Plaidophile

So, my old apartment, which I'm almost done moving out of, used to be a retirement home. When they opened it up to the general public, a lot of retirees decided they liked it and stayed, even though there were no longer any assisted living facilities. So many times there'd be some pretty surreal situations, like heavily-pierced hipsters chatting with sweet old ladies about politics, or people with advanced senile dementia talking to nobody in the lobby.

Last night I was moving the last of my area rugs out.

Hopefully today will be the last day of the drive-bus-work-bus-load-drive-unload cycle.

After that I just need to clean up the old place and unpack at the new place! So I should be ready for a housewarming party in, oh, three years.

I'm still excited to be working on this project, and will be extremely proud of it when we finally launch!

The server which hosts my email is currently down, so I'm currently without email. Which is actually kinda cool since it's one less distracting time-drain, but it also makes it harder for people to get in touch with me if they don't know any of the other myriad ways of getting in touch (AIM 'plaidfluff', private messaging on my forum, etc.).

Also it means not getting any of my forum subscription messages. Which makes it even more of a win!

So unlike last time, now my mom's getting on my case about a family history of diabetes and constantly saying how I need to watch out for diabetes even though I am actually getting quite a bit of exercise.

So how long will it be before I'm kicking ass and taking names?

On HeuristicsInc's advice, I got the Ikea Markör unit, and so far I'm quite impressed with it. It's actual solid, stained wood (not that laminated MDF crap they usually sell), though granted it's spruce rather than hardwood, and the center part is exactly the right width for my center channel and the shelves are adjustable nicely.

The only complaints I have with it so far are is that adjusting the hinges to make the doors flush when closed is a bit weird (and the pictograms don't explain it very well), and while the back thing has a cable-management cutout for the bottom-most central space it doesn't have cutouts for the other spaces, which kind of defeats the purpose (which is especially silly since one of the marketing features is how a remote will function through the glass doors, which implies that they DO expect people to put components in the other spaces). So I'm just leaving that off (fortunately, it doesn't appear to be load-bearing like the back covering board thing on a lot of the cheap furniture I got back when I was a student). 12:42 AM I'm an idiot. The shelves/dividers aren't flush with the back. So it only needs the one hole, which would presumably be for the A/V hookups to the TV and the power cord. Yay!

It turns out that an AirPort Express will do WDS just fine with a WRT54G without any third-party firmware. I never got around to setting it up before because I just didn't feel like dinking around with it, but in my new place the WiFi signal wasn't quite making it from the living room to the studio room and I already had my AE plugged in in my bedroom (which was halfway between them) and anyway after failing to get Sveasoft installed I finally found a handy guide for configuring it, which I felt I'd link to in order to give that page more inbound links to make it easier for others to find in the future.

For now I'm just keeping my network open (and I've disabled the MAC filter, even) since I don't feel like messing with WPA/WEP/whatever right now. Hopefully it won't become a problem.

Following in Marcus' footsteps, I've finally gotten around to retiring my AIM username of 'trikuare.' You can now find me there as 'plaidfluff' (note the lack of a terminal 'y').

(I wanted to do 'plaid sockpuppet' but that was taken. Go figure.)

My condo's DSL service new hosting facility is finally getting set up tomorrow, so at about 7 AM PST this site will be temporarily down, until I get my *ahem* server happily colocated. Email to me will still work, though.

10:21 Yay, my mini is sitting pretty. Er, I mean, my big ol' server rack is. Really.

Anyone know of any decent TV stands which can accommodate a 120-pound 27" TV which also has an adequate space for a fairly large center-channel speaker and some form of cable management? Everything I can find either is made for lighter or shallower TVs, doesn't have enough space for the center channel speaker, or is metro shelving, and I've been using metro shelving for the last year and a half and am rather sick of the "residential-industrial" so-called aesthetic now.

