Me - Aldoblog

Must. Not. Remodel.

It started innocently enough. Rochelle’s mother very generously offered to buy us a new stove, after we complained about our current oven during Thanksgiving. And, if we could have just done that, it would have been a great kitchen improvement that would have cost us almost nothing.

It started innocently enough. Rochelle’s mother very generously offered to buy us a new range, after we complained about our current oven during Thanksgiving. And, if we could have just done that, it would have been a great kitchen improvement that would have cost us almost nothing.

But, we started looking into options, researching in Consumer Reports and in cooking and food resources. Rochelle eventually found this article, A Range of Options, by David Rosengarten, which blew away both the Consumer Reports mantra of low cost, high value appliances, and our gift budget.

But, once you commit to getting a centerpiece-style range, is it even possible to just do that? Not if you’re Rochelle or me.

The next obvious requirement is to get a new stove hood, because we currently have no ventilation in the kitchen, except opening the back door and window. And, well, looking at the wall it would be mounted on, it’s actually a fake wall, built (by the previous owner) to hide the brick chimney behind it. Let’s take that out!

And, when we measure the chimney in the basement, it’s clear we’ll be getting a lot of space back. And when you combine that with the need to conceal the ventilation pipe, you come to the inevitable conclusion that we need new floor-to-ceiling cabinets in that corner.

After doing all of this, is there any doubt that we’ll need to paint the entire room afterwards? Especially since we’ve been planning to take the over-sink cabinets off the wall for over a year? And that horrible fake tile siding that lines the lower half of most of the room?

And these are the plans we haven’t quashed. Because taking the cabinets off the wall is really the first of many things that should happen to that side of the room.

But, since we’re not really remodeling, those will have to wait. Hopefully…

The Joy of File Folders

I wrote before that I’ve been reading David Allen’s _Getting Things Done,_ and it’s already clear that I like his system. I’ve also been reading a few different web sites where different people write about their experiences using the GTD system. One post in particular talked about the necessity, and the joy, of having lots of file folders on hand, for immediate use as soon as you need to group things together. I was, to say the least, a little skeptical.

I wrote before that I’ve been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and that even though my reading isn’t close or complete, it’s already clear that I like his system. I’ve also been reading a few different web sites where different people write about their experiences using the GTD system, including Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders and Mark Taw’s site, among others. One post in particular talked about the necessity, and the joy, of having lots of file folders on hand, for immediate use as soon as you need to group things together.

I was, to say the least, a little skeptical. I mean, I understood that file folders are an important component of GTD, and even picked up a box of them at Costco the other day so I could get started GTDing, but really, the joy of file folders? Come on!

So I cracked the box this evening, with the intent of getting one folder out to hold all the magazine clippings I save to remind myself to check out something interesting. I even got out my P-Touch labeler and made a label for it.

Then I found another group of stuff on my desk that I could put in a folder. Labeled that one too. 15 folders later, I’ve emptied the labeling cartridge, but my desk and the top of the filing cabinet have no more lose papers.

Consider me a convert. Fresh file folders are cool. And I’m heading to the office supplies store early tomorrow to get a new cartridge for the labeler.

2004 in Review

2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this blog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.

2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this weblog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

Continue reading “2004 in Review”

Sleep is Sacred

I enjoyed the (fairly long) article Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask). The author works in the Seven Deadly Sins, the 2004 presidential election, and Chernobyl, among other things, with current scientific research and understanding of sleep. There’s also some really good hints on how to optimize your sleeping patterns.

I especially enjoyed this quotation:

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

Possibly this will save my Saturday mornings from Rochelle’s depredations. (I am an owl, Rochelle is a lark.)

Anyway, it’s longish article, but some sections with considerable scientific detail are easily skipped, and overall pretty interesting.

Personal Survey of Anti-spam Tools

In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.

In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick (ha!) survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.

My very first anti-spam tool was something called Mailfilter. I used it for my personal e-mail on Mac OS X, wrote about it here, and almost immediately afterwards lost a non-spam message to an aggressive keyword match. That was the end of Mailfilter. I can’t even remotely recommend it, as it’s just not intelligent enough (strict, single expression matching), and had zero safety net.

