house chaos, kitchen chaos, more lame book reviews

We've slowly been settling into the house. Hampered in large part by our decision to remodel the kitchen. So far, so good. It has stayed on schedule, and is turning out well.

A little over one more week of no kitchen sink or appliances to go, then we'll be able to stop living off of the kindness of friends and family, the mini-fridge and microwave, and waaaaaaay too many take-away and fast food dinners.

Further lame book reviews accumulated during the move and holidays. To further distill my always lame, and always blessedly brief reviews, they will be presented in list form.

First the Good:

• Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Interesting alien(s).
  
• They Call me Naughty Lola, edited by David Rose. A collection of personals from the London Review of Books. Bizarre and very funny.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Bladerunner), Philip K. Dick.
  
• Also decided to pick up some science fiction classics I had never read. All pretty fun. A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. Also, The Mote in God's Eye, and The Gripping Hand, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
  

Next, the mediocre:

• Storm Front, by Jim Butcher
• The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road -- by Guy Gavriel Kay. Re-read these. I remember picking them up years ago because I'd heard such good reviews. I remembered not liking them much. I thought I'd give them another go since my tastes have changed quite a bit since then. Still found them very annoying. Stilted dialogue, and the whole college-kids transported into alternate medieval reality thing kept making me think Ren Faire.

the thank you that keeps on thanking

The best way to thank your friends and family for helping you move?

Food poisoning.

Including myself and the lovely wife, nine of the dozen or so people who helped us move were struck down by the Subway sandwich platter. I don't think I've ever been so sick. About 24 hours of sick, sick, sickness followed by a week of not eating solid food.

MarkMail, sweet!

Last May, at the Mark Logic User Conference, Jason Hunter showed off MarkMail. It's finally available to the public at http://markmail.org/

Various links about it:

• An overview at Mark Logic's site
  
• A message from Mark Logic's CEO
  
• An article at O'Reilly OnJava
  

One part that wowed me is the ability to view attachments within the interface. Maybe I'm easily impressed. For an example, go here for email with a PDF attached. Click on the link for the attachment. Search for other attachments with a search string like 'extension:ppt' or 'extension:doc'

who knew?

Finally added labels to the blog posts. Who'd have guessed? Tied for the most frequent label:

• computers
• i am lame

so close, yet so far

The appraisal is complete and our buyers haven't complained so it must have covered the sale price. Our buyers decided to do the inspection themselves, which we found odd. It's a fairly new home, and we are paying for a home warranty, so maybe they don't think much could be wrong. But, we're baffled that they wouldn't spend a couple hundred to get a professional to look over the house to verify there aren't any non-obvious problems.

The sellers on our new home were happy to extend the closing date on our contract for another couple weeks, so everything is looking good for the closing and move in the next 2 weeks.

Our buyers came by on Sunday to do the inspection, said they needed 3 hours. We decided to head up to the new house, visit our friends across the street, and rake leaves. I'd assumed it would be about an hour's job.

15 orange bags, 6 blisters, and 4 hours later, we were done.

Did I mention we've got 7 big trees on the new lot? 2 ash trees, 3 maples, and another 2... something else ... and a couple assorted smaller trees -- peach, crab apple, birch. The ashes and had dropped all their leaves, the maples and other big trees still had the majority of their leaves. Guess what I get to look forward to doing again in a few days?

We roll back home around 8pm, and realize our buyers had left the back door out of the garage wide open. Awesome!

Soon all the contract drama will be over, and all that will be left is moving 9 years of accumulated crap. And then we can kick back on the huge back deck at the new house.

where's the suggestion box?

The employer frequently elicits employee ideas for additional revenue streams. I have decided on one that beats my previous "Nominal fees for helping minors purchase alcohol" stream.

1. Form Hannah Montana tribute band, 'Amanda Bandana'
2. Prey on gullible parents thinking they're purchasing Hannah Montana tickets.
3. Profit

However, brief googling suggests 'Amanda Bandana' is already taken for a teen's myspace/livejournal/etc.

This is as disappointing a googling as when I found that 'Hell Toupee' was already taken. Back to the lame-cover-band-name drawing board.

under contract!

Lots of interest on the house -- typically 5-10 viewings a week, for the 5-6 weeks we'd been listed. No offers till about 1.5 weeks ago when we got two in one day: one good offer, one low offer.

The 'good offer' went south fast. They had acted very flaky, so we were disappointed but not surprised.

