Monday, August 16, 2004

6 Ways From Sunday

Ah, what a day. Dawn and I had a meeting, but blew it; she had one time written down and I had another and for some reason we decided mine was right. We went to Doyle Street for lunch instead. Her work is pretty unpleasant right now; there's a ton to do and no place for her to go at work to be alone and focus. The building is under construction, and they're running out of time to be ready for the new school year, both in the construction and in the work they already have to do. And the best part is that the Fed oversight team is coming in later this year.

Elisabeth is going to run in the Honolulu Marathon, working with Team in Training. I've been encouraging her to start a blog, so now we've started one at least for the marathon training. I still think it would be cool for her to have another (or continue to use this) for other stuff - she travels and does so many things it would be fun for her to put them up on a blog. I have a feeling I'm going to have to come up with a good way for her to post pictures soon. In the meantime, we started her marathon blog.

She's also probably going to come live with us for a while; she is selling her house and wants to be out of it before she sells, but can't buy something else until after. It'll be fun to have her with us again; we don't usually get to see her as much as we like, so having her coming home to our place will probably increase that a bit.

Work's been a little odd; frenetic yet not, at the same time. M was having a cow and we agreed to deliver something to them by tomorrow morning, but then we ran into some more problems and the shear amount of work that a single person can get done in a short period, and they asked whether we shouldn't just push out to 9/15 while adding some more of the stuff we're planning on. Ummm. Gee. That sounds like an excellent idea to me. Why don't we do that? Funny thing is that we tried to suggest that once before, but got shot down and that's why we were doing build 1 tomorrow and build 1a by 9/15. So now we'll do it by 9/15. We do have to be careful, though, to make sure that we get it done because there's a good chance we'll lose the account if we miss again, and that could mean some peoples' jobs - more from a revenue stand-point than punishment/example setting, I think. Including mine. I'm not terribly concerned. I think 9/15 is easy.

Spent most of 2 hours on the phone with J; they're doing a lot of testing this week with plans to make the major transition around 9/1. They did mention going to Oracle, but I am still hoping that's not set in stone. Have to look into that again...

I added True-a-Day to the bottom of the blog's main page today. I can't recommend This-is-TRUE highly enough, so I decided to do it. It was also kinda fun to play with it to get it right. I haven't been getting to do much playing of that sort lately. Randy once asked me if I was interested in helping him build the scripts necessary, and I am sure I could have done it - I just didn't have the time. It would have been interesting. And fun. And maybe even some good exposure. I have a list of things I'd like to do just to learn them and play with them, but having the time for that sort of thing is rare...

We had a really nice party at my parents' place on Saturday afternoon for my grandfather's birthday; also just to get the whole family together at least once while my neice and nephew are in town. Rachel played with her cousins, particularly Tycho. It's been really great to see her enjoying them so much. I know that she could just as easily wind up hating a sibling as loving one, but it does sort of increase interest in having another child. Tycho came to music class with Rachel and me as well, and then we went to a park for a while. That all went really well until Tycho hurt his finger just as we were about to go home. No big deal, really, but it probably hurt a lot at the time.

Rachel and I had a bit of trouble this weekend. She's not napping on weekends for some reason. On the one hand, it was pretty funny to turn back towards the back door after half an hour or so of sitting in the backyard talking to Dawn, while Rachel was supposedly in bed napping, and find Rachel standing outside the backdoor naked with a broom in her hand! On the other, she can be pretty frustrating when she's as tired as she gets when she doesn't nap. Yesterday, we eventually tricked her into napping by taking her "to do errands". We drove to Old Navy so Dawn could return/exchange some new clothes for Rachel, but we went about 15 miles out of the way until Rachel fell asleep!

My new bike has been shipped and will probably be at the store on Wednesday; they may even be able to get it built that day! I'm excited. I hope it actually turns out to be the right size and I like it. I've decided not to get a new computer for it at this point; I'll just move the one I have. I think I'll even let the guys at the bike shop put the rack for Rachel's seat on, since they offered. I got to work at an average of 17.2 miles per hour. I think the speedometer might be over by as much as 10%, though I'm not really sure, but even so, that's somewhat faster than I've done before. I do think part of it was not having Rachel on the bike for part of it and therefore not having her seat at all, but I also felt pretty good. But I still wish I'd been able to ride at least once over the weekend.

Bought a Linksys WRE54G. They call it a 'range expander'; aka a repeater. I've been wanting one of these for a while, and I'm really hoping I can get it to work. At the moment I can't. It doesn't notice the router, even after I upgrade the router to the latest firmware. Even after I put the repeater in the same room as the router. I can actually get my wireless card to hook up to the repeater, but can't browse into the repeater's control system. Spent some time on an instant message chat with someone from Linksys but didn't quite get it solved - for one thing, the setup program kills my connection to the router when it tries to find the repeater. We'll see how it goes. The manual says that it should be placed right near the limit of the wireless reception of our devices; I imagine that it is more powerful and/or more sensitive, so will be able to communicate better with the router from that distance and through the same obstructions. Otherwise, it won't work well. I'm also contemplating the high gain antennas or just running a wire outside the house from the router to the bedroom and then putting a second access point up there. It sounds as if we can even have the second AP set up with the same network name.

The landscaping is pretty well underway, but Luke mentioned water pressure (it's not great) and that reminded me that at some point we are going to need to do something about the water service line and the connection into the house. The water service line is probably galvanized, as is everything under the house, but I'll have to check. The problem is, of course, that to replace it we have to dig up a channel right through where Luke is doing a bunch of work. He's already done some stuff we'll have to interfere with, but I'd rather not have him do more, or let the new plants he's going to put in grow for a couple of years and then rip them up to do this. So, now I'm going to have to do some digging tonight when I get home; if I'm very lucky, I'll discover that the line is already copper... if not, I'll be meeting an estimator at the house on Wednesday to discuss what it will cost and when they can do the work. I wouldn't mind having them replace the galvanized pipe in the crawlspace, along with the three outside hose bibs. They will have to move the water shutoff outside, because having it deep under the house isn't up to code anymore.

Truthfully, I'd like to have them do even more than that if I could... I want to move the water heater into the corner of the basement and redirect all the water pipes around the sides of the room. That would make the room a lot more usable. And I suppose they might also be able to rearrange some of the gas pipe stuff too, along the same vein of making the basement more usable but also to give us a place to connect a gas dryer, which I'd prefer over the electric one we have now.

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