Kitchen Destruction: Accomplished

With the help of my parents and Kate's colleague, Rob, the kitchen was basically disassembled on Sunday afternoon. While the removal of the upper cabinets a couple weekends ago was relatively clean, the removal of the base cabinets and countertops was messy and noisy.



As you can see from the picture, the only cabinet in place is the sink base. The other cabinet in the center of the floor is acting as a temporary island since there's no place to put anything down. The dishwasher, stove, and refrigerator are still in place.

The next task will be pulling up the rest of the floor. While Kate and I had really wanted to keep the Pergo floor since it was in decent shape, its age (approximately 13 years) combined with the changing footprint of the cabinets necessitated its removal. As a result, we selected our flooring today. Though it was a tough debate between a lighter and darker finish, the darker one won out. We picked Armstrong's Origins Merbau, which has a rich color and interesting grain.

In other news... our vessel sink arrived today. It is beautiful and will look great against the Zodiaq countertop in the powder room.

Cool Geeky Software Tool

We're kicking it into high gear in preparation for the 2009 NCEMSF conference this coming weekend. As VP and Chief Technology Officer of the Foundation, I am responsible for the computing needs of the conference. Over the last year I've amassed a cache of hardware that should make this year's conference easier than ever to manage (we hope).

Two years ago we introduced the use of proximity RFID readers to keep track of attendance at the lectures. Each conference attendee was issued an RFID tag that uniquely identified them. Upon entering a lecture, the attendee "badged" in.

Last year we added LCD screens to the RFID readers to display the name of the current session. It also displayed the name of the person swiping in, but the updating of the LCD screens with the name was the slow step of the process. The process also relied upon a reliable connection back to the "mother ship" for verification of the name. As it turned out, the connection from some of the far workstations was not reliable. Additionally, the virtual serial port for the LCD screen in conjunction with the Visual Basic 6 code I wrote was just too slow.

This year we are using essentially the same RFID hardware, but each workstation will be standalone. No need to talk to the mother ship this year. Plus, instead of renting laptops and rushing to install the software the day of the conference, we have invested in a set of seven small form factor (SFF) PCs. These PCs will be solely dedicated to running the RFID stations, and will be operated without monitors.

So the challenge was setting up the seven SFF PCs identically. That's where the cool geeky software tool that I mentioned in the title of this article comes into place. I had initially evaluated Snap Deploy 3 from Acronis. It turned out to be a bit overkill for our situation even though the price was very reasonable at $19.99.

After scratching my head at the complexity of feature-rich Snap Deploy 3, I stumbled upon Clonezilla, which is free. It's produced by National Center for High-Performance Computing, which is located in Hsinchu, Taiwan. I opted for the "one at a time" copying method, but Clonezilla also offers a multicast mode that they claim can replicate a 5.6 GB disk image to 40 PCs simultaneously in about 10 minutes. My experience with the unicast version is similar: 4 GB disk image in about 7 minutes over a gigabit Ethernet switch.

Kitchen Update - February 15

The kitchen demolition continues. It was amazingly easy to remove the wall cabinets on the stove side of the kitchen. On Sunday night we tackled them, and are very pleased with the results. The most difficult part was hauling the cabinets to the basement for temporary storage.

Before upper cabinet removal:



After upper cabinet removal:

The Kitchen Demolition Has Begun

In preparation for our new kitchen early next month, Kate and I started demolishing the old kitchen tonight. We started small with the removal of some of the wall cabinets. You'll be happy to know that these cabinets will find a new home in our garage or my basement work room.

Before:


After:


We've picked out and purchased new cabinets and appliances. Our big debate now is what to do with the floor. We had hoped to save it since it's in good shape. Unfortunately, we're told that with the slight change in the footprint, we'll have to replace the entire floor since replacement boards for 13-year-old Pergo aren't easy to come by. Note to self: buy a few extra boxes of whatever new floor we go with.

Toronto from the Air

As you may have seen from my photo archive, I enjoy taking photos from the air. Here is a shot of the CN Tower taken while on final approach to Toronto's Pearson (YYZ) airport. While the plane window was dirty, I managed to get a decent picture.