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Thursday, May first, 2008
 I totally forgot to note the passing of another year blogging, which happened last Friday. I have been keeping this journal for 5 years, now! (At roughly 240235 posts/year.*) That is a long time.
I feel like writing some reminiscences of starting this journal, but not right now. Maybe on the weekend I will. (In the meantime, here is an early post about my motivations in starting a blog.)
 *Forgot: the id number of the latest post is not quite the same as the number of posts, since there have been a couple of deletions here and there. (It's very front-loaded though: in the first four years the average number of posts is 176, in the fifth year there are 473 posts. I wonder what the sixth year will bring?)
posted morning of May first, 2008: Respond
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 Oh boy, another month! This one is going to be the month of my birthday and the month when our garden really starts looking garden-y. (April hasn't been too bad -- some nice flowers -- but in May you start getting the lush greenery, the azaleas and the mountain laurel are going to come out in force, I need to start mowing the lawn.)
posted morning of May first, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008
This morning I planted the beginnings of an herb garden -- specifically, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, two kinds of mint, parsley. I'm happy about that and am hoping they flourish this summer -- before I have only ever grown herbs in pots and they never seem to do very well. I think it's going to rain today (though the weather forecast does not agree with me).
I want to put the screen door up on our back door today (which means I have to go to the hardware store for some screen, to repair the lower panel of the door). And, there is furniture to set up on our side porch. Lots of stuff to keep me busy around the house today.
posted morning of April 20th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I got into the theater and discovered it's a lovely room. Who knew there was a beautiful ballroom on the top floor of Manhattan Center? I did not. My seat was in the front row -- the dance floor had been covered with rows of seats -- about 15 feet away from the performers. The crowd was mostly white, but exhibited a wide diversity of age and of fashion sense. Robyn walked out onto the stage and informed us the building was originally an airship, until it was taken out of comission in the thirties, "around when many people believe the Marx Brothers peaked." -- From there he segued into a story about Groucho Marx traveling cross-country on ducks, "very long ducks that moved on rails and belched coal;" this was by way of introducing his first song, "Heaven," which I did not recognize though I believe I've heard it before -- it is a sweet love song. Next was "Daisy Bomb," which I'm sure I've never heard. It is startling and catchy, and I thought, Awesome, this is going to be a night of new songs for me. Sometimes a bomb is not enough
To express the way I feel Robyn spent a minute tuning his guitar and explained how tuning as part of the show is very important, "tuning up a guitar is the sex part of" sex, drugs, rock n' roll. You see, if you as the audience absorb the tuning-up vibes through your coccyx, you will be able to radiate them outwards later on, when you go up to the tower to feed your pet hamster, or gerbil, or rodent. Be careful, you don't fall over and set fire to his straw! And he played "I Got the Hots," beautiful and funny. He seems to play this very frequently and that is alright by me. A lovely pantomime with his guitar at the beginning of it. Robyn talked about his being "Nick Lowe's psychedelic younger brother," and how that was reflected in the shirts they buy and wear. Then he played "Wax Doll" and "The Cheese Alarm," two more songs I was not familiar with. I guess a large area of his catalog remains for me to explore!
A little more tuning -- Robyn talked about how he was "tuning by consensus -- you see if two strings agree, I will tune the third to match them, even though the third might have been the one that was correct all along... like the people who thought we should not invade Iraq. The majority rules." He played "Full Moon in my Soul," which I love, love, love, and "One Long Pair of Eyes," and then talked about how Gandhi kept a Stratocaster and a Marshall stack next to his bed, but never played -- it was an exercise in resisting temptation -- "He never even touched the strings..." and played "Glass Hotel," which I think he plays nearly as often as "I Got the Hots," and which I like, but not quite as well as the other. The last song of this all-too-short set was a new song, possibly called "I declare that we are free," written for the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. Robyn said he had been asked to write it on short notice "because David Crosby was not available," and that it is going to be performed in a stadium in Holland, so we should imagine that it is "produced and in tune". And he left the stage! But, came back out for encores after Nick Lowe did his set. The final two encores were just tremendous, the best thing in the whole show: Robyn and Nick and surprise guest Elvis Costello playing "If I Fell in Love with You" and "Mystery Train", the whole audience was a single body. Robyn took lead vocal on both, totally appropriate given that he has the best voice of the three.
 Lowe's set was, well, a little corny it must be said. He is a handsome man and an excellent, charismatic showman; but his songs are lacking in the spark of genius. He played "Cruel to be Kind," "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding," "All Men are Liars" and some other tunes I thought I recognized, plus some new stuff. Some lovely tunes but just a bit corny. Update: Here are some pix from SketchGuy... who blogs about the show here.
posted morning of April 10th, 2008: 5 responses
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Thursday, April third, 2008
 Per Mr. Fritz's request, a comparison of our bathroom floor plan before and after the remodeling project:
Only very roughly to scale. But the basic message communicated, that there is now a lot more open space in the bathroom through which to move, is an accurate one.
posted evening of April third, 2008: 4 responses
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Tuesday, April first, 2008
 For the past few months, we've been in the process of renovating our 2nd floor bathroom -- workers in and out of the house, trucks driving up and delivering large heavy objects, paint odors and sawdust mixing with our air... It's finished now! And what an improvement -- the old bathroom just was not a well put-together room. Besides that the tiles were old and ugly and the fixtures falling apart, the layout was nonsensical. You pushed the door open into a narrow corridor next to the bathtub and at the end of the bathtub there was a little bit of space and then the toilet; the sink was placed so that you would always knock into the corner of it when you were going by there.
