I'm mostly interested because my dad's side of the family is originally from Denmark (we're a bunch of Jensens)