Categories
Fixing Stuff

How to Instal a Refrigerator water line

My friend Julia and I decided it would be fun to document installing a water line for a fridge on my rental property today.  We used the following items:

1/4 inch flexible water line

sharkbite copper valve

compression fitting

For convenience if your looking for all the items you need to hook up your fridge water line, this kit from your local home depot has everything you should need: water line kit

Now onto the installation, the first step is to slip the copper compression fitting over the line running from your fridge (see below).  One important item to note, keep the round fitting close to the end of the line when you are pushing the small copper nipple inside of the tubing during the next step. If you don’t do that it is very hard to push the fitting back up over the nipple to the edge of the line where it needs to be (See below)

CAM00267

Once you complete that,  you are ready to make the connection from the fridge line to the 1/4inch line you purchased.  You will essentially just do the same thing to the new line and then screw it together See image below:

CAM00269

Now your ready to put the sharkbite fitting on the copper pipe.  You want to assemble it and put it on the pipe like so:

CAM00270

 

Once you tighten down the screws to secure the fitting, you will turn the plunger on the top several turns and it will penetrate the copper water line.  *Note water will not flow until you back the plunger out a turn or 2.  So what you want to do it hook up your water line to the fitting using your compression nut.  Turn the plunger 3 or 4 turns, then turn it backwards 1 turn or so and you will hear the water flow out.  The final result should look like:

CAM00271

*Note.  The small black rubber piece that comes in the kit goes on top of the copper shark bit fitting.  It houses the metal dagger that breaks through the copper pipe and helps create a seal.

 

Categories
Fixing Stuff

How to fix wordpress contact form delivery to google apps email

So I ran into a super annoying/somewhat confusing problem today and thought I would share the solution to save anyone else some time (also to keep a record of it for my own person use).

Problem:

We moved email hosting for several websites to google apps.  The email accounts work great, but for some reason when a user filled out a contact form on the wordpress website the email would not be delivered to the google apps account.  To make a long story short this was caused by a small bug in our cpanel setup.  Full instructions to fix the problem are below:

Step 1:

login to cpanel and click on the mx record link:

mx-entry

 

Step 2:

select the option to set cpanel as a remote mail exchanger

remote-mail-exchanger

Hit change and you are good to go.  All mail generated by your website will not try to be delivered locally to that server.  Hopefully if you were running into that same issue you were able to follow those simple steps and fix your problem.

 

Categories
Inspirational

Simple Joys

Sometimes little things can really affect your day for the positive or the negative. I have written a list of simple activities that bring me enjoyment.  When you find yourself in a bad mood think of your list of simple joys and try to do one:

-running hot water over my hands

-taping my hockey stick

– Playing Hockey, Playing Golf, Lifting Weights, Biking

– Watching the Ryan Oreily summer workout Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fitSz07EFEw

-speeding up so that one of those police signs on the side of the road stops showing your speed and just blinks (slow down)

– Doing an exotic Hill Jog real late at night

– Eating a legend club from legrands with a bag of billy goat chips and a twisted tea

– Watching the St. Louis Blues or St. Louis Cardinals play

-Watching construction workers build or tear down a building (watching a wrecking ball tear something down is an especially good treat)

-Watching anyone do a physical activity really well and really focused.

-Foam rolling with Hanna Corbin

– Vacuuming the floor, hearing all the little crummies get sucked up, and knowing that I won’t feel them on my socks later.

-being the first person to cross at a crosswalk and having everyone follow

-running on moving walkways (mainly the ones at the airport)

-looking up at the stars

-writing on this blog

Categories
Inspirational Samuel

Dreams

Dreams have always been very interesting to me. I’ve always been confused when I have a particularly weird dream what it could mean, if it means anything at all, and what caused me to have the dream…. One such dream happened to me last night and when I woke up I wrote as much of it down as I could remember:

Dream starts:

Nelly (the rapper/singer) walks up to a stage. I’m sitting in the library….. wait what the hell is Nelly doing on a stage in the library. He then proceeds to perform a silent concert. Everyone in the library has his microphone linked to their laptop/computer/tablet and can hear what he is singing through their headphones. I take my headphones off for a second to hear if he is really making noise and disrupting the library, magically he is not. I put my headphones back on and rock out to must be the money.

Once the concert is over I stop by the stage and take a photo with Nelly and thanked him for the great concert. I told him he may not know but that was such a big deal and so helpful to many people because we were stressed out about school (what I have not been in school for 4 years?)

