Building a new house and shop (4 Viewers)

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It's ironic in a way, but the 42" HP color plotter that I bought years ago (and a 36" before that) is now pretty much obsolete also
I still print all my tender drawing packages and do manual take-off from the Arch D but the younger guys we hired do everything digital…weird to walk past an office with virtually NO paper in it 🤷🏼‍♂️
 
Thanks CD.

I still use that HP11C every day. Bought it new in 1982, if I remember correctly. Got pretty good at programming it too. It doesn't have many bytes of memory and limited storage registers, so the code had to be super efficient. I wrote a program to do well log analysis that used pretty much last byte and resource.

A friend/former co-worker gave me another one exactly like it, in the original vinyl case that still looks brand new, so I have a backup if mine ever dies - but it's like the Toyota Hilux of calculators; can't destroy it and it just keeps on working. I'm sort of surprised that you can still buy batteries to fit it, at least last time I needed some - the batteries last like a decade, LOL.

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Apologies for mucking up your thread but since we're down nostalgia lane. I bought an HP 41CV around 1981 (sophomore year of undergrad). Girlfriend (wife now) had to have one after borrowing mine for an exam. Still have them both with cases and various expansion packs. Having said that, I don't think either have had batteries installed in 20 years or more. I scaled back a few years later for a 15C which is just a later version of your 11C. Now that one I still use when I need a calculator. Good times.

The 41C was something like the 6th backup computer for the Space Shuttle missions at one time. Trivial today but unreal capability for 1980.
 
@1911 reading about your wall map and you say “ ; it's a commercial product, a producing zone map of the Permian Basin.”. No clue about this Permian Basin ( hell, I’m in NJ) so, I looked it up…very cool to know

My wife and I re-watching. “LANDMAN” on Paramount+ with BillyBob Thornton. It’s a series about an oil guy who wields some powers developing oil fields and has the craziest life with his ex-wife and daughter as well as all of the accouterments of the lifestyle.

Son of a gun…he’s talking about drilling the Permian Basin. Wife ask’s. “What’s that”. After I’d explained it she says. “Damn you know everything “

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@1911 reading about your wall map and you say “ ; it's a commercial product, a producing zone map of the Permian Basin.”. No clue about this Permian Basin ( hell, I’m in NJ) so, I looked it up…very cool to know

My wife and I re-watching. “LANDMAN” on Paramount+ with BillyBob Thornton. It’s a series about an oil guy who wields some powers developing oil fields and has the craziest life with his ex-wife and daughter as well as all of the accouterments of the lifestyle.

Son of a gun…he’s talking about drilling the Permian Basin. Wife ask’s. “What’s that”. After I’d explained it she says. “Damn you know everything “

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I watched the first episode 'cause it was free, and it was entertaining but I'm not buying the Paramount+ streaming service just to watch the rest of it (yes, I'm a cheapskate). I appreciated the character's observations on the usefulness of fossil fuels, but suffice it to say that 95% of the show is a gross exaggeration, and that a real landman's job is pretty boring, mostly office/courthouse work, and nothing remotely like what is portrayed. The character in the show is a geologist, engineer, landman, roughneck, and roustabout, and executive all rolled into one. I am a geologist BTW.

At least they did film the outdoor scenes in it on location in the Permian Basin. I worked and lived in Midland for seven years early in my career, and while I have worked many other oil and gas basins, there has never been a time when I was not working the Permian Basin, and I still am to this day. It has been good to me. I have spent a lot of time on drilling rigs over the years; I'll attach a few photos below.

The first episode even had a couple of my former coworkers in it, in a scene they filmed in the Fort Worth Petroleum Club.

Me on a rig in 1981, with my Olds Cutlass company car:

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15-16 years ago

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5-10 years ago:

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Way cool photos…. Thanks for sharing them. From only your photos…AND NO CONTEXT OR INTERPRETATIONS, I can see LANDMAN….I was only in Texas a few times at the time of the David Koresh events in Waco…in fact about 1mile away on some very straight roadways from Dallas.

