So our house has become a general disaster area over the years. During the first 5 years that we lived here I was a daily drinker and keeping tidy didn’t really matter a heck of a lot to me. The wife, of course, liked to keep things in order, but there were certain areas that were “mine” that simply got various detritus piled on them for years. Then when I quit drinking and started my new job I started working so many hours (and with that hour each way commute) that I never found the time to clean up those areas -at least that is what I tell myself so that I don’t feel like quite so much of a filthy pig.

We have made tremendous progress in the making the house look slightly less like it is currently being occupied by transients over the last couple of years: The bathroom was completely remodeled in 2006 when I was out of work. At the same time I replaced the kitchen sink, put in a garbage disposal, we got all new kitchen appliances, etc. The carpets have been ripped out of the living room, bedroom and computer room. It was subsequently replaced by a new carpet in the living room, and faux hardwood in the other two rooms (we have dogs. carpet and dogs don’t mix. the dogs don’t go into the living room often.) Our large Arizona room even got some new peel and stick tile. We also threw away tons of stuff from those rooms when they were cleaned out for the new flooring/remodeling (here I think that tons is not actually an exaggeration; there was much furniture that went to the curb, the carpet itself weighed a couple hundred pounds, all the pipes from the new plumbing, the old appliances. It was probably quite literally tons). We have been just very generally trying to purge the old, dilapidated shit from the house and replace it with less shitty and worn out more current stuff (where it is being replaced at all. Trying to get rid of stuff mostly and keep the rooms as minimal as possible).

The only thing that keeps me from just shoveling shit into the back of a truck with abandon and taking it to the landfill is the knowledge that somewhere in this mess we still have some stuff bearing sentimental value. I lost my father when I was very young, and the only things I have that were his are a picture and his old watch -which I haven’t seen in a decade. The wife’s mother also died several years ago, and I know that somewhere in the house we still have some of her artwork, and some pictures of her (sadly most of her jewelery was likely pawned by her husband ((the wife’s step-father)) when she died). And while we haven’t seen these things in years, I really don’t want to accidentally throw any of it away. So the digging out has been slow.

Yesterday I made great progress on the finding the finding the sentimental items when I happened across my father’s watch. In addition to that, I also found two working copies of our wedding cd (this was something that I actually tried to launch as a business years ago; All the photos from the wedding were cropped and thumbnailed, I laid them out in two html formats, one with frames, one without frames, put in a snazzy menu, embedded a font, burned them to disc and put an autorun feature on them so that even the least computer literate person in the world would be able to use them. I think I was going to charge something like a hundred bucks to do all the coding, cropping, etc., then a buck a disc or something like that. It never got off the ground floor. Although I did manage to spend several hundred dollars on cd jewel cases, discs, labels, and everything else I would need to make it fly before I flopped). I also found yet another cache of photos (about the third such find in the various rooms during various cleanings). I have only quickly thumbed through them so far, but there was one (three actually, but you only get to see one) that made me decide to write about.

Now if I were to find a photo of someone else I knew, and say they happened to be naked -or mostly so-, my strict code of ethics would keep me from sharing said photo with anyone as far as you know. That said, if I were to find a picture of me, and I was posing like a cheap man-whore, OMG yes! Post that shit! Alright, I get it. I played the guitar. But why was I naked? Further, who was taking pictures of me while I was playing the guitar naked?

I remember being in fairly horrible shape at the time this photo was taken, but as I look at it now, I really don’t see it. Barely a hint of a love handle there, my man boobs won’t hold up a pencil yet, the hair on my chest/stomach hair is still in the “kind of cute” phase (which would later be replaced by the more grotesque “why is this the only place on my body an inordinate amount of hair grows” phase), my legs look like they could have been superimposed from a third grade art student’s stick figure. Damn I wish I looked that good right now! Ahh memories.

And just for fun I took that photo and added some fun text to it. Enjoy:

Since recently canceling my account with Blockbuster and signing up for Netflix I have been quite pleased the service. Being able to download so many movies instantly, and for no additional charge, has allowed me to watch a lot of movies that I likely wouldn’t watch if I had to go pick them out, or if I was going to be keeping the wife from watching something she wanted to see while she waited for me to return the dreck I had rented. Netflix probably thinks I have some pretty odd -and likely demented- tastes in movies, but really I don’t. I just like a movie that I can immerse myself in and enjoy, which I really can’t seem to do with most of what is coming out of hollywood these days.

