Monday, May 31, 2004
New House Checklist
A room primarily for books. The house generally, in that room or otherwise, as spacious and well-made as possible for accomodating an expansive collection.
In this apartment, we have 1084 inches, in length, of shelf space currently devoted to books, videos and DVDs - mainly books, and another 180 inches worth using a built-in hutch/china closet.
We are hoping another 367 inches, to be purchased Real Soon Now and devoured from the one remaining book-free shelf in the place (once the plants and wizard are banished from it), will be enough for the remaining unpacked books.
This does not count that all too many of the books currently out are on their sides on top of shelves of standing books. This does count the tops of bookcases that are being used as if they were shelves.
Nor does this count that all my computer-related books are at the office, taking about one entire bookcase worth of space there. That doesn’t count books there that are not mine personally and belong to other people or were purchased by the business.
Doing the math, I get about 136 feet of shelves needed just for starters, at least, right now. Using standard 6’ high bookcases from Wal-Mart, that would line a wall 25’ long. Not that I needed to get to this state to know I wanted a “library” room in a house; I have for as long as I have been thinking of what I would want for a house, which means at least back to the age of 12 or 13.
Heh. I just realized this was a way to estimate replacement value on renter’s insurance. Throw out an average width per book, divided into the inches of shelf, times typical current retail. Or something like that. We were talking about coming up with a coverage figure for the insurance just the other day, and the books were a major consideration. But I digress.
I mentioned some non-book media on some of those shelves, and really the same thing applies. Space for that stuff, not as an afterthought.
*dreamy sigh*
Have I mentioned lately how much I adore my husband?
He’s currently got the sleeper ripped out of the sofa in his bid to get the furniture rearranged like we’d like it. Definitely above and beyond the call of duty, especially for a holiday.
Okay, Enough Blogging…
Time to continue moving furniture and junk around the apartment. The bad part is I was unable to get help yesterday to move the couch. I’ll at least move some other stuff and if I can make the couch light enough, I’ll move it myself. I’m as concerned about the logistics of a bulky eight feet of furniture moving through the place as I am with the fact two people can barely move it so long as the innards are in it.
New House Checklist
Cats.
I mean, not that we wouldn’t have them, but a gentle reminder never hurt anybody, right? *angelic grin*
Besides, it gives me an excuse to point out that the Carnival of the Cats is up.
So there you go.
Freebies Are Cool
I scored a slightly used, originally expensive stroller from one of the lawyers at my big client. She’s bringing it in for me tomorrow.
It comes with an infant car seat that snaps into the stroller, in addition to the stroller being for bigger squirts too. That kills two birds. We also got a pretty nice hand me down high chair, and a crib for $15 and my mother volunteering to buy the mattress for same.
One of the secretaries offered girl clothes if needed, and the aforementioned lawyer pointed out a likely source of boy clothes.
If we ever get all the junk out of the baby’s room and the rest of the place semi-organized, things will work out nicely.
New House Checklist
Closets. Lots of closets. Some of them huge. A walk-in or two even.
New House Checklist
Acceptable outflow plumbing. Adequate pitch, pipe width, etc. to avoid chronic patience or plunger usage.
New House Checklist
Hot water heater that includes a storage tank. A big one. Not some kind of “on demand” crap.
New House Checklist
Big kitchen. Lots of storage and counter space, including an island.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
May 31 Carnival of the Capitalists
Small Business Trends has what appears to be a nicely populated and varied Carnival of the Capitalists. Be sure to check it out.
If you are thinking of hosting or submitting, the are some details I posted here you will want to catch up on, as well as being aware of the traditional Carnival of the Capitalists hosts and info page.
Next week’s host is The Window Manager, already accepting entries via capitalists -at- elhide -dot- com.
I Have My Computer Back
Yay!
We got Deb’s new computer setup and both of us online at the same time. It’s so cool! And no more sharing mine.
The Linksys router naturally came with a spiffy CD and wizard to guide you through setting up the connection when you have had existing broadband on a single computer. That means to get it all working, I had to do it manually.
Both the DSL modem and the router were using 192.168.1.1 and DHCP. They conflicted enough to be a showstopper. I ended up resetting the address of the router, assigning the computer a static IP in the same range and for good measure manually setting the primary and secondary DNS to what the DSL modem’s internal configuration page specified. There were hoops leading up to this, but nothing worth going into.