• Being woken up at 2 in the morning by my neighbors fucking
• Being woken up at 2 in the morning by neighbors' doorbells being rung and other such random noises
• Having to pay out the ass for heating the whiny octogenarians' apartments (central building heat which is prorated based on square footage, and always turned up way too high)
• Having to pay for laundry in an always-broken facility which is also often Party Central
• A maintenance staff which takes forever to fix even minor things, and needs to be asked repeatedly for the not-so-minor things
• Paying out the ass for a non-guaranteed parking spot
• Elevators which are often in a state of disrepair such that only one of four is actually running at any given time
• A management company which is always finding new ways to charge for services. Like the new $10/month "convenience fee" for being able to pay rent with a credit card (previously free). And which adheres so strictly to the idea of a lease that they won't even let me transfer it to someone else for the remainder of the term.
• A management company which also doesn't disclose current rents and charges extremely inconsistently based on "market demands" and so on (my unit apparently costs 2x as much as one a few floors down)
• Residents who don't give a fuck about the cleanliness of the common areas, responded by admonishments from the management company who treats everyone like children, not just the few bad eggs
• Completely crappy "luxury" features, which sound good but are so horribly mismanaged and restrictive that you can't really use them much (the pool table is in a room always being used by other people who don't want to hear the pool table, the private theatre's equipment is so badly misconfigured and they don't let residents fix the configuration, etc.)
• Being woken up by the frequent sirens from the fire department two blocks away.

Right after listening to the artsy free-jazz High Lines by Michael Galasso, up comes "Jazz Makes Me Nervous" by The Fuses off of Are Lies.

So, my money's kinda tight right now what with having bought the condo and still having to pay rent for my old lease. I haven't even moved in yet and I have a lot of stuff I need to buy before I can, as well as needing to get around to hiring a moving company since it's become clear to me that I can't bring myself to finish moving all my crap.

So today when I was checking my account balances, I got a message from Chase about how my account is no longer available online, and to please call customer service. So I called them.

At other jobs: 50 hours? Bah, you're not working hard enough. I put in 90, myself.

This job: 50 hours?! Goodness, I've failed as a manager if I've caused you to work over 40. Go home!

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You look just like your avatar!

Really?! OMG!

Woo! Take Five!

Yes, it sounds totally the same, what with being in a different key, having a completely different chord structure and melody, and only having a vaguely similar rhythm!

Thank you for contacting T-Mobile. My name is Rod and it is my pleasure to help you today.

I see you are requesting information on a T-mobile to go account. I also see you had an issue with verifying your account which in the past has been clearly verified and I apologize for that. However what is not entirely clear is the exact issue we are dealing with in terms of T-mobile to go. I want you to be aware if you decide to change your account to T-mobile to go, it carries a $200 cancellation fee with it.

If you have any further questions regarding this issue or other T-Mobile services and features, please respond to this email referencing case # and we will be pleased to assist you further. You may also call our Customer Care line at 1-800-937-8997 or 611 then SEND from your handset and a representative will be happy to help you with any questions or concerns.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you. We appreciate your business and value you as a loyal T-Mobile customer.

compare and contrast. (and comment!)

I can't quite place why, but the Panasonic X700 is annoying me. Back to the Ericsson T39m. Again.

Someday I'll learn.

I've been thinking about this problem for a while (ever since I decided to buy the condo I bought), and I still haven't come up with a really good set of solutions:

How can I make my entry access intercom work like a modern one?

I'm thinking of dual-licensing all my stuff as by-nc and as by-sa. It seems like by-sa is much more like the GPL in intent, and also is more compelling from a "use my stuff!" angle (since I guess I'm fine with people making money off of something using my stuff as long as it's still released as by-sa, meaning anyone who buys said thing would still be able to modify/rederive/redistribute it — like I said, it's much more like the GPL). But of course the big problem with by-sa is that it means that everything else derived from it would have to be released as by-sa as well, hence my dual-licensing thing (since by-nc stuff can be used in by-nc and by-nc-sa derivatives, both of which are very popular).

When referring to a condominium, it's typically shortened to "condo," not "condom."

This is probably the most impressive movie-trailer mashup ever. (Thanks, Cartoon Brew!)