I find that for the most part I can really only enjoy comedies that are current. I watch a comedy for the express purpose of laughing at what is happening onscreen, and for that it doesn’t matter who is in the film, or what the circumstances are. That seems to be the problem I have when trying to watch a drama or thriller that is current: I usually can’t enjoy it because of who is in it. For me it is extremely difficult to watch a movie with Nicolas Cage in it and see anything other than Nicolas Cage pretending to be someone acting out events. I have seen him (and all the other actors that seem to be in every damn movie that comes out) play so many roles that I simply can’t watch the movie as a story; I can’t suspend my disbelief, and that takes all the fun out of watching. When I go to Netflix to pick out something to watch, I intentionally try to find movies with people I have never heard of, and stories that I have never heard of, and I find that it makes it much easier for me to enjoy the show.

I find a lot of duds.

Even when I do find duds, I am usually able to watch them, and I don’t think I take any more or less away from them than if I had watched the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes I do find genuinely good movies… Though not nearly as often as I would like.

Netflix has been keeping track of the movies I have been watching though, and is offering up suggestions. The movie suggestion it had for me this morning was dead on: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

I really enjoyed this one. Thanks in part to knowing absolutely nothing about it going in, partly because I was able to believe the characters -since you haven’t heard of anyone in this film, and the roles were played well- (Robert Englund is in it, but in a role that his Elm Street work actually strengthens the character if you have seen those movies), but mostly because it was quite clever and unique. The basic premise is simple: A documentary crew follows around a young man who has aspirations to become a killer. Not a serial killer, but a killer of legend or folklore: a la Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers. A killer much bigger than life (death?), with a story and reputation that will live on long after he is gone. That seems hard to believe, and as I sit here typing this I remember that I was thinking at the start that there was no way I would be able to believe the premise. Though as the story flowed I found myself not only believing it, but not finding it odd that the documentary crew was with him, and actually rooting for the guy.

That is about as far as you should read before this is going to get spoilery. Be warned.

As the story unfolds Leslie (the would be killer) is showing the crew all of the detail, training, and preparation that goes into making a successful appearance as a legendary killer. He picks a town where there was a tragedy some time before. That tragedy has already spawned some local folklore about the young boy who was pushed off a cliff to his (probably very real) death. Leslie was planning to make his appearance as this dead boy coming back for revenge. But to make sure that everyone knows that he is the resurrected boy, he fabricates news clippings to leave lying around conspicuously. These clippings also have a bogus photo to make the story seem like it personally affects one local girl. It really is genius in its own twisted way.

If you have any experience with these types of horror films parts of this are actually pretty humorous; for instance it shows him cutting through the handles of all the farm tools that could be used against him. Now you know why that damn axe always breaks with the first damn swing! He nails windows shut, has a remote control for the breaker box in the basement, pre-cuts the limbs of the trees near windows so that they will break if used as a means of escape, later he removes the spark plugs from all the cars. All the things that normally leave you wondering “when did he have time to do that” in the horror movies, he shows you.

The first hour of the movie really is just him showing the crew what goes into it. They follow him through the entire setup of the final showdown, filming it all as he starts to terrorize one poor girl. And as expected the crew grows more and more apprehensive with every passing moment. The question that you will be asking yourself the whole time (at least the one I was asking myself) is “are they really going to tape him killing all those kids or is the movie going to end just as he goes into the house?” And the answer does not disappoint.

I’ll not go into much more detail. I liked the movie when I finished watching it, and the more I think about it, the better it gets. The only complaint I have is that the movie would have benefited from being possibly fifteen minutes longer. There are two characters that are left absolutely hanging at the end. If you watch it you will know the two I mean. There is no resolution as far as they are concerned and for the protagonist to have closure we really need to see what becomes of them; it simply is not possible for them and the protagonist to coexist.

My words don’t do this movie justice, and I am terrible at trying to review movies. But take my word for it, watch this one.

One of the things that I noticed while trudging through every page I have ever written was that I made a lot of posts about games. I suppose that makes sense, as I do spend way too much time playing them. What I found odd, though, was that while I have spent more time playing World of Warcraft than all the other games combined, I have posted less about it than any other game. I have 11 posts about Guild Wars but only 6 that even mention Warcraft. I mean seriously, I have 8 posts that mention Roller Coaster Tycoon FFS, and I barely played that game at all.

