spent the afternoon into the early evening helping my father replace the old fixtures on the antique ledge-back bathroom sink. we even went to home depot after dinner to look for parts (large washers) - not realizing they close early today at 7:00. but the faucet works better than ever now, with the only caveat being we have to adjust the knobs a little bit (something to do with disaligned washers), so sometime in the near future we'll need to pull out the sink again to make the fix.

i'd rooted the coolpad F1 8297w phone this afternoon with a chinese copy of vroot (now known as iroot v1.7.9.10454). when i returned home, i spent the rest of the evening up until 3:00am researching and then flashing the ROM on the phone after i successfully updated the recovery software to CWM. i went with a stock AOSP 4.4.2 just to see if it can be done. it worked flawlessly, including google go, which was the one feature my father wanted on his phone that he couldn't get before. the only downside is now it looks like all my other rooted tablets and phones. i plan on trying out a few other ROMs (MIUI, CoolLife 5.5, Baidu OS - all china ROMs since the phone itself is a china import) to see if i can get google go to work on them as well.