The boxes are landing, bit by bit.
The floors are done! This is the original flooring from '48.
The Petrs are finishing up the moulding. There are only a few details left in their part of the project.
And in other news, my phone saga keeps on giving! Our long-standing number was successfully transferred to the new house after much gnashing and wailing; sometime last week we noted with surprise that our answering machine appeared to have ceased picking up. Calls to the number were not picked up in test calls, and tonight I finally had the bright idea of calling the number while looking at the phone. No ring - but a busy signal!
To my aggravation, when I picked up the phone to call my cell, the number that registered on caller ID was some number I had never seen or heard of. Qwest verified with me on the phone that this was some sort of error and will investigate. Argh.
Upon inserting the Elph's 1gb card into my card reader, only a subset of the files I knew were there appeared in the Mac OS. Upon reinserting the card into the camera and hitting playback, I was pleasantly informed that there was "No File."
So I shot some more test pix.
I had been planning a card experiment anyway, as Viv has been pestering me to learn how to get pictures from her phone, a Nokia 6220, on to her computer. When I bought the phone, it was supported by iSync; now, however, it is not, and in fact, there is no Google-able solution for easy data exchange to the Mac with this phone at the moment.
(Unless, by now, there is! via burning paper. crazy!)
The phone is much mocked for the idiotic placement of the SD card, buried deep beneath the battery, so even should this methodology work it's less than desirable.
Happily, her card read fine and I was easily able to grab all the video and pictures from it. Unhappily, sometime in June, she started shooting to the internal storage of the phone. The phone does provide a mechanism to shift photos from the internal storage to the card, but only one at a time, and the procdure requires several button presses to complete for each image.
Once this had been attended to, I reinserted the Canon's card.
Once again, the dreaded words: "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in 'IMG_0001.JPG' could not be read or written." Sigh. Looks like I need to do some research, or maybe actually insert the Canon-supplied software disc. At least this time it didn't nuke the images.
You know, I'm just gonna quote Fantagraphics Head Shill Eric Reynolds in full.
"It's Here:
Alas, he provides no buying link. Also, I'm puzzled by ecto's willy-nilly use of offsite image embedding. I should fix this, but instead will sleep.
Wednesday is the projected completion date on the remodel. They started setting the moulding saturday, and should have gotten at least two coats of clear finish onto the floors today, for a final sanding tomorrow and cleanup on Wednesday. It's moving time.
Say, my server may be down; shoot!
(It appears I was correct, btw. something bumped my router off the 'net at about 11pm.)
Jon Konrath appears to have apologetically assembled a thoroughly interesting holiday booklist. I shan't be setting MasterCard to bookspine for quite a bit given the move (20 boxes of bound matter and counting), but Konrath's unfazed by his, it seems.
As I impatiently waited for my Treo to complete an interminable media sync, I idly wondered where the pda's usb datacable was. Perhaps it had wandered to the deepest inner reaches of my bedside table.
As I peered into the murk, what should I spy but the formerly lost D'image camera. I am a fool.
ah geez, too much to cover.
- remodel in final stages
- spoke to parents
- transient business problem resolved
- new camera in hand (elph 450, pace jon)
- move started
- lawn mowed again
- met neighbor's mother and ex-homeowner
The night before Thanksgiving, while out carousing with a subset of the usual reprobates, I appear to have lost the Minolta D'image that i so valued for its' image quality and movies. Front runner for replacement is a current-gen Elph, but the proprietary rechargeable battery gives me pause.
This also means I have to bust out the feared Kodak to document the end of the house project until I can finalize my camera decision.
No sooner did I read Tom's interesting analysis of his decision to go back to wintel for his laptop needs than I am presented with a low-space dialog regarding this laptop's internal 70gb drive. Tom notes that from his perspective, Powerbook HDs are not upgradeable. As someone who once performed a hard-drive upgrade on an original iBook, my bet is that upgrades are actually possible, but a giant pain in the neck.
Some research on the subject, for reference. Interestingly, most of this info clearly concerns older Powerbooks.
