Back to Normal

Well, I'm back in the office today after we closed all of last week. Although I did do a good deal of office work while I was off, the vast majority of my time off was spent moving and fixing stuff in the new house. Yesterday afternoon, I went out on one last errand run, stopping at Home Depot for some shelving, swinging by the Ronkonkoma train station to beat the rush for monthly train tickets, and dropping by the condo to pick up the last of my clothes that I had left there. Once I got back, I spent a lot of time arranging my home office. I'm not sure my Color Laserjet survived the move. The thing was spewing yellow toner all over the place. I cleaned it up as best I could and set it up, but I'm getting all sorts of blinking warning lights. Fixing it will likely be my next project.

Basically, my home office is done, though. I took Rob's old desk from the Wading River house, which is L-shaped. I put up plenty of shelves, got my old desktop computer set up and ran a bunch of wires. Everything looks pretty nice. My only regret is that, since it was raining, I didn't get a chance yesterday to go out to Wading River and pick up the boxes of books sitting on the rafters in the garage. So there are all these shelves sitting empty, waiting for books to fill them up.

I've got a bunch of things to do at the house for the next few days, including cleaning up the garage and basement a bit. We broke down a lot of moving boxes and the box from the new fridge and threw them in the garage, so the garage is overflowing with cardboard and styrofoam, all of which needs to go. At some point after work, I need to sit in the basement and take a few hours to get all my music and recording gear set up. Whatever doesn't fit in the basement needs to go to the garage, so I've got my work cut out for me.

My buddy Dan always used to tell me how owning a home is like an endless string of projects. I see projects stretching off into my future ad infinitum. Oh, well. I guess it will keep me out of trouble.

We're In

Well, Lauren and I are in the new house. So much to do and so little time. Thankfully, lots of folks have dropped by to give us a hand, including our parents, siblings and friends. My office is set up with the bare bones - a desk (a gift from Rob), my laptop and my old desktop, and some shelves. I'm right in the middle of getting all the sound equipment I own set up in the basement. One challenge will be to string a CAT6 cable down from the router (which is in my office on the second floor) to the basement where my Mac Mini will reside. (I tried to bribe the cable guy to do it yesterday, but no dice.)

Lots of sanding, priming and painting ahead, and I see that upon closer inspection, the bathrooms need to be redone in here, particularly the floors. Most of my friends who are homeowners tell me that it's never quite "done." I guess this will be my ongoing project for at least the next several years. In the short term, I've got a bunch of rooms to paint, a broken window (!) to fix, a pool cover that needs rainwater pumped off it pronto, and light fixtures to be installed.

Needless to say, blogging will be light until the New Year.

Did Microsoft Just Patent RSS?

Dave Winer links to the patent.

Tagged

Jetpacks tagged me yesterday afternoon, which means if I feel like playing nice and not being a dick, I have to reveal certain facts about myself that folks might not ordinarily know.  Here goes:

1. I grew up in Wading River on Long Island, a hamlet that bills itself as "The Gateway to the Hamptons."  Really its claim to fame was that it was the site of the former Shoreham Nuclear Power Station.  The SNPS pumped a lot of money into the local school district in the form of PILOT payments.  This enabled my little public school to do insane things like send middle schoolers to Hawaii to study flower bulbs, have a circus arts program, and own a state of the art mainframe in the early 80s.  This is the genesis of my interest in computers - I learned to program in BASIC, Fortran and Pascal there, and even took the AP Computer Science test in Pascal back in the day.
2. In addition to being a marketing guy, I am a fairly decent plumber, owing to having spent every summer from 1983 until about 1994 working for my dad's lawn sprinkler business.  I like to keep that quiet, because when people find out I know something about their pipes, they call me at 2 AM when their toilet breaks.
3. I took classical piano lessons from the time I was five until I left for college.  Like most kids, though, I rebelled.  After switching teachers, I started learning popular music of the day.  So the 13 years of piano lessons my parents paid for leave me only with the ability to play cheesy heavy metal ballads after I've had too much to drink.  I have perfect pitch, so even to this day you'll see me listening intently to something on the radio, coming home to my piano, and playing a reasonable facsimile of what I heard earlier.  I also taught myself how to play guitar when I was in high school.
4. I am a geek of the first order.  I played Dungeons & Dragons for years growing up.  I love video games.  I'm a member of American Mensa and very frequently geek out with crossword puzzles, Sudoku and other brain teasers.  Back in the early 80s, I trolled the original Compuserve BBS on my Commodore 64 trying to figure out ways to break the copy protection on C-64 games.
5. I am a reformed conservative, having graduated (barely) from one of the most conservative schools in the country.  Upon returning to New York, I gravitated back toward my liberal/libertarian roots and became a Democrat again.

Okay, I tag the following bloggers:

1. Brad Berens - Because we're getting to be great friends, and we'll be better friends when he reveals some embarrassing facts about himself.
2. Rick Bruner - Because the guy rides a unicycle, and if he's willing to reveal that publicly, he'll probably also reveal some other interesting stuff.
3. Rob Burke - Because he's a new client and needs the blogging practice.
4. Tig Tillinghast - Because Tig is interesting as hell, and I want to know more.
5. JTA - Because we were childhood friends, and I have no idea what he's been up to since, oh, 1989 or so.