Anybody remember what goofiness was required to display what was on a given floppy disk on a Commodore 64?  I spent many hours playing/copying games back in the early 1980s on one of these machines, and I remember how you used to have to load directories from disk and then use a LIST command to see them.

LOAD “$”,8

I also remember that when you got a fresh game from the store, you’d pop the disk in the drive and type

LOAD “*”,8,1

which loaded the game program into the appropriate memory.  Problem is, sometimes you’d absentmindedly add the “,1″ to the request for the disk directory when you wanted to see what was on the disk and end up accidentally causing a cavalcade of junk characters to end up all over the screen.  This article does an awesome job of explaining why that happened, as well as some other interesting things about how the C-64 worked.

Brings back memories of spending long hours locked in my basement with my Commodore, and of using a hole puncher to turn single-sided disks into double-sided ones. 

It’s Kate’s birthday today!  Send her a quick birthday wish at Kate@Hespos.com, if you like.

Her latest exploit is practicing her walking.  For weeks now, she’s been able to balance in place.  She can also walk along a wall or with Mommy holding her hands.  Her record unassisted is six steps.

It’s also Uncle Rob’s birthday.  Don’t forget him.

Kate’s first birthday is tomorrow, and we’ve been planning her party for the upcoming weekend.  Thus, projects are falling into three buckets:

1. Get done in time for the party
2. Get done as soon as humanly possible, but not necessarily in time for the party
3. Get done whenever

The lawn fell into category #1.  Thirty yards of topsoil were spread by hand, after moving around via wheelbarrows and the dump cart on my John Deere.  (Thanks, Jimmy and Jack!)  About three quarters of that was tamped by hand or by repeatedly running it over with heavy things.  Two big bags of Scott’s seed were spread, followed by starter fertilizer.  And the grass is coming in.  It’s growing surprisingly fast, and you can see a difference from day to day.  Yes, that’s true.  Every morning, I peek into the back yard before I go to work and I assess the grass situation.  I do believe that we’ll have something that passes for a lawn on August 1st.

A major project in category #2 is demolishing the basement.  We have a mold problem, thanks to a moisture problem.  And the basement demo needs to be done before any projects get started on.  Over the weekend, we were finishing up the demolition (Thanks, Jimmy and Paul!) and I have about 20 bags’ worth of material to take out to the dumpster.  From there, it’s just a Shop Vaccing away from having the mold abatement guys come in and do their thing.  They wanted to charge me to get rid of half the sheet rock in the basement, and I figured I could save some money by getting rid of all of it myself.  (Well, with family help anyway…)

Of course, this means that all other projects are in category #3.  This includes weeding the garden, pouring various concrete slabs, digging out and transplanting the arbor vitaes around the foundation, painting the porch and a bunch of other things I’d like to be doing right now.  But first, the basement.

On top of all this crap, our garage fridge broke down last night.  Until recently, the garage fridge was our kitchen fridge.  So in the grand scheme of things, having it go on the fritz now means a couple o’ skunky beers and not an entire fridge-full of spoiled food.  But still, it sucked to have to go out to Home Depot last night and negotiate with the floor nerds for favorable pricing on a fridge that doesn’t need to be – how should I say? – cosmetically perfect.  While I was there, I ran into a family friend who gave us a window air conditioner while we wait for our central air system to be replaced.  (Thanks, Don!)

Notice a theme here?  I couldn’t have done any of this without support from family and friends, so thanks to all of you who have pitched in to help us renovate.  Extra special mega-thanks to Jimmy for graciously giving up his spare time to share (and, often, absorb much of) the grunt work.

Here’s a vid Jimmy took of me flattening the pool in the back yard with a Bobcat

It took us most of the afternoon to squish the pool up into a little ball of aluminum, vinyl and dead leaves, then drag it out of the yard and chuck it in the dumpster.  We got rid of the old swingset in the yard, too.

I got the machine stuck, eventually.  I actually had to go on YouTube to check out a video on how to get a Bobcat unstuck in order to get it going again.  (Secret, plunge the bucket straight down and use the hydraulics to assist in backing out of the hole you’re stuck in.)

We also tore up the yard a bit.  I need to spread out around 20 yards of topsoil in order to be in a place where I can even think about spreading grass seed.  That’s a project for next weekend.

There’s a lot of stuff to post here, but a lot of it is at home.  I have some great videos of driving a Bobcat through the old pool this weekend, but they’re on my Flip camera back home.  There are also some before and after shots of the back yard.

In the meantime, here’s a photo Danny took while we were hanging around at the house on Saturday.  In the batch of Weebles we bought Kate, we found one that did, in fact, fall down.  Naturally, all his Weeble friends gathered around to witness this strangeness.  Enjoy.

