Thursday, April 3, 2014
Luscious forest overhead scene...
New house update...
New house update... We took possession of our new home today, after doing a final walk-through. I also got a bit of an education from the former owner about how things in the house work, and where they are located. My first impressions are mostly ... that there's an awful lot of work to be done.
I'm “camped” in the house right now, and I'll stay camped for as long as it takes to get some changes made to the house. The biggest things to be done are new flooring (throughout the house, we've decided), new paint (again, throughout the house), and some remodeling in the master bathroom (mainly to make a nice big shower).
The flooring and paint involve lots of choices driven by style, something I am absolutely no good at. Debbie is working with a good friend who just happens to be an interior designer. The goal is to arrive at a design that (a) Debbie loves, (b) isn't completely crazy, and (c) I can stand. It's not clear that there is an intersection of those three sets :) I'm not sure what we'll do in that case!
I spent a lot of today in the local Walmart, buying the bare necessities required to make this house liveable for me over the next 8 weeks or so. The majority of what I got was for the kitchen – it's amazingly hard to cook without basics like oil, salt, knives, measuring cups, etc., etc. When I got to the checkout counter, the clerk said “Oh, you’re moving into a new house!” It was that obvious :)
I also managed to stop by the local Comcast office to pick up a cable modem/router and start our service. Compared with any Internet service we've ever had, it's crazy fast out here. On advice from some technical locals, I opted for the 50Mb plan (for a $10 monthly surcharge over the base 25Mb plan). There's also a 105Mb plan (for a $45 monthly surcharge), but the locals tell me that the 50Mb generally bursts to the same speed. I'll try that for a while, and if I don't like it I can always upgrade. With about an hour's usage, so far I'm just blinded by the speed – I'm not used to seeing videos pop up and immediately run, and that's what's happening. Also, my morning news read (which simultaneously opens 36 tabs) is easily 10x faster than our wireless Internet service back in Jamul. That's not a ding on our Jamul service – it's awesome considering where we live! But here in Utah, we just happen to be living where there is some modern and underutilized cable infrastructure ... and it shows!
I'm “camped” in the house right now, and I'll stay camped for as long as it takes to get some changes made to the house. The biggest things to be done are new flooring (throughout the house, we've decided), new paint (again, throughout the house), and some remodeling in the master bathroom (mainly to make a nice big shower).
The flooring and paint involve lots of choices driven by style, something I am absolutely no good at. Debbie is working with a good friend who just happens to be an interior designer. The goal is to arrive at a design that (a) Debbie loves, (b) isn't completely crazy, and (c) I can stand. It's not clear that there is an intersection of those three sets :) I'm not sure what we'll do in that case!
I spent a lot of today in the local Walmart, buying the bare necessities required to make this house liveable for me over the next 8 weeks or so. The majority of what I got was for the kitchen – it's amazingly hard to cook without basics like oil, salt, knives, measuring cups, etc., etc. When I got to the checkout counter, the clerk said “Oh, you’re moving into a new house!” It was that obvious :)
I also managed to stop by the local Comcast office to pick up a cable modem/router and start our service. Compared with any Internet service we've ever had, it's crazy fast out here. On advice from some technical locals, I opted for the 50Mb plan (for a $10 monthly surcharge over the base 25Mb plan). There's also a 105Mb plan (for a $45 monthly surcharge), but the locals tell me that the 50Mb generally bursts to the same speed. I'll try that for a while, and if I don't like it I can always upgrade. With about an hour's usage, so far I'm just blinded by the speed – I'm not used to seeing videos pop up and immediately run, and that's what's happening. Also, my morning news read (which simultaneously opens 36 tabs) is easily 10x faster than our wireless Internet service back in Jamul. That's not a ding on our Jamul service – it's awesome considering where we live! But here in Utah, we just happen to be living where there is some modern and underutilized cable infrastructure ... and it shows!
The wisdom of crowds...
The wisdom of crowds... Interesting piece on a fascinating topic. In this case, a crowd of ordinary people with no special access to information beat CIA analysts with access to classified intelligence...
Tarsnap gets even cheaper!
Tarsnap gets even cheaper! Secure cloud backup for any UNIX-like machine, with data stored on Amazon's S3 service. The service's web page is here.