As previously mentioned, I have logged more than 2400 hours of play time in WoW on my Horde characters alone. Were I to add the time played on Alliance characters that number would nearly double.  That is way more time than I have ever devoted to a game. Even Diablo II, which I played the hell out of, couldn’t hold a candle to that number. Not that I am necessarily proud of that, just that I found it odd that with all the time I have spent playing it I didn’t post about it more often.

The game can immerse me so completely that often I will sit down to play for an hour and the next thing I know the day is gone. At least it used to be that way. They have been changing the gameplay so rapidly over the last couple of years that all the parts of the game that used to take up so much time (traveling at low levels, professions, leveling new characters) has been reduced drastically. Rather obviously they are trying to expand their fanbase to include the more casual gamer, but making it so easy has really taken a lot of the fun out of it. I have 6 level 80 characters at this point, and each new character I level goes exponentially faster than the previous ones. Part of that is just knowing the game mechanics and quests, but a lot of it is just the big nerf bat that Blizzard has been hitting the game with.

Prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King I only had two characters at max level. Those two characters consumed hundreds of hours of my time as I leveled their professions and ran 10 and 25 man raids to try to get the very best gear in the game. Of course at that time the difference between the gear you could get in the raids and the gear you could acquire otherwise was enormous. If you were walking around on a Warrior with the mace that dropped in Serpentshrine Caverns, people would notice. I got whispered dozens of times by people just drooling over it. Now the gear that you get from the top end raids is only marginally better than the gear that you can get with badges acquired through running 5 man dungeons. Why waste all that time and frustration trying to get items that are barely better than the ones they are just giving away? It seems so pointless.

I’m sure I’m not done with the game at this point, but it does get tiresome doing the same thing over and over again. As I said, I have 6 Horde characters at level 80, with another at 65, one at 62, one at 30 and another at 14. Once I get them all to 80, I will have one of every class at 80, and then what? I don’t think I have it in me to run all the 25 man raids anymore, and even if I did I am never home at the hours when most people run them. So I just keep leveling my alts with no real plan for what is going to happen once I have them all to max.

This all brings me to why I decided to write this post in the first place. It had been a while since I came home from work -usually around 2am on Monday and Tuesday- and just played a character through the lower level zones. Perhaps since it had been so long, I was able to see the game with different eyes. The artwork in the game really is pretty amazing (at least it was for when it came out), and I absolutely love the world when it is very late at night, just before the moon disappears and the sun comes back out. I have taken many, many screenshots during this late night/early morning time, and currently they are set to cycle as my desktop background. Here I decided to share a few of my favorites (click on them for 1280×800, the resolution I currently play in. They stretch well to 1680×1050):

Even if I don’t enjoy playing as much as I used to, I still love the screenshots. I especially like the top left one (shot off the cost of Shadowprey Village in Desolace) and the bottom right one (shot overlooking Spirit Rise in Thunder Bluff).

After probably three years without posting any news, this one is just too precious to skip.  Evidently Fox News is again accused of airing misleading video.  I know what you’re thinking, not Fox News, surely they mean one of the more dubious, liberal media outlets.  Fox News is certainly above suspicion on this sort of thing, right?  I guess not.

For the second time in just over a week, Fox News is coming under fire for misusing old news footage. The latest flap is leading some people to charge that the cable news network is intentionally misleading its audience, while Fox claims a “production error.”

…

Wednesday’s incident occurred when Fox News host Gregg Jarrett mentioned that a Sarah Palin appearance and book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan had a massive turnout. As footage rolled of a smiling and waving Palin amidst a throng of fans, Jarrett noted that the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is “continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand-new book,”…

All sarcasm aside, is there anyone who is even remotely surprised by this?  Fox News has been a mouthpiece for the Republican party since its inception.  Their stock and trade is to mislead their viewers/listeners into believing what they deem necessary for them to believe in order to demonize Democrats (although there is no such thing as a Democrat to Fox News; All democrats are Liberal Democrats when spoken of) and push their viewers/listeners to believe that whatever it is they are talking about is so right that every person in the country -aside from a couple of Liberal nutjubs- is behind it.  If there is no evidence to back them up, they make up the evidence.  Probably the only thing I find surprising about it in this case is that the subject is of the “who gives a fuck anyway” variety.

The last time they were caught doing it, just last week, in fact, at least they were trying to sell bigger support for a Republican rally:

The current mishap comes on the heels of a controversy sparked last week when footage from a conservative rally held over the summer was played on “Hannity” during a segment on a more recent rally.

