Radiator niches and bathroom work

Ow. Ow. Even though contractors are hip deep in our first floor bathroom renovation, we still have plenty of projects of our own, including (ow ow) framing in the niches where the radiators used to be, so that the plasterers can make them flush with the walls. This, as always, turned out to be more complex than we ever imagined.

Background: we didn’t want to find a plasterer ourselves and so had put off this project, but we’ll have one coming in to finish the walls and ceiling in our new shower. So we decided we would take advantage of his coming to have him do the work. And it turns out to be affordable, provided that we do the basic framing ourselves. So on Saturday we cleaned out all the broken plaster from the niche, which turned out to be pretty much all of it, measured, and cut the 2x4s to length. Then I started swinging a framing hammer, and learned about slow progress. Really slow project. Fortunately we finished the dining room one and I even hung a box for the outlet.

Then things started to slow down. We had to remove trim from each of the other openings—intact, if possible, since we would need to reuse it once the plastering is complete. And in some cases we needed to bring up floorboards, since we had some floor to replace where there was some water damage and need to reuse the good boards to patch the bad ones.

Then there were the two pipes, that, in spite of all our HVAC installers’ efforts, were still too high to lay floor over. Fortunately our contractor volunteered to knock one off during his lunch hour—seeing that otherwise his plasterer wouldn’t be able to finish his job. And tonight I got another one done, in spite of a nightmare of bad angles and sheer fright. (Handling a reciprocating saw to cut a few inches off a loose cast iron pipe just below our bedroom floor ranks as my least home improvement chore ever.)

But that’s done, and all the lumber is cut to length. Now I just need to rig a jig so that I can use my circular saw to trim about 5/8ths of an inch off each piece, so that the blueboard will lay flush with the wall surface or below it. A few shots of the progress here, including the shower stall pre-rough piping and tile.

Blogging to Manila from Flock.

If this works, I will have successfully blogged from Flock. To get posting to my Manila site working, I had to bypass Flock’s blog autosetup and hand-edit the configuration file, which on my Windows machine is saved in my Documents and Settings directory under Application DataMozillaFlockprofiles[default]blog_alpha.rdf.

The problem with Flock’s autodetection technology is that both the Blogger and Metaweblog API attempt to use the GetUsersBlogs API call, which is not implemented on Manila. All I had to do to get it working, though, was to save a profile that called Blogger using the Metaweblog API, then edit the RDF file to set all the correct user ids and URLs based on my RSD file.

A few things I like about the blog editor—the built-in Flickr topbar is cool, cool, cool. And the UI for the actual editor is pretty nice. I especially like the option to show me the HTML of my post. I have used enough “WYSIWIG” editors that end up generating nasty HTML that I don’t really trust them anymore. —Flock is no exception to this rule, btw; rather than wrapping paragraphs in <p></p>, it ends a paragraph with a <br /><p>. Bad bad bad, particularly if your blog is HTML 4.01 Transitional. But once you drag up the splitbar to get to the raw HTML you can edit to your heart’s content. Which is good, because Flock totally mangles HTML entities. I put a curly quote in the HTML view with & rsquo;, which turned into the proper ’ in the preview; I then went and copied and pasted that into another place in the preview, but it pasted as a high ascii character rather than an HTML entity. Bad, bad, bad. And when you hit Italics in the preview, it formats it as <span style=”font-style: italic;”></span> rather than the more semantic <em></em>. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Forget what I said about the blog editor; it needs work, and I will be posting some bug reports.

Also, the draft functionality is weird. When you save as draft, your post window closes, and you have to open a new blog window, switch to the Draft account, open the Blog topbar, and click on the saved post to get it to open. Then you have to mouse down in the text field to enable the Publish button. Not intuitive.

Flocking, almost.

Flock has launched its public Developer Preview. Congrats to Sloanie Geoffrey Arone and the rest of the Flock team.