On our way to Scott and Jaye's for Thanksgiving dinner, we dropped by the house to take a look at the floors. Petr had sanded them yesterday and we wanted to see the color.
(Last night I misplaced our camera, so no pix today, sorry.)
To our surprise, we found Petr hard at work, puttying the floors in preparation for final sanding. I told him three times that he should go home and be with his family, but he wouldn't hear of it!
watching tonight's PBS Katrina doublheader has me thinking about a miscellany of things I need to do to the outside of the house, such as assessing the soundness of some weathered boards up on the roof and replacing some wood that's gotten turned to mud by poor gutter placement.
On the phone the other night, Mom mentioned that my current bedside tome, Bill Vollmann's Europe Central, won the National Book Award for fiction. It clearly deserves it, as thus far I find it to be the most accessible thing of his I've yet read. It may be a tad too accessible in a way, as I so enjoyed puzzling out the secrets of The Jamestown Booke, but on the other hand I have had, cumulatively, nearly an hour or so over about three months to read the damn thing as I drop off, so perhaps it's for the best.
I am quite enjoying it, honestly. Congratulations, Mr. Vollmann! This is but the first oof many valuable celebratory bestowments! Unless, of course, it's not.
Our credit union sold our mortgage as soon as we closed; I was not unprepared for this but I had a self-deluding hope that I would still be accessing Alaska USA customer service personnel instead of EvilBankAmeristates. The real pisser for me is that I can't just transfer money from my main account ot my loan account.
I can't possibly describe my anger. God, this pisses me off. I did, I acknowledge, sign the paperwork. I hate. I hate. I hate. Oh, I hate.
You know, looking at the postmark on the old Russian stamp and comparing it to the Hungarian one leads me to believe that the stamp must have been postmarked in 1901, possibly in October. THis is because the Russian postmark reads "1 X 07.6" while the Hungarian one reads "68 VII. 1..." and I immediately read it as July, 1968; this was influenced by the fact that the room it was found in was built sometime in 1968, presumably during the summer.
We found the Hungarian stamp first, before we realized that a stamp collector must have lived in the house.
It occurs to me that I could easily find out more about the history of our home, as the house directly behind us was just sold by the only tenant it ever had up to today, and our neighbor spoke to her at some length.
Our contractors gave us a finish date of next Tuesday. Viv and I have finally begun to pack. Alas, the apartment is too messy for me to shoot QTVR panoramas, a fault I will no doubt woe and rue as the century unspools about my feet.
I am excited about the new house, but this apartment is the only place I have ever lived that I truly loved for its' architecture. It is more or less the exact place I visualized living in as a grown-up when I was a teenager, and it's just killing me to go.
What's different about the apartment from the place I imagined?
Well, there's no sun in the place, at all, year round.
It's an apartment, not a house, and the upstairs, when rented, is nearly always rented by loud persons with enough money that they tend to be somewhat careless as neighbors.
The walls of the space lack sound insulation, which means we hear much too much of our neighbors' lives.
The single-pane lead glass leaks heat like a sieve, and the consequence of this and oddball ventilation is a constant battle with mold.
There's no real fireplace, just a really neat model of one.
The neighborhood is currently subject to urban woes, and is loud and stress-inducing all year 'round.
Still, a year from now, I will miss this place like a dead friend.
Well, using Uploadr, I was able to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr. For some reason, FlickrExport is still uncooperative.
Here are some of the pix you can see over at my Flickr page:
After repeated rounds of yelling, begging, emailing, and so forth, my ISP went right ahead and sent out a second router of the exact same model. I'm unimpressed, and still lack parity with pre-move services.
We found and hauled a clawfoot tub Saturday around noon. Thanks to Greg and Stacey for the loan of the truck!
Saturday evening, Petr began to lay the floor.
A Nationalist Chinese stamp, I think. Pre-forties?
This is the most interesting of the stamps we found in the house. It appears to be a Russian 20-kopek stamp from 1899 or thereabouts. The cancellation reads "Nikolais" and "1 X 07.6."