It is kind of a blessing really; People tend to get more conservative with age, and Fox News has a viewer base with a median age of 65 (all the websites that I could find with a median age for Fox News in 2009 had the same number.  Unfortunately all I could find from the Fox News website was a “30%” increase in viewership).  While they are keeping the fleece over the baby-boomers, they are further isolating themselves from the moderates with these antics.  I, for one, know that regardless of how conservative I happen to get as I age, I will never assume anything on Fox News is factual.  Of course as the nation ages, values will change, and the Republican agenda will probably start to more closely mirror my ideals by the time I am in my sixties.  That doesn’t mean I want to be lied to.

This particular piece of deception is of such little importance it would hardly warrant a mention were it not for the fact that it really exposes Fox News’ capacity to outright lie to make a point.  Perhaps they should change their taglines from things like Fair and balanced and We report, you decide to something more accurate, Op-Eds for Old People or Inventing a more Conservative reality, would certainly be more accurate.

I have just finished converting the last of my old webpages to Wordpress.  The total page count was 441, which I thought was a little bit low for every page I have posted since January 2004, but it must be right.  Hell, I haven’t been posting much of anything lately, in fact I have only about 10 posts since January of 2008!

While trudging through the content of all those old pages, I did happen across a few things that I had completely forgotten about.  The first is Pandora. This is basically a radio station with a 30 second commercial every 15 minutes or so. You tell it a song or band that you really like and it will start picking out songs and artists similar to that. If you like what it is playing give it a thumbs up, if not give it a thumbs down. It will then find more songs and artists like that one, and on and on. I remember liking this a lot when I first started using it years ago, but giving up on it because I was crippled with a 56k modem connection that made the songs break up pretty bad. Now I am getting back into it. Even though my mp3 library has some 82hours of music on it, I find that I am getting pretty tired of hearing the same stuff all the time, and Pandora likes to throw in something I have never heard of from time to time. It’s a bit refreshing to hear something new now and then.

Cartoons I’d Like to Fuck (C.I.L.F):

This is a pretty damn funny song. I remember laughing out loud, alone, in real life the first time I heard it. I posted it previously, but it is worth putting up again.

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:

This is another amusing song/video that I posted about some time ago.  It is also elol-able enough to warrant a second posting.

This last one is a group called “Tripod” that has a wonderful love song.  They do love their video games:

I strongly recommend that no one else click anything prior to mid 2005 in my archives.  I did take a few things away from going back through them though, the videos above, for instance.  I also realized that the old posts weren’t nearly as bad as I remembered them, at least once they were set into the new format.  Amazing how the visual presentation can make them seem less like they were written by a retarded three-year-old who was very sleepy while writing.

Wordpress has arrived! I have been playing with the layout for the past couple of days and have managed to come up with a passable replica of the old shadowtwin site. Mind you, I am only trying to match that theme for my own sake; switching to wordpress is a HUGE change and I need to have some sense of familiarity. No doubt even that will change once I become more comfortable with the new system.

Since I got it up and running, I have been deleting the wordpress index file every time I am done editing it so that the page would continue to load as it normally did. I am going to quit doing that now. I have had a few moments of clarity where I realized a setting that I need to change, or that sort of thing, and having to then upload the index file before I could effect the change is rather annoying. So until I get the rest of the site set up and the files converted to the new format, you can find the old main page Through this link. It is just the blogger main page that has been running the site for the last few years.

If you happen by, drop me a note if you have any comments or suggestions for the new layout.

Again, Click here to visit the site you are used to.

After my last, rather angry, post about CyberPower PC, I thought I should probably post that I did get a response from them regarding the condition of the PC when I received it.

First I want to say that one thing that they did right was to never try to blame the damage on UPS shipping. I say that because while it may be possible to believe that a component had come out of place during shipping, it doesn’t seem that it would have been possible for the graphics card to unscrew itself, the CPU fan to detach itself, the front panel fan control to loosen its screws, and the Motherboard tray to also loosen its screws. This was clearly thrown together very quickly, most likely due to my email telling them to give me my money back if they couldn’t ship it on the date promised.

As I said in the previous post, I put the components back in myself, tightened everything down, and fired it up. It seemed to work just fine except for a high pitched squealing noise that was coming from one of the fans. Since the two fans that were flopping around loosed during shipping were the one on the graphics card and the CPU fan, I naturally that one of those was going to be the culprit. But in typical, lazy fashion, I wanted to try the easiest ones first. So I began disconnecting the fans one by one (starting with the case fans) as I powered the machine up. It turned out that both of the 120mm side case fans were making a hell of a lot of noise. I was able to bang one of them around to get it a bit quieter, but I had to disconnect the other one entirely to be able to use the machine without getting a splitting headache. The back exhaust fan on the case is also making a lot of noise, however I think that it is just louder than the others due to it being an 80mm fan and -theoretically at least- running at a higher RPM.