We are subscribing to several streaming services to plan for cable cutting shortly. It is difficult for someone (wife) in my house to locate the CBS soap operas without that main FiOS guide that literally sticks them in your face by just selecting “guide” on the remote. She’d need to select ..input, locate the app, then…log in in some cases, then maneuver through each of the apps despite it being a repetitive operation. It’s freakin’ frustrating but I get it.
 
We are subscribing to several streaming services to plan for cable cutting shortly. It is difficult for someone (wife) in my house to locate the CBS soap operas without that main FiOS guide that literally sticks them in your face by just selecting “guide” on the remote. She’d need to select ..input, locate the app, then…log in in some cases, then maneuver through each of the apps despite it being a repetitive operation. It’s freakin’ frustrating but I get it.

We ditched our Dish Network subscription and equipment like a cold turd, about 10 minutes after getting Starlink internet and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Hulu set up, and have never looked back. Does your wife know, that pretty much all of the streaming services (even the free ones) remember your place for any series or movie you are watching? You shouldn't have to keep logging in and finding stuff; ours is all right there when She Who Must Not Be Named turns on the tv for us.
 
I'd guess that there are few people younger than us that even know what linoleum is, never mind what a drafting table is or how it is used. This one is mostly just sentimental value for me, but for the first 15 years of my career, I made all of my maps and cross sections with paper, pencil, and an eraser. Now it just lays flat and is a workspace for my computer. It has more real estate than most desks.
I just uncovered my original field work kit. So many slots for colored pencils. :lol:
 
I just uncovered my original field work kit. So many slots for colored pencils. :lol:

I still have a metric sh!t-ton of colored pencils in the right-hand drawer of my drafting table, but of course never use them anymore. It would just be too sad to throw them away though!
 
After some problems with the vendor over what was in stock versus what they would take my money for that was not in stock, we finally got the kitchen range hood installed, and the pendant lights over the island, a light over the kitchen sink, and the kitchen ceiling fan installation completed. Pretty happy with the way it turned out.

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I also got the second water heater and isolation valves delivered and am installing that now. Going a lot faster than the first one. The two are nearly-identical, but the kitchen one is only 130,000 BTU because all it has to supply is two sinks and two dishwashers. 130K BTU is overkill for that, but it's the smallest output they make in that model, and I liked the other features (condensing, super efficient, built-in freeze protection, outside mounting/venting).
 
After some problems with the vendor over what was in stock versus what they would take my money for that was not in stock, we finally got the kitchen range hood installed, and the pendant lights over the island, a light over the kitchen sink, and the kitchen ceiling fan installation completed. Pretty happy with the way it turned out.

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I also got the second water heater and isolation valves delivered and am installing that now. Going a lot faster than the first one. The two are nearly-identical, but the kitchen one is only 130,000 BTU because all it has to supply is two sinks and two dishwashers. 130K BTU is overkill for that, but it's the smallest output they make in that model, and I liked the other features (condensing, super efficient, built-in freeze protection, outside mounting/venting).

Kitchen looks great. I really like that shade blue for the cabinets, and the gold fixtures and pull knobs work really well with them too.

I think I picked out the same kitchen faucet for our build. Is that a Kohler?
 
Love the old school green drafting table mat!

Thanks CD.

I still use that HP11C every day. Bought it new in 1982, if I remember correctly. Got pretty good at programming it too. It doesn't have many bytes of memory and limited storage registers, so the code had to be super efficient. I wrote a program to do well log analysis that used pretty much last byte and resource.

A friend/former co-worker gave me another one exactly like it, in the original vinyl case that still looks brand new, so I have a backup if mine ever dies - but it's like the Toyota Hilux of calculators; can't destroy it and it just keeps on working. I'm sort of surprised that you can still buy batteries to fit it, at least last time I needed some - the batteries last like a decade, LOL.

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Really nice work on the kitchen and office. When I first looked at your desk I thought, "Is that a 12C?"
 
