We've found yet another salvage store, this one much closer by than the other and offering a wider inventory selection and better prices to boot. We did not locate a used shop table yet, though.
I met our rear neighbor, who bought at about the same time we did. He's about our age and will be living in the home with his elementary-aged daughter. He seemed sympatico and I look forward to getting to know him better.
Lawn: mowed.
Edging: started.
Contractor: engaged.
The contractor made great progress today, nearly completing the removal of the paneling. Viv worked on cleaning the shelves we puled from closets and cabinets throughout the house.
The washer and dryer were delivered but we hit a snag when the leads to the hoses each leaked, in the valve. We had to figure out how to turn the water to the house off (as the gate valves leading to the leads also leaked when engaged), and ended turning it off at the street, since predictably enough the in-house master valve was not only broken-handled but flat-out broken.
I also confirmed that dial-tone is in the good phone jacks, and the DSL router confirms a good circuit, so I'm just waiting on my ISP to execute the move order.
An odd issue cropped up when I noticed survey marks labeled 'TV' running through my yard to the house in the rear, which which we share a driveway. The survey line runs down the interior edge of my side lawn and across a set of concrete stairs which would presumably need to be jackhammered to lay the conduit. I have heard, I think, that Seattle has an ordinance against new above-ground line services, and so this must be from my neighbor (who also just bought their house) calling for cable. Of course, I haven't heard anyone asking for permission to dig up my yard. My inclination is that the line must be laid under the driveway, and not at my expense. The driveway is an exisisting easement, and probably will be more expensive to dig and repave. The main reason I want the cable run in the driveway is to enforce the easement, I think. I really don't want neighbors or cable goons digging up my yard whenever, and if the service is restricted to the easement, we have existing legal documents covering access.
I also don't really want to get off on the wrong foot with my new neighbor. So. It's a bit of a delicate situation. Viv already pointed out to me that I come off as angry and defensive when discussing this, so I will need some practice or something. At the very least I need to determine if it is in fact a city thing that new cable runs must be underground. Because I would not care at all if they strung the cable from the existing service pole in the yard.
We found the same sink that is in our new kitchen, but in white, at a local building salvage operation. It was $15, so we're grabbing it. The current sink is quite worn and features a craptacular shade of chocolaty brown enamel.
Today my sister would have been 35. So not only is it Fitzmas.
I paid my first gas bill today; I can already tell that I dislike the utility company, which is clearly untrustworthy - a six dollar 'convenience charge' to pay via card, an online billpaying option that cancels the paper bill: the unmistakable spoor of evil.
My mail backup service plan appears to be working quite well, thank you, and I was pleasantly surprised by the professionalism and responsiveness this far on the part of my ISP. I initiated my DSL service with a mom-and-pop out of Olympia years ago, and my account has been acquired by a succession of pump-and-dump providers that really did a pretty poor job of providing support - a year or so ago when Qwest altered some technical details of the connection, I had to act as the ombudsman between Qwest and the acquiring party.
Saturday morning we're meeting our contractor at the house. He says two to three weeks. I sure hope so. Maybe this weekend I will be able to mow the lawn.
You know, it's really frustrating when you take the doors of your refrigerator off in order to change the way the door opens from left-to-right to right-to-left and discover that the last part exposed, the base mounting pin, is riveted in place on the carrying plate rather than removable and reconfigurable, like everything else. Which you had just removed, and now must put right back in place.
Also, someone somewhere must have explored the mystic rules or lack thereof which govern or torment the placement of light switches.
In attempting to fathom the plan, or lack thereof, behind the electrical 'system' installed in the new place, I begin to glimpse what I think must be the handiwork of the Old Ones.
A MeFite suggests TCPMP as a video playback method for the Treo. I must admit, I had not considered employing the Treo to face video-capable iPodders. Come to think of it, I still won't.
Qwest informs me that they will be transferring phone and DSL to the new location on October 27. I forecast some dark fiber in my linkfarms. Please bear with us as we navigate the outer reaches of telco provisioning.
Chez FLOG subordinate shill-in-chief Eric Reynolds notes a long profile of house genius Joe Sacco today in the Oregonian.
The Oregonian has a non-PII demographic thingy you click through, and at least for me, insited on throwing up a print dialog on accessing this page; you may wish to print, given that the article is seven pages long as broken up for web publication.
My final weekend count of Home Depot visits appears to be five.
It's unclear if this should remain an index or a high point. I would prefer to plan the jaunts and execute them once per weekend on Saturdays at 8 am.
As I stood in the sun on our shaggy lawn yesterday, I thought, 'Perhaps I should mow it today instead of Sunday - after all, it is the rainy season.'
I dismissed this as an idle thought which was distracting me from other chores and decided to stick to my plan.