I sent CyberPower PC an email at about 2am on Wednesday morning when I first opened the box. That email said that there was damage to the machine and linked to my last post for them to see it. I sent them another email at around 11am, after I was able to determine that the case fans were the ones in need of replacement. I finally got a response to the emails via a phone call on Friday night (more than 48 hours later). The guy was nice enough. He said it would be no problem to send me the new fans, they just needed to verify my shipping info. So we did, and that was that.

So on Friday night they verified the info. I expected they would ship them out on Monday, I would likely receive them by Wednesday. Instead, I got an email from UPS on Wednesday evening saying that they had only just picked the package up from CyberPower, I wouldn’t be receiving them until Friday. At this point it doesn’t matter a whole lot as far as the functioning of the PC is concerned, I still have three functioning case fans and have been running it without the fourth. What does matter though is that when they had the chance to really redeem themselves from a customer service standpoint, they failed twice. It took over 48 hours to respond in the first place, then they called to verify shipping, which was absolutely unnecessary unless they thought I had moved in the two days since they had shipped me the machine in the first place. Then it took them another 5 days to go ahead and drop the fans in the mail.

So, would I recommend CyberPower PC? At this point I would have to definitely recommend against customizing a pc through CyberPower and having it shipped to you directly. However, CyberPower does have pre-assembled machines available on NewEgg. The machine that I got from Newegg came in within 3 days, was assembled correctly, and has worked flawlessly for the last couple of months. Also worth noting, Newegg has probably the best RMA program in the business, I have never had a problem getting an RMA, nor do I get the accusatory “something you did caused it” attitude. You can get the CyberPower machine pre-assembled through Newegg cheaper than you can build it on their site, the only downside being you can’t customize it so you just need to make sure it meets your minimum requirements or plan to upgrade it yourself.

I don’t know if I just got unlucky on my particular order through Cyberpower, but I do know that while I would gladly order another CyberPower machine (even the one that arrived damaged has exceeded my expectations) I would certainly involve a third party distributor in future purchases. While they may be slow to react to a single customer, I would be willing to bet my house that they wouldn’t give Newegg that kind of lackadaisical response time. Even if they did, Newegg wouldn’t pass it on to their customers as they have their own reputation to think about.

In a nutshell, to get back to the point of this post. CyberPower did make it right for me in the end… It just didn’t seem like they were all that concerned about getting it done very quickly.

Normally I am not the type to complain. Well, I complain a lot here, but I mean in real life I am not the type to bitch about a lot of things. The world is an imperfect place, imperfect things are going to happen, if you spend your time bitching about it, you are dwelling way too much on it and it just puts you in a foul mood. But sometimes I just get really, really irritated.

I mentioned previously that I was extremely happy with my new CyberPower PC. Happy enough, in fact, that I decided to get one for my wife as well. The one that I am using I actually bought pre-assembled from Newegg, but I wasn’t able to find a similar deal on a similar system when I started looking to buy a new one, so I went straight to the company’s website instead.

They give you options… Boy do they ever give you options… In fact, they give you every option. I chose to go with a gigabyte motherboard with an AMD Atholn 3.0ghz processor complete with a mean ass cooling thing, 4 slots for DIMM (upgradeable to 16gigs), 4×2gig (some brand) RAM with heat spreaders, an nVidea GeForce 220 1 gig video card, 4x red neon cooling fans, 500gig HDD, 22x DVDR, front panel fan control unit, and a 600 watt power supply, also threw in a red cold cathode light just for fun. I put my order in and they charged my credit card immediately. Then it listed my estimated ship date to be 16 days later.

Now the delay in shipping wasn’t a complete surprise; the website actually displayed a date a couple weeks in the future, but I assumed that was just so people wouldn’t get pissed off if it took them 5 or 6 days to get their system. What was a surprise was that as I checked my order status everyday, they had not even began to assemble the machine on the date it was supposed to be shipped. The order still just read as “payment processed”. The lines for assembly date, quality control date, final quality control date, etc. were all blank.

