Eric Walker

  • What a great day to be outside for an afternoon run

  • Now this is true trail run this morning..

  • Today was a great day for a trail run

  • Mr. B and I after our 1 mile Family Fun Run this morning

  • Remodeling project

    Looking back I realized that in the last post I talked about how I was looking for new books to read and I was actually really excited about reading books instead of just listening to book tapes.  In fact, I received a copy of “Sleep your way to the Top” by Jane Miller from FGPress not long after publishing that post (perfect timing right).   Also, I had some other plans of spending time on some projects that were still very rough ideas in my mind.

    No sooner did all of that happen than I found myself trying to figure out why there was water dripping in our basement from the ceiling.  What caused the leak you asked.. Well of course a leaky toilet seal.  So I did what every do-it-yourself handyman would do.... I decided to redo the entire bathroom instead of just fixing the leaky Toilet ring.  If you are going to do something do it right from the beginning.

    Upstairs Bathroom - Finished Product

    Before and After

    Always great to find what the previous owner did. Really shims!

    Demolition almost complete

    Replacing the floor

    Starting to go back together

    This bathroom remodeling project only too me 2 weeks until it was usable where as the first one I did took me just about 3 years (Read more here).  Here are my words of advice from my first two bathroom remodels.

    • Over-buy at your home improvement store.  You will be more frustrated driving back and forth than having to go there once in when you are done to return everything.
    • Check the tile pieces that you buy before you install them. Otherwise, you will end up installing one that wasn't the same color (Yes this happened to me see below).
    • Buy the right trowel for the size of tile you are using and then make sure you don't use too much mortar.  Especially, be careful on the small tiles as I spent a lot of time in the back end trying to scrape it out of the joints so my grout would fill it later.
    • You will run into more problems than you anticipated and are going to start replacing a lot more things (e.g., Pipes, Sub-floor, Walls).
    • Did I mention that you should overbuy things at your Home Improvement Store
    • Realize that as you are going to get sidetracked by your significant other to complete "Fluff" projects some of which are unrelated to the task at hand.
    ![](https://ericmwalk.blog/uploads/2021/8fcb1f033a.jpg)

     

  • Thanks to the dog I got a run in and was able to catch up on some news/coffee before heading to work

  • Nice morning for an early run.

  • Three watchers during my early morning run today.

  • Camera Card Issues

    A couple weeks ago we went to the zoo and took our Cannon Digital XLR camera along as we always do in order to capture pictures of our kids.  However, after a full morning of taking pictures we got home and were going to load them on the Mac when we got a lovely message that the camera card needed to be reformatted and no pictures were found…

    WHAT!?

    I was sure that was a mistake, so we plugged it into a few other machines but each one said the same thing. For my family we love to take pictures and have been doing it for a long time.  About 8 years ago we went to Peru for vacation and took 100+ pictures a day for each of the 14 days we were there.  So after realizing that the Card was “Really” not working right I started looking for any type of software that could help recover our pictures from the day.

    Let’s just say if you want to check and see if you have a chance of recovering anything you can easily do a quick Google search and find a lot of trial software.  I ended up installing a few of them from companies that I felt I could trust.  The nice thing about most of the trial software is that you could run the SD Card recovery and get a preview of the photos it found before you had to purchase the full version.  In the end we bought the eSupport.com product called Undelete Plus and were able to get all of the photos back from that day.  In reality this seemed like a lot of the other products but I liked that this one can restore more than just pictures and videos like the other two I was reviewing.

    Update: After this issue happened we decided to use our old CF Camera card we purchased at the same time as our camera.  Also, we just got back from a 2 week vacation of taking pictures with no issues.  I think in looking back the issue relied in the CF Card Adapter as we had previously tried to replace the SD card.

  • Blogging to Learn

    A while back I had read a blog post by Chris Dixon on Blogging to Learn, it was a short post but the last point he made really made me think.

    Try to learn at least one interesting thing each week and then blog about it. Then see how people react in comments, on Twitter etc. I guess some bloggers don’t like comments but for me they are the crucial so that I can get feedback on new hypotheses. Blogging new hypotheses also means a decent portion of your blog posts need to be ignored or ridiculed. Otherwise you are playing it too safe.

    The one sentence that really stuck out for me was the first.  So instead of making excuses that I don’t have anything to write about or that I don’t have time to write, I should find one interesting thing ever week to write about.  I am guessing some weeks it will be more interesting than others but if anything that will help get the habit formed.  Just as if you were going to run a marathon, it all starts with the consistency of running before you can really start building up the miles.

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