We now have telephone numbers for our Ohio house, and a promise of DSL no later than 9/11. Things are starting to move along!
Why bellsouth is my favorite phone company
For some reason, our home phone stopped working. I called BellSouth. Did they play their usual crappy music-on-hold? They did not. Instead, I was treated to Van Halen’s Dance the Night Away.
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Filed under Musings
Soldiers’ Internet Church
An Internet ministry dedicated to peacekeeping forces all over the world. Is that cool or what?
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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Like unto a net
I needed the ISBN number for a book that I knew I had on my printer desk, about 18″ behind my chair. Almost without thinking about it, I opened a new IE window and headed to Amazon before I realized that I had the actual dead-trees book right here. Would this be evidence that the ‘net has thoroughly pervaded my work life?
Filed under General Tech Stuff
From the esoterica dep’t
I have no idea what this article is about. I mean, I understand the individual words, but the concept remains elusive. I guess it’s good to be reminded of my personal limitations from time to time.
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Real estate update
The incessant parade of minor real estate annoyances is beginning to get to me. I am torn between being thankful that we’re able to buy a home and move on one hand and, on the other, the urge to start living in a cardboard box. We’ve completed the home inspection on both houses; our repairs are (mostly) done here, but we’re waiting for the Ohio seller (oops; I almost wrote “remote end”– guess what I’ve been writing about?) to tell us what they’re going to fix. We’re also waiting to get a final closing date on our Alabama house. We’re also waiting for our mortgage lender to decide if they need blood samples, fingerprints, brain scans, or anything else. On top of that, we’re waiting for the results of the Ohio radon test, and we’re waiting for the buyer to tell us what color they want the boys’ bedroom painted, and…. I’ll stop there before I begin to hyperventilate.
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Filed under Friends & Family
I fought the law
Consider the following screenplay, coming soon to your local multiplex. It’s all true, at least mostly so.
SCENE: the IRS regional office, a rather tatty-looking office next to a hamburger stand near the public library.
ENTER: PAUL, a fairly young, casually dressed white male. He looks around and spots a window in one wall.
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At long last
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Not appearing soon on MTV’s Cribs: our new house. It’s about a block and a half from Mom & Dad’s, which is great for the kids. 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths and 2 half baths, and a basement. The pictures don’t do it justice, mostly because I’m not much of a photographer but also because my camera doesn’t have a wide enough wide angle. |
| The kitchen features some really awful wallpaper (you can’t really tell from the small picture, but trust me: it’s bad), plus some disco-looking pink countertops and a broken microwave. However, off on the right-hand side (where you can’t see it in this picture), there’s a great breakfast room. The door in the upper-right corner leads to a library/study with beautiful wood paneling. |  |
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The family room has a great full-brick fireplace and a little shelf/cabinet combo that should be just the place for keeping snacks. The master is on the ground floor (to the left in this picture), and the other bedrooms are upstairs. There’s a nice-sized formal dining room through the door in the upper-left corner; behind the wall on the far left is a formal living room with dark rose carpet that will (hopefully) match some of our furniture. |
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It’s a two-story house: 3 bedrooms up, master suite down. There’s an unfinished partial basement, which is so ugly I’m not including its pictures. A little paint, though, and a lot of electrical outlets will turn it into a dandy office space. There’s even a small ground-level window, so I can see whether the neighbor’s car is there– what joy! We got a terrific deal, mostly because the house has been vacant and on the market for over two years. We’re really excited; our excitement persisted even after going to the mortgage company to sign up for 20 years of indentured servitude. Arlene & I are driving home tomorrow. On Saturday, I’ll pick up a |
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New MTAmazon feature
I’ve been meaning to supplement the book review engine on this site with better links to Amazon, using Adam Kalsey’s MTAmazon plugin. Brad Choate has an interesting application of the plugin on his site. I haven’t figured out yet exactly how I’m going to make this work, but it should be an interesting project for any free time I accidentally happen to get between now and the time the book’s finished.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Hurry up and wait
On Saturday, I had the boys at the barbershop to renew their summer tennis-ball haircuts. Arlene called and said “Gosh, I wish you could come up and look at houses”. So I did: the three boys, the boat, and I all headed north on I-65, leaving about 1630 Saturday afternoon. My plan was to stop for the night somewhere around Louisville. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan on the annual Street Rod Nationals, held each year in Louisville during the first week of August. Every hotel we checked, from fleabags up to the Louisville Hilton, was full. We sure did see a lot of cool cars, though.
Actually, David and I (the others were asleep) ended up in the middle of a parade/drag race in front of the Executive West hotel.
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Filed under Friends & Family
Useless but still cool
Wireless networks are great. It follows, then, that a wireless networks between two cars on the Interstate must be greater still.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
New to the area?
I threw together a quick page listing some things that a newcomer to our area might want to know. It is in no wise comprehensive, but it’s a good start, and I’ll be adding to it until we move. If you’re not from around here (see? I didn’t use the word “ain’t”– I am ready to move to Ohio after all!), you might not find it very interesting.
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Must… restrain… fist of death…
The Financial Times has a special report out: “Barons of Bankruptcy.” It reveals that the top management of the 25 biggest recent US corporate collapses walked away with (or, more properly, stole) more than US$3.3 BILLION in compensation! Holy spit! That’s hard to imagine.
Lots of people find it fashionable to crack on CEOs like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs (particularly Gates, who is unfairly dammed even in the midst of huge charitable giving–“oh, $25m is just a drop in the bucket!”, they say)– but they never engaged in this kind of flagrant dishonesty (well, OK, Oracle did). Disgusting.
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Paging Captain Obvious!
In a shocking revelation, Simson Garfinkel points out that Starbucks is charging for wireless Internet access in its stores! Oh, the horror! He says:
Starbucks, the king of the $4 coffee, wanted me to pay for a service that should be too cheap to meter.
Well, duh. Consider the fact that Starbucks is a demonic corporate monster bent on world domination, and this probably won’t be too surprising. Simson does make a few good points about the fact that for most of us, it’s cheaper just to set up a WiFi access point and let people share it than it would be to set up an elaborate billing infrastructure.
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Just don’t call me a bloghole
As long as I’m in the mood for making up new words, I hereby coin the term blogholing for stereotyping blog content based on one of the widely established categories of blogs: warblogs, techblogs, and so on. If you go to Google and plug in the search term of your choice, plus “+blog”, you’re probably going to find a blog on that topic. In trying to prove my point by finding and linking to some ham radio blogs, I found a fascinating essay by Tony Collen, “What is ham journalism?” In it, he says:
There’s something we bloggers have in common, regardless of whether we belong to the upper or lower castes (and cases) of Journalism. Or to both. We are all, each and every one of us, many things; but we are all writers. That’s what we do here. We write.
He goes on to liken blogging to ham radio: both are hobbies involving communication, and both represent opportunities to jump in, start conversations, and share information without having pre-established relationships. Sure, there are journalist bloggers like Dan Gillmor and ‘real’ author bloggers like Cory Doctorow, but most of us are just ordinary people (ranging from librarians to USAF mechanics to schoolteachers to, probably, garbagemen) writing about what interests us. Blogging is a pleasant cross between talking to a stranger at the airport or doctor’s office (since you can get trapped into receiving Too Much Information) and the ease of access and information content of Big Media.
I guess I’m halfway in between; I earn a living by writing, but it’s technical. On the other hand, my brother earns his living doing technical stuff, but he writes too. We can all do it. If you’re not blogging yourself, why not?
Update: Doc Searls has an explanation of what bloghole means.
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