My next attempt at a solution was a utility called SpamFire. Like Mailfilter, it is a “pre-filter,” which means it would run before my e-mail client, download my mail, and skim out the spam. Unlike Mailfilter, it actually saved the trapped messages, so if it made a mistake, I could recover the message. It had plenty of other differences from Mailfilter, which I wrote about previously, and which made it so useful that it became the first anti-spam tool I paid for. But in the end I switched to a different tool because SpamFire was separate from my e-mail client, and that made it cumbersome to use.

Continue reading “Personal Survey of Anti-spam Tools”

Quoted in the New York Times

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the Sunday magazine, in a travel article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.”

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the travel section, an article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.” It’s a fun article to read; better do so quickly, before the story disappears behind the for-pay firewall.

It looks like the story might have gotten chopped up a bit in editing, because I am a San Francisco-based software developer, not LA-based. And, while the Klausners may also have done so, I know we told the reporter about our trip to Chicago to eat at Charlie Trotter’s, which turned into a week-long eating binge though much of Chicago’s best-rated food establishments. (Our vacation eating focus is much less high-end these days.)

If I was going to offer once piece of advice to other food enthusiasts who were going to plan a vacation around that passion it would be this: walk everywhere you can. There’s no way you can put everything of interest in a spreadsheet before you get on the plane; walking will take you past things you could not possibly have planned for. And if nothing else, it’ll keep you from gaining too much weight while you’re eating your way through the local food scene.

Getting Things Done

I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review and an overview of his organization system on the 43 Folders weblog. But buying the book has had unintended consequences.

I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review of his latest book and an overview of his organization system on a weblog, 43 Folders, which has also been doing a nice job explaining how to implement Allen’s system using software available for Mac OS X. I investigated further, and was impressed by what I learned. The system seemed both sophisticated and simple — an extremely rare combination.

More importantly, aspects resonated with me; it both explained what was missing from my current approach to being “organized”, and made me believe the system could work for me. I immediately bought the book from Amazon.com, and when it arrived placed it in pole position on my night-stand for immediate reading.

Can you see where this is going?

So far the only thing Getting Things Done has helped me do is fall asleep. I pick it up diligently each time I get into bed, begin reading…and pass out after a couple of pages. I cannot read the book for more than 20 minutes at a stretch — at least, not while sitting in bed.

I’m still a believer in GTD. Indeed, the first third of the book has convinced me that it can work for me, improving my efficiency and stress levels. I plan to give the book a better go in the New Year. Setting up our reading chair with a good light and a warming blanket is the current action on that particular project.

On second thought, maybe the blanket isn’t such a good idea…

I Might Be a Crank, But I’m Not Alone

I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.

After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.

When I got my new girlfriend, that noise went away. My PowerBook is normally completely silent, because laptops run cooler than desktops and the aluminum case dissipates heat extremely well. There is a fan, and it makes noise when it’s on, but that’s only when the CPU is really crunching. Now, although they are pretty quiet, the server and Rochelle’s PC are again the noisy items in the office.

It’s really not a lot of noise. A quiet radio or a conversation would cover it, as does the street noise most of the time. But, it’s still there, and since I’m most efficient at night, when everything else gets quiet, it’s starting to be annoying. Which is crazy, because 6 months ago the reduced noise level from those systems made me ecstatic.

I’ve realized that I’m becoming a crank, someone obsessed with something most people find trivial, and I’m sure I will ultimately go mad trying to squeeze that last decibel or two out of the office. My only consolation is that I am not alone, and it’s now possible to find plenty of components, and even whole systems, that make computing quiet.

LTFP

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.

“LTFP” was an acronym we used at Cymerc, the dot.bomb I worked at for 14 months before it imploded. We started using the term a couple weeks before we released the first version of our public web site. It stood for Launch This Fucking Pig, which basically meant we thought it sucked but were tired of testing, and just wanted it out the door.

LTFP is what I did very early this morning.

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my Mac OS X system, setting it up, configuring it to use the same URL scheme as my old weblog system, tweaking the template a bit, and — most importantly — importing all my old weblog posts from the old system. After four weeks of dithering and obsessing, it’s not done, but it’s going live anyway.

