RockDoggy’s Woodshop

My new project is what I’m calling a “coat center” although it’s a bit more than that.

The problem: My kids are too short to hang their coats up on the hanger bar in the coat closet.  Plus, they are unable to keep track of such items as library books.

The first solution: Put a set of coat hooks behind the front door at a height the kids can reach.  This has been an improvement, with the kids finally able to take responsibility for their coats, hats and gloves.  But it needs more…

The final solution: A set of shelves and cubbies for their hats and gloves, and also larger cubbies for library books.  Books have been hard to keep track of, since the kids have many of their own, and also visit the library on a regular basis.  Lately, the library books have become mixed in with their own, and this has been a problem.

The design: It’s a simple bos with some dadoes to fit the shelves, back and dividers into.  I’m not sure yet, but I think the goal with this project, as with many of my recent projects, will be to use up some of the large amount of poplar plywood stock I have had around for years.

The shelf area of the coat center

I will face frame it with some solid wood, and paint the whole thing white to match the foyer.  The board with the coat hooks will be attached to the bottom using a dovetail groove.  I’ll have to practice this on some scrap.  Finally, this will be hung on the wall using a french cleat.  I chose this method in order to achieve the most flexibility as the kids grow, because I imagine I’ll want to raise this unit higher as they grow taller.

I have attached a Google Sketchup (free 3-D modeling tool download) file that is coat-center Sketchup drawing for this project.  If you download it and take a close look, you’ll see that this exposes my inexperience with the tool.  I find it difficult to use, to the point of wanting to abandon it for pencil and paper.  But, I see its potential, and will give it more time.  Also note that I have yet to show the attached coat hooks at the bottom.  I’ll update that later and post it here.

The width was chosen to precisely fit the width of the foyer wall behind my front door, and the number of cubbies directly relates to the number of kids I have.  Your mileage may vary.  If so, you can edit the Sketchup drawing all you want.

I actually have a deadline on this.  My wife has asked that this be complete by the time the kids go back to school the week of January 5th, 2009.  so, the bad news is I have pressure.  The good news is I should have plenty of shop time to get this done.

Updates to follow!

This is a shot of Frank Klausz using a tenoning jig he built for the table saw. I took a class he gave a few weeks ago in Novi, Michigan at the Rock Financial Showplace. The class was about the setup and use of the table saw, and he showed us many jigs he made from Baltic birch plywood.

Frank Klausz and his tenoning jig

Sorry if the picture is a bit blurry, but it was not the brightest classroom, and the picture was taken with my cell phone.

One humorous, but serious, anecdote to share. Frank made sure he told us how serious it was that we lock down our rip fences, since failing to do so can, and usually will, result in kickback. This of course would cause serious injury if you happened to be standing anywhere behind the workpiece. Frank told us that the first thing he does before cutting his workpiece is to push against the fence in order to ensure that it is properly locked down.

So as Frank demonstrated his tenoning jig above, I noticed, from my front-row seat, that his tenon came out a bit less than straight. It turned out that he had forgotten to lock down his rip fence. He said, “Don’t tell my Grandpa!” We all had a good laugh, but I couldn’t help but think how close we came to seeing Frank Klausz get injured by kickback with his own table saw jig.

It’s a class I won’t soon forget, especially when I’m about to turn on my table saw.

Just completed the upgrade to WordPress 2.7.

I am also getting ready to enable blog updating via email so I can accomplish this from my workplace on my lunch hour.

For some reason, I can’t access my own site from my workplace. I think there is a DNS issue at my office. But, how does one ask about access to one’s personal blog site and not have it look like you’re trying to waste time at work? So I let it be.

More to come, I hope!

Well, how boring!  No posts at all for over two months!  Some blog this has turned out to be!

Sorry about that.  It became easy to forget about this nascent effort once school began for the kids, and then the inevitable illnesses came.  And they only spared my wife, but that’s OK.  Couple all of that with some tight deadlines at work, and here we are 63 days later!

So, I’m not giving up on this, and I hope to find my rhythm again on this.

I finally cut the cord and have moved to “the cloud” for my email needs. Here’s how I got there.

I’m a longtime user of Microsoft Outlook, since I’m well accustomed to it after years of use with various employers. It is relatively easy to use, not too badly organized, and has a few nice features. I had settled on Outlook 2000, since it is a license I own from way back. Having to spend around $80 to $100 to get a newer version was never very enticing - the 2000 version did what I needed it to do.

The trouble was that I found it to be increasingly crashy. After much trouble for both myself and my wife, it occurred to me that I hadn’t patched it (or any of the other Office components we use) since installing them. Not cool - as a software developer, I know better than that.

So, I patched Outlook and Office up to current levels. It’s great that we now have software where all the known problems and vulnerabilities have been fixed. But I was still experiencing crashes. Many more than previously, even though my wife was having better luck than ever.

It was clear that I had to change something. My choices included using a different client software, or use a web-based solution.

I had previously tried the ubiquitous Squirrel Mail as well as Horde without being very excited about them. These both have been available on every web hosting plan I’ve had for years. Neither one was particularly responsive, and I found them a bit clumsy to use. Plus, I had to login separately for each email account I have, and I have a few.

I don’t use the free email addresses that come from my ISP, but when I did, I never liked those web-based email interfaces much either. They were always slow and clunky, and once again, I had to login to those separately for each account.

I had also tried Thunderbird, but don’t recall being convinced that I should abandon Outlook for it. Plus, my wife didn’t need to be dragged through another email client experience where the default client changed. We had used Eudora long ago, and the transition to Outlook wasn’t always easy. So I didn’t wish to make my wife the victim of my experiment anymore.

Another difficulty is that I like to be able to check my email from work, but for some reason they have blocked the ports that Horde and Squirrel Mail operate on. For reasons less nebulous, they have blocked the SMTP and POP3 ports as well. So standard clients would not help me at work.

I had been using a web-based service known as Goowy to act as my email client at work. But it is a Flash based system, and was slow and clunky to use. It was effective, but hardly compelling enough to make me abandon Outlook at home.

Finally I heard about the Gmail site. Now I’ve had a Gmail account for quite some time - I grabbed one back when they were invitation only, and now use it as my login to my iGoogle page where I keep my RSS feeds. But I had never used it for email.

Then I heard (wish I could remember where) that Gmail allows you to configure it to read your POP3 email accounts into the Gmail interface. So I took a look, and was impressed with how responsive it is. It’s relative intuitive, and with 8GB of space, I can keep as much email archived there as I like. I can customize the display of email from my various accounts so they show up with different colored tags. Finally, their spam filter is top-notch. I haven’t seen a single spam message in my inbox since I began using it. It did catch one email from a legitimate sender as spam, but it was simple to mark it as “not spam” and move on.

I do wish the archived email storage allowed you to create folders to store emails by categories, or at least allowed you to tag emails with keywords for easy retrieval. But in spite of this shortfall, the search function works fine, and I don’t think I’ll lose track of any emails.

The bottom line is that I don’t miss Outlook. I don’t miss the crashes. I don’t miss worrying about backing up my Outlook .PST files, or about corrupting them. And I don’t miss being tied to a single machine for my email access. I can access my email - all of my email - from any internet connected computer I want.

I don’t think I’ll be going back.