We then got into a discussion about Nellys charity in Africa and how he was getting down that he could not affect more positive change in the area. In particular the road infrastructure was lacking and he could not transport drilling rigs to drill for water wells fast enough. He was also trying to get food and medicine to lots of cities but it was taking forever due to the bad roads…. I tried to inspire him and left him with the advise of “opportunities are often disguised as problems ” which he really enjoyed.

 

The next time you have a crazy dream try to write down as much of it as possible right when you wake up.  I know for me I forget details quickly so leave a pen and paper by your bed for a few nights and record what your crazy mind comes up with.

Categories
Traveling

First time using Air B&B

I am in DC this weekend for work, the weather is horrendous (its rained/snowed 100% of the time I have been here). To top that off my friend who I was planning on staying with randomly canceled (no reason given) and said we could not stay with him…. this obviously sent us into scramble mode to try and find food/shelter/clothing (wait we had clothes but it felt like we were at the very bottom of the pyramid)

We ended up finding a hotel to stay at for the first night, but we didn’t feel like paying 250/night and being forced to go out to dinner for each meal so we tried AirB&B (my older sister loves it and has been trying to get me to use it for a while). First impression its super sketchy. Second impression, I love it.

We found a great place (I’m writing this blog post from Emily’s, a very small but nice apartment with a great stove, great counter tops and a great set of knives). The process of finding a place is pretty easy, my buddy Brian and I were marooned at a local pizza place drying our clothes, charging our phones and trying to find shelter for the night when we started our search. Once we downloaded the app, we started rifling through profiles. There was an abnormally amount of gay people offering rooms to stay, and also “shared” rooms which we thought sounded terrifying….. or at the very least super sketchy. Then we found a cache of hot girls who were also offering shared rooms. This quickly degraded into us messaging probably 20 good looking chicks asking if they had availability while at the same time not believing life could possibly work like this. These women would surely murder us and take our laptops in our sleep… but they were hot so we figured it would be worth it.

In the end we opted for a more normal arrangement with a private room from a seemingly nice women named Emily. In general I am somewhat surprised that the system works so well. It seems to have a lot of “trust” in the users. In our case it certainly was correct. Brian and I are good people, Emily seems to be normal and is very pleasant. Our space is much nicer/bigger than a normal hotel room and only $98/night. The next time I travel I’m definitely going to look for places on AirB&B before looking for a hotel.

Categories
Alternative Energy Technology

Palm Springs Wind Mill Farm

This past weekend I went to the Palm Springs Wind Mill Farm with my Father and older sister….. it was amazing!

In general I love alternative energy more than the average bear. More accurately I’ve been obsessed with learning all that I can about how solar panels and wind mills work since as long as I can remember. At some point in my life I plan on owning large scale wind generators and possibly a large scale solar power plant (provided that I can figure out how to build a more efficient solar panel).

One thing that gets lost on most people (me included) is just how large these wind mills are:

view from about 100 feet away
view from about 100 feet away

As you can see from the image above these turbines are massive. Each blade weighs 8 metric tons (a metric tone is 240 pounds heaver than our version). With such a big blade they are able to turn an astonishingly large gear (average gear box weighs 45,000 pounds). Turning such a large gear allows the turbines to generate impressive amounts of power. The turbines at Palm Springs are some of the largest in the world, and currently the major limiting factor to their size is actually our interstate system. Our turbins have outgrown our interstate system, all of the parts must be small enough to be shipped under an overpass which limits them to under 14 feet 3 inches. There are plans to build even larger turbines at offshoar facilities like the the cap cod wind mill farm

Some Stats about the Palm Springs Farm and wind power in general:

-there are over 2,800 mills in operation at palm springs farm, with an average 98% up time. That stat is a little confusing though, it just means that the turbines are in service 98% of the time, not that they are generating power 98% of the time. In fact the wind is blowing hard enough for the turbines to generate power only 38% of the time.
-the new generation wind turbines can generate enough power to run 900 average house holds
-the obama administration commited the us to a goal of generating 20% of our nations power from wind by 2030 (a great goal that I think should be made even more ambitions)
-1 service technician services on average 10 wind mills per month (think there will be some job grown in this sector?? currently we generate less than 2% of our power from wind, upping this to 20% will create several hundred thousand jobs in this sector)
-1 wind mill can generate more power than 500 typical solar panels
-the largest GE turbines at palm springs cost 6 million dollars to build and assemble