Wii're going to have some fun

Sorry things have been quiet in blogland lately; I’ve been super busy and haven’t even been in my office most of the week. But I’m back now.

In certain esoteric circles there is a video that has been setting the internet on fire. It involves a Wiimote and a PhD graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. The student, Johnny Lee, is part of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and he has a simple but remarkable ideal. Mr. Lee made the observation, that amongst other things, a Wiimote is camera that tracks infrared (IR) light. How a normal Wii system works is there is the “sensor bar” which sits on a TV that is just a couple of IR LEDs and a Wiimote controller that figures out it’s relation to the TV by tracking where those IR LEDs are. [The Wiimote also has a bunch of accelerometers that help determine how fast it’s moving and in what direction…but those don’t matter for this discussion.]

Johnny decided to see what would happen if he mounted the Wiimote on the TV and the sensor bar on a person. The result is now the TV can track where the person is. He’s how he did it. He took advantage of the fact that the Nintendo Wiimotes use Bluetooth to communicate with the Wii. A computer with a Bluetooth adapter and the correct driver can also communicate with a Wiimote. So now he’s gotten the signal from the Wiimote to a computer. The next step was to give the Wiimote something to track. It normally tracks the Wii’s sensor bar…but people aren’t going to want to wear that. So Johnny found safety glasses that have LEDs built into the sides and replaced the normal white light LEDs with IR LEDs, now the glasses are essentially a sensor bar made to fit on a head.

Why would you bother doing all of that? Because if a TV (or computer screen) knows where you’re head is in relation to the screen it can re-render the screen based on your relative position. The result is that the TV acts more like a window than a display. If you lean left you’ll be able to see a slightly different view than if you lean right. Walk closer to the TV and things appear closer, move away and things appear smaller. The overall effect is an amazingly convincing 3d display created out of parts lying around the house (if your house is awesome like mine). The video linked to above does a better job explaining it and demonstrating the effect than I am doing here. The demonstration is impressive.

So impressive in fact that if you go to Amazon to look at buying safety glasses with LEDs in them ...look what Amazon already suggests as a good compliment to that purchase - a Wiimote. I guess enough people have purchased the two together at Amazon has detected it as a trend.

[clicky for larger]

Scourge of the Neighborhood

I hate kids and I hate dogs. It’s that simple. Occasionally I slip off into a fantasy where neither exists. If pressed I’m sure you could get me to admit that I like a certain kid or a certain dog….but in the general abstract sense, I disapprove of both. Wishing kids didn’t exist at the very least is probably just wrongheaded and foolish, but in the long view of things is just asking for lack of retail service later in life. Wishing dogs didn’t exist….well I’m not exactly sure what dogs are good for…but maybe someone somewhere has a medical condition where they need constant responsibility and annoyance for medicinal reasons. It could happen.

Oh, way do I feel the need to write a needlessly inflammatory tirade against dogs and kids? It might be because I just came home and found my mailbox full of dog crap.

I suppose you could credit the little buggers as being resourceful, they didn’t have to bring the dog crap. That was supplied by some frac-off of a neighborhood dog-owner who thought letting their dog defecate all over my front yard was a privilege of owning large vermin (judging from volume it came from a large dog or small horse). I noticed the dog crap a day or so ago.

As for the kids? I wonder if this could have anything to do with asking a few of the little delinquents to not shoot up my house in their BB gun war games on Tuesday. Frankly I’m surprised I don’t have to replace a window BECAUSE THEY WERE SHOOTING THE GLASS. The woods behind our house are a constant BB gun theater of war. Why can’t they shoot out each other’s eyes and just go home? I blame the parents for forcing them to wear goggles….that’s just prolonging the affair.

Oh and another thing. There was no mail intermingled with the crap….it’s pretty unusual that a day goes by without receiving mail.

Dog crap. Mailbox. Not happy.

Kind of Heavy Stuff.

I caught an interesting interview on The Daily Show (er…I mean A Daily Show) this Tuesday. The guest was a guy by the name of Jim Wallis who was there to pimp his new book “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” It was late a bit late so I’m not 100% sure what all they talked about or even what the guest’s actual stance was, but yesterday I was left with the following impression of what Jim was trying to say. Morality should not be dictated by religion, but instead, religion should conform to morality.

