A wallpaper story This post reminded me of my largest house project ever, which was started by a cat. In our first house in New Jersey, the dining room was covered in a brown grasscloth wallpaper. This was by far not the ugliest room in the house, so at first we didn't plan to do much there for a while. But Fred apparently did not agree with this strategy. He started to stand on top of the piano that was there then and use the grasscloth as a scratching post, which left a nice ragged area in a prominent place. So I started to look at removing the grasscloth, but discovered that it was applied on top of that very cheap 1960s style paneling that every old house that existed then seemed to get magically covered in. The paneling had also been painted white. It immediately became clear this stuff was not coming off, and if it did the wall would look very bad as is. So I started to get a little more ambitious, and decided to try pulling off one piece of the paneling. This actually came off pretty easily, it was just tacked up with tiny brads, but all of the wall mouldings were applied on top of the paneling so they had to come off too. Underneath, I was surprised to find plaster in pretty good condition, except at the bottom where the original 1920s Craftsman-style mouldings had been thoughtfully yanked out. The same genius had also removed the wonderful original broad window mouldings in that room. At this point, as a new homeowner I started to get more ambitious. So all the paneling and current mouldings came out, revealing more plaster in good condition except where the mouldings were gone. A sensible person would probably have either hired someone at this point or put up drywall, but as previously mentioned I was a new homeowner, not a sensible person. So I decided to patch the original paster (which was the old fashioned kind applied over wood lathing). This project only took about six months and a lot of patching plaster and drywall compound to complete. Seeing as there were no mouldings in the room at this point, I figured I should make some, and decided to do the room in natural oak. I fancied myself somewhat of a woodworker, but maybe didn't realize how hard it is to cut mouldings to fit properly in an old house where nothing is straight. Considering that I lacked experience I hired a supervisor and bought a saw. After this saw proved to be not very useful, I then bought another saw (a Delta tablesaw) that worked better, once again proving how do-it-yourself work can save you lots of money by buying over $1,000 worth of power tools. During the project, the dining room was kind of interesting. Since the plaster didn't go all the way down to the bottom of the walls and the 1920s house had no sills at the bottom of the balloon walls, you could see right down into the basement. I learned a lot about working with wood during this project. I also found that crawling around all over the place to nail in new baseboards was actually very good for my sore knee. The results: I was pretty proud of them. I put in all new baseboards -- actually a three piece job composed of a 4-inch flat board, a quarter-round and a decorative top moulding, and tried to reproduce the Craftsman-style window mouldings as best I could. The original windowsills had been chopped off at the ends, so I ended up making new ones from giant slabs of oak I had to order from the mail, using various router bits to shape the wood to resemble the original. It ended up looking like this; my wife picked out some new rollerblinds in an ivy pattern. The resulting room included a built-in bookcase (shown as we were moving out, it did really have a lot of books in it) and a new square casing for the entranceway into the living room. I like our new house a lot better than that one, but I do wish sometimes I could have taken the dining room with me. And I'm not sure I'll ever have the energy again to do a room like that, or the money to hire someone to do it. And it would have never happened at all if it wasn't for Fred.

A New England weather report Yesterday (Thanskgiving), when the stove was working overtime, it was so warm here (high of 65 degrees) that the house got uncomfortably hot even after we opened most of the windows downstairs. Today, when we all wanted to go out, was sunny but cold (around 40 degrees but the wind made it feel a lot colder), way too cold for my Florida-based mother-in-law to want to walk anywhere. Now there are a lot of great things about Boston, but the weather ... well, we do get great weather sometimes but it is impossible to know when, and it usually happens on a day I'm trapped in the cubicle. It says something about the other benefits of this region that people will pay some of the highest real estate prices in the nation to live here.

Thanks For a wonderful son, his wonderful mom, two great cats, and a great place to live. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! PS: If you aren't having a good time today (and I'd bet that a very high percentage of people don't -- it is a day that makes you lonely if not with family and friends, and often seems to lead to a lot of bickering if you are), who cares! Life isn't about holidays, if they don't work ignore them and maybe some odd day like Dec. 4 or Jan. 8 will be the day to celebrate ... who knows?

If I only had a brain I think my brain has finally conked out on me. Yesterday, going to pick up my mother in law at the bus from the airport, I missed the turnoff for the terminal, had to loop around, then turned into the wrong part of the terminal, so had to exit and go back around. Today I can't remember the root password to one of my Linux systems. I've tried all the ones I use everywhere, but no luck. Fortunately this is an old Red Hat 8.0 install that is probably going to be wiped soon, but it is still very annoying. I am off from work Tuesday through Friday this week, but I'm not sure that will be enough to restore my sanity. (Having relatives visiting usually doesn't help my sanity anyway). I could use a serious getaway, away from everything, but I don't have enough vacation time to do that and the other trips we really need to make (I haven't visited my mom in a while now). All this is on top of a sinus infection that lurks at just the level that's too mild to force me to the doctor to to bedrest, but enough to give me a splitting headache every morning. I think I need a warm place, an island, that is very quiet.