• Our agent is told (on Wednesday): "We'll send you an offer today!"
• No offer. Our agent calls them and is told: "Oh, they're putting an offer in on a different house"
• 24 hours later, we get their offer. They've only offered $500 earnest money, ask for %3 in closing costs, and don't have show any money down for the loan.
  
• We decide to counter-offer, asking for $1000 in earnest money, and say we'll cover $5000 in closing costs rather than %3. Send the counter-offer Friday morning.
  
• Saturday: We hear from their agent, "I'll be talking to my clients this afternoon"
• Sunday: No word
• Monday: No word... Our agent calls, and is told "I'll be talking to my clients this afternoon"
• Monday evening: Their agent says the deal is off. Leaves some nonsensical message for our agent saying we should have just accepted the offer and we could have closed in 3 days. I don't know why he thought he could get the inspection, appraisal, and loan stuff all worked out in that time.

In the meantime, we'd also counter-offered the other offer. And did the counter-offer thing every day last week. The buyers appeared solid financially, and were motivated to buy in our neighborhood -- their cousins had just bought up the street from some desperate sellers (they had been on the market 6 months). That house also probably screwed everyone in the subdivision on appraisals (they'd listed in May for $280 and gradually dropped to $250, accepting a $237 offer). It was nearly identical to our house -- 100 sq feet more, but hideous inside. Despite the hideousness, it was clear from the start that our buyers really, really didn't want to spend more than their cousins.

After talking them up $7k from their initial offer, we ended up accepting quite a bit less than the asking price. However, with the current market, and the fact that we'd already found our new house and were under contract on it, we decided that we couldn't wait for the perfect offer. At the price we accepted we wouldn't have any worries with appraisal and it gives us enough profit to put 20% down on the new house with a bit left over.

Our agent's co-workers are amazed she got us under contract in ~5 weeks. Some of it was us being priced right, in the right location, and our hard work keeping the house clean. But a huge part of it was how hard she worked. Lots of marketing, including at least one open house a week. She was awesome, and very funny. Best of all, unlike a lot of horror stories we'd heard about realtors, she was always available. Any time we had questions, she was very quick to respond to phone calls or e-mails.

If you're selling (or buying) or planning to, I have no reservations recommending her. Shauna Thomas at the Sugarhouse Keller Williams (599-9126). Shauna also hooked us up with a mortgage broker: Rain Wallace at Citywide Home Loans. We didn't have as much one-on-one time with Rain, but she was great -- quick to answer phone/email questions, patiently showed us our options, and helped us lock in a loan with a great rate.

nuggets from the dumb monkey sack

We've got a new developer in the group. As he's installing all the supporting tools he'll need for the projects he'll be working on, he came to me when Ant stopped working. Odd messages about Ant core/tools version incompatibilities.

We fiddle and fiddle with JAVA_HOME, with ANT_HOME, with PATH... No luck. Same messages, despite the Ant we want being right there at the start of PATH and in ANT_HOME.

Like a revelation from heaven, I realize... wait... what's in CLASSPATH? Well, there's a Documentum Jar in there... but that wouldn't have stuff to do with Ant, right?

The documentum Jar in question turned out to not have any classes in it, but it did have a giant list of other Jars in the manifest's classpath. Including Ant. More specifically, a local install of Ant 1.2 beneath the Documentum installation.

As much as I'd like to blame Sun for not providing a non-insane standard for application startup, I think its more appropriate to vent at EMC/Documentum for creating an installer that modifies the system's classpath environment variable to add their kitchen-sink Jar. For as much money as they charge, you'd think they could write an installer that doesn't screw up your system.

I'm not sure why I was surprised. Nearly every other interaction I've had with Documentum has been an exercise in agony. They must have a burlap sack full of exceptionally dumb monkeys deciding how their software gets installed and configured. Other nuggets from the monkey sack:

• No desktop application needs to talk to more than content server, right? Well, if they do, they can manually edit this INI file in c:\windows.
  
• No desktop application needs to talk to more than one version of a content server right? Well... if they do, they can uninstall/re-install to do so.

I can excuse their crappy, obfuscated APIs. Still hate them, but I can understand inflicting them on software developers. But to screw things up for all the end-users, QA, and support that need to use their crappy desktop apps, seems mind-numbingly stupid.

blog comment spam

I had to enable moderation on the comments due to the spam getting added. Moderating seemed like a better solution than going in and deleting the comments after-the-fact.

The first thing that clued me in to their spaminess:

These articles are fantastic; the information you show us is interesting for everybody and is really good written. It’s just great!! [more sales pitch and spammy URLs here...]

