Woodshed

When I bought my place there was an old woodshed on the fenceline. From the looks of things, all of the houses built in the housing estate had them originally, although many have been removed. As my house has central heating, and I have mild asthma, using the wood fireplace in the house is not something I want to do. So the woodshed (full of wood) was just a home for spiders and rats. Last year my parents helped me move all the wood out of the shed onto the nature strip, ready for the hard rubbish collection. Not that that was needed, because the wood all vanished long before the council came round to do the collection!

This year (well, August 2009, which is strictly speaking last year...), I wanted to demolish the woodshed, and put the wood and roofing out for the hard rubbish. My parents loaned me a wrecking bar, and with that, a hammer and a ladder, I got stuck in.


The first step, and the hardest, was to remove the roofing iron. This was complicated by the fact that the roofing iron for the woodshed on the neighbors property, on the other side of the fence, overlapped with mine. I needed to buy some new roofing nails to re-nail the roofing iron for the neighbors woodshed by the time I had finished.



Next step was to remove the slats, and then the framing. Mostly that was just a bit of work, except for the beams that connected into the fence. I had to cut those with a bow saw.


The final step was to haul all of the wood and iron out to the naturestrip for the hard rubbish. I started with the roofing iron. By the time I got back out with the first load of timber, the roofing iron was gone, rust and all! The scavengers move fast around here! The wook took a few days to disappear, but even though it was a bit rotten, it all went before the council came around.

Job done!

Email upgrade

For a long time I have been using Microsoft outlook 2000 as an email client, largely due to inertia. I had it, it worked, why change. Recently I have been having a problem where when outlook shuts down, it doesn't shut down cleanly, making it hard to shut down the PC. So, clearly time for a change.

I had a look at a couple of freeware email clients, and finally settled on Thunderbird, mostly because I was already using firefox. I like the client and the look and feel, but the set up was a bit of a pain. Thunderbird happily imported my outlook folders (which was excellent), but it only imported half the account information. It didn't bring across the username/password, and it didn't provide any option to add them to the account it had imported. In the end, I deleted the existing mailbox and created a new one. The automated setting detection got the wrong info, but the manual setup (referring back to outlook for the correct settings) eventually worked.

The second part to replace was the Outlook calendar. It turns out that Mozilla also have a calendar app, called Sunbird. There is also a version called Lightning which is an add on to Thunderbird. I tried Lightning first, and found that the latest full release available on the Mozilla site (0.9) doesn't work with the latest version of Thunderbird that I had just installed. So I went back to Sunbird, which works fine.

I can see why people who are not computer savvy would have problems getting things working, given the amount of stuffing around I needed to do.

Still, now things are up and running it is looking good. And I can't argue with the price!