My parents went out for dinner......

.... and all I got was this satay peanut sauce, cucumber and
onions. The stall ran out of satay so late in the night, you
see. And I have left the lemang lying there for hours, which
became hard. Anyway, with Wife and the kids away to
her sister's till tomorrow, I am practically home alone. And
I am so lazy to cook a simple spaghetti meals too. Been
stuck in front of the Notebook since I came back from
the Office. This is to satisfy my need as there were no
Internet here for the past few days due to a password
problem. I could have spend the time better by watching
Star Trek DVDs as there is a project I am supposed
to start soon.......

What we did today

And so, the good news is, we get to renovate the office! I noticed that there is a sort of pattern where every two years or so, we either move office or reposition our tables. But this time,we're doing an in-house renovation!

There are a lot of changes but for now, I will concentrate on my (or our) Technical Dept. For the whole of the morning, we were busy preparing the framework for the partition walls. From an outside point of view, it looks very simple:

1) Lay the metal frames on the floor, drill a hole and put the screw in.
2) Lay the metal frames on to the wall, drill a hole and put the screw in.
3) Lay the metal frames on the ceiling, drill a hole and put the screw in.

Easy, right? Not really.

First, you have to make sure that the metal frames are properly aligned so that the walls would be solid later on. In order to do this, there are various method with lasers being one of them. However, in the absence of the tool, we went old-school, using strings with pendulum and a water hose. The latest would be to buy a "rocket" which has all the laser lines. You just align your metal frames onto the laser lines and that's it. Saves a lot of time too.

Part of the wall/frame is ready. By next week, we will
take stock of the partition boards. There will be a little
perspex window so that we can make faces at the clerk.

This crimp tool is used to mate the two pieces of metal
frame together. Punches a small rectangle and then
the leftover flaps from it will be used to clamp them.
Something like a reverse stapler. You cannot use a
rivet tool here because the holes are round and so,
the pieces would flex a lot. Unless you use a lot of
rivets. But this would mean drilling a lot of holes for
the rivets which would take a lot of time.

While everyone learns and try their hand
at making the wall, myself included, I also
used the cutter and the crimping tool to
make myself a little phone holder to put
in the car. Its far from finished but this is
to show you how easy to make something
with that crimp tool. (And also it shows
how long I skived on the job......Ha ha ha)