I was driving around yesterday and all of a sudden it struck me how concise a message that is. It just sort of crystallized into a concentrated little mental sound bite. Again, I’m not 100% sure that exactly what the guest said. I could go back and watch the interview again, but I’m not sure what the point would be. If he didn’t say that - then he should have. I think most rational people can get behind that sentiment whether they are religious or not.

Sure it shifts the burden of establishing morality from reading it from a handbook to having to sit down and hash out the pros and cons of any action. Actual thinking may even be involved. I think I prefer that method of establishing morality to defining hatred, discrimination, or some other base act as moral because you found it written in a book.

That is all.

EEEnthusiasm

One of the main attractions of the EEE for me is the chance to get to learn a bit about Linux. I fooled around a bit with UNIX when I was in college, but then again who didn’t experiment with UNIX in college, right? Since then I’ve pretty much dealt exclusively with Windows. For those not in the know, it appears that Linux is a bright up and comer in the world of operating systems (I’m sure I could find lots of people who would argue with that statement). The thing about Linux is it’s free. It’s part of the whole open source, free software movement. Linux has been around for years with a rather unimpressive adoption rate (which is just one reason people might object to that earlier statement).

Why is it worth checking out Linux now? Well if you keep an eye out for this sort of thing you’ll notice a trend of local (and in some cases national) governments experimenting with swapping all of their desktops over to Linux. Wikipedia claims that the cities of Vienna and Munich have migrated all of their desktops to a Linux variants along with a host of other government initiatives by European, South American, and Asian countries. (I won’t bother typing in all the examples listed on Wikipedia). The reason is if you use Linux you don’t have to buy a license or pay to upgrade the operating system every few years. Even further, if you use Open Office you don’t have to buy or pay to upgrade Microsoft Office every few years. All that not paying Microsoft to license software adds up if you’re a government with 1000’s of desktops.

But I’m not a government with 1000’s of desktops, so why do I care? In a word: Google. Google builds and runs most of their technology on various flavors of Linux. Their search engines, Google Earth, their Andriod cell phone platform…all run on Linux. Chances are, if you doing some serious work with Google technology, you’re going to come in contact with Linux. So that’s more of my incentive to want to figure out Linux….that and it’s just plain fun to get to play around with a new computer. This last weekend with all of the reading of metadata registry specifications, predicate algebra descriptions, and natural deduction rule proving for school it was nice to be to sit down and relax with some recreational Linux tutorials.

So here’s the cool thing about the EEE - it comes with Linux on it, Xandros Linux to be exact. However, out of the box the Linux distribution is a bit crippled. Everything you need to run the full Linux install is there, but the EEE is configured to run a program that basically only gives you a limited GUI interface to interact with it. This is actually probably a pretty smart move on ASUS’s (the people who make the EEE) part. I’m sure they don’t want to field all the tech support calls from people who haven’t a computer before, not to mention all the people who haven’t used Linux before. The simple interface let’s you get to all provided programs easily and keeps you from getting yourself into trouble by playing around with options that probably don’t need playing around with.

But what if you want to get yourself into trouble? Good news. You just have to press Ctrl-Alt-T to open up a terminal window and after a bit of console wizardry you can enable the full Xandros Linux interface. The sky is the limit now. There are all sorts of strange things you can attempt to do using Linux and your EEE. I’ll cover one of those tomorrow.

EEExcitement.

Well I didn’t get any of the home improvement stuff I had hoped to accomplish this weekend done. I was simply not willing to tough it out in sub freezing temperatures in the garage. I am, after all, a delicate little flower.

I did manage to accomplish a respectable amount of reading for my classes and a whole lot of cooking. So I can’t say the weekend was wholly unproductive. I also got a chance to spend some quality time with my new toy… an EEE PC.

I got Dawn an EEE PC for Christmas to replace her old laptop. I became so envious of the gift that I eventually broke down and bought one for myself. Let me explain what an EEE is for the uninitiated. Basically an EEE is just a small laptop. There’s some debate on the correct verbal way to refer to the device. Some people say “E cubed”, some people just pronounce each letter “E E E”, but personally I prefer to simply squeal “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee” when I’m refereeing to it. Much to the delight of those around me, I assure you.

