2005-06-19: Last day of the Cleaning Weekend

Pictures of this weekend's handiwork are located here. Note that this is probably the cleanest the dining area and kitchen area have been at the same time since I moved in here. Of particular note are the before and after shots of my dining area. If you look in this shot, you'll see that I've actually de-cluttered the counter in there for once. That having been said, note that my table actually looks small for the space it's in, due to there no longer being piles of stuff around it. Once the reading room has been cleaned, I may relocate it into there and put in a table large enough for four people. Any more than two people at my current table requires a bit of fitting, and more than that requires contortionistic skill.

Next up, are the before and after shots of my kitchen. Those don't look too different, but trust me, the random smudges and such on the counter are conspicuously absent when viewing it in person.

Minus the horrific mess in the foreground, this is my favorite pic so far of the racks. Yes, that's a lamp in the bottom of the right rack; for the time being, it just plain looks cool and I don't have any better place to put a light yet. The wire mess on the left rack has been straightened up a bit since that pic was taken. The left rack will eventually get a front door like the right one; I actually have the door, just not the pins which hold its hinges in place. Still trying to figure out where they went. And, I must bid a solemn farewell to my entertainment center's old look: like this. The old look had a certain charm to it, I must admit, but it was far easier to pile really huge messes onto.

Of course, crap can neither be created nor destroyed. A good chunk of it went off to be recycled today, but most of the crap was relocated into the reading room here. Just after removing the racks and relocating the end tables into the same room, it looked like this. After taking this shot, I realized that in order to protect the end tables' wood from sunlight's damaging effects, I needed to bury them under boxes and such. It was easily accomplished.

Part of the mess from my bedroom, which can be seen in almost its full glory here, has also been relocated into the reading room. Believe it or not, this does represent a significant improvement.

In other news, I've semi-scientifically proven that the cable company isn't providing an over-amplified signal. Or more to the point, it may be getting signal loss due to over-amplification, but it's not over-amped by the time it reaches my box. I picked up a grab bag of in-line attenuators from Smarthome, and even the 3db attenuator just made the picture worse. The 20db made it almost unwatchable. This does show that I'm not getting an over-strength signal. Thus, my next step in the quest for cable which doesn't suck will be a variable amplifier with tilt control, which is fairly pricey but it should correct any issues which CAN be corrected on my side. That particular beast does run way more than I care to spend at the moment, but it just might make my cable signal good enough and pinpoint the actual cause of the problems. If it doesn't do anything, which is entirely possible, it'll just be proving that the company isn't providing a clear enough picture at their source end to begin with. I'm pretty sure that's the case, which is why I'm not really too worried about getting into amps for a while. In the same Smarthome bundle, I also ordered a pack of cable terminators just so that everything in the house would be hooked up correctly. I didn't notice any difference in signal quality, but it does provide a warm fuzzy feeling that it's done correctly. I also disconnected the unused cable line which stretches off into who-knows-what unknown territory under the trailer, in the event it was acting like an antenna and picking up RF noise from the computers. Nope, not the case.

Anyway, future plans are to work on my PS2 desk area. It's buried in tax related documents and such, which have been taken care of for quite some time now and really ought to be re-filed. Once that's taken care of, I'm not sure what I'll do. I might get enthusiastic about stain removal spray for my carpet, if I can get to the point where carpet spots are my chief concern.