I think this is finally fixed The problem was an old copy of the mtblacklist plugin, which was overriding the new Movable Type code. So now if you have TypeKey, you should be able to post. Finding problems like this is a little too much like what I do for a living, actually.

Broken That's my kid's favorite word today, and it is also the state of comments here. They basically do not work -- I am still getting spammed, but TypePad users are not able to post like they are supposed to be. I am running an old version of MT that really needs an upgrade, but I've lost the password to the site (through general confusion). This is embarrassing because I'm a software developer and I'm supposed to know how to fix things like this. But I'm too tired right now ...

It took me a while, but I finally got TypeKey working properly on this site -- apparently I didn't have the right form of my URL entered at TypeKey. From now on I am limiting comments to TypeKey users. For a while I had it set that anyone could comment, but I had to approve the comments before they appeared. But the deluge of emails from blogspammers was just getting to be too much. Granted, I write so little here that I'm not sure anyone is reading anymore, but I would like to be able to see some real comments from time to time, and could never keep up with the garbage in my mailbox. So if you use TypeKey drop me a comment! (PS: One problem with TypeKey registration (and with some similar systems) is that it requires the user to type in characters from a graphic. I'm aware this limits access by people with screen readers (and frankly I find these characters hard to read sometimes), but I have not been able to think of a good alternative yet. I do hope that a better system emerges).

Tiger talk I've been pretty bogged down in both things technical and not to be too excited recently about new operating systems and such, but OS X Tiger is looking very interesting. From this article for Apple developers it seems like there's really more to this new release than first meets the high. Apple has also linked to this O'Reilly article that has a little more to say. Building synchronization into the OS is an idea that's overdue, for one thing. Of course potentials of an OS are not very useful unless developers take advantage of them I remember the days of OS/2 when a lot of built-in power went untapped. But the (compared to today) snaillike speed of the CPU then made a lot of "cool" ideas too expensive to really use. When I bought my Mac it was intended mostly as a "fun" machine to edit photos and make moves, but it has now become my favorite place to write code as well -- especially since Visual Slick Edit runs on it now (Visual Slick Edit is an X windows app and as such is a little more awkward than editors like BBEdit, but one of the reasons I like VSE is that it works the same way on Windows, Mac or Linux. It's not the prettiest thing around, but one of the most powerful.

Winter thoughts Suddenly we're surrounded by white here, a late fall snow that got a little out of control. But a great playground for all the kids. We have a plastic sled that probably cost $4 and is just perfect for the rather gentle hill in our yard, which in turn is perfect for a 3-year-old. Lots of snow also gives us at least a temporary pardon from having to rake up tons of leaves, although I was rather looking forward to shredding them all up in our new shredder-chipper, a manly toy if there ever was one. And we actually had neighborhood kids taking leaves from our yard to build a bigger pile next door. Yesterday I was chatting with a woman from work who left our office when she and her husband moved to Virginia, and she said getting out of the cold weather was one of the reasons they moved. Some of the outsourcer workers we use spend a couple of months here on rotation, and coming from India it is not pleasant for those who end up here in the winter (maybe they got on the wrong side of their boss in Bangalore?). But we live here quite voluntarily, and I would really miss winter if I lived somewhere that didn't have it. And if you have to have winter, you need the full-blown New England kind. When we were in New Jersey the winter had far too many ice storms and too few gentle snowfalls. Our boy is entranced by the snow -- his second winter in New England. My wife worried recently that he would be disappointed if the snow this weekend was a dusting, not suitable for snowmen. Well, not to worry. And we all had a great snowball fight today. I need more snowball fights in my life ...

Right out of hell This started out as a comment on Amy's post but got too big so ... I think the victories by the extreme right-wingers worries me more than Bush -- especially since their victories will encourage Bush to move further that way. Though he ran a lot better campaign than I thought, I have to say that I still think the Democrats should be able to field someone better than Kerry, someone who can simply say Iraq WAS a mistake. But the other thing that worries me is that I'm afraid someone not willing to waffle on some key issues would have gone down in flames in this increasingly right-wing country. Politics used to be more complex when the South was Democrat territory -- though the motives of the Southern Democrats were often racist, their existence made the system more fluid. There were more than two kinds of states then. Though I'd wish it came with different motives, we could use some of that complexity again. Though each was in his own way rather demented, pols like Johnson and Nixon were complex mixtures of left and right (although in today's GOP mindset they were both flaming liberals). I can only hope that maybe some voters wrote off Kerry as just a "Massachusetts liberal" and might be more willing to listen to the same message from someone else -- but I honestly don't know.