The EEE is a small form factor laptop. It comes with a lightweight Linux installation and is preconfigured for all the tasks you’re likely to use it for (web browsing, email, writing, etc). Let’s be clear about this up front. The EEE is not a workstation replacement and it’s not even a laptop replacement if you do serious work on your laptop. When I’m selecting a computer to do serious work on I place high value on screen real estate. The EEE simply doesn’t have much in the way of screen real estate (it has a small little 7” LCD screen). So the EEE is not designed to be the computer you reach for when you want to sit down and do serious work. It’s designed to be the computer that is so mobile that you’ll take it places you wouldn’t bother taking a serious computer. The EEE is smaller and lighter than a hardback book. It has a fast boot and suspends times. It basically is a device that allows people who need computers to have a small computer when they are in between their computers. How marvelous is that!

Now that I hammered home how the EEE isn’t a real work computer let me expound upon what it can do. It is a fully functional computer so you could do work on it if you wanted to. Most mobile devices sacrifice functionality for mobility, the EEE really only sacrifices on size. It has a full (small and cramped) keyboard so you can actually type on it. It takes a little getting used to, but actual normal typing is possible. It comes preinstalled with Open Office, which is a free competitor to Microsoft Office. Open Office comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint equivalents. They’ll even open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. It comes with FireFox as a web browser (the real full-fledged version, not some crippled mobile version of a web browser) and an honest-to-god version of Adobe Acrobat. So you’ll be able to do as much document reading, browsing, and/or writing as you want on the small screen.

The OS installed on the EEE is Linux Xandros with an easy to use GUI installed. If you get rid of the easy to use GUI (more on that tomorrow) then you have a full fledged Linux OS at your disposal. Basically anything you can do in Linux you can do on your EEE. I’ve managed to install all the software I need to create LaTeX PDF documents on my EEE! If Linux isn’t your thing then it also comes with Windows XP drivers so you can load a copy of Windows XP on it.

Oh the price? There are models that range between $300 and $500. The most popular models seem to be the $300 and $400 versions. For the record, I got a $300 model for myself (more and that tomorrow as well).

Props to Project Runway

I meant to post this yesterday but was too busy. I wanted to give props to Project Runway. I think this week’s episode was one of the best that they’ve had this season. I thought all the designers did a really good job generating a lot of interesting work in a very short time frame. In short, it’s the type of episode that originally sold me on Project Runway in the first place.

I did have one small issue to take up with Victorya and Jillian. At the beginning of the challenge it showed the two of them arguing over who got to be team leader. First off, I don’t understand why anyone would ever want to be team leader in a reality show. The risk of getting eliminated is instantly multiplied because you get held accountable for whatever someone on your team does. The people on your team know that you’ll be held accountable…so if they aren’t threatening to eliminate the whole team I suspect their incentive to do their very best might be questionable. After all it’s probably not their butt on the line. So I wasn’t sure why Victorya and Jillian were fighting over who got to be team leader (perhaps they have some of that artistic integrity I’ve heard about and really wanted to realize their visions).

When the show reminded me that Victorya had immunity then I was even more flabbergasted. Why was there an argument at all? I imagine that the initial team planning should have gone something like this: Do we both want to be guaranteed to get to the next round? Yes? Good. Victorya you be team leader because you’ve got immunity. We’ll work really hard on your concept so that if the judges are snorting bezaddler stones or freebasing bobbin lint then I can claim that I was implement the team’s vision and being a good team player. I’ll be safe. You’ll be immune. We both get a guaranteed by.

This little piggy got frozen and snapped off.

This was supposed to be the weekend I got tons of stuff done. Basically it was going to be the last weekend at home before I was sucked into the maw of the semester and spit out sometime in May. I was planning to build shelves in the garage and finish staining two more parts of Dawn’s bookshelves. So much planned productivity.

Then I saw the weather forecast for this weekend. The highs are in the thirties. Hmm… working in the garage while it’s in the thirties doesn’t not seem very ideal. I’m not sure how well the shelves will take the stain if they’re at near freezing temperatures. I’m not sure how well my fingers will take to manipulating power tools if I can’t feel them.

I guess we’ll see how bad the weather really is. North Alabama has been known to predict winter Armageddon before without any serious weather event occurring. I think it gives the local news stations some sense of relevance. Did I mention that they’re also predicting an inch of snow tomorrow? I bet it will be the worst inch of snow in history. The inch that killed. Women will openly weep and men will gnash their teeth as the thin blanket of snow suffocates the land. Perhaps I should go back to ignoring the local news.