This lovely one is Hungarian, and the cancellation is from 1968.
sorry, folks, something's awry between iPhoto and flickrexport this evening, so no photo updates on flickr for a while.
It's too bad, really. We found some stamps in the house, one of which appears to be a russian 20-kopek stamp dating to 1889.
Well, I think I found my first Tiger app incompatibility: The Missing Sync. I've downloaded the last version 4 update and have a $25 upgrade coupon for 5, so I might just spend the dough.
The interior painting on the house is basically done. That leaves the laying of the new floor, refinishing the old one, and retrimming the rooms. They'll definitely be done by the end of the month. Looks like renting a sanding suite for the old floors will run about $100 a day; the provisioners both speculated that the sanding should only take a day. Here's hoping.
On the way up to the house this morning, we drove by a house which we'd looked at in Wallingford, a beat-up but still handsome craftsman. On the median by the sidewalk was a de-footed claw-foot tub, clearly set out for hauling. We pulled into a neighboring drive to ask if we could haul it away, and the new homeowner was happy to let us do so. Viv didn't think she could lift it with me, so I called a few friends to see if I could borrow them for a few moments. I struck out, but Greg and Stacey were kind enough to loan us their truck.
As it turned out, Viv was able to assist sufficiently that we were able to get it into the truck with no problem. From haunting salvage stores lately, we were well-versed in the going rates for claw-foot tubs, and nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than a good dumpster find.
Several months ago in Now Playing I published a long piece about Star Trek fan films, for which I spoke with several persons from various Trek fan projects. Today, when Wired arrived, I was amused to note a cover-featured story about one of these projects in particular, the East Coast-based New Voyages.
The laptop did successfully resurrect, and so far i haven't run into any application compatibility problems. I haven't had the time or inclination to explore the bells and whistles. I suppose the one I want to demo most strongly is videoconferencing in iChat, which I am sure I will be able to explore with Eric and my dad. However, at the time that Tiger was released, I recall reviewing the hardware requirements and concluding that the in-house hardware did not support the feature to an acceptable degree, and will not for some time to come.
UPDATE: light text on dark background font smoothing in Tiger SUCKS.
the machine's made it past the startupscreen this time. I'm still hearing massive disk thrash.
Crap, I picked up a Mac-centric disk-repair tool within the last couple years, um, DiskWarrior. Hope I don't have to figure out where the discs are, given the move.
So, it seems as though my laptop's OS upgrade may have hosed something, given that I have been awaiting a completed reboot for well over an hour.
If only I had two hours to rub together.
Hooray! We got back to the apartment just in time for me to run down and pick up the new Mini box, which in due time will be the server. Of course, I'm not sure what monitor to hook it up to on the dry run, so it will have to wait a bit, I fear.
I hope.
Looks like we're back in business!
I'm sure my mail config will have to be hacked upon, as I reacll having to do something bruteforce with a dependency that referenced "localhost" but I am also considering chucking the self-admin bit vis-a-vis mail anyway.
As will quickly become apparent, I have been blogging the whole time we were down, since October 27.
ETA of new server is tomorrow. I spoke to the ISP, having received no update on IPs, and indeed, no notes were added to the case.
What do you call a workday that begins at 6 am and ends at 8 pm?
In other news, we bought the floor for the house's large family room over the weekend, about $1.5k, in a thicker-plank red oak than the existing oak that was under the carpets. On the whole, the remodel is on track to go over our hoped for budget, but not ridiculously so, and the pace that our contractors are keeping is stunning, measured by the yardstick of hearsay.
My mom's birthday was Sunday, and I called minutes before her midnight, from work.
On Saturday Viv and I had lunch with League brothers Manuel and Jeff and ex-Seattleite daymented, and afterwards took them over to the house to see the remodel in person. It was great to see all of them and interesting to have guests at the house, dust, remodelers, and all.
An oddity about the weekend was that each day was scheduled to within an inch of its' time, beginning at 8am and ending at 10 or so, and none of my activities involved alcohol.