I awakened this morning to the soothing sound of steady winter rain.
Today, I put my newfound knowledge to use in the service of self-pauperization, and now own one each of the appliances featured in the previous blog entry.
Also today, I found a child's folding lace fan and the jawbone of a dog (?) in the yard. Pics to come, but I post via bluetooth from the porch. Which reminds me, Viv's hard at work sterilizing the massive mold zone of one of the two inherited refrigerators - I should get to work!
This Yesterday evening, I have learned about washers, and also dryers, and furthermore, about lawnmowers!
One thing I have taken away from my studies is this: appliance prices appear to be tracking the housing market's rise.
Things muses on relics and repositories, with a side of chocolates. The web is like a box of chocolates, you can't stop until you realize you've had too much.
The Shemp Meditation Tape, from the longtime geniuses at WFMU, via one Dr. Alice Dee.
Alice, who loves ya, baby?
Oh man. It's frickin' spiritual, OK?
stacey's finally done it - I am totally jealous of her brand-new very-old letterpress! All I ever wanted to do when I was a kid was set frickin' type, and the goddamn computer blew the jobs right out of the water. Man! I can't wait to play with this thing!
I'd better get some kinda insurance as a motor-driven letterpress is a great way to lose a finger or break an arm, and for some reason, I find myself drinking whenever I go over there. But damn! What a deal!
This weekend, Tom mentioned that Bloglines and NetNewsWire work well together. I had no idea. The key is that you read the bloglines-hosted (redirected?) feeds instead of the feeds directly from the original providers. Hm.
The online help topic at Ranchero, "How to Use Bloglines with NetNewsWire," covers this. Imagine that! Reading the manual to learn how to use a softwares!
In other issues, did AVG can the free version? I cain't lay hand to hide upon it.
Another day, another meeting at the house. This time the contractor, an electrician, did not show up. We walked Karel through the house as well and he will be giving us a painting estimate. We're also waiting on a full-boat contractor's estimate that includes all of the work we need done.
I have noticed that since Saturday, I have used over half a tank of gas. Normally a tank lasts me a month.
NYT: Restoring Slumberland. Peter Maresca's quixotic reprint project restores a selection of Winsor McCay's amazing comic strip to full-size, on newsprint-like stock. The 21" x 16" book is priced at a bargain $120 and was printed in an edition of 5,000. The books are available for purchase via sundaypressbooks.com.
Man, long day. We met a contractor at the new house, ate at Cyndy's Pancake House, showed the house to some friends, and then I picked up Dan, Spence, and Manuel for a League meeting in Georgetown, from which I have just returned.
The video iPod is not yet in Apple stores.
There is an Apple-hosted page on converting or creating video content for your iPod here. In essence, downsize it to spec using Quicktime 7 tools.
There is a page here which covers working with Tivo To Go content, importing and exporting it to and from the DRM the content comes wrapped in. In essence, use one of a few tools to save it as plain MPEG.
Unknown until tested are the undocumented features that may or may not be found in association with the S-Video out port on the new iPod dock; in particular, can the S-Video port support higher-resolution playback than the built-in screen's native resolution of 320 x 240, quarter-VGA. Standard NTSC is 640x480, if I recall correctly.
Finally, will the iTunes store's current podcast support seamlessly allow videobloggers to deliver content? Could an extant podcaster with a currently-supported podcast stream available through the Store slipstream video content to the new device?
Hmmmm.
To my interest and surprise, ebay is chockablock with 1/8" video-input headmounted 'iGlasses.'
Surely Apple can do better than this.
Oh man, flickr is driving me batty. The iPhoto module flickrexport works well, but a) does not successfully apply privacy settings in all cases, at least for me and b) I couldn't get it to upload to an extant group. I only noted this after uploading all 1200 photos from 2004. Upon cursory googling, I found no hint of any large-scale batch management tools for photos uploaded without an assigned group, making it nearly impossible to move all of these photos to one group, and definitely impossible for me to change the privacy settings.
(UPDATE: It appears that for whatever reason the Organizr link 'batch operations' was invisible to me. Dunno If I missed it or if it didn't render in the flash.)
My preferred course of action was to upload everything - five years' worth - into year-long groups, locked down as fully private. Then, I would go though and find what I wanted to unlock.
At the same time as I have been doing this - overnight and so forth - I have been reuploading to my old Gallery install. So far, I'm afraid, old, piggy, runs slow as winter molasses Gallery is beating the pants off Flickr. I can see where once it's all uploaded the incremental updates and sharing features are pretty cool, but geez, if you're a completist pack rat like me it's nearly as fun as going though your deceased family member's forty-nine racks of slides dating back several decades.
