The sixth step is now complete. This part was actually divided into a number of smaller steps to complete the walls of the dome. This entry is going to have a lot of pictures to show various stages of this rather complex construction.
This step required approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes to complete.
The fifth step is now complete.
This step took about 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete. It was made simpler by completing all four of the towers at the same time.
With adding the towers to the base it is starting to take shape.
The fourth step is now complete.
This step took 2 hours and 50 minutes to complete. Again, it was a lot of rummaging through bags to find the correct pieces. Building both copies at the same time helped substantially as the parts necessary for both sections were either in the same bag or similar bags.
This step completes the base or lower section of the structure.
The next step will be to add the corner towers.
It’s only four days into 2009 and it is snowing again. There isn’t much coming down right now. But it is snowing. My wife and I like it. Our son the college student isn’t very happy about it. Something about having to drive back to Wazzu in the snow in a couple of days …
The third step is complete. This step included building two copies of one of the corners of the base.
This step took 2 hours and 50 minutes to complete. Again, it was a lot of rummaging through bags to find the correct pieces. Building both copies at the same time helped substantially as the parts necessary for both sections were either in the same bag or similar bags.
It’s New Year’s Day 2009 and there are still remnants of the unusual snow of December 2008 in my front yard. Granted, the remnants are just piles of ice that were shoveled out of the driveway. They persist nonetheless. That’s 16 days by my count (December 17, 2008 through January 1, 2009). Most areas of Longivew proper have been devoid of snow for several days. Most of what remains is piles of snow scraped off pavement … like I have.
We had up to 12 inches of snow on the ground here at the house at one point. I’m sure that broke some sort of record for the area. Longview doesn’t have an official mechanism for tracking snow depth.
This is a test posting from my iPhone using the WordPress iPhone application. This posting was much simpler than the original test post using the phone’s Safari browser.
The second step is complete. This step is the center of the back side.
This step took approximately 2 hours and 50 minutes. Again, the time on this step was mostly de to the hunting through all of the bags to find the pieces.
This very first step required 32 pieces from 5 different bags. Twenty of the pieces came from the same bag.
The completed assembly.
This step took about 2 1/2 hours to complete. Most of the time was simply spent looking for the pieces. Part of that might be because I refuse to dump all of the pieces out.
While developing this morning on my Windows Vista Home Premium system this morning I came across an unexpected error message when trying to delete a folder through Windows Explorer. This was unexpected because, as a software developer, I’ve deleted thousands of directories over the years using Windows Explorer. I also always run as a user with admin rights. (Yes, I know this is bad, but that’s what I do.)
Naturally, I tried the “Try Again” button a few times. I even tried cancelling the operation and restarting. None of these troubleshooting steps worked.
A web search through Google didn’t reveal anything really useful. Most postings suggested that the user didn’t own the folder and, therefore, didn’t have enought rights to delete the folder and that the user should “take ownership” of the directory that they were attempting to delete. This wasn’t particularly helpful in my situation as my user account was the one responsible for creating the directory in the first place.
I solved this particular problem by engaging in good troubleshooting practices. I drilled in through the directory tree to the files that it contained. I deleted each file. I then deleted each directory up to the one I had originally tried to delete. Magically I was then able to delete it. Since the problem only involved two files and two directories it wasn’t a big deal.
There must be a reason behind this error message, but it isn’t obvious from the title, any of the text, or any of the buttons within the dialog.