We rearranged the space pretty radically and as I said, I think it's a huge improvement. Before and after pictures are here. The design and the painting (which still has a little bit of touching up to be done) are my and Ellen's contributions, the other work was contracted out.
Update: I posted a rough floor plan of the before and after layouts here.
posted evening of April first, 2008: 3 responses
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Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Permit me to wax geeky for a moment: last night I added a new feature to the site, which involves dynamic loading of page elements. Fun! About half (a little less) of the size of this page (ie, roughly 20K bytes) is the blogroll, on the right-hand side of the page under the "Where to go from here" heading -- which you might not think to look at it, since most of the data is hidden when the page loads and only shown when you click on the category headings. This means that whenever a person or a robot downloads the page, 20K of data is sent that is probably not going to be displayed or used. I've been trying for a while to figure out how to only send it to people who are interested in it, i.e. not to robots or to one-time visitors who come here from a Google search for a book their class is reading, which together account for the great majority of page views. Last night I came up with a pretty seamless solution: I recently implemented a sticky blogroll, using cookies to ensure that once you have clicked a blogroll category header, the category will remain visible when you reload the page. So it's easy to check whether a user is a repeat visitor who has in the past looked at the blogroll -- since the blogroll is stored in a file on the server that gets read at load time, all I had to do was create a truncated version of that file (containing only data for the default visible categories) and include that instead if the relevant cookie was not set. But then when a new visitor decides s/he wants to look at the blogroll, and clicks on a category header, how is s/he going to get data? Well in the truncated blogroll file, the empty headers are linked to a Javascript function called load_full_links, which uses XMLHttpRequest to download the complete blogroll -- so the first time you click a category you will see about a 1-second delay. But then your cookie is set, so going forward the blogroll is loaded with the page. I think it's a pretty nice bit of design/programming and I'm looking forward to using a similar algorithm for other pieces of functionality.
 Potential problems: - I have tested this with Firefox and Internet Explorer. I'm not sure how it will work with other browsers, and it will definitely not work in a browser where Javascript is disabled. This doesn't seem like a big deal to me but if it causes trouble for you, let me know and I'll try and come up with a solution.
- Search engines will no longer index most of my blogroll. This is, on one hand, good -- I have seen referrals from searches that hit an item on the blogroll, which generally seem like my page is not what the searcher was looking for -- and on the other hand, possibly not ideal -- Google and Technorati both pay a lot of attention to outgoing links.
posted morning of March 29th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 24th, 2008
So the plumber (from the heating company) came and let us know, the pressure relief valve is leaking because the water main pressure is too high -- 120psi*, when the house wants it to be between 80 - 100psi. We called Donald (at the water company) and he was like "Oh, well of course you need to have a pressure regulation valve on your main." Turns out we don't have any such thing. So, another plumber (from the plumbing company) is coming (hopefully this afternoon), to install the valve. In the meantime, this guy adjusted the relief valve so that it will hold 120psi without leaking.
(Later on:) The second plumber came, installed the valve, everything's fine.
*psi is a lovely acronym in that it could also be spelled ψ.
posted afternoon of March 24th, 2008: Respond
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Hm. Well, I turned the main water supply off last night. Turned it on this morning, and the pressure relief valve is not leaking. I'm not sure what to make of that -- it could mean the problem was a transitory surplus of pressure in the main line; or it could (more likely, I think) mean giving the valve a chance to rest made it stop leaking, which probably means the leak will come back after a little while. I don't want to call a plumber and have him come over here while there is no leak, I don't think that would be useful. So, deputizing Ellen to check on the pipe through the day (assuming it is still not leaking at 8:30, when I go to work -- otherwise I will take a personal day and interact with plumbers.)
 ...Aaand, we're dripping! A very slow drip right now, I'm assuming it will get worse as the day goes on. I have called the heating company and the plumber should be here later this morning.
posted morning of March 24th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Aargh... Some water is dripping out of a pipe next to the combination boiler/water heater in our basement. It is not dripping out super-fast, but probably a few cups every hour, which is a lot in the scheme of things that is our plumbing. The pipe appears to be the output of the water heater portion of the mechanism; as near as I can tell it is a pressure relief valve, described in detail on this page; the likely candidates for causing the leak are - That the valve itself is broken (but this seems unlikely since a new valve was probably put in when the boiler was replaced a few years ago);
- that the water pressure regulator* attached to the main water line coming into our house is broken (this seems more plausible);
- that the main water supply pressure for our block has really unusually high pressure today (possible I guess?); or
- that something done during our bathroom renovation broke the system somehow (seems likely and unnerving, except I can't see any logical way that would work -- the water pressure is an input to the system not at all dependent on the devices attached to the system when they are all shut off.)
It is definitely pressure -- if I turn on a hot water tap upstairs, the leak stops. (Should check whether a cold water tap has this effect, but I think it will.) Of course we cannot get a plumber on Easter Sunday; I guess I will shut off the water coming into the house this evening before we go to bed, and turn it back on in the morning.
... Yes, the cold water tap has the same effect. The leak seems to be getting faster, too! Hopefully it will be a simple repair; we'll find out tomorrow, I guess. I'm glad we're doing a lot in the basement these days; I think there have been periods like late last year, where this would have gone undetected for a couple of days.
*(The next day: we don't actually have a water pressure regulator, which is the source of the problem, in combination with the third bullet point above. I was assuming there was one since the linked article made it look like this was standard.)
posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: Respond
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