Kitchen looks great. I really like that shade blue for the cabinets, and the gold fixtures and pull knobs work really well with them too.

I think I picked out the same kitchen faucet for our build. Is that a Kohler?

Thanks; the mrs. picked those colors, knobs, pulls, and fixtures, but I like them too. She agonized for months, trying to choose between four or five nearly identical shades of dark blue.

Both the sink and the faucet are Kraus.
 
Really nice work on the kitchen and office. When I first looked at your desk I thought, "Is that a 12C?"

Thanks.

The 11C and the 12C shared the same case/frame, mechanical parts, layout, and exact dimensions; only the programming and key functions were different between the two - one "scientific" and the other "financial".
 
Thanks; the mrs. picked those colors, knobs, pulls, and fixtures, but I like them too. She agonized for months, trying to choose between four or five nearly identical shades of dark blue.

Both the sink and the faucet are Kraus.

Sounds like my bride.
Building such an amazing place would be loaded with decisions/choices at every turn. My bride has said that she would find this overwhelming and too stressful. Kudos to your bride in making your build a success as she made innumerable hard selections.
 
Regarding that calculator….have you heard of RPN? I have a recollection from decades ago when I was learning to use a calculator like this that it stood for reverse Polish notation? Any validity there?
 
Regarding that calculator….have you heard of RPN? I have a recollection from decades ago when I was learning to use a calculator like this that it stood for reverse Polish notation? Any validity there?
All HP calculators were RPN back in the day. Some, maybe all?, of the new ones let you chose between RPN and algebraic entry. If you ever start using RPN you will never go back. And yes, it's Reverse Polish Notation.
 
All HP calculators were RPN back in the day. Some, maybe all?, of the new ones let you chose between RPN and algebraic entry. If you ever start using RPN you will never go back. And yes, it's Reverse Polish Notation.

Yep!

I agree, it is way faster and easier to use, once you get used to it. It's also way more efficient with memory because of the stack architecture, so you could cram a ton of features and subroutines in a very small amount of code and memory. This was a big deal, back when memory on these devices was very limited, and had to be allocated between program memory and storage memory, and HP were masters of it. Nowadays, memory is so ridiculously plentiful and cheap, but it was not always so.
 
Last piece of the range vent hood; a stainless steel cap for it. This is a pretty unusual custom vent stack, and there was nothing off-the-shelf that was going to fit - but I bought this one on sale, hoping it could be made to work. Thanks to that 8th or 9th-grade sheet metal shop class I took at Manning Junior High, it does now!

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Right after I took this photo, I scuffed the cap with sandpaper and painted it desert tan. Don't want Big Brother to see it reflecting in aerial/satellite photos. :cool:
 
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Continuing slow progress; back from a trip to Scotland to bury my mother-in-law.

Flooring is down in the family room; still need base boards. Installed a 72" electric "fireplace" in the family room - that thing weighed a ton. Not the greatest photo of it in the morning light, and there is a glass front that goes on it but not until I do some mask painting and put the stone on the surround:

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LED-backlit guest bathroom mirror installed; more to come for the other bathrooms. Still needs a regular light fixture above it:

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A recent sunset from the front "yard" by the shop/barndominium building:

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Central HVAC heat pump is being delivered today; going to install it myself. Pulled 10/3 solid-wire Romex through existing conduits for the condenser and air handler power in preparation.
 
Isn’t it amazing how knowledgeable you get doing these kind of things. The fireplace is a beauty. I have always thought I would want one of these bathroom mirrors. Saw a few last year on Amazon but never did it.

I became a fireplace temporary expert for 6 weeks while trying to get ours finished and actually completed the surround a few days ago. Found a few oddball pieces of lumber at depot and was disgusted enough to build this so it’s FINISHED.

This was a seat of the pants plan….Once I got the idea the biggest delay was waiting for the glue to dry. ( gotta do the floor trim yet)
Hell, I’ve got a Land Cruiser waiting
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