Greg In The Desert

Last fall, I threatened that I would have the master bathroom completed by the end of the winter. Here it is spring and I did almost nothing to the bathroom. I have a variety of excuses that I wont go into now, however I did finally make some actual progress on it this weekend.

Before I can do anything I need to install the pocket door. Before I install the pocket door I need to relocate the wiring that exists on the wall where the door goes.

The wiring consists of power in, a wire to the lights controlled by a switch and a power out to a outlet. The good news is the wiring was easy to move to the next wall, it was loose in the attic and there was plenty of room to move it. I thought I would leave the outlet unpowered for now, until I figured out how I was going to rewire everything, apparently the wire to the outlet is also hooked up to the living room.

Now I have a problem that I need to wire that outlet back up, so i have Romex running along the other side of the bathroom along up to the switch. It looks pretty messy and dangerous in the pictures, I know. Trust me it’s safe and temporary.

I need to decide how to wire up a exhaust fan, will it go near the light switch or near the toilet? I also need to figure out if I’m going to use a fancy digital shower control. If so It will use the power from the outlet then I can wire it up properly.

Finally I can install the pocket door. I have the studs marked to cut down, but I’m waiting for some friends to come by and verify my measurements before I screw it all up. I will save the pocket door install for another post.

Teal is a simple paint and drawing application. I don’t know how many people have asked me for a basic drawing application for MacOS X that is like MacPaint (ah, the good ol’ days). Teal seems to do a good job of filling the void, it’s not a $400 photo manipulation program yet it still has some modern tools beyond the more simple tools that MacPaint had. Teal has a variety of brushes, some cool effects and allows you to save in JPG and PNG file formats. It is missing a text tool, you have to copy and past text from another application which can be tedious. I have no doubt they will address this in a future version. It also uses standard MacOS X widgets for color selection and etc, which is a good thing.

Teal is still in beta and free. No indication if they plan to charge for it, but $20-$30 seems reasonable. Apple should bundle this program with all of their Macs.