I did try Uploadr, but it craps out on me every time somewhere around picture 250. It, at least, creates sets, uploads to existing sets, and accurately assigns permissions.
A while ago I concluded that I had accidentally eaten part of a habanero, a conclusion not embraced by all but one which remains in place in my mind. This belief was reinforced when last night I unthinkingly popped a whole roasted pepper into my mouth and then thought to ask, just as my diaphragm went into convulsions, "Was that a habanero?"
It was. I'm still feeling it. The immediate, five-minute symptoms last night and last May were quite identical. Happily, we were able to flag a waiter down to bring a shot of rum in short order. The rum was quite helpful.
Stacey has a delicious sounding bean soup recipe. I imagine I'll skip the whole pureeing nonsense, as the texture of a toothy bean is a sublime thing. If attacked on the grounds of non-puree, i will simply leap behind my Cuban relations.
It's always halloween at my house!
Also, sometimes I try to post several thousand photos at a time to flickr, which makes me swear and cuss.
Also also, it seems that flickr and MT don't always see eye to eye, imagine that.
NYT: Google, Comcast hanker after AOL.
A little bird told me about some impending uncertainty at AOL. I wonder if this news would have a positive or negative impact on that uncertainty?
Yesterday we signed for the house. Viv gets the keys tomorrow morning.
I'm deeply unhappy and upset about it. I feel like I've just murdered someone, a friend. I don't really wish to write about it, but it seems wrong to let it simply pass by without a mention.
Local software company Ranchero just sold its' creamy-smooth RSS reader, NetNewsWire, to RSS agglomeration juggernaut Newsgator. Paid users, TidBITS reports and NewsGator confirms, get a bonus:
As part of this deal, existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will receive a free 2-year paid subscription to NewsGator Online. More details will be announced with the next release of NetNewsWire, which will include advanced features and functions from NewsGator Online.
In theory, wiser persons inform me, that means a full cross-platform blogstream, retaining read state from machine to machine across platforms. Oh man. Two years is surely long enough for Google to shake the crap out of the underwhelming Google Reader.
Thank you Paul for hipping me to NNW at some point in the past year!
The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl runs a long look at the graphic novel, now that it's all grown up (presumably not having really been so twenty years ago on the publication of Maus, or forty years ago on the publication of A Contract with God.
He opens, more or less, with a paean to Chris Ware, who, possibly non-coincidentally, was granted the honor of the cover of the magazine two issues back.
Michael Lewis entertainingly and at length recounts some of the absurdities of his New Orleans flood, and finds reason for hope for his city.
As a part of my multivalent photo-storage disaster, I am finally exporting from iPhoto to Flickr. The flickrexport iPhoto plugin works OK, but I need to export about 150 albums to Flickr as sets with the same names as the albums. Flickrexport allows one to export more than one album at a time, but it does not automatically create the sets on an album-by-album basis.
I suppose the workaround here involves tagging the pics pre-export, uploading the whole schmeer, and then selecting by tags in the organizr to create the sets. That's not quite as big a PITA as uploading the albums as sets one at a time, but it creates a problem in that the work of assigning the tagged pics to sets is time-consuming and subject to interruption and abandonment.
Hm.
UPDATE:
PF sez "try flickruploader."
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the 'albums' directory of my Gallery install - all the albums directories vanished. Alas!
Uh-oh. Regarding 'mv':
As the rename(2) call does not work across file systems, mv uses cp(1) and rm(1) to accomplish the move. The effect is equivalent to:
rm -f destination_path && \
cp -PRp source_file destination && \
rm -rf source_file
Thus the effect of applying 'mv' like this:
mv * /path/to/intended/destination/*
will result in the removal of the files in the destination directory.
oddly, the command was not issued with -r and thus I would have expected it to error out on the first directory it encountered. Shit. Hope one of my ancient backups is about.
if not, back to Galleryadd.pl. Or maybe install G2 from scratch and then do the import.
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the 'albums' directory of my Gallery install - all the albums directories vanished. Alas!
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World takes a moment to note the 50th anniversary of 'Howl'. He notes that he sports a tatoo dedicated to the pome, something that interests me.
Years ago I noticed that the first line of 'Howl' can be disassembled and reassembled, essentially at random, without appreciably diminishing the verbal power of the line. I mused about building a Howl first-line randomizer, but had no idea how to do it. As I sxtarted to write this entry, I realized that now I do know how to do it, easily. But I don't have the time to do it just this second. Bug me about this and I will execute the project, internets!
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
I have minded the generated scenes of my madness, best destroyed
I have maddened the best generation of my sight by destroying minds
I have destroyed my mind by besting generations of maddening sights
I have X the Y Z of my foo bar, baz (by) quux
(cf. metasyntactic variables, for the puzzled)
Editor b has released a 'rough cut' of his evacuation from New Orleans just over a month ago.
