AC Days 3 and 4: mission accomplished

First, the punch line: for the first time, as of about 2:00 PM this afternoon, I am making mortgage payments on a house with central air.

Details: yesterday, under Lisa’s close eye, the contractors pulled all the tubing, connected the electrical wire, installed the compressor, installed a new thermostat, and test-fired the blower (albeit without refrigerant). Today the head HVAC guy came out to inspect the system, and (long story short) the AC is now running upstairs.

Which is good, given the outlook for the weekend:

sunny day, sweeping the clouds away

So what’s next? Quite a lot, actually: The installation of the first floor and basement air handler; installation of a new Viessmann boiler and connection to the hot water coils in both air handlers; and removal of steam pipes, oil-fired boiler, and oil tank. But that’s a matter for a few weeks in July.

Then we get to fix the holes in the walls. Currently we have two open stud bays that need to stay open until the work gets done, at which point I learn everything about plaster repair. Fortunately the holes are eminently patchable with large pieces of backing board and I will get a lot of practice in making smooth plaster coats.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn lemons into lemonade. With those open stud bays, it sounds like a great time to run coax up to the top floor for future cable modem/TV hookups. Finally that structured media panel is going to pay off. And I might as well get started since Lisa is on the road all next week.

Nights are growing long: Alex Chilton free concert

Well, I may have missed Sleater-Kinney at Avalon (sob), and I can’t make My Morning Jacket and Wilco tomorrow night, but I’m damned if I’m going to miss Alex Chilton at the Hatch Shell on Saturday—for free. He’s going to be there with “the original Box Tops”—not sure if that means the actual band or the session players that played on all the group’s classic 1960s Memphis soul albums—but he could turn up with a Turkish prison band and I’d still go if he were singing.

For the uninitiated: Alex Chilton was 17 when he had his #1 hit with the Box Tops, “The Letter” (as in, “My baby, she wrote me a letter”); then went on to be the core of Big Star, a band which single-handedly created both indie pop and power pop, as well as reviving the “jangle” sound of the Byrds so that it could be absorbed by early REM. Unfortunately Big Star failed to make a chart impact and the band fell apart over several years, but not before releasing three incredibly seminal albums.

So this should be a fun show. For more modern day Box Tops stuff, check out what’s in Current Listening on the lower right side of the page…

AC Day 2: mid-course corrections

hood chocolate milk cardboard cap, fresh from the wall

After the workmen left yesterday, I cleared the area where they would be opening the wall in the morning, then went upstairs and tried to figure out where the equivalent opening would be upstairs. And said, “Uh oh.” The equivalent opening was right behind the radiator, right under the window. In other words, it was not a clear path from floor to ceiling.

This was a problem. What the contractor was going to do was to run coolant lines, drip lines, and electrical lines up from the basement to the attic through that bay. And the key was the copper line for the coolant. That wasn’t going to bend from one bay to another.

In the morning, the contractor confirmed my concern. We looked at all the options and figured out that the best solution was to open a bay in the office/guest bedroom instead, just inside the wall on the second floor, and meaning I had to open a little more ceiling in the basement. Sigh. But no biggie. At this point, I’m getting pretty quick at ripping down plaster, even on my lunch hour.

In the meantime, the guys were hard at work, getting the holes opened up for the vents and installing them, and doing the hard work on the wall opening. A few surprises remained. For one thing, all the contractors commented on how tough our plaster was. There were many hole saws and Sawzall blades that were sacrificed to cutting the holes in the wall. For another, we discovered the insulation material in the outside walls: an odd vapor barrier plus horsehair combination that explains our energy bills. Next priority: proper insulation.

The third surprise was the odd bits and pieces that popped out from behind the walls. I should have expected based on Aaron and Jeannie’s experiences that we would find a few things, but I wasn’t prepared for a bottle and a cardboard milk bottle cap (pictured), found in totally separate places in the house.

But at the end of the day we had:

  1. Eight outlets upstairs—three in each bedroom, one in the bathroom, one in the stairwell.
  2. Insulated mini-ducts running from the outlets to the air handler.
  3. An outlet and overhead light (though not yet connected) in the attic.
  4. Upstairs air return, installed but not yet connected to the air handler.
  5. Two opened interior walls.
  6. Electrical lines run from the panel, through the joists that were exposed in the basement ceiling, and tied off just at the base of their run.
  7. Bonus: an extra couple of electrical lines that were run by mistake and were undersized for the needs of the downstairs air handler. The electrician asked whether I wanted them connected to outlets upstairs. “Sure,” I said.

Whew. Tomorrow, we might have AC upstairs.