On sunday, Viv and Spence and I also went to see "Magnificent Desolation," a Tom Hanks / Ron Howard 3-D IMAX film about the moon landings. It was pretty good, but I was preoccupied. At least I did note with pleasure that the movie dealt directly with the problems the filmmakers had set for themselves: a) re-enactments of Moon-landings beg the re-enactors to address the Capricorn One scenario (pace OJ) and b) the much-remarked-upon single most distinguishing optical feature of the Moon's surface is a lack of long-range dimensionality, calling into question the wisdom of such endeavors as, oh, as 3-D film concerning lunar exploration.
There were indeed, I'm happy to report, some wonderful, intimate 3D sequences covering such things as lunar rover travel, the landing process and suiting up for lunar EVA, and a lovely postmodern remastering of the LEM's lunar liftoffoff. Alas, though, I was too preoccupied to properly focus on the film.
My ISP finally deigned to provide service and apparently I am now the proud owner of yet another new router and, according to the service person, "one IP address." This, of course, make me insane with rage, but having worked such a long day, the form it takes is restricted to involuntary eyelid twitches. I have considered contracting these twitches out to Danelope, as he is ever so much more amusing when fueled by irrational hatred, but have declined to do so, on the grounds that he should actually purchase them from me as an ancillary inspirational resource.
Shortly, as well, the new whybark.com box should arrive. It remains an open question when I will have the time to configure email and web and database dervishes on the device.
In conclusion, why can't I receive my hard-copy New Yorker on Mondays? It would give me something to look forward to.
My day of rest involved eight hours of work! Not counting the hour it took to buy a floor and the hour to see a movie.
When you've been awakened in the night by your beloved kitten ferociously gnawing on the still-warm, headless corpse of a rat while crouching on you, purring loudly, the world changes.
Week two of the remodel and the check I just wrote tells me we'll be over budget. Still, we're asking for a lot and I do think we have a shot at getting it in before Thanksgiving. Tomorrow we're looking at floors all morning, starting early.
There's a store near where I live that advertises Seattle's largest selection of imported beers. I'd guess the claim is true. I found several beers I've been looking for for some time on an inaugural visit. The selection is grouped by country, as in a wine shop, and offers extensive tasting notes fluttering from the shelves. I'm looking forward to regular visits.
The ISP says they will have a site visit implemented on Monday. Here's hoping.
I awakened at 3:48 am in a cold sweat brought on by an anxiety dream about a friend's blog. The friend posted about an friend of his who, he'd learned that day, was killed in a freak funeral-home accident, when she was pulled through what appeared to be a band saw, by the three-dimensional Quicktime VR of the decendent's neatly halved corpse my dream visualized posted on my friend's blog. Accompanying this extremely disturbing product of my slumbering mind was a video clip of the dead young woman, speaking about her relationship with her job at the funeral home.
How do you people stand living in your own skulls? I really don't think I'm that different from most of you, but I fear and dread my own mind, my dreams, my body, and my soul. I've been insistently told that this is not how it has been for most of we language-using apes over the ages, but to my ear. the assertions ring falsely strident, carrying a kind of desperation which ultimately I find unconvincing.
Still, I would much rather not have had the experience above that I recount here as a result of reliving the memory involuntarily all day.
Excerpted early-return election numbers:
MONORAIL:
Endless gridlock: 28,821, 67%
Monorail: 14,143 32%
I voted for the light rail project for the first time in 1990. It was projected for completion in 1995. Do date, not one track has been laid, and the downtown bus tunnel, which opened that same year with rail built in, is closed, so that they can replace the railbed, as apparently train technology, that hotbed of innovation, has advanced so far in the intervening fifteen years that all-new rails are called for. Seattle is well-positioned to continue its' settled course of becoming just like every other car-choked metropolis in the country. Pray for a crippling recession.
NO SMOKING ANYWHERE IN SEATTLE, EVER, THIS MEANS YOU, YES YOU:
Smoker = shiftless, no-good addict low-lifes: 483,823 63%
Don't be so absurd: 277,107 36%
I challenge you to find a pleasant, pedestrian-oriented street which includes a non-thoroughfare location more than 25 feet from a door. I wonder, are pot-smokers bound by this nonsense? Also, don't sit on the sidewalk, and if poor, please remain south of SeaTac, mmkay? Thx.