Maybe the weather won’t be that bad. Maybe I’ll man up and go out and buy some work gloves (to keep my delicate fingers warm) and get the job done anyway. Or maybe I’ll spend the weekend working on class work (I already have homework and a project I could be making progress on). Or perhaps, as Dawn suggested, I could spend the last free long weekend of the spring “drinking scotch and playing Rockband by the fire.”

Story Time!

Due to the huge groundswell of support for LaTeX themed posts I suppose I’ll humor you for another day and give you what you so lustily crave - more information about LaTex. Perhaps you’ll find the history of LaTex to be of some interest. I think it’s pretty cool. It’s filled with giants (in the field of computer science) and is the stuff of legend. Those readers who are of the breading persuasion may want to take note and include it as a bedtime story for your young ones.

The story begins with Donald Knuth. Donald Knuth is a dashing pioneer of computer science. Did you know that when he received his Bachelor of Science degree the faculty also simultaneously awarded him a Master of Science degree because they found his work to be so outstanding? Yeah, he’s that kind of smart. Knuth also won the very first Grace Murray Hopper Award (Grace Hopper is the computer scientist often credited for coining the term computer “debugging”) and a Turing Award amongst many others (although Knuth had to settle with winning the 9th Turning Award).

[For those playing the giants of computer science game at home Turning is credited with being the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. That test to see if you can tell if you’re IM chatting to with a real person or with a computer is named after him.]

Anyway, back to LaTeX. Knuth wrote a book in 1969 called The Art of Computer Programming. In 1977 Knuth received the proofs for the second edition of his book and thought they looked horrible. When he inquired why the second edition of his book looked like crap he discovered that the first edition of the book had been typeset using 19th century monotype technology which had since been replaced with new-fangled photographic techniques. The new-fangled techniques kind of sucked though. He had also recently been exposed to digital typesetting which offered higher quality…if you could actually get anything into it. So in order for his book to be printed better he decided to sit down and develop his own digital typesetting system. Sure, why not revolutionize an industry so that your book looks a little better?

Knuth thought he’d finish his digital typesetting program, which he called TeX, in under a year….turns out that it became more of an ongoing development process. Development on it was finally frozen in 1989. Although, during the 80’s people started to use and extended Knuth’s TeX system, the most popular extension of which is LaTeX still uses the core TeX typesetting engine with a more user friendly interface (although I find that hard to believe). Your children’s’ faces are sure to light up when you tell them that LaTeX was developed by no other than Leslie Lamport…. Yes, that Leslie Lamport. The one who invented Lamport Logical Clocks which are the basis for the vector clocks that allow distributed systems to order their messages. [He’s also the man who’s laid a lot of ground work in the field of temporal logic.]

So that’s our story. Exciting isn’t it. I know if you’re like me the only thing more interesting than talking about computer science is talking about historical computer science. Good luck getting the kids to bed…I bet they’re all wound up now.

A New Dark Art

I was up till midnight last night attempting to get a character into a table. It took about an hour of fiddling around but I eventually got it to work. There wasn’t really anything special about the table, it had one row and three columns. The character in question was the logical symbol for implication, it kind of looks like a double-bar arrow.

One of my classes this semester requires that I use a software package called LaTeX to submit all of my work for the class. LaTex is supposedly pronounced "la-tek" but Dawn informs me that I’m a damn fool if I pronounce it anyway besides "latex" (we scientist and engineers do have our fun). LaTeX is a typesetting markup language that helps better reproduce equations than typical WYSIWYG word processors (Word). The quote on Wikipedia has a very high opinion of who routinely uses LaTeX:

LaTeX is most widely used by mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, engineers, scholars in academia and the commercial world, and other professionals.

Does that leave anyone out? It sounds like everyone must be using it. If you’re not using LaTex you’re probably a looser.

All kidding aside, I’ve been hearing about LaTeX for over a year now, usually in the context that it makes life easier to express things that Word makes difficult. I didn’t realize that the inverse was equally true. LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) program. Instead you add lots and lots of markup code to your text and then you get to compile your document and then you get convert it into something you can actually read (like a PDF). Obviously there are a few programs that will help compile and convert the file for you…but the fact remains that you don’t get to see what it looks while you’re typing; you have to stop and hit a compile button and then open a PDF to peak at what you’ve actually done.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what the markup looks like. That’s only natural. I’ll give you a taste of what it takes to make a table:

\begin{tabular}{ c c c }
\hline
p & q & p \wedge q \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

That’s what I was trying to compile last night…but don’t try that - it won’t work. It will complain. The problem is the \wedge, which tells LaTeX that I want the symbol for logical conjunction (and operator). Perhaps due to diminished late night mental capacity or shear obscurity it took me quite awhile to realize that I had to wrap the special character in $’s in order to get it to work: $\wedge$... Duh.