Since it was already about 3pm on the day they were supposed to be shipping the machine, I dropped them an email that basically said, “Look, you haven’t even started to build it yet, give me my money back so I can buy the parts and build it myself.” That email got a quick reply stating that the (some brand)RAM I had ordered was on backorder, but that they would upgrade me to Kingston HyperX RAM so they could get the machine together and ship it that day.

So, at 3pm they had not even started to put it together, but by the end of the business day they actually did ship it. And a few days later it arrived at my door.

I just opened it up, and here is the first thing I saw when I got it out of the box:

That empty PCI slot you are looking at is where the video card is supposed to be. At first I thought that maybe they had forgotten to install it, but then why would they have removed the shield for the slot. So it must be in there somewhere…

Ah yes, there it is, hanging ever so precariously in the middle of that mass of wires, a mass of wire which can be seen much better in this picture:

You can even see the now completely broken cold cathode tube floating around in there amongst the wires. But the fancy light was the least of my concern. Here is how it looked as I began to pull the cover off to assess the damage:

The Video card is actually sort of connected to the CPU cooling fan, which has also fallen off of the fancy heat disperser thing. Now they are both floating around in there beating each other up as well as the rest of the components. Here are a couple more shots of the Video card and fan, taken simply because I couldn’t believe I was actually looking at it:

The enormous cooling fin system on the CPU is also bent, but doesn’t appear to be damaged beyond cosmetic. The screws holding down the motherboard are all loose. The fan control on the front of the box is also loose and flops up and down every time you touch it…

I am very disappointed with the condition of the system and the non-existent customer service prior to my angry email. If one of the components that I had ordered was not available, why didn’t they call or email me sometime prior to the day it was supposed to ship to ask if I would like to choose a different type of RAM? Was the sale so important to them that they rushed putting this together to get it shipped? I would have been irritated if it had taken an extra day to get the system, but I can guarantee you that if it had arrived in perfect condition I wouldn’t be writing this -despite the wait.

I put the parts back where they go and powered it up anyway. It is currently downloading updates. The motherboard, power supply, HDD, DVD, CPU, and RAM all appear to be in working order, the only question is which of the fans was damaged. I know one of them was damaged because I can hear the high-pitched squeal of it even as I type this. If it is one of the 5 dollar case fans I will simply buy a new one. If it is the fan on the Video card or CPU (which seems the most likely since they were the ones banging around during shipping) I will ask them to kindly send me a replacement -which I will install myself- and hopefully they will; I would love for this to have a happy follow-up, but I’ll be damned if I am going to send this back to them and wait another month to get it up and running.

Update Here

I have been having problems with Leech FTP for a while now, but continued using it anyway. There were random error messages, random disconnects, and at times it would just get stuck on an upload, download, or directory switch. The reason I continued to use it was that it was so simple and basic; I don’t need a lot of beneficial features crap cluttering it up. I want to upload and download files, I will handle all editing on machine. Yesterday I couldn’t get Leech to connect at all, so I had to find something else. What I ended up with is Core FTP.

Core FTP has roughly the same minimal features, but with the bonus of not locking up at random intervals. An additional bonus is that it automatically refreshes the remote directory on upload, that’s something that I always wished Leech did. It occurs to me that rather than post that here I really should just make a short list of links to put on my sidebar with all the programs that I use for website related stuff. Then I could just visit my page to download them if the need arises. But damn I am lazy…

I have been having problems with the faucet in my shower for about six months now. I have neglected to fix it because I absolutely knew that I was going to encounter all kinds of problems when I tried to fix it, and of course I was right.

The problem with the shower is a bit odd, really. For reasons unknown the hot water side will gain and lose pressure seemingly at random. It could go for 2 weeks without having a problem, it could go for 2 weeks without working properly. I had tried disconnecting the hot water line and just blowing water through it without success, so I needed to try something else. The plan was to try to just pull the control lever and clean the fittings inside of that; possibly replace a couple of the rubber seats. Of course this all went to hell the second I touched it.

You can see that little bastard here. I have taken off the trim already, and started trying to take the ring that holds the faucet together off. Up to this point it hadn’t been working -which is to say that it wouldn’t move a bit- so I knew it was only a matter of time before this minor repair became a major headache. You can actually tell from the photo that the whole faucet has been moving as I have been trying to apply gentle and even force with a wrench, you can also tell by the angle it is currently at that is hasn’t been working to loosen the retaining ring at all. I already have the water off at this point, and I have no intention of stopping until I get the damn thing working again, for better or worse, so I grabbed the camera to document the demolition phase disassembley.