Not like I can't understand the votes. The fools that blew through the Monorail money killed the project, no doubt there. And who can possibly defend smoking? It's bad, bad for you, etc. Still, it's legislating morality disguised as a public-health issue.
On Saturday, Petr found a rat hiding in the closet of the new place.
On Sunday I set four traps.
On Tuesday, I found the rat, dead in the one I set by the furnace. The animal did not appear to suffer, as the trap bar landed directly across the brain pan. Happily, there was no mess, apart from the rat's body.
However, there are little bits of rat poop through out the house now. Yick.
In other news, Qwest has finally completed the telephone services migration. Tomorrow, my ISP claims they will show up to configure the router. I'll believe that when I see it.
16 dead in Indiana tornado, 200 injured, more casualties expected in deadliest Hoosier tornado outbreak since April, 1974 (I've written about these tornadoes and my recollections of that April day but, of course, the blog's d own).
Tornadoes in November? That ain't right.
Update: 22 Dead, sayeth the NYT.
I'd love it if I could assemble a workflow for especially my Treo pix which would automatically pick up the pix from the folder they land in at sync, add them to iPhoto, and push them right on out to flickr in a new set with the day's date as the set name.
It would be great to get that going for any arbitrary photo source, toom actually.
Since the Treo (and my other cameras) do not retain or offer rotation data, there's a bit of a pitfall there. But not such a big one. I think setting my privacy defaults on Flickr is a bigger issue than that.
Last week the P-I ran a piece on a bunch of local salvage stores, which have become a primary materials resource for us in the remodel.
The REstore
1440 N.W. 52nd
Seattle 206-297-9119
M-S 9-6
Second Use Building Materials Inc.
7953 Second Ave. S.
Seattle 206-763-6929
Seattle Building Salvage Inc.
330 Westlake Ave. N.
Seattle 206-381-3453
www.seattlebuildingsalvage.com
2nd Floor Store
945 Elliott Ave. W
Seattle 206-933-3032
The NYT writes about Wal-Mart, among others, quaking in their boots at the specter of Google looming on the horizon. Annointed media priestess of the future Esther Dyson prophesies "a huge increase in efficiency" as a result of Google, and others', far-reaching efforts to enable universal ease-of-access to arbitrary data. Efficiency! Ha!
The writer of the article either heard what they wanted to from Ms. Dyson or bought the nonsense whole, as a bit later on the article notes, breathlessly,
Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.
The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google's revenue.
This service is already available independently, albeit imperfectly, and was widely celebrated as an early and impressive Google Maps hack. The site is housingmaps.com. In addition, non-Google players have been rolling a fully--fledged version of this service out for the past year, as evidenced by our largely Redfin-powered house hunt. Redfin is Seattle-based, and I understand that also-regional real-estate programmers HouseValues just unveiled a similar tool, homepages.com.
I did appreciate the tools. I was, indeed, able to consider a seriously larger number of houses than I would have otherwise. But in the end, we invested an estimated twenty hours a week for about six months into the search. Without Redfin, I would have invested a probable five hours a week into the search. How long it would have gone on is unknown, but given the ten-percent-plus monthly cost increases in the market, my estimation is that we would have been flat priced out by February.
My real beef is with the idea that information transparency will bring greater efficiency. We looked at an estimated 120 houses and bid on five. Requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses my sweet-smelling, taut, and perfectly round ass!
As person who has worked in the graphic arts for some time, this incredible, unproductive ballooning of the work needed to produce a given product, be it brochure or mortgage, is quite familiar. When the new tools make it easy to provide the client with a range of options, options increase to fill - and overfill - the time available, to no actual benefit or economic advantage.
Infinite choice is the end result of perfect information transparency. Infinity is the horizon of inflationary event spirals, while the numeral one is the horizon of efficient decision making.
For some reason I got sucked into a decent, if ultimately pointless Ask MetaFilter thread on the problem of evil.