The sanitation of the Starbucks mermaid

If your first introduction to Starbucks was in the last few years, you may not realize that the woman in the logo is a mermaid—or that she’s holding her tails wide open in a fertility gesture. Dead Programmer traces the evolution of the logo from 15th century fertility symbol to 21st century corporate logo and explains how it has morphed over the years.

What he leaves unexplained is what happened when the first radical leap occurred, from the brown “coffee, tea, spices” logo to the green more stylized mermaid. As I recall reading in a print article about ten years ago, this happened as part of a general brand refresh (or first brand design) that also ushered in the use of subtle “steam” graphics in the packaging, the introduction of earth-toned paints in the graphics and the stores, and just about everything you think of as the modern Starbucks iconography. This all happened about the time Starbucks made the shift from mail order coffee into retail and began to appear on the East Coast. I think the article appeared in How magazine. (I can’t find the article online, but there was a recent article about the work of the in-house Starbucks design team that does appear on the How site.)

Original link via BoingBoing.

AC install day 1

unico air handler

Yesterday’s first day of installation went pretty well. Our contractors spent the morning preparing the small air handler by installing an expansion valve, then managed to load it into our small attic (in spite of a very small access panel and a very tight roofline) and spent the rest of the day preparing and insulating the main ducts and marking the locations for the ducts on the second floor. I didn’t manage to get many photos, but that’s our air handler and the very tight space around it.

A word about our installation: we are going for a full conversion. As I mentioned before, we’re getting a Unico system installed. Our setup consists of two small air handlers, the aforementioned attic one for the upper level and one in the basement for the lower two floors. Our contractor is combining this system with a high efficiency gas boiler which will provide indirectly heated hot water to coils in the air handler that will provide heat in the wintertime. As a consequence, we get to eliminate the old boiler and all the radiators.

Of course, this means the installation is a little more complex than a straightforward AC installation. So the workers are doing it in two phases. Phase 1, which is this week, is the upstairs work, plus installation of the compressor and removal of the steam radiators. Phase 2 is installation of the downstairs air handler and ducts, plus installation of the new boiler and removal of the old one. That phase will occur the week of July 4—when I’ll be at Tanglewood with the BSO, keeping cool in a different way.

Whither VB? The withering away of a category killer

Rogers Cadenhead posts about something that has been on my mind recently, the ending of support for Visual Basic 6. A while ago Scoble and Dan Appleman blogged the opposing viewpoint: making customers move their apps off VB6 is the right thing to do because VB.NET is a far superior language.

Let me illustrate a real world perspective on the debate, rather than the strawman that Appleman provides. Say you are a small software company that makes a product that is written in a variety of languages, and a core part of the application suite having to do with automatically sending e-mails is written as a Visual Basic 6 application.

Now why would someone write an email notification process in VB6? I don’t know. Why would someone write the standard procurement system for the Department of Defense in PowerBuilder? This happens all the time: mission critical apps get written in less than mission critical languages, and then get maintained, more or less, forever.

So fast forward about eight years from the creation of this app. The mail landscape has changed, and the architecture of the mailing process, which used to leverage client apps for sending mails, needs to change too. Email viruses and spammers have made old approaches to writing mail functionality painful; organizations are abandoning POP/SMTP based mail and retreating to MAPI. Meanwhile your VB app, which relied on a once attractive piece of third party code to provide MAPI support, is stagnating, and has started to show issues with age (like memory leaks, and interop issues with the security measures added across the Microsoft mail stack). In other words, it’s time to freshen the app. So the natural thing to do is to look at Visual Basic.NET, the successor to VB6, right?

Um, wrong. VB.NET famously no longer supports the programming interfaces used by VB6. And the VB6 to VB.NET migration tools bite; in fact, the tool blows up prior to successfully migrating the VB6 project. And no one in your development team has expertise in the .NET framework. In the years since VB, the team has moved on to C++ and Java. So which language will be the natural choice for migrating the mail app? Not VB.NET. What might have been a no-brainer to move up the ladder to the next version of VB has turned into a major nightmare for our small software company, and the only clear loser is Microsoft.

Beaten to the punch.

I was very excited that I was going to be at our house for the first day of our AC install today, and that I would be able to document the whole thing, when I opened my RSS aggregator last night and realized that: The Old Man and the Street had posted a much more compelling set of first-hand observations of his AC installation than I could manage. Like our house, his is a high-velocity system being installed in an old house with no existing ductwork. Unlike our installation, it looks like the Old Man’s owners (yes, the Old Man is the name of the house) will be keeping their radiators. And I think our installation team will be moving the blower into the attic first, rather than cutting the runs for the ducts. But otherwise a very similar project.