There are lots of instructional videos online showing just how to do this (take the ring off and replace the seats and springs, that is), and in all of the videos these fittings are barely finger tight, and the entire operation takes about two minutes. Of course in the real world you will be there with a pipe wrench -actually leaning on it for additional torque- and the fucker is going to break. You’ll know you’ve reached this point when the water starts pouring out of the handle as seen here. Pretty much as expected I broke one of the lines on the back of the faucet well before the retaining ring broke free. I want to point out the quality of the image though: you are seeing a version that is cropped pretty heavily and reduced to 20% of the original size, and still those little water droplets just hang there, as if frozen in time… It’s a good thing I had the camera handy, eh?

Another thing that all the instructional videos I saw online had in common was that there was always ready and easy access to all of the plumbing. That’s nice for making a video, but a house generally tends to have most of the plumbing fixtures hidden away in walls. They are much more difficult to get at there, but they also aren’t nearly as much of an eyesore. My house is one that has said plumbing connections hidden away, so there was much work to be done. The wall behind the shower (the one on the outside of the bathroom) is about 18 inches of solid adobe. There is an access panel that goes about halfway up the back of the bathtub, but no reasonable way to access the faucet from there. You can reach the water supply lines and that is about it. That meant I had to do all the work from the front (and theoretically finished) side. First I had to remove the sliding glass doors that I put in when I initially remodeled the bathroom a few years back. That is easy enough; the top bar is held in place only by gravity, and each end is easily pulled off by removing three screws and cutting the bead of silicone running along the edges.

The walls of my bathtub/shower are covered with a 5-piece pre-molded surround. This also went in when I did the bathroom remodel. Previously there had been 8″x8″ ceramic tiles that ran only about 30 inches up the wall. Water had gotten between and behind them and done some horrible damage to the adobe. Water is the #1 enemy of any structure, but in adobe that is tenfold: water + packed dirt = mud. The goal was now to try to remove this piece of the surround without doing extensive damage to it. I expected I was probably not going to be able to do it without getting any cracks in it, but I was hoping that I would be able to reuse it; I really don’t want to have to replace the entire surround. So with a chisel and some finesse, off to work I go.

Now having mentioned the prior problems I had with water getting behind the shower enclosure, I knew that I took extra effort to make sure that it wouldn’t happen again. I remember being pretty liberal with the liquid nails on the back of all of the panels, then going batshit with the silicone near the top and edges, but even I was surprised to see just how much glue I had holding this thing up. I mean holy mother-loving shitballs that is a lot of glue! I was taking my time here to try to do this slowly, peeling it back a little at a time, trying not to let it crease so that it wouldn’t crack. You can see one large crack near the top of the picture but thankfully that is behind an overlap when installed.

I managed to get it off in one piece, with only a minimum of damage. Near the bottom left you can see a crease which would end up cracking, but with a little bit of caulking it will be just fine. If I was doing this for someone else I would certainly replace this whole sheet (I should also point out that there is absolutely no way I would do this for someone else anyway, so that example probably doesn’t mean much), but since it is my house and I don’t mind a few imperfections this is good enough for me. I would move this out of here and lay it flat on the floor after I saw that first crease form, and that was the only visible crack that formed during the process.

Getting the plastic surround off was really the only part I was dreading. Once I got down to the lumber and plumbing I was a lot more confident that I could do this without too much of a headache. The plywood that you see in the picture here was all added when I remodeled the bathroom. There had been a couple of 1″x4″’s behind this previously that were holding up some particle board, and it had all rotted through. Plywood is not an ideal structural material, but in this application the only thing it is actually holding up is the thin plastic shower surround, so there isn’t any real weight to it, and it needed to be smooth. This whole thing came off easily, there are about 10 screws holding it up (they can be seen as little black dots throughout). A couple of them had gotten hidden behind that ridiculous mass of glue, but I was able to get them all out pretty easily to get at the plumbing.

The cup that I had been holing all of my screws and other hardware in got knocked over into the tub. As I was picking the parts up, I snapped this picture. If you are ever working on a sink or bathtub, make sure you plug the drain. I just threw a handy washcloth in there, and as you can see there are still a couple of little red washers in there from where the cup tipped. I’m sure that the sliding glass door frame would go back up just fine without them, but the less crap you get in your drain the better. The last thing you want is to have to tear out your drain as well.

