Make your own Smoke-Free QuitMeter. The latest simple productive product from the Haqur Labs. ^_^

I’ve had a lot of requests for the Ticker Factory ripoff script I made as well as a few requests for new tickers so I made a Smoke-Free QuitMeter.

This ticker or QuitMeter or Banner, whatever you prefer calling it, will count down to your quit date and then start counting up. It’s very simple. It simply shows you how many cigarettes you have yet to smoke or have avoided and how much money you are losing or saving.

I owe a thanks to Garf for fixing up the CSS for me and to Erin Leadbetter for helping dig up some icons and making suggestions pertaining to how the quit smoking banner generator should work. If you would like to use the quit smoking (quitmeter) banner generator on your site just request it in a comment and I will email the current version source code to you otherwise everyone is free to generate and use as many banners as they like. If you have any suggestions, please leave them. It’s not for the lack of trying but I overlook a lot of simple things like the fact that my original ticker script counts negative numbers after the count down date has arrived. I’ll be fixing that today.

I live in an old-school house that’s been converted into 5 apartments. I’ve lived in these apartments on and off for the last 4 years. Unfortunately, the owners died and the children had to take it over but none of them live in state so they hired me to managed the place. About three or four months ago the wet pipe fire sprinkler system we have networked through the house froze in the loft apartment (mine) which caused one of the spinklers to bust off from the pressure. When the sprinkler broke it didn’t take long for the sprinkler system to dump 10,000 gallons of water into the loft apartment. Gravity took over from there and needless to say the apartments got pretty jacked up.

My apartment, the loft (3a), was a pretty simple fix. Since everything from the cieling to the floor is tounge in groove hard wood paneling it really didn’t take too much of a beating. I had to rip up all the carpet and replace the drywall in the closet. Not so bad.

The apartment below me to the east side (3) was left relatively unscathed. Just some minor stuff here and there. Again, not so bad.

The apartment below me to the west side (2) took some serious damage. I’ve been spending the afternoons in there tearing out all the drywall, ripping up carpet, replacing trim, and just cleaning up the mess in general. It sounds lame but I’ve never really done any construction work at all until this project. I’ve hammered a few nails here and there, tacked up some shingles, and installed insulation but going into an apartment to tear it apart and put it back together is definately a first for me. It’s a lot of work but we are already putting on new drywall and making things look good so it shouldn’t be long until we have apt2 finished. All this carpentry style work is getting me excited to start tearing up my own house. I spend way too much time just sitting behind a computer monitor.

After we (I got some friends that actualy work construction jobs helping me) finish the 2nd story apartment on the west side (2) we have to re-do a whole bedroom in the ground floor apartment on the west side (1) and then finish the job by re-modeling nearly the whole apartment on the ground floor west side (4). It’s a whole shitload of work but it has to be done and if I can learn how to not skrew up my own house learning from the guys that I’m working with on this then hell yeah. The only bummer part about this job is I don’t have the budget to put all the cool gadgets and tricks into the apartments as I would if I owned them.

If I’m still motivated to put in all the work I have been in the afternoons on another place after the apartments are done I would definately consider purchasing one of the homes around here (with help from a few buddies who will actualy know how much work will be involved) and fixing it up. I always hear about people doing that kind of thing and turning the houses around to make a little money. I’m not sure if I’m going to burn out on this after the apartments are done or not but either way i have definately realized I need to get into more physical work. Sitting behind a computer all day hacking shit out only to go home and sit behind a computer to chat and code has been wearing on me and the idea of just simply excersizing is numbing. Feeling productive has always been great motivation for me. I’ll put up some pictures of the final product when we are done. I forgot to take pictures of the wretched mess before we started.

Happens to everyone… At the moment I’m enjoying it.

Here’s the lineup…

Zippy the Unskrewer

Josh the thinker

Roy the Builder

An unfinished product

A couple pictures of the final product.

It’s a little lopsided but I like it. Cost like $25 although we ended up getting the bulk of the wood from Roy after realizing how jacked up the stuff I got was. lol. Fun stuff.

Hehe. At work I was just assigned two interesting projects. Here they are in order of importance.

#1 - A new PBX system for our office. I’ve been waiting for them to ask me to do this. Our copper phone system is probably older than I am. We’ve got a fistfull of relatively lame meridian 3 line phones with a meridian PBX right now. Extremely simple, no frills, boring. Since elections are comming I’m just going to add a couple phones to get us by but after the election I believe I will be switching everything over to VOIP within the office. Asterisk will run the show. Any tips for a complete newbie?

#2 - A recording studio. I get to setup a recording studio somewhere upstairs. I’ll build a room, setup the equipment & go gonzo. With the new Diebold TSX machines for voters with a handicap of sorts we now must record all the ballots for the machine to play back in human voice. I am a complete newb to this idea as well but it should be a great project to get me half way knowledgable. Anyone have any tips for cost effective sound deadener? I will also be learning about & hunting down decent sound recording equipment. We will be starting with a simple microphone + PC setup but will most likely need to upgrade immediately into some quality equipment. Any tips or ideas?