When I was regaling Dawn with the story of my fun night this morning she nodded and simply replied “It’s amazing what you can get things to do if you’re willing to wrap them in dollar signs.”

Out of my league

Last night our neighbors invited us over for dinner, which was especially convenient because we were just getting back from Birmingham and didn’t have to figure out what we were going to eat. After eating at their place (and drinking a bottle or two of wine) we then headed back to our place so they could try out Rock Band.

[This is the same family that went out and bought Guitar Hero right after they played the original at our house…so we were pretty confident that they would appreciate Rock Band.]

We got everything set up and they started to rock out. During the second or third song we were playing their son (~ 11 years old) failed out. Dawn turned to him and asked if he had bumped the difficulty up to medium. He shook his head no….he wasn’t playing on medium. He’d been playing on expert. He got about 85% through the song. My jaw hit the floor. Expert!?! I said something to the extent that I could only do some of the songs on hard. I’m not sure if he was looking at me with contempt or with pity but he declared that “if you aren’t playing on hard or expert then you aren’t having any fun.”

Fortunately Rock Band comes with a drum kit to help humble Guitar Hero savants. I spent the rest of the evening pointing out that he was forgetting to press the kick drum as he struggled through songs on easy (I can play most everything on medium!) Of course that is only a temporary fix. If they actually go out and buy Rock Band it’s only a matter of time before he comes over and plays everything on expert. I can hardly wait for him to wryly point out that he hasn’t seen my band on the Rock Band leader boards. I’m sure I’ll be able to see his at the number 3 spot.

Postscript
Not to be out done by a mere child Dawn decided to show them tough. She proceeded to play Tom Sawyer on drums while singing, both were set to medium. She finished with the drum score in the 90s…

Project Runway Part II

So Dawn and I ended up further discussing Project Runway over lunch. She is of the opinion that the correct dress won because it is most in step with current fashion trends and color pallets. I still maintain that you might as well be wearing a potato sack.

We were talking about how tricky these type of challenges are to judge. Which considerations should be weighted the most? How much the model likes the dress? How much the dress represents the designer’s style? How much the dress shows technical competency? How much the design is innovative? While I think most people would agree that all of those factors are important it seems like you have to decide which is the foremost criteria in order to rank submissions.

Dawn thinks the judges should have used how much the models liked their dress as the foremost criteria since the challenge was essentially to make a custom dress for each model. She also thinks they instead used the industry’s definition of what is innovative. She also sees it as an unavoidable conflict of interest in judging being that Nina is in the business of trying to dictate what fashion is instead of reporting on what people want to wear. Giving credence to what people actually want to wear to prom is less important than selling the editorial idea of what they should want to wear. [I’m sure if I’ve mischaracterized any of Dawn’s thoughts she’ll correct me in the comments]

I know better than to care if the model likes their dress. In Project Runway world that’s a sucker’s game. I think we’ve seen more than one challenge where a designer has made an outfit for a client that they have loved….if the client were paying for it they would have been happy…and that designer gets crucified for sacrificing their vision just to make some worthless client happy. How dare they. If you have reasonable construction you just have to scream and yell that this is your vision. How dare the judges not respect a designer with impeccable construction and a strong vision. Taste is subjective.

That’s a regurgitation of my earlier rant…but so be it. Ranking how I would judge things is a bit trickier. For this challenge I think I would have ranked designs by technical competency, personal style (designer’s), innovation, and finally whether or not the clients like it. Although I can see how a persuasive argument for a different ordering might be made.

I guess I’ve never really thought about judging this carefully before. It hadn’t explicitly occurred to me that the judging criteria might change from challenge to challenge.