The scary thing is that Joe Average User would have been screwed in the same situation. How is he supposed to know about IP address conflicts, changing the IP of the router, maybe trying static addresses, and that sort of thing? For a support person, it’s one of thos complex enough calls to keep them on the line for a while. And is it a DSL provider problem, or a router maker problem when it’s interactivity between the two? I’d say router, but how many people would go straight to the DSL provider?
We’re still not in Oz anymore. But when setting all this up becomes like magic, everything will change to something more complicated anyway.
New House Checklist
And now, a post to read now that you are back from seeing the incredibly funny and clever Shrek…
I declared a new feature earlier, and Deb didn’t think it sounded as insane as many of my puns. We are going to start making brief posts from time to time, as things come to mind, on what we will want or decidedly not want in a house when the time comes. Besides naturally not wanting a community or homeowner’s or whatever association; who wants an extra layer of government. Ugh.
We may or may not include an explanation or hint of what inspired any given item. Feel free to comment or not. Mainly I figure we can refer back later when we actually need to compile our accumulated thoughts and opinions. No doubt a burst of them will appear right away, as we have been running into “when we have a house...” things and mmmm...hmmming them at each other regularly these past few months.
Shrek 2
Go. Now. Catch you when you get back!
Settling In Could Happen Yet
While it never stopped looking like a moving van explosion, our place is even more disrupted than it had been. We’re in the process of moving the living room to the computer room and vice-versa. Sadly, this is going to include moving the couch, which is a near impossible task. For which we will try to recruit Bob to help after we see Shrek 2 today. Shhhh.... He doesn’t know that yet.
So far we have my computer desk and its beige accessories moved and running, which led to a bit of a surprise. In the computer room, we had to run phone cord around the corner slightly to the wall jack in the kitchen for DSL. No biggie, but less convenient than having the phone jack three feet away.
Except the tiny little surprise of finding the living room phone jack was dead. Doh! I have to see if I can fix that today. Meanwhile, we went from having a modest line around the corner to a tripworthy, 25 foot line across a hall and into another room.
We also had moved my big antique bookcase out of the computer room, where it was back to back with the computer desk. Today I need to vacuum the newly clear area, move stuff around, and vacuum where the couch will go before we go to the movie. If possible, move more stuff around so Deb can setup her desk in the living room. After all, we built her computer last night… woohoo!
It’s a P4 3 GHz on a D865PERL board, with a 128 MB video card, 80 GB hard drive, DVD, CDRW, and 512 MB RAM. Oooooh. Now I need to make it so both of us are on the DSL, which will involve putting a NIC in my machine, which inexplicably lacks one.
But enough geekness. It’s time to get to the tasks at hand. I’m trying to decide whether I am wakeful and patient enough to see if the phone jack in this room can be fixed before I do anything else, or if I want to go straight to more physical effort. At least I seem to be able to type straight, unlike when I left my first comments on other blogs this morning.
Dogs Just Wanna Have Blogs
Despite receiving no links, Mickey still posted the fourth edition of Carnival of the Dogs Saturday, rounding up a bunch of links she’d found.
Don’t forget to submit your canine posts or even suggest posts that you see around the blogosphere. The address is mickeym -at- comcast -dot- net.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Violence In Utero
I got punched! Silly baby, beating on daddy like that. Heh.
But seriously, this is only the second time I have felt the baby, who can be beating Deb mercilessly but will helpfully stop the second my hand meets belly. This time it was just after I set my hand there, not expecting anything, and felt a THUMP-thump. Got a reportedly Christmas morning look on my face and looked to Deb for confirmation.
She said it had to be a punch, because the kicks were getting her elsewhere near the same time. Unless of course the little gymnast flipped around just for that.
The baby reliably kicks the doppler in disgust. Last time it was right where the thing was touching the belly, hard enough to make it jump in the midwife’s hand. Yet usually I get nothing. Guess I don’t emit enough sound waves or something.
Friday, May 28, 2004
Baby baby…
Er, there’s one of those update thingies over at the Alien’s place.
Update time!