Here we see the faucet assembly. The board that it is mounted to is another addition I had to put in there, the old faucet had been simply held in by the pipes and I needed to change that. Also the little pieces of one inch lumber on the sides were added to give me a couple more screw points for the plywood front. Down at the bottom you can see a piece of lumber with a square cut out if it, that exterior access is just below that. As you can imagine it would be impossible to get a screwdriver all the way up to the faucet mounting screws from there. I am to the easy part at last!

This shot is just to get a good look at the copper and bronze fittings. You can see a lot of discoloration on them right near the tips, and the hot water side has some running the length of the pipe, but being copper and bronze these are still in pretty good condition and don’t really need to be replaced. Those bronze elbows go 5-8 bucks each (depending on the store) and sweated copper pipe can last a hundred years easy, so there is really no need to replace it.

Remember to disconnect the shower head assembly before you start trying to remove this line. I actually neglected to do that during the remodel and was forced to replace the entire line after I applied about three ass tons of force and creased the copper. This top piece is usually in a finished chrome so be careful not to damage it if you are going to reuse it. I find that you can usually stick a screwdriver inside of it and use it for leverage (the top piece that goes into the shower should be bent so this works nicely).

Disconnect the water supply. I am going to point out that this is one area where I probably went far astray from building code. I really shouldn’t have the flex lines you see there in this application. I should be using compression fittings for this (the ones with the nut that crimps down on the pipe to tighten it) and I think building code would dictate that since this is inside a wall you shouldn’t have this type of connector (I can’t swear to that) but when I put this thing in I knew I was going to have to replace it eventually, and using the flex lines meant I would be able to put just about any faucet back in here, where if I had gone with a solid line I would have had to do a lot of cutting and soldering if it didn’t all line up. I do have access to these lines from the outside (note the hole in the block in the back of the picture) and since I am replacing the faucet now I sure am glad I did it this way.

Once all the other water lines are disconnected, there are only a couple of screws holding the faucet up. These ones were rusty as hell, but they came right out.

Then to pull the spout out… Unfortunately the length of this piece of pipe wasn’t something that I had a great deal of control over. It had to be long enough that the spout would sit snugly against the wall when the whole thing is assemble, and as it turns out that is about an inch longer than the space I had available to remove it. As you can see I actually had to notch a piece of the lumber out in the back to get this thing pulled out. Again, the plan is to reuse all of this, so I didn’t want to just cut the pipe.

I wanted to take a shot of this one to show the actual end of the pipe. While it looks extremely corroded, you can see that the threads are still in excellent condition. There was clearly a leak at some point, or it could be from condensation, these lines are not in an insulated area, but there is no damage to any of the pipes or fittings beyond superficial. The flux was still clean and unbroken, there were no bends, kinks, or crimps. I’m sure your helpful hardware store attendant would probably give you the opposite advice, and equally as sure that a general contractor would point to the corrosion as evidence of a need to replace all the plumbing in the house, but in the real world there is no need to throw money at it just because the faucet was faulty.

Here are those pieces again, cleaned up just a bit. Just hit them with a wire brush to get rid of any loose debris. The only concern is anything on the threads that might keep the teflon tape from making a seal, remnants of old teflon tape doesn’t fall into that category. Also I didn’t clean the threads all the way to the nut simply because it’s not necessary to screw them any tighter than a couple of turns. Again, a contractor may offer different advice, but we are looking at real world application. Just as there is no need to waste a lot of money, there is also no need to waste a lot of time, unless you happen to be paying yourself by the hour for this repair, if that’s the case, by all means, clean those pipes up like new!

Here is the whole assembly reattached to the new faucet. You can see that the teflon tape hid all those imperfections around the threads anyway. A couple things to note if you are using a single faucet handle like this: The first is to make sure that you have the correct side up. It would be entirely possible to install this thing upside down. As I’m thinking about it, it might still work upside down, but better safe than sorry. The second is to make sure you get the pipes oriented correctly. I could probably still turn each of those pipes a quarter turn with a wrench, give or take, but since they have to line up, snug (with a wrench) is all you need; if you get stuck and are force to back it out, remove the pipe, retape it, and do it again.

It all goes back together just the way it came apart. Just hook it all back up and, with any luck, there won’t be any leaks. Make sure to test it for leaks before you put the whole wall back together. I have the wallboard only connected by three screws and the laminate cover not glued in place so that I can check again in a couple days to make sure the temperature changes don’t cause it to start leaking.

And that is about as far from the three finger-tightened screw walktrhoughs that you are going to find.