I wrote a post but MeFi went down before I could post it and I didn't want to lose it. So here it is.
---
"transworld depravity?" Ill-mannered skateboard magazine readers? I don't get it.
I think a part of the problem here is attempting to associate culturally-derived values and perceptions with the attempts of cultures to represent an idea which is necessarily beyond culture. If God is eternal and omnipotent and the universe derives from God, our little corner of that universe can't wholly represent or comprehend the nature of God at all.
Additionally, it's clear that what is or is not evil changes depending on the cultural perspective of the perceptor. We tend to associate evilness with torture and murder and so forth; other cultures at other times have associated evil with, oh, porn and gay sex. Still other cultures have sanctified sacrificial murder and even genocide.
A common thread in other posters' attempts to look at the nature of evil in this thread is the acknowledgement of a differentiation between the idea of a world without evil and the world we live in. Evil, then, is apparently seen as a consquence of living in an imperfectible, non-ideal world, which includes suffering and, most crucially, change.
The deistic idea, which posits an extrauniversal reality, eternal, omnipotent, and ideal, must also therefore depict a sort of stasis, where no entropy can effect change. If this gloss is accepted, suffering is a consequence of entropy, of time itself, and therefore will always be with us. Evil may be described as directed suffering, in my view, and as long as humans remain monkeys with complex troop-building and maintenance behavior, some monkey will be suffering at the hands of others.
I took the whybark.com server apart tonight in anticipation of a physical move tomorrow. I expect to configure it Saturday. I sure hope the damn line is up.
Sigh.
On October 27, Qwest disconnected our phone and connected the new line, with a new number, at the new house. I moved the Qwest-provided router to the house and plugged it in, and the router illuminates to a state indicating connectivity.
On November 1, I called Qwest to get our old number restored in the new location. We had to wait until the new POTS number rang through in order to allow them to merely transfer the extant services rather than end and start anew, or so I was told. On November 2, I was told when I placed this second call, the old number would be effective in the new locale. Instead, the new line yields a "this number has been changed" message whilst the old number remains disconnected.
Today I was told that the old number will actually be restored on November 7.
Meanwhile, I placed a call to my ISP, which is not Qwest, and requested that they assign the IPs so that I can get my server online at the new house. I have now called them every morning for three days, and each time I get a different story about the expected delivery date and required actions from them to deliver the service. All I need from them is six IP addresses. They refuse to release these to me until a technician has made a site visit and configured a brand new, quite unnecessary, router.
This morning I was assured that the technician would be on site this afternoon, and that I would get a call from the technician when they were on site. I was hoping to intercept them and get the IPs directly in order to get the whole ridiculous mummery show over with on the sly. I don't need or want a new router. I didn't want or need the last new router. I believe that there must be some way to force the ISP to buy the Qwest-provided router from me. However, my intention is just to reconfigure the Qwest router to match their setup and swap it back so I can stick their junk on the shelf with ALL MY OTHER DAMN ROUTERS.
I have argued.
I have pleaded.
I have been reasonable.
I will call them once more in the morning. After that, I will no longer be reasonable or patient.
Flight Patterns collates FAA flight data, resulting in an aerial map of sorts. Via MetaChat.
For the first time in several days, I did not spend the immediate four hours after work at the new house. Doing so afforded me the following learning experiences:
The wine store remains out of stock on the Swiss white I hunger for since a teen, grown on the shores of Lake Geneva and dry as sandpaper.
I shall dearly miss our current abode, as despite transitory challenges f the neighborhood's fortunes, it truly is the only home I've ever loved. Restoring the new place in the manner of a 1920s take on an 1880s stately home is clearly not something I have the stomach for. Goodbye, box beams.
I, personally, employ flexible and polar definitions of the terms "east" and "west."
A neighbor at the apartment has a kindly open wifi node.
Love is a burning thing.
Our old telephone number, promised to be reactivated by today, remains disco.
Danelope may be interested to learn that Werner Herzog will be in town attending four screenings of his films at the NWFF.
An email from my mother brought the mysterious Mima Mounds of Washington State to my attention.
