What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
General news and thinking about living in the Alderete-McCune household.
“Do you have any idea what a leap of faith it must have been to loan me that much money before I was 30?”
“Yeah. I have trouble letting you use a sharp knife.”
“Do you have any idea what a leap of faith it was to loan me that much money before I was 30?”
“Yeah. I have trouble letting you use a sharp knife.”
Our water heater tank has sprung a slow leak, and today the plumber said it would need to be replaced. We’re considering a tankless water heater, probably the Bosch AquaStar 250SX. Any suggestions?
Our water heater tank has sprung a slow leak, and today the plumber said it would need to be replaced. We’re lucky, usually when a water heater goes, it goes fast, failing catastrophically, lots of water everywhere. You have to replace it immediately, no time for research.
In our case, it’s a slow enough leak (from the top, no less) that we can take a couple days to figure out what to do. And one thing we’re considering is getting a tankless water heater, probably the Bosch AquaStar 250SX.
Searching the blogosphere, I don’t see anyone writing about meaningful experiences with this or any of the alternatives. Anyone know someone with a tankless water heater, especially if they are very happy or very sad with it?
_Regarding photos of a recent night out…_
“How bad was it?”
“It wasn’t that bad. We all kept our clothes on.”
Regarding photos of a recent night out…
“How bad was it?”
“It wasn’t that bad. We all kept our clothes on.”
Which, if we’re being honest, has not always been the case…
Don’t you hate those projects you start, thinking they will take 10 minutes, and they end up taking hours?
Don’t you hate those projects you start, thinking they will take 10 minutes?
I just spent almost 3 hours fixing the dining room light switch, after my 5 minute “project” to replace two dead bulbs turned into a trip to the hardware store to get new bulbs (30 minutes), and then turned into disassembling the switch because the light wouldn’t come on, discovering that the ancient wiring insulation was crumbling, and then fixing it with heat-shrink insulating tubing (60 minutes, including all the trips to the circuit breaker to turn the current on and off), and sanding the wiring to take off some corrosion (15 minutes, because the sandpaper was packed away in the basement somewhere), and finding that the light still wouldn’t come on, so replacing the switch entirely (30 minutes, two trips to the circuit breaker), which after reassembling didn’t quite fit, preventing the switch from throwing completely, so I had to fabricate a tiny plastic insert to give the knob a slightly longer stem (15 minutes), which finally got our dining room light working again.
So then I had to vacuum up all the plaster, crumbled insulation, and wiring bits, which lead to vacuuming half the house (30 minutes, it needed it), which lead to this posting (10 minutes).
Whew! I’m sweatin’! Now it’s time to watch 24!
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.
I tried the new Chantico drinking chocolate at Starbucks today. It’s supposed to be richer and smoother and more intense than regular hot cocoa. Or in Starbuck’s marketing speak, a “drinkable dessert with an intense, full-bodied chocolate flavor and silky, rich texture.” It’s not bad.
I tried the new Chantico drinking chocolate at Starbucks today. It’s supposed to be richer and smoother and more intense than regular hot cocoa. Or in Starbuck’s marketing speak, a “drinkable dessert with an intense, full-bodied chocolate flavor and silky, rich texture.”
It’s pretty good. A little more sweet than I prefer, and certainly no substitute for a true chocolat chaud, but far better than a regular hot cocoa drink, no question.
Would I change the recipe if I was in charge? Absolutely. I’d love a darker, less sweet, more bitter, intense chocolate flavor. But for a mass market product, it seems kind of daring. Given the products available in the US, I get the impression that most Americans want a watered down, dusty, sugary, choco-flavored powder-based drink. The Chantico at least avoids being that, and could actually be too strong for the American palate used to Quick and Swiss Miss.
I hope it’s successful. And I hope that Peet’s offers a competing product, with the differences I expect from Peet’s: darker, more intense. It still won’t be a chocolat chaud, but it’ll be worth getting regularly (I do love chocolate). In the meantime, I’ll probably get a Chantico every other week or so.
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.
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 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. (The guy is apparently a biologist working in sleep research.)
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.
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.
Mentioned in the lead paragraph of that NYTimes article is the spreadsheet which Rochelle put together prior to our trip to France in 2002. Since publication we’ve actually had people inquire about getting access to it, so I thought I’d put it online. Some background will help you make the most of it.
Mentioned in the lead paragraph of that NYTimes article is the spreadsheet which Rochelle put together prior to our trip to France in 2002. Since publication we’ve actually had people inquire about getting access to it, so I thought I’d put it online. If you’re impatient, you can find a download link toward the end of this story. But some background will help you make the most of it.
Rochelle created the spreadsheet in an attempt to duplicate the really amazing experience she had using Vindigo on her Palm handheld when visiting New York City in May 2002. She did a lot of pre-trip research, and entered addresses and venues of interest into Vindigo. Then, while in NYC, she was able to tell Vindigo where she was, and get a list of places within walking distance, along with step-by-step directions for getting there. It made her touring the city (while I was locked in business meetings) efficient and fun, while still allowing for serendipity to influence where she went.
However, there is no Vindigo for Paris, or for any city in France. So we set out to try to duplicate the most essential features, by tying every location of interest to the nearest Metro stop and its arrondissement. We thought that this would let us figure out where we were, and then find interesting places nearby. In the end, it was only partially successful for us.
We had the most fun when we used it at the beginning and middle of the day, during breakfast and lunch, to plan where we would spend the rest of the morning or afternoon. When we tried to use it to follow whim after whim, which Vindigo had done successfully, we ended up pretty frustrated.
The other thing that didn’t work out the way we envisioned was the Palm version of the spreadsheet. We managed to download the data into Rochelle’s Palm, and use a micro database called JFile to be able to search and sort it, etc. But without a lot of additional development, having just the table of data was simply too hard to use on a Palm screen, it’s just not wide enough. With a search engine, hand-crafted results and detail pages, cross references, etc., the electronic version could have been pretty good…but even if I had put 20 hours into it, it would still have been nowhere near as good as Vindigo.
In the end, the printout of the spreadsheet was a tremendously valuable tool for us, and we’d never have seen as many cool places without it. And even if Vindigo had covered Paris, we’d still have wanted to pore through all the guidebooks and websites that Rochelle found. We would never have depended on Vindigo’s content. But having Vindigo to organize our own content by precise location, instead of rough chunks, would have been pretty darn cool.
Anyway, the spreadsheet was put together prior to our trip to France in October 2002; some things are now surely out of date. We’ve made no attempt to clean up Rochelle’s unique annotations and categorizations (Rochelle is an information organization specialist), which will likely be meaningless to you. And you don’t get our copies of the guidebooks, where were marked up and bookmarked with color-coded flags, and cross-referenced in the spreadsheet; we used those constantly, too. But if you still think it might be useful to you, here’s the spreadsheet.
Last note: this only covers half our trip, the time we spent in Paris. We also spent a lot of time in the Champagne region. We didn’t make a spreadsheet for that part of the trip, which (except for our first hotel and one meal) was entirely unscripted. Instead some photos and some weblog entries may give you some useful information about that.
Enjoy France!
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.
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…