[Dawn commented on my other post while I was in the process of writing this one]

Project Runway Post

I was going to post this yesterday, but decided to hold off a day in case anyone was waiting to watch the episode via Tivo. If you’re poky and read any further than it’s your own fault.
Last year I read an article containing quotes from Tim Gunn about this season’s Project Runway. One quote in particular caught my attention. Take it away Tim…

"There was one case in particular where I said to the producers [...] 'It's really too bad that so-and-so's design is so terrible, because the audience will know right away. The minute they see this, they're going to know that he's going home. And I'm just sorry that something else isn't almost as bad, almost as challenged. Everything else looks really good!... He wins the challenge. He wins! It's inconceivable. So I went backstage to tell the designer who was out that he or she had to go home, and I turned to him and I said, 'And you know, I'm stunned and shocked that you won this challenge' and he said, 'Well, no one's more surprised than I am.'"

Since I read that I’ve anxiously been awaiting an episode which fits that description. I’m wondering if this week’s episode was in fact the one. I suppose the fact that he mostly uses the pronoun “him” precludes this episode…but he throws in a quick “he or she” at the end to keep us guessing.

I suppose it’s obvious but I’ll explicitly state that I hated this week’s winning design. I hate it because I hate sacks. I don’t like baby doll dresses and I especially don’t like sacks. The winner was as sack. Perhaps sacks are popular because they are the great equalizer. No matter what you’re figure a sack will make you look like crap. Hurray for the lowest common denominator.

But this week’s winner is worse than that. In addition to the oh-so-unflattering sack shape the dress..er..bag is also a bright saturated blue color. There is only one destination that this outfit can possible be suitable for. It’s clear that this young lady is in fact going to prom as one of the Fruit of the Loom fruits. Perhaps that was a crucial piece of information that accidently got edited out of the show. Their prom is a costume party and the ladies were supposed to go dressed as some sort of advertising icon…. Oh wait. I’m thinking of last year’s Boo.

Of course maybe this isn’t this episode that Tim was talking about. Perhaps we’re all in for a wild ride this season. If the designers can be criticized for making something too sophisticated I guess anything is possible. Maybe someone will get criticized for constructing an outfit too well…..and maybe someone will punch someone in their nasally gob.

Objects of My Annoyance

I really hate the shopping cart + kid carriers at Publix. They’re the ones that are designed to look like a race car or some such nonsense. Basically they take a shopping cart and add a big plastic addition to the back for kids to sit in….and ostensibly pretend to drive. I hate them because they are larger than normal carts and take up more room in already cramped aisles, thusly, being more inconvenient to fellow shoppers. The fact that they are sometime populated with loud children does not help further endear them to me.

I say they are only sometimes populated with loud children for two reasons. Occasionally they are occupied with good children being quiet. In which case, I only find the uber-carts to be just mildly annoying. I’ll concede in this instance the child carts are doing their job, which is to keep small children from being underfoot, even if the massive cart is blocking the particular area of shelf space I’m interested in.

However, for every ginormous cart filled with a good quiet child, there appears to be three ginormous carts filled with no children at all. That’s because the little brats complained about being stuck in the cart so the parents set the little hellions loose on the public at large. This is the worst of both worlds. The parents are taking up an inordinate about of aisle space with their shopping monstrosity and their noisy little brats are underfoot. I dare not type the dark intentions I wish upon such parents.

Reflecting upon the Publix child-car shopping carts I am reminded that there is still a worse option which gratefully has not taken root in this area (yet). In Indiana some grocery stores provided separate miniature shopping carts for children to push while the parents pushed normal sized carts. I can only assume the desired effect was for children underfoot to be even more of a nuisance than they already are. Yes, reflecting back on the visceral reactions this little chaos buggies evoked I’m almost grateful for the child-car-barges. Almost.

Bookcase Update

One of the things I did over the holidays is spend a considerable amount of time working on my bookcase project. After spending a few days in the garage working on the bookcases I got them to the point where three out of four sections of the bookcase are ready to stain. I plan to install the bookcases in four sections. The first section will be the four foot by eight foot framework that consists of the major shelves. Then inside the major framework three smaller sections stack upon one and another Tetris style.

I’ve completed building the major framework and the bottom and middle interior sections. Those three pieces are ready to stain. I’ve made considerable progress on the last section. I have most of the subcomponents for it already built. I have decided to postpone connecting all of the fourth section’s subcomponents until I have the first three sections installed. That way I can take measurements of the space left for the last section and make sure that it will actually fit!

