Piqued

Teri and I love our house, but one thing that is lacking is storage space.  There is no attic and the closets are packed.  When my dad visited recently he suggested installing some shelves above the garage door, since there’s a fair bit of space between the door’s rails and the ceiling.

So I began doing some research and although there are plenty of metal off-the-shelf options, and even a clever DIY scheme using totes, ultimately I figured I could build something more spacious for a lot less money if I just built it from scratch.

After bouncing some ideas off my dad, I settled on a design that was cost-effective, sturdy and not too heavy.  I used mainly cheap 1×2 and 1×3 lumber and 1/4” OSB to build the shelves, and then built some hangers using 2×4s fastened to the ceiling joists (which happen to be made of 2×4 floor trusses, which probably isn’t quite as strong for hanging as a 2×8 or something, but better than the manufactured I-beams that are also in use).

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Update:

I must retract most of this post.  Although I do feel that I am somewhat less jittery after giving up aspartame, the main symptoms (throbbing in my ear a la pulsatile tinnitus) are back.  Still trying to find the cause…echocardiogram and MRI/MRA both came back clean, so the search continues.

Original:

Aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in most diet drinks and sugarfree gum, has long been the subject of controversy, with plenty of websites dedicated to exposing the dangers of this man-made chemical food additive.

Although the FDA and other government food regulatory agencies stand by their ruling of aspartame as safe in the quantities found in food, in my personal experience I believe the risks outweigh the benefits.  This may not be true for everyone, and I ingest far less of it than those who drink diet soda everyday without any serious side effects, but I recently concluded that I do in fact respond to aspartame in a bad way.

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I finally spent a couple hours tonight upgrading Wordpress to the latest version and picking out a much nicer theme for Piqued. A much-needed change I think…hope you like it! Props to my friend Marcelo for inspiring the change, since his theme put mine to shame .

I apologize that captcha is now required for commenting, but the comment spam I had to dig through was getting pretty overwhelming.

The boring old Worldview.BrianFrantz.com page has been redesigned and reorganized.  I’m still working on the final video, but at least for now the existing videos should be laid out better!

You may have noticed that several of the links accessible from the drop-down menu above have gone to placeholder pages with estimated times of completion that have already passed.  Well, I’m happy to say I’ve gotten back to working on this site, and the first addition has already been rolled out.

Feedback.BrianFrantz.com is up and running and ready for users to register.  I don’t expect there to be a lot of commotion on the forums right now, but the registration is for more than just the forum.  The login scheme that used to exist on the Photography Portfolio site has been replaced with the Feedback login, so in order to download the larger wallpapers, you’ll need to register at Feedback.  It doesn’t require any more information than the old registration scheme, and is more secure and feature-rich.

I’m also planning to make blog comments only available to registered members, to get rid of the comment spam that comes in waves every couple of weeks.

Now that I have the feedback forum in place, I’m hoping to tackle the Worldview site soon, as well as finish the final video in the How Great Thou Art series.  Once that’s finished, I hope to finally put together the Reaching Up Productions page, though that may be a while.

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