So we hit a major milestone this weekend.  The old house is completely empty, clean and ready for new people to move in.

The deal was that if I emptied everything and brought it to the new house, Lauren would clean the old house.  Probably 95% of the move was done by May, but there were some things lingering in the old house that took us a while to get to, like our office, which we didn’t really pack in its entirety before the movers got there.  There was also a lot of stuff in the basement and in the attic.

So a lot of the weekend was spent moving boxes, which made it not very distinguishable from other weekends in recent memory.  Just getting everything to the right place, much less getting it unpacked, is a nightmare.

Then there was the dirt thing.  See, it’s been raining pretty much non-stop in New York for the past several weeks.  That’s led to water intrusion in the basement.  I’ve been doing a lot of stuff to get the gutters to channel water off the roof and away from the foundation, like cleaning all the goop and trash out of the gutters and buying pieces of elephant trunk to extend the downspouts.  But there’s another thing we need to do – pitch the grade away from the foundation so that water siting on the lawn won’t pool up against the house.

So I ordered some topsoil on Saturday.  Ten yards for $120 delivered – not a bad price.  It was just the “delivery” that was the problem.  You see, the topsoil was somewhat moist, so when the delivery guy showed up with his truck, he raised his dump bed about as high as it would go without tipping the truck over, but the dirt just stuck and refused to slide down onto the driveway.  The delivery guy actually had to take the dirt back and bring a different, wider truck that wouldn’t tip over in order to make the delivery.

Then Jimmy and I started taking it out back to where it was needed.  We’d fill up a wheelbarrow and the John Deere’s dump cart and take it back into the yard, dump it and rake it out.  Jimmy and I would switch after two loads, so that I’d be using the wheelbarrow while he used the tractor and cart.  It was a pretty good system and we moved at least five yards that way.  There’s still five yards sitting in the driveway on a tarp, though.  We’ll do a few loads when I get home from work.

I think I’m going to end up ordering more dirt, though.  There are plenty of uneven areas around the lawn and I still haven’t put any fill or soil under the porch where there’s a whole other bit that needs to be filled in.  Water is pooling under there, too, because no one ever took the time to do a final grade before the builders put the porch on the house.  So the grade under the porch is slanting back toward the house.

Soon, Jimmy and I will start pouring the slab for the air conditioning units and the hot tub.

I can’t believe that something that was invented in order to streamline online payments has made it MORE difficult to make online payments almost every single time I’ve used it.  If it weren’t for eBay and all these little independent merchants who don’t have their own credit card processing, I’d never use it to begin with.

Here are some suggestions for PayPal to help make things easier for the end user and make some more money in the medium- to long-term.

1. Stop defaulting to the payment option that’s most profitable for PayPal. I have my checking account linked to my PayPal account.  But it’s often better for me to use one of the credit cards linked to my account.  PayPal always defaults to take money directly from my checking account and makes it a huge pain in the butt to pick another payment type.  The end user, though, doesn’t care what’s most profitable for PayPal.  They just see that PayPal is picking the option most profitable for it, and not the one that’s most convenient for the end user.  I find myself changing my payment option out of spite – to the debit card that draws money from the same checking account PayPal wants so desperately to directly debit.
2. Make it easier to change information after you change addresses.  Having just moved, I now know that this process is a pain in the ass.  You can’t just change your home address in the system.  You have to log in, delete any credit cards associated with your old address, then delete the old address.  Then you have to add your new address, add the credit cards back and then designate that address as your new home address.  All credit cards have to be reconfirmed.  How about an “I’m Moving Wizard?”
3. Change the whole process for confirming credit cards. The existing process is screwed.  PayPal wouldn’t let me use my Discover Card because it was “associated with another account.”  I just found out it was associated with the right account, all right – just the wrong address.  So I went through the steps described in #2 above and found out that I needed to reconfirm the Discover Card.  How PayPal does this is to charge the card $1.95 and have the owner of the card confirm it by entering a code that appears on their statement.  Once confirmed, the $1.95 is refunded.  The transaction takes a few days to show up in electronic billing, assuming you don’t want to wait for the statement to come in the mail.  Meanwhile, PayPal gave itself a $1.95 interest-free loan on your credit card.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what if you’re confirming a few million credit cards at any given time?  That’s a lot of float, to say nothing of the breakage.  I should point out that when I’ve opened checking accounts with ING Direct and Emigrant, they send you a micropayment of something like 8 cents or 12 cents and ask you to confirm the amount.  They don’t take money out.  Interesting…
4. Quit trying to upsell when you should be streamlining payment processes.  People resent it when PayPal wastes the chance to make a payment process shorter and simpler and tries to upsell a Mastercard or whatever.  Do Not Want.  Keep doing it and its a big Do Not Want for the whole service, which exists (ostensibly) for simplifying payment.