This last weekend Dawn and I actually stained the first section. It’s currently sitting in our garage awaiting transfer to Dawn’s library. We went with a dark wood stain (Bombay Mahogany or something like that). It looks awesome. Once I get the first section installed we’ll be able to stain the second and third sections at the same time. I can actually see the finish line on the bookcase project. There still some work to be done, but man, does it feel good to feel like I’m actually making progress on that project.

Check out the house with the spiffy new roof.

Huge strides forward in the de-ghetto-fication of our house were made this weekend.

Saturday morning we experienced an extremely odd way to wake up - to the sounds of someone walking around on our roof. Actually that’s not entirely accurate. We woke up to the sounds of many people stomping around on our roof. When we went to bed on Friday night we knew that our new roof was approximately half done and that workers would be coming back on Saturday morning to finish the job. It’s all fine and well to know that Friday night when conscious. However, that knowledge is inaccessible in the very first few moments of semi-consciousness. It doesn’t help to know that the night before when your slumber has been interrupted by an untold number of interlopers. Nightmares fueled with actual verifiable sensory feedback. Ahhhh. Then the brain finishes rebooting and decides that today those noises are acceptable - even expected.

Riblet was pretty funny. By the second day of roofing she had gotten well past wondering what could possibly be on the roof. She had reached irritation. There would be a burst of pounding and she would look up at the ceiling in contempt. The incessant noises had become nuisance and a distraction to her regularly schedule napping. She was so over getting a new roof.

They finished up the roof on Saturday afternoon and it looks great, even more surprising is the ground surrounding the house still looks good (or at least as good as it did before). I am very pleased with how careful the roofers where not to make an impact on our yard. They didn’t drive any vehicles on the grass. They laid down tarps by the house and made sure to drop all the shingles on to the tarps, then they dragged the tarps to a trailer they set up to haul away the debris. There was no collateral damage to our yard in the process. Classy and professional.

In addition to a new roof we also have a contractor working on our soffits and columns. He finished repairing the soffits on Friday. There is no longer a 2x4 holding up our house (I suspect much to our neighbors’ relief). Our old decrepit columns already been removed and replaced with actual structural columns, as in, they have a 6x6 wooden post in the center instead of absolutely nothing. He’ll be back on Monday to finish up the cosmetics and painting them.

All and all a pretty successful weekend.

Perhaps today it will be too foggy.

In preparing to write this I looked back to see when I posted the picture of the 2x4 that held up our house. I was shocked to discover that it was October 1st. A 2x4 has been holding up our house for a quarter of a year. I am dumfounded. To be honest I’m surprised I haven’t woken up to find the 2x4 crashed through the bay window and poking into the dining room. It’s sitting right outside the window…that’s the little tragedy that I see played out in my head when I look at it. I guess that fact that it has remained firmly in place through thunderstorms and gales is just a testament to how much weight the crutch is actually holding up, or alternatively, how much weight my roof is shrugging off its responsibility to hold.

Yesterday was to be the day that the sins of our house construction were to be once again hidden from the casual observer. A nice contractor person was supposed to show up and fix the soffits by the bay window so it would not be necessary to have a 2x4 crutch prop the roof up. We were to become a respectable household once again. Too bad that’s not how it turned out.

To be fair, yesterday it was cold, really butt cold. If the contractor had called us up and said, “Bad news. It’s butt cold out there today and I don’t think quality work will get done when my fingers are frozen.” I would have been sympathetic and agreed. But that’s not what happened. We received no calls. Dawn and I both rearranged our schedules so we could be home during the day to see that the project got started off right and the courtesy of notification was not extended to us, the home owners, who are paying the bill. Instead Dawn had to repeatedly call and try and figure out what the hell was going on, or more to the point, not going on. Eventually we were told that work was not going to start because it was too windy. Too windy? Dawn looked out the window at the still trees and informed the contractor that it was not in fact windy at the job site. No dice. It was too windy.

I don’t understand manufacturing a flimsy excuse when a much more understandable and verifiable one is present. It’s the coldest day in recent history. Nuff said.

Perhaps today they’ll start work on the house. Dawn tried to work from home again, but the ever present threat of meetings may pull her in. I’m at work and clueless as to how ghettofide our house currently is.

I know our neighbors also have a vested interest in our little project. They are getting ready to put their house on the market and would appreciate it if our house did not give the impression that their home construction may in fact required exterior braces to keep from falling to the ground. You and me both.