jason thurber's blog

We got the fridge upstairs last night. It took us less than an hour, including removing the doors (on the ‘fridge) and taking the box off (at which point the only damage of the night occurred; a small scrape to the stucco on the entrance, not bad). We lifted the fridge over our railing which, even tho’ I knew it “should” work, surprised me by actually working as planned. Very smooth!

I’m sorry I said anything negative about Mountain View Garbage (actually Foothill Disposal). They came by Monday evening and picked up everything we had left out for them (without my having to call them).

On the other hand, I am really pissed at Sears Home Delivery. They sent the second team of guys out today, called me to come home in the afternoon (they we supposed to be there between 4-6pm and changed it to 11:14am at 10:30am). However the were unwilling to try and get the ‘fridge box (which is admittedly huge) over the railing of the second level of our split-level main floor. I can sympathize with the delivery guy, who is a contractor and responsible for any damage he causes, but am extremely frustrated by Sears inability to deliver a reasonably sized appliance into a normal home…

So, tonight I hope to have about 6 buddies over for a Bar-B-Q. Our extremely technical plan is just to lift the thing over the banister and get it done! It only weighs 375lbs in the box (which sounds like a lot, but between 4 people should have been totally do-able, 6 should be overkill). Hope everything goes ok, we won’t start drinking beer until after it’s upstairs!

“The Move” is complete!

BIG Thanks to:

Jeers and Derision to:

All in all it was a very painless move. I’ll have DSL again around the 29th (oh yeah, and we’ll have a washer/dryer that same day, but that’s not nearly as important). Until that time all early morning/late night browsing is via the good graces of Sprint and the wonder of the WirelessModem for the Treo 300.

From The Filthy Critic:

The Filthy Critic was killed in a
bicycle collision late Thursday night.

He died the way he lived–wobbling aimlessly in the slow lane.

Is this the end of Filthy?

So, here we are, several months later and I have experienced (almost) the entire home acquisition process (everything except the fun bit where you’re moved in and unpacked and haven’t yet made your first mortgage payment).

It’s been fun, except for the ungodly amount of financial documentation the lender needs, the complete inability of anyone to call me back and the (occasional) uncertainty around the question “is the house actually going to be done by the time we have to be out of our current place?”. The answer to that last question has changed from day to day. The answer today is a resounding “maybe” (as compared to yesterday, where the answer was a “probably”).

One of the biggest dissapointments of the whole process is the state of the house when I walked thru it this afternoon. I guess my expectations were out of line with what I could expect from a big builder, but there’s still a ton of work left to do on the house. I would find that easier to stomach, were it not for the fact the there are some pretty major problems with some of the work that’s already “done”. There are several badly textured areas of wall, in every room. The baseboards in any room with tile (kitchen, dining room, bathrooms) do not sit flush with the tile in all cases. The counter tops in the kitchen aren’t smoothed along the lower edges. Some of the steps are too thin (wall to wall) so there’s a 3″ gap on the left side of each step. Basically I’m a picky SOB, and am having trouble adjusting my expectations down to accepting the cookie-cutter quality that the builder wants to deliver! Hopefully we can find some sort of middle ground by next week!

Set up a CafePress store selling quality “Look at the Monkey” gear…

Saw this over at Lockergnome Bytes (not Locker-Byte Gnomes), which in turn pointed to an article at BaselineMag. Apparently a guy named Scott Painter is starting a Build-To-Order car company in Los Angeles. What an awesome idea.

I was somewhat disappointed by this comment, as it strikes me as irrational (particularly when it’s followed by a similarly “E-Level” description of the advantes of “web-services” as offered by .NET):

[Chief Information Officer] Lele has largely ruled out using Unix, saying he would like to think ahead.
“The preconceived notion is that the network will run Unix, but I came to the view that this is a unique opportunity, so why take something that’s decades old?” says Lele.

But I was impressed by the vision:

Build-To-Order’s specialty will be assembly. Painter has divvied up the car into 13 modules such as interiors, chassis, panels and braking systems. Each will be pulled together by a supplier, such as Johnson Control or Dana. Each supplier’s factory will sit around a cross—the assembly line—which resembles a street intersection. And each of those suppliers’ factories may in turn be ringed by parts vendors that supply components that arrive minutes before being used in, say, a transmission.

It’s also sorta cool that they’re considering using E.piphany…

My experience with Bluetooth up until now has left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand I have always been quite excited by the promise of Bluetooth. On the other hand, I have had very different experiences with the two Bluetooth implementations I’ve experienced. Two experiences, 180 degrees apart:

Basically it comes down to this. The FreeSpeak promised to make my cell phone more usable, but sacrificed much of the user-experience while not materially delivering on the wireless headset promise. My Powerbook (on the other hand) uses Bluetooth as an enabling technology without sacrificing anything from a usability perspective. Apple continues to impress me with it’s ability to integrate “new” technologies such that they improve the overall experience without making you constantly aware than you’re doing something technically complicated.

I am looking forward to two developments on the Bluetooth front:

I got a D-Link D-624 4-port DSL/Cable wireless router a few weeks after getting my new Powerbook 12″.

It was (relatively) painless to set up, and the transfer speed was awesome between the powerbook and my desktop. Then, a few weeks after I got the D-Link it stopped working with the “Airport Extreme” (Apple’s name for 802.11g) card in the Powerbook. I could connect to the router, but it would not issue a DHCP address. It continued to work with the “Airport” (802.11b) card in the old Powerbook.

Around this time one of my neighbors had set up a Linksys router (I know this because it showed up in the list of available networks for a few hours until they hid the SSID). Well, <sarcasm>being the analytical debugger that I am</sarcasm>, I spent about two hours trying a bunch of network voodoo-type remedies (reset everything three times, reboot the laptop, reset everything again, reconnect every cable, upgrade the firmware… you get the idea)… nothing worked. So, network voodoo having failed I settled for network frankenstein and hooked my old Linksys wireless router up to the D-Link for the Powerbook to use, and settled down to wait for new firmware.

Well, new firmware has arrived for the D-Link D-624, and I updated, and it was good, and there was much rejoicing. My old Linksys has been laid to rest to await the day when it will again be called forth to save the home wireless network…