There are a lot more tips I could give.  PayPal ought to give serious consideration to fixing some of this stuff.  The big picture is that they’re screwing up their brand.  They look like a company that scrapes for every nickel and dime it can get out of customers in exchange for adding minimal value.  That may cut it in a world where PayPal is pretty much the only game in town for folks who don’t want to spend money on payment processing, but how much longer can that last?  It can’t be too long before PayPal will see serious competition (most likely indirectly).

My guess is that PayPal will leverage its user base, the eBay ownership and other assets to enforce the status quo.  Should be good for a 4-7 year slide into oblivion while users slowly find and exploit other options.

Lots of things going on, as usual.  And because the tasks are piling up, so is my general list of maladies and complaints:

1. Dear Best Buy, CostCo and all other brick-and-mortar retailers – I bring the product to the register and pay for it.  You give me my receipt.  Transaction over.  No, you can’t peer through my bags to see whether or not I’m stealing something.  (Oh, and nobody’s buying that “We’re making sure you got the right item” bullcrap, either.  If I didn’t have the right item, I wouldn’t have brought it to the counter.)  You can’t stand in my way and block my exit until I give you a receipt, either.  Think I stole something?  Call a cop.  You don’t get to BE the cop.
2. Dear New Next-Door Neighbor – Keeping pets requires responsibility beyond leaving giant mounds of cat food on your porch outside for the cats that live in the woods behind your property.  You’re supposed to make sure they’re spayed/neutered, get them their shots and keep them off other people’s property (namely, mine).  You can’t have it both ways such that you feed them, cuddle them, etc. but bear no responsibility for what they do.
3. Dear Mother Nature – Make up your mind regarding whether or not you want to wash out the weekend.  This “two hours of sun followed by two hours of rain and then back to sun” thing is getting old.  My vegetable garden looks like the mud pit at a monster truck rally.  And, please don’t wait until I’ve brought a bunch of boxes out of the garage into the driveway before you decide to make it rain again.  Can I have a sunny weekend, please?  It, is, after all the second half of June, not the beginning of April.
4. Dear Guy at the Brookhaven Town Dump – It sucks that I got there five minutes after closing.  You don’t have to shoot me a self-satisfied smile at me as you’re closing the gate in my face.
5. Dear Brookhaven Sanitation Workers – If you’re not going to pick up two tall kitchen trash bags filled with ordinary household trash, I need to know why.  You can’t just skip my house for garbage pickup and leave me wondering whether I did anything wrong.  (Was I supposed to put pink bows on the bags?)

Thanks.

Weird stream of consciousness at about 7:30 this morning.  I was thinking about how much cooler toys used to seem back when I was in the target market.  Big Wheels, Star Wars action figures, slot cars, Stretch Armstrong, etc. – All these things would get me really excited when I was a kid.

So then I started thinking about whether kids today would get excited about toys I had during the 1970s.  And I was thinking I’d do a little experiment: Get Kate a vintage 1970s toy and see if she spends as much time with it as she spends with her other stuff.

So then I was thinking Weebles, because they’d be too big for Kate to swallow and they don’t have any moving parts.  I remember digging Weebles when I was, like, three.

So I logged on to eBay.  And there are a few vintage Weeble auctions going on.  I can’t seem to win one to save my life.  I bid up a set of five or six of the little bastards to over $20, only to find out someone else wanted them more.  No way I’m paying more than $20 for a set of plastic eggs left over from 1973.

But I still want some vintage Weebles.  So I’m opportunistically bidding.

Tell me, what was the first toy you remember having?

I thought most of the work on the house would have to get done on weekends and Summer Fridays.  But thanks to summer daylight hours, I can usually get a few minor things done when I get home from work.  I can’t save a major project like spackling and sanding for a weeknight, but I can do a few small projects.  Last night was a good example.  Lauren picked up the baby and I rototilled the new garden area.  We ordered dinner in and then put some chairs together that we ordered from Target.com.  Then I went out back again and started fencing in the garden.  (By the weekend, it should be ready for planting.)  I am going to have to replace a sprinkler head I hit with the rototiller, but truth be told, it needed to go up on a riser anyway and I was probably going to have to switch to a shrub head, so I’m not mad I hit it.

I didn’t have to go to Home Depot, but that’s only because I had already bought the sprinkler parts and garden soil I needed, and already had the fencing and stakes from the old house.  So it’s only advance plannig that kept me away from my big orange friend last night.

I’m going to be posting some pictures of the new place soon, but I wanted to make sure we charged Lauren’s digital SLR camera and got some decent shots.  Give me a couple days.