Building With Iron Pipe

For a while I’ve been wanting to do a project that used black iron pipe for the main structure. Kind of a Lego’ish appeal for grown ups, if such a thing is possible. It’s strong and not hard to work with as long as you can stick to the stock lengths (you can cut it […]

Giving Away Woodworking Magazines

I read a lot and one of the topics I enjoy reading about is woodworking. Recently I’ve been on a de-clutter kick and part of that is a trimming down a big stack of wood working magazines. I sent some to a friend, and was thinking to drop the rest at the used book store […]

Sometimes Cheaper Makes Sense / Mastering the Basics Always Does

It’s good to remember that the ideas and challenges of mastering a craft – any craft – have been around a while. No, the world of IT doesn’t match exactly to building woodworking or cooking or anything else, but the path to mastery is really close to the same. It takes time, but not just […]

Picking a Conference Venue

I was reading about the American Association of Woodturners annual symposium that will be held in Tampa this year (and yes, I plan to attend) and ran across this document that describes their process for picking a site each year. It’s not an equation, but here is the opening section that drives it: “The Board […]

First Try at a Wooden Hand Plane

I’ve been reading about wooden hand planes lately (as opposed to hand planes made of metal that plane wood) and decided to just do a quick experiment to see what I thought. I started with a square piece of rosewood about 2” thick, ripped a piece 2.5” wide, then ripped 1/4” slab from each side. […]

Ever Want to See How a Hand Plane Works?

If you’re interested in woodworking, read on! I’ve been thinking of making a hand plane out of wood and was doing some reading, ran across a post titled Setting a Cap Iron recently and by itself it was interesting, but much more so when you look at the video below. A cap iron – also […]

Firefox and Reporting Services

Not everyone uses IE and that’s ok, but what’s strange is that by default if you point Firefox at a Reporting Services report the display gets chopped to about 200 pixels. The fix, documented on this post by Jon Galloway, is to modify the CSS to force the height (and width if you choose) to […]

Firefox and NTLM Authentication

By default Firefox doesn’t pass through NT credentials, not a big deal when you’re browsing Amazon by a big pain when you’re trying to hit a corporate Reporting Services site – you get prompted to enter credentials each time. It turns out there is an easy fix, just modify the config file with the names […]