So this is where we’re at:
1. Level 2 Ultrasound with perinatologist on June 7,
2. See OB for first time June 16, and
3. See my primary doc June 18.
In the meantime, I’m trying to keep the chocolate intake to reasonable levels and trying not to cuss too often or loudly about the kicks in the bladder.
Actually, I’m loving this part of being pregnant. There’s nothing in the world like waking up in the morning to the little one kicking away. Feeling that miracle has actually got me smiling before noon. It’s a joy beyond words, it really is.
For those of you who love the stats, at my appointment this last Monday I was at 21 weeks and a day, my bp was astonishingly low (being in the normal range for other folk *grin*), and I had gained 6 pounds in the four weeks since the preceding appointment, for a total gain of 14 pounds so far. Call me crazy, but I don’t think I’m doing too badly.
For those of you who love the gory details, the offhand reference I made the other day over at the other blog about the big orange jug in my refrigerator was indeed a reference to that most beloved of all tests, the 24 hour urine. Lovely, no? Believe it or not, I was actually able to complete this in good cheer, in spite of how funny the chicks in the doctor’s office seemed to find it. I love the sense of humor that my midwife has, but when she referred to the collection device as a hat...and the nurse came in wearing it on her head…
I didn’t laugh. Rueful grin was more like it. 
Anyway, the lowdown is that since I already have a nice case of high blood pressure, not only do I have a higher risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension (AKA pre-eclampsia), but it’s more difficult to sort out whether any elevation in blood pressure is due to a worsening of the chronic condition under the physiologic strain of the pregnancy, or whether it is indeed PIH, which is a disease of pregnancy and must be treated differently. PIH has a variety of other markers, one of which is the spilling of protein into the urine, and the most accurate test for that is apparently to measure total protein in a sample consisting of all the urine the lucky subject produces over a 24 hour period.
Now, the reason I’m smiling about having met the big orange jug already is that said jug (and some accompanying bloodwork) is a baseline lab. In other words, they’re doing the PIH workup now so that they have something to compare later workups to, which cuts the risk of unneeded intervention if there’s something slightly wonky about my body chemistry anyway.
Pretty cool, ‘eh?
Beg pardon.
Never promised rose garden.
Er, sorry.
I’m in the mood to tinker around with the layout a bit, so don’t mind all of the sidebar bits wandering around for a little while. It’s just me having Friday.
I Feel Safe
An idle thought: Attacking the Democratic National Convention or environs, in an area as leftward as the Boston area tends to be, would be too much like an attack on friendlies or colleagues for it to be a target of the terrorists. Therefore, I guess I feel safe that Boston won’t get suitcase nuked or something during the convention.
Besides, the disruption of the DNC will be a good substitute for the disruption an attack would bring. No reason to strike there instead of elsewhere to spread anguish and economic disruption.
A Capital Notion
What a great idea! Far more appropriate than some of the critters we similarly memorialize.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Why I love the ‘sphere, #3245
I never would have known that Joan was on tonight if I hadn’t surfed my way around the blogroll to this post. I started watching after I moved out here in February, so you can imagine how eager I am to catch up. Yay!
Fun With Someone Else’s Code
Sigh…
I have this program that was primarily written and masterminded by a former partner. It’s mostly done, and very nice to the extent that it is done. The primary functionality is there and solid enough for it to be beta, which is exactly what I am attempting to make happen in the next week.
I’m finally enough less busy to put in some time trying to make a distribution that will work. Sounds easy enough, eh? I had left the testbed server and a virgin Windows 2000 machine with my partner so he could work on this, but immediately after he went and got laser eye surgery and couldn’t spend much time staring at computers for a few weeks. Now it’s back with me.
Long story shorter, in the design environment it runs fine. When the four projects that comprise the program are compiled, bringing up the form containing the homebrew custom control (usercontrol) gives an error that there is no license to use the control in the development environment. It’s not the development environment, and the control is set not to require licensing. Duh. The error is completely bogus. Which makes me wonder if it’s a sign of broken binary compatibility or something, which I used to know more about.
In the course of playing with that this afternoon, I discovered something that appeared to be a configuration program my former partner had made and included in at least one of the source code directory trees. Curious, I ran it.
It deleted the SQL Server database the program was using. No prompting. Just gone. Doh!