Yahoo Acquires Upcoming.org (MetaFilter), Andy Baio's announcement.
Hm, despite Andy's involvement in Upcoming, I never really even bothered to look into it. Looks like I should. I do know that I really want a private, distributed calendaring solution that accepts input from my family, not my "team," and which publishes in multiple formats. Something like iCal if it weren't feature-dead, with event-level and groups-based privacy settings. I want my mom and my wife to know what my chores are and I want to know what city my dad will be in on a given day. I also want to see my mom's upcoming friends-and-relations birthdays. I would even appreciate knowing my parents' evening engagement schedule, for that matter.
Speaking as a man who once gave his wife a Roomba for her birthday, something I doubt she will ever foorget, Litter-Robot, the automatic self-cleaning cat litter box that really works, looks worth investimagatin' if pricey. (Via, um, Tom? I fergit)
(The Roomba has a bum leg at the moment; I was able to diagnose it easily enough but so far the veterinary care instructions, largely involving the use of compressed air, have failed.)
Over on Siffblog, E. Steven Fried notes that the EMP will be showing D. A. Pennebaker's Eat the Document shortly.
I saw the post title and subject and mistakenly took it for a review of No Direction Home; I had been mulling a review of the film myself but think I said I what I had to say, more about the subject than the film, last week as the film aired. Any film by Scorsese is going to offer some critical fodder that relates specifically to Scorsese's themes and work; in this case, I think the theme is Scorsese's greatest theme, that of self-invention. I recall realizing with disappointment that the director was not going to tie Dylan's youthful interest in Civel War-era New York City to his own.
(God! I must be asleep at the wheel! In my correction I misidentified the venue for the film as the NWFF!)
Incredibly, word has belatedly reached me of the wrap on a Darby Crash biopic, which will apparently lead to a Germs reunion tour. Don Bolles, later of Nirvana and in between his Germs time and that with Kurt, was the original drummer for 45 Grave, who also recently were slated for a revenant tour, but have apparently dropped out.
Bolles stayed with me for several days in my freshman dorm room circa 1984 when he was separated from his 45 Grave bandmates. He was reunited with his cadaverous colleagues shortly before my floor's residential advisor approached me about the discarded needles that had unexpectedly begun to appear in the men's restroom facilities. Despite this, I recall my week with Don fondly, as he slept a great deal and embellished my copy of "GI" in black marker before autographing it in behalf of the long-departed Darby.
August Wilson died today, say the wires. Wilson lived in my neighborhood for most of the time that I have, I think. He was a familiar face in the local coffeeshops, most recently Victrola. My recollection is that he wrote much of his work while sitting in these cafes. He always had a yellow legal pad with him, at any rate.
It's interesting that in the Boston.com link above, Mr. Wilson refers to the death of one Gunars Berzins:
He looks around, as if expecting someone to arrive. "Man, where is Gunars?" he asks rhetorically. His friend Gunars Berzins, a self-described "crazy Latvian," died a few days ago at age 74, and Wilson will be attending his memorial service in the afternoon. "He was nutty as a fruitcake, and he was the first person to say he was crazy," Wilson recalls. "He might come down the street singing an aria. `My cat is God! Hitler! Goering! You Bush-whacker!" The arms flail. The eyes twinkle. "`And you! You are the best playwright in the neighborhood!'" Wilson laughs. "Man, I really miss him."
That has got to be the local character I only ever knew as General Scheisskopf, an older man who often wore absurd neo-military getups and constantly ranted and raved about anything and everything. I hadn't really realized that he was gone, but I haven't seen him lately, and now Wilson's gone too.
A few days ago, pbaron offered $200 for a script to export his large Gallery photobase to flickr. It appears he found a supplier.
In related news, sunkencity offers an OS X flickr backup app.Struck by a desire to avoid housework this morning, I hacked up a current-listings set of updating film showtimes for a selected set of Seattle-area theaters over on Siffblog. It's drawn, circuitously, from the customizable movie times listings to be found via My Yahoo, which is why the film links point at Yahoo, and there's no direct ticket-buying link. I may experiment with getting the data from the Google Movie Times page, but that does not yet allow one to exclude by theater.
You can see the list in Siffblog's sidebar. Hopefully I can figure out how to do something like this for SIFF next year, too.
For wahtever reason, Yahoo's RSS initiatives have yet to extend into the Yahoo services heirarchy, meaning that while you can set up a theater-by-theater list of local movie times, you can't easily look at it outside of the My Yahoo website. Happily, Mikel Maron at BrainOff has a little RSS widget up that republishes My Yahoo content as RSS feeds. Ah, sweet, theater-by-theater customizable goodness at last!