Oh well. Being first isn’t everything, right? Hopefully our team will have the AC working as quickly and easily as The Old Man’s.

Daniel Lanois gets control

According to his web site, überproducer and occasionally brilliant ambient-roots solo artist Daniel Lanois has regained ownership of his first album, Acadie. It’s available from his site as well as from eMusic.

Lanois seems to be focusing some attention on his solo career after a long hiatus, punctuated only by his uneven 2003 release Shine (I liked the track “Fire,” which I included on my 2003 mix cd A page I was meaning to send her, but Lanois-does-reggae can only be described as a disappointment). He also released an instrumental album this week called Belladonna. I’m listening now; it strongly recalls the early 80s instrumental work that he did with Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is in my opinion a Really Good Thing.

Weird tales of Weird Tales

weird tales oct 1993

Boing Boing: Weird Tales covers 1923-1942 gallery. When I read this post, I immediately thought about the album Weird Tales by alt-country supergroup Golden Smog. I wondered: did that mean that the oddly evocative cover of that album was derived from the magazine?

A little spelunking through the cover archive found the answer. Golden Smog’s album cover is based on the cover of the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales, and is an illustration by Margaret Brundage for the story “The Vampire Master” by Hugh Davidson. (The Golden Smog album cover hides the bat head on the woman’s mask.) No word on who in Golden Smog was the pulp fiction fan, though.

The “new Internet” and business

Interesting panel discussion from Wharton on “Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?” Contrary to the title, there is very little discussion of the specific impacts of blogging or RSS, but a lot of good discussion about general business shifts: lowering transaction costs as a way to enable business process flexibility, the rise in importance of economies of scope, shared benefits from collaborative improvements in products, and so forth.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext gets one of the killer quotes of the article:

It used to be easy to measure transaction costs especially when looking at economies of scale and speed. That’s what helped justify centralization in vertically integrated firms. In the more dynamic and decentralized world, the value shifts to economies of scope. The real problem that we have is we have no transaction-cost analysis like “build versus buy” for determining whether I should share an asset and cooperate with other firms to develop greater capabilities. To create such opportunities and convince managers and decision makers that they are worthwhile, you have to deal with the fact they have been schooled in a different kind of thought. Fundamentally they have been schooled in a competitive environment where you gain by hoarding information and where there’s no rationale for more open architectures and participation.

Jared, the Butcher of Widgets

jared, butcher of song

He’s back, and this time he’s in your Dashboard (on Tiger, that is). The infamous Jared, the Butcher of Song, is now available for Mac OS X 10.4 as a Dashboard Widget. From the release notes on the Freeverse blog:

Jared has long been an affront to the senses, an insult to the diatonic scale, an inappropriate “yo-mama” joke told over-loud at the elegant dinner party of internet culture, but never has Jared been as much of a waste of hard drive space as he is as a widget.

For full background on Jared, you’ll have to go to the Wayback Machine, or this old feature article from Wired. Briefly, though, Jared is a little round smiley face who lip-syncs to a wonderful, wonderful Guatemalan song, performed as though cats were being tortured in the vicinity. (Actually, his original biography stated, “Never has the mating of cats sounded so melodic as after one has listened to ‘El Carnicero de Canciones,’ the ‘Butcher of Songs,’ as Jared was known in Guatemala.”)

The Windows version of Jared appears to have gone the way of all flesh (the version I found on line doesn’t even run in Windows 95 compatibility mode under Windows XP), but if you download the Mac OS X version to a Windows machine, you should be able to unzip it, go into the directory, and play the song for yourself. Should you really wish to torture yourself, that is.

(Footnote: when I was working for AMS, I wanted to stress test our ability to embed arbitrary Windows files as documents in our procurement document management software, so I uploaded the WAV file of Jared’s song into our database. I wish I had thought to route the thing along for approval to my co-workers. I almost succeeded in embedding him as an Easter egg in the app, too, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Pops Flag Day concert: a correction

I thought the TFC performance at last night’s Pops concert went quite well, although it is quickly becoming clear that doing a lot of these concerts back to back on weeknights has the potential to take some of the magic from the experience—primarily by exhausting me. However, in the haze of the last few minutes of last night’s concert, I found out something: Saturday night’s audience wasn’t “roaring with approval” because the chorus stood to sing.

It was roaring with approval because an enormous American flag had just unfurled directly above us in front of the proscenium, ending some ten feet above our heads.

Heh. At least I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. The guy right in front of me found that out for the first time last night, and he’s been singing in the chorus for several years.