The first step after getting the projector running was getting it mounted. One reason I picked the Epson 8350 is that it has a huge amount of available vertical and horizontal lens shift. This allows you to place the projector just about wherever you want and then place the image at the right spot with no distortion. It will move the image about one screen above and below the lens and one screen right and left of the lens. There aren’t many other projectors in this price range that will do that.
As you can see in the picture, I didn’t purchase a fancy mount. And because of the lens shift capabilities, I didn’t even do an upside down mount like you would normally see. I grabbed a couple shelf brackets from Home Depot along with a 2’x4’ sheet of 1/2” MDF. I originally tried 1/4” MDF but it bent quite a bit with the projector on it. I built a little lip all the way around so it won’t slide off if we have a little earthquake or something like that.
The mount is far from beautiful, but it’s functional. Once I get around to painting that wall, the shelf will be painted to match. The next step is probably going to be running the wires down from the projector inside the wall. That’s not going to be simple though because it’s mounted up in the trusses of the elevated ceiling and I’ll need to cut the wall open halfway down to get through the horizontal piece of the truss.
It works wonderfully though. It creates a lot more seating area underneath and feels a lot more professional. It also means that when people get up they don’t have to walk in front of the image, and if we ever get a Kinect, we’ll be able to play it without blocking the screen.
There are a lot more projects like this coming, but it has gotten to a point where I can focus on a few other more pressing house projects.
While I would love to have network cable installed in the entire house and run to a nice patch panel, realistically that’s either going to take me forever or cost a lot of money. So for now I’ve settled with running a couple wires from the family room to the theater room. The rooms sit on top of each other and share a wall in the garage, so it was a pretty simple job. I ran the cable out through the wall in the family room to the garage, up the other side of the wall, and then punched through into the theater room. It ended up looking really nice because all of the networking gear can stay upstairs in that room and the family room just gets the TV and a PC to drive it.
Tyla thinks we bought this house so that we’d have more room, own some dirt, etc etc etc. Wrong. We bought this house so that I could have a projector again. Those of you who have been reading for a while may remember that back in Jersey, we had a little 
Last weekend we spent a lot more time at the house getting it prepped. We owe another huge thanks to Don, Nancy, Logan, Megan, Andy and Stephanie for coming over. We’ve gotten so much more done than I thought would ever be possible! The projects for this weekend were painting a weird bar in the master bedroom white, painting the hallway (vaulted ceilings), and cleaning out the pantry and painting it. We were home before dinner on both days which is a testament to how much help we had. The house is really looking great!
We spent a lot of time painting this weekend, and before we got started, I knew I was going to need some ladders. I figured I would need a step ladder and an extension ladder, but being the geek I am, I found one ladder that does both. It’s available from a lot of places, but one of the cheapest is 
After a long and crazy journey, we finally closed on the house on Friday! We were very thankful to finally have the keys in hand and be the proud owners of a house that exceeded our dreams.
While Luke, Rachel and David were here last week, we had a sunny BBQ up at Tim and Chelsea’s house. They made one of the most amazing lunches I’ve ever eaten: grilled carne asada, rice, refried beans, guacamole, salsa, and 
I headed out with the Brandt family to Alder Lake State Park for the Fourth of July weekend. It wasn’t our first choice since we got a late start on reservations, but the campground actually was pretty nice. The biggest downside was that it was close to Hwy 7 which is the western entrance to Mt. Rainier, but the traffic died down a bit at night and the fan in the camper drowned out the noise.
September 11 Retrospective
I was in my senior year at Purdue and it was going to be a big day. It was the start of a two day job fair out in Memorial Mall on campus. John Deere had recently told me that although they wanted to hire me after my internship, they couldn’t because of a hiring freeze. That put me into a bit of a tail spin and I felt that I really needed to come out of that job fair with some solid options.
The first I heard about the attacks was when I went down for breakfast. One of the ladies who worked there was a friend of Grandma Hinkle so we always had a little chat when we saw each other. She told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, but since she didn’t seem too concerned, I didn’t think much of it. I was picturing a little Cessna that had an accident or something along those lines.
I took the food back up to my room and flipped on the TV. That’s when I saw how devastating it actually was. A few minutes later, I watched the second plane crash and then the towers crashed.
Looking back now, I don’t think I realized how big of an event this was. It doesn’t seem possible now, but watching on a little TV screen with so many unanswered questions, it didn’t bring the same feeling that it does now. I knew it was a big deal, but I had no idea who was behind it or what would follow in the coming years.
So I suited up and head out to the job fair armed with resumes. The first thing I noticed was how quiet campus was. Purdue has one of the busiest airports in the Midwest (in terms of touchdowns and landings, mostly from small planes), but there wasn’t anyone in the sky. When I got to the job fair, it was a bit chaotic. Some company employees were on the phone with their loved ones or their home office trying to figure out if they should stay or go. The armed forces booths were being hurriedly packed up. Trains seemed to be the transportation of choice, but people from the west coast were left wondering if they should just start driving because the train tickets were quickly snatched up.
A majority of the companies stayed at the job fair. I ended up getting a few good interviews that resulted in some job offers, but in terms of world events, that was far from the most important thing that happened.
Later in life, I would meet people who were actually in the city at the time, see a lot of friends head off to the ensuing wars, and visit the site of the old towers a few times. It still brings back a wide variety of emotions and I can’t see that ever changing. I wonder if this is how Pearl Harbor felt. Are they comparable? Was Pearl Harbor scarier for the average citizen because of the small amount of information? Was 9/11 worse because we had so many data streams coming in everywhere we looked? I think about people like my grandparents who lived through both of them and wonder how they connect the two events. I’ll have to ask Grandpa and Grandma about this at Christmas.
After writing that paragraph, I went back and read what I wrote on the day it happened. Most of my post seems to be about how this event was much worse than Pearl Harbor. I don’t know if I agree with that anymore, but I’m so glad that I took the time to write down some thoughts on that day. It doesn’t really matter which one was worse. They were both terrible in their own right.
I’ve included a few of the videos below. Posting images of this seems to be taboo in our culture, but I think it’s important for us to see it happen and remember back to those first few minutes of horror and confusion. Put aside your politics and just watch these…