I’m playing with the release, but it’s living up to its designation as a developer preview release. For one thing, it doesn’t appear to work with my Manila blog; though the release notes state that it works with Blogger, it doesn’t appear to know how to talk to Manila’s Blogger or Metaweblog APIs, and there’s no UI for blog configuration aside from an autodiscovery engine that doesn’t work for my blog. I will be digging into the developer section and the pref files to see if I can figure out how to get around the autodiscovery feature and make this work with my blog. At a minimum, I would think the web services support would let me talk to the Manila API directly.

The Wilkerson transcript

Financial Times: Transcript: Colonel Wilkerson on US foreign policy. Don’t let the title throw you—this is one of the most astonishing insider critiques of the administration, and of the execution of US foreign policy generally, that I have read yet—and it’s only a partial transcript. The summary: a “cabal” of insiders led by Cheney and Rumsfeld has been making foreign policy decisions in secret, with disastrous results when the decisions go to the bureaucracy for implementation, and that we are all screwed as a result. But the actual transcript is far more entertaining. As Salon notes, “Wilkerson has a long working relationship with Powell and was often thought to be someone who would say aloud what Powell thought himself but was too cautious to reveal. If that’s what was happening Wednesday, the former secretary of state has a lot to get off his chest.” Yep:

And I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again…

Under Secretary of Defense Douglas [Feith], whom most of you probably know Tommy Frank said was stupidest blankety blank man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

And yet, and yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere.

Wrap-up of press coverage at The Washington Note by Steve Clemons, who was instrumental in organizing the talk at the New America Foundation (full video is also posted at that link).

Introducing the alternate merge

I feel unfair posting this in my Boston category, since it’s equally applicable to Seattle residents, but I feel compelled, after my 30 minute commute stretched to an hour this morning, to introduce a new concept to my fellow Massholes Boston-area motorists:

al-ter-nate merge
(n.) A method of bringing two lanes of traffic together into one lane in which a motorist from one lane proceeds and the motorist behind him yields to a motorist in the other lane to allow them to merge into the flow of traffic.

You think this is funny? That the term doesn’t bear defining? Well, the number of motorists who speed up to cut off mergers from the other lane, or who attempt to merge two or more cars in front of a motorist from the other lane, or who don’t come over when it’s their turn to merge even when you open a space for them, tells me that it’s not a well understood concept.

In Seattle, the problem is typically that the lane being merged into is populated by people driving under the speed limit and not leaving enough space between their cars for a motorcycle, much less another vehicle, to merge into traffic. In Boston, it’s worse:

  • People in lane 2 speed up when they see someone coming over from lane 1;
  • Drivers in lane 1 try to beat their turn to merge by cutting over behind the front driver in line, and blocking his merge attempt;
  • Drivers in lane 1 pull out and drive well past the merge point rather than wait their turn to merge, often cutting into lane 2 at the last possible second whether a space exists for them or not. (Especially common at the junction of Rt 2 westbound and 128 south in the mornings.)

I don’t know. Maybe I’m making up this whole concept. Am I alone in thinking that everyone should understand alternate merge?

We are ALL not consumers.

I’ve been getting an unusually high level of linkage to a post I wrote in July, called “I am not a consumer. I am a human being,” after Doc Searls linked it (and my recent rant about the crippling effects of the c-word) on Saturday. The attention is flattering, but I’m not the first person to express this sentiment. In fact, the web is boiling over with it. A brief survey yields these variants:

  • “I am not a consumer. I am a person. Start treating me like one.” — michaelw
  • “I am not a ‘consumer,’ a ‘recipient’ or any other abstraction. I am I. I am a person, I am a self.” — Harold A. Maio
  • “They do not see us as disabled. They see us as able. I am not a consumer who consumes government aid at exorbitant costs and never improves. My crew and I are producers…” — Bruce Ario
  • “To refer to citizens as ‘consumers’ indicates a pro-business bias.” — Christopher Palms (comment to FTC on Do Not Call registry)
  • “…being American means I am NOT a Consumer above all else.” — Roger Born
  • “I am not a ‘consumer’, I am not a number. I am not a walking wallet for companies and government to fight over. To the corporate heads and government rulers I say ‘HEY! You F**kers work for ME! Remember THAT!’” — “Phugedaboudet”
  • “I am not a consumer of your political products, I am a citizen!” — David Weinberger, cited at Blogads and at GreaterDemocracy
  • “I will not spend my money with a company whose CEO thinks I am nothing but a consumer (I despise that word) of useless media crap from Hollywood and the Copyright Cabal. I am not a consumer. I am a customer. And I will not be treated like a criminal.” — Terry Frazier
  • “I am not a consumer but a reader of books…” — Katherine MacNamara