I’ve tried to not break any permalinks to pre-existing posts or the syndication feeds, and otherwise keep it compatible with the bookmarks that people may have for this site. But I’m sure there will be a few things to fix. Leave me a comment if you find something.

There’s also plenty to do on cleanup. I will probably have to edit every single post to clean up the HTML and re-link the URLs I included in old posts. And I’m not terribly happy with the design of this template, which is pretty basic, and virtually unchanged from the generic version of Kubrick, which I used to get started. It’s a great template, but there are well-understood steps I still need to take to make it my own…

Anyway, by switching to WordPress, a much more popular weblogging system, I should be back to posting regularly, as the system will get in my way a lot less.

Cancel Your Friendster Account

Well, OK, I won’t tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what I just did: I cancelled my Friendster account (Friendster is a social networking company), because they fired an employee for blogging (participating in social networks).

Well, OK, I won’t tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what I just did: I cancelled my Friendster account (Friendster is a social networking company), because they fired an employee for blogging (participating in social networks).

There’s been some coverage of the issue on weblogs and in more mainstream media

Frankly, I wasn’t using my Friendster account anyway; my LinkedIn account is more useful, and my Orkut account is more interesting. Friendter was trapped in-between being useful and being fun, which meant it was pretty useless. So cancelling my account to send a (tiny) message seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

After all, I have this blog, and someday I might be working 9-5 again…

Quiet, Busy, the House…

Some of what we’ve been up to for the last four months or so…

Been awfully quiet here in the past few months, with my last active posting going on in February. That was when we started the painting project for the bedroom, which we did eventually mostly almost finish. Our original intent was to move onto the parlor and office, which are connected through pocket doors that are nearly always open.

We didn’t do that. Instead, we decided that we couldn’t take the various stains on the light blue-gray carpet that covered half the house. (Two years ago we got rid of the other half, by putting in hardwood floors, which we are still in love with.) Time for new carpet.

Rochelle and David had already spent months finding just the right pattern and color, so when Rochelle’s twice-yearly ESPP kicked out a chunk of change, we decided to go for it. This involved moving everything out of three rooms (including, once again, the bedroom) for a day. And because of the noise and the strangers in the house during the installation, the cats liked this less than the painting. Let’s just say that Billie didn’t stop at puking this time.

But the carpet was fast, in no small measure because we weren’t the ones installing it. We were moving furniture back into all three rooms by the end of the day. We got a lot of the big stuff, but three months later, we still haven’t moved everything back to where it should go.

This is because we’ve decided not to move anything until we’ve decided where it really belongs. Which means we’re throwing out crap, giving away crap, selling off crap, taking crap down to the basement, etc.

To go with the lovely new carpet, we also bought all new furniture for the office. It’s all from IKEA, so it was reasonably cheap. Two bookcases, a three-level horizontal filing cabinet, and two huuuuge new desks for probably less than a grand, and the office is far more usable. And if we ever actually paint the office, it’s going to look really fabulous, too. Which will be good for me, since it looks like I will continue to be self-employed (gainfully, really) for a while. It’s almost to the point to where I could have clients visit!

In the last few weekends, we’ve moved a bunch of stuff to the basement, taken a bunch of stuff from the basement and either thrown it out or taken it to Goodwill, and generally spent a good 30+ hours working on house organization. It’s starting to feel good!

We also had a friend, who is a professional contractor, come and paint, stain, and varnish our brand new back door, which is really beautiful, with small glass panels framed in wood, and lets far more light into the house. The new door framing and brand new weather stripping mean it seals far better than the old door; in spite of being glass, the kitchen is actually 10 degrees warmer than it was before. This is going to be great this coming Winter.

Anyway, all of this is to catch up, and explain a little bit about why no posting. We’ve been really, really busy!

Working Again, Kinda

My unemployment benefits ran out in mid-February. Not entirely coincidentally, I’ve found some medium-term work (sub-contracting for a small consulting company), that I hope to be able to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

It’s not full-time or permanent, so I make less and will have to pay self-employment taxes, etc. But for now, it gives me a lot of flexibility. And while I pays less than I was making in my last job, it pays way more than unemployment benefits.

Anyway, it’s going to have something that gets me up and out of the house most days, and pays some bills.