I feel like I keep going backward.
At least I can rebuild the database structure using a .sql file, which is how we originally created it. It’s just work I did not anticipate.
This is the kind of thing I’d end up solving in one crazy weekend in which I’d barely leave the office and have my most focused times in the wee hours.
It’s to the point where I have started considering hiring someone to bang on it for a couple days. When I work on it, I am applying time I can’t explicitly bill for to a project that will eventually bring in modest definite money, and might potentially get other customers as well. If I have an unemployed programmer friend work on it, I can do enough billable work while they are working on it to be able to pay them and still net something definite. That’s the thing about hiring. It’s not necessarily just a cost; it’s leverage.
Anyway, I think I am going to leave well enough alone and head home to the wife and almost-kid for the night. Before I do any more damage.
*exasperated sigh*
OMG! OMG! OMG!
I see blue sky! There is sunlight! Woo-hoo!
In other news, I had a smoking dream last night so satisfying that it’s helping to quash the urge today. It was so good I feel sort of dirty telling anyone about it.
Did I mention that we have sunlight?
Oh. It’s Thursday. That’s what’s wrong with me. Phew!
And in the “now I think I’ve seen it all” category this morning:
Jaw, meet floor. Floor, jaw.
CotC Reminder and Guidelines Update
Carnival of the Capitalists next appears at Small Business Trends. This is a reminder to send your entries to the capitalists -at- elhide.com alias per usual by sometime on Sunday for the Monday edition.
This is also the first place I am going to mention new guidelines I will be promoting to avoid certain problems.
When submitting a post, please clearly indicate in the subject what it is for with a designation such as CotC in the subject.
When submitting, please not only include the blog name, blog URL, and post URL, but also a brief summary or description of what the post is about that even someone alien to the topic could follow. I expect each host to read each post to know what they are linking as they put the CotC together, but when I hosted I remember having to read one or two of them twice or three times to understand what they were about because they were highly technical. Conversely, I had to reread a couple that seemed borderline or off topic to try to get an idea how the sender thought they fit CotC. I didn’t want to reject anyone. If you describe your own submission, it will double as a sanity check as to whether it fits the broad but not all encompassing “biz and econ” topic range. It will help ensure the host knows it is on topic and understands how to describe it or has a ready made description to crib. I’d consider this all the more important if you send your entry toward the last minute.
If you are hosting, please consider acknowledging each submission so the sender can know for sure it went through. I am not sure how much is spam filters, how much is excluding posts from CotC because they seem inappropriate (I always say err on the side of inclusion) without letting the sender know, or how much, if any, might be rejection due to the mail going through a forwarder.
The capitalists alias is a convenience. Senders are welcome to seek out and use the actual e-mail address of the host as well.
Please be careful where you send. It’s capitalists. If you use capitalist -at- elhide.com, it will bounce over to me. Ditto for cc -at- elhide.com, which is the address of a read-only announcement mailing list. Hosts is a mailing list you should be on if you have ever volunteered to host CotC, whether your turn has arrived yet or not. Subscribers may post to that one from their subscribed address to discuss CotC hosting, though in practice the only posts are usually my announcements it is up.
That’s all I can think of for now. At some point I will update the info page, but for not I’ll link this post from there and try to publicize the above guidelines as far and wide as possible.
Enterprise
Which I have always especially liked, despite jokingly calling it Emptyprize. Saw the season finale except for a few minutes. Impressive! If a bit confusing. Just when I thought I had the nature of the cliffhanger pegged, they took it up a notch.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Ugh.
Whoops...sorry about that. I’d actually meant to be back and posting earlier, but it was one of those trips out of the house. The kicker was that the front bumper of my truck was partially removed by someone kind enough to at least leave enough of the thing attached that I could drive home without any difficulty. Presumably this individual used his or her vehicle to detach said bumper, but I’m in the sort of mood at this point that I actually suspect it may have been a rabid college student chewing on the bumper in a drug-induced search for sustenence. Strangely enough, I’m not particularly upset...more like matter-of-factly in a not-so-happy place. Sort of like Nathan, apparently, though with considerably less provocation.
I’m off to have a nap before it’s time to cook supper. *waves bye-bye*