Point? While there is certainly a fair amount of consumer-label-resentment directed towards the broadband providers, the same backlash is appearing against the music industry, the retail industry (through Amazon), Hollywood, marketers (tele- and otherwise), and the political establishment. That’s a lot of minds to start to shift.

So it’s time to start shifting them, to take the power back.

Update: Doc points out that I missed a very important variation on this, from Cluetrain: “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Doc: I missed it because that’s written as an image with no alt text, and thus was not turned up in the Google search!!! Irony is alive and well.

ECM hits the iTunes Music Store: go get some Pärt

I thought I was seeing things a few weeks ago when I saw an ECM release in the iTunes Music Store, but no: a bunch of essential ECM classical releases have been added this week, including the Pärt Te Deum. If you haven’t already added this recording to your collection, I highly recommend it. And don’t buy just the tracks; go ahead and get the album so you can get the recording of the “Te Deum.” I remember sitting around in Monroe Hill with fellow Glee Club member Morgan Whitfield listening to this and being in awe back in 1993, and then being just as awed in 2002 when I sang the work with the Cascadian Chorale.

Other Pärt ECM recordings of interest in the iTMS: Tabula Rasa, the Miserere,
Kanon Pokajanen, and the Passio (which, as on the CD, is a single 70 minute long track).

BSO update: A Child of Our Time

My first BSO concert of the season is coming up: a performance of Sir Michael Tippet’s oratorio A Child Of Our Time under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. The work, a response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particularly Kristallnacht, in the days leading up to the Second World War, alternates highly chromatic and difficult choral passages with settings of African-American spirituals. While on first blush the description sounds too “high concept” for comfort, the choice of spirituals is appropriate: the texts of the spirituals evoke images from Old Testament (i.e. Jewish) history as a response to slavery, particularly “Go Down Moses” and “Deep River” (“my home is over Jordan”), and the juxtaposition of the spirituals with the texts about persecution brings things full circle.

Rehearsals with the chorus have been good so far. We start orchestra rehearsals next week, and performances are at the end of the month (the Mozart Posthorn Serenade is also on the program), on the 27th, 28th and 29th. I hope some of my Boston area readers can make one of the shows.

Splendid Sundays in Slumberland

New York Times: Restoring Slumberland. There’s an eerie synchronicity about reading this article at the same time as Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks serial in Salon. Peter Maresca’s painstaking restoration of Winsor McCay’s century old comic strips, which still stretch the limits of the form in both imagination and quality, and his subsequent decision to self-publish the results seems as brilliantly quixotic as the creation of garden gnomes with face-recognition for providing context-sensitive household memos.

What’s best about the new book is that it’s about a passion for something that was itself insanely passionate. No hack working in syndicated comics today could pull off anything like the imagination and brilliance of a page from this book. Unfortunately, what’s worst about the book is the infrastructure: the book’s website, sundaypressbooks.com, is was pretty much unreachable (it’s back now).

Update: Nice post at BoingBoing citing Glenn Fleishman on the copyright issues involved: “100 years later, the public that granted the limited exclusivity of copyright gets to reap in the greater benefit of cultural heritage being shared more widely.” The ironies abound in this case. Prior to the Dover reprints that surfaced a few years ago, I’m unaware of any collections that appeared while the work was still in copyright. It’s only now that the right audience has appeared to create a work that might spark new interest in McCay’s work.

Even more unbelievable: Virginia 26, Florida State 21

As Fury points out, it was a weekend for upsets, and while Michigan’s 27-25 victory over Penn State is pretty darn dramatic, my money is on Virginia’s 26-21 win over Florida State for upset of the week. Sentences like “beat a top-5 team for only the second time in their history” and (my favorite) “We couldn’t stop that dadgum No. 18” make the victory that much sweeter…and almost erase the humiliation of losses to Maryland and Boston College in the preceding weeks. Of course, Virginia’s return to the Top 25 helps too.

The mystery of the disappearing door.

the release mechanism for the lock

While I’m pondering house changes, I can’t help but be captivated by this illustration of how to make a hidden door in a bookcase. Very cool, and solves a problem with our plans for the built in bookshelves in the library… provided I can sell Lisa on it.

We have limited space in the library room for shelves. One wall is mostly occupied by a large fireplace, and the facing wall has the staircase—which has little room for bookshelves, sadly. In the outside wall of the room is set a door, which leads to the access for the water shut-off (and also provides a convenient access behind the walls for running electrical cable to the breaker box). I had thought that the door limited what we could do with shelves on that wall, but the illustrated how tos in this article suggest we may have some options.

The choice of book for the hinge is especially good: an old volume of Sherlock Holmes. Though I might be tempted to find a more literal title, like this one, to serve as my mnemonic.

Color us nervous.

Well, today is the big day: bathroom renovations started at our house this morning. Our contractor is ripping out a closet and a half on the first floor to squeeze a shower into our half bath (which makes it now a three-quarters bath, I think). We’re a little nervous and have been forgetting important things to ask. Like: when you do the demolition, if it’s possible, could we get the floorboards out of the closet so we can patch the holes and water damage left where the radiators used to live?

This is also the point of no return in a lot of ways. Most of the other jobs that we have had someone else do have been quick and relatively painless: one day at most, even for the window replacements. The HVAC job was an exception, but it didn’t make a lot of dust and noise, as opposed to this job.

And there are so many moving parts: tile, fixtures, lighting, paint, plaster, all have to be managed separately. Our general contractor has been pretty good so far, but there are still things that we have to manage.

So we deal with it. The dogs are out of the way in New Jersey, and we’re at our respective offices IMing nervously back and forth to each other with budget numbers and details we’ve forgotten. You can say what you will about doing big projects yourself, but at least you know exactly what’s going on. Makes me wish I had set up a webcam or something.

Consume, consume, consume

As I’ve mentioned before, I want a moratorium on the word consumer—both because it is disrespectful and because it builds bad thinking habits in companies that sell to “consumers.” Doc Searls’s experience with his local Internet providers today is a case in point:

The bottom line: I can replace my 3Mb/300Kb $49/month Cox home Internet account with a 3Mb/768Kb $29/month Verizon home Internet account. The business account won’t be so easy. First, I have to get a Verizon business phone account, the person on the phone said. Then I have to call a number to see if static IP addresses are available. The number “is experiencing extremely high call volume.” So I gave up.

In the course of talking, way too much, to Verizon and Cox representatives the last few days, it’s clear these kinds of companies simply cannot imagine a world where consumers also produce, where demand also supplies, where the Net is anything other than a new way to deliver the same old crap.

Least of all can they imagine that there is real business in real service to individuals working out of their homes.

It makes me think: First, where is the service offering for geeks? Second, how insidious is this C word that there are not even product offerings to meet the needs of real people for symmetric download/upload speeds? No, all “home users” (my other favorite condescending euphemism for real people) need to do is download other peoples’ stuff.

iTunes recovery

As noted on Monday I’ve been trying to rebuild my iTunes library after inadvertently deleting the central library index file. To date I’ve managed to recover detailed information on about 4700 tracks, or about a third of the library—and as about a third of the tracks are newly ripped and never played, I can reimport those from disk without worrying about losing playcount. That leaves another 4000 or so.

At this point I’m thinking that I’ll cut my losses and just reimport the music files and start rebuilding the playlists by hand. I’ve probably passed the point of diminshing returns by working with scraps of recovered Library XML files. But getting playcounts and ratings back for 4000 songs is better than nothing, for sure.