Anyone who actually read my blog would know that it has never been, and never will be any of those things.

hardware problems are teh suck

Why does my home PC pick the worst time to decide to stop booting? I really didn't want to spend 4 hours tonight fiddling in the XP recovery console, the BIOS settings, and running disk tests.

At first, I thought it was the height of inconvenience that I'd packed up my Windows XP install disk, had to search the basement, unpack the box, re-pack the box. Then, unpack the box again after realizing I forgot to grab the floppy disk with the SATA drivers.

However, that turned out to be minor compared to having to reboot twice every time I changed something in the XP recovery console. Once to get out of the console, and again so that the XP install disk would release itself from the CD-ROM drive. Gah!

System Rescue CD and the XP recovery console both seemed happy to read the disks, no problem getting into the partitions and looking at files. Tried fixboot, tried fixmbr, ran DFT's tests on both hard disks. No love from the boot gods.

Finally, decided to start fiddling with the BIOS. Swapped the order in which the hard disks are booted (SATA then IDE), and it came up. Not sure why I didn't notice it before. Also not sure why the BIOS implies it'll check disk #1 then disk #2 when booting, but only actually try #1 and give up.

Also not sure what would have screwed it up. I re-installed Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D over the weekend. We also had a couple power-bumps a couple days ago.

In less annoying news, System Rescue CD is 4-6x as awesome as it was the last time I tried it a few months ago.

found it!

The pictures of our house are now on the online listing... all the paint colors and floor photographed well. And, our cat is now famous.



So far, things are looking pretty good for selling our house. Lots of interest. Open house this Sunday. Our realtor is so optimistic, she's going to have a 2 co-workers there to help her out.

Hopefully it'll all work out because we found the house to buy. The location we wanted, near my parents, near friends. Great neighborhood. We'll be going under contract on it tonight. I'm not sure if I feel relieved, or more panicky.

Best of all... the new house optionally includes 6 chickens. I know it's a bizarre and sad thing to have always wanted... but I really have liked the idea of having chickens. We're already speculating that our cat is finally going to be even more fascinated and intrigued by the outside. Maybe enough to get over her fear of the unknown.

sweet spot

After many self-imposed deadlines came and went, finally listed our house for sale this weekend.
We felt bad about letting the deadlines pass, but we wanted finish all the painting and staging of the house before we listed. Turns out that was a very good idea.

Listed it about 3pm Saturday. Around 5pm Saturday we got a from our realtor saying there was someone who wanted to look. Aaaiiiiieeee! We weren't ready. The house was a mess. Paint cans, cleaning supplies, unpacked rooms. A couple hours of last-minute cleanup got 90% of the rooms ready for viewing. They seemed to like the house, and also said that even with our mess, it was one of the top two homes they'd seen in the area.

Got a wake-up call Sunday from our realtor. Another group wanted a viewing. We didn't have to do much because of the previous day's frantic cleanup. We run a few errands while they look at the house with a realtor. Afterwards, we get back home to be accosted by a family in a mini-van asking about the house.

Late Sunday afternoon, I finally get a breather and mow the lawn. Interrupted once by a couple while mowing the front lawn. Interrupted a second time, and nearly had a heart attack, while mowing the backyard when a realtor waltzes through the gate with another couple in tow asking if they can view the house.

I guess we hit the sweet spot w/ regard to location, price, and size of home. We don't even have the pictures online yet (that should happen today). It's a big relief, seeing the amount of interest in the home. And, seeing that our work over the past 2 months was worth it.

If only our own house hunt was as successful. Still having found the right home after viewing probably 70+ homes. At least we're done with our own home now and we can focus on finding our new home.

update: Got a call from the lovely wife. Another realtor and their clients just dropped by "We were in the neighborhood...". 4 viewings in the 2.5 days it's been listed. Aiiiiieeeee. We're beginning to wonder when we'll have time to do the final cleaning for the open-house next weekend.

stressful vacation, house hunting, awesome basement

Just finished a week of vacation. 'Vacation' being code for fixing up the house -- finished laying the laminate floors, installing new baseboards, some new bathroom cabinets, and lots of painting.

Still not terribly near the end point. Plenty more painting and packing to do before we'd feel comfortable having potential buyers look at the house.

The lovely wife and I have been house hunting with our realtor. So many open houses, they're all a blur now.

The price on one with a super-awesome basement has finally dropped enough to be worth it. Those are indeed built-in sofas. The tales those cushions could tell.

But seriously, that house has a great location, great square footage, and the extra fantastic basement. And, the price has dropped enough that we should be able to update the kitchen and a couple other out-of-date rooms prior to moving in.

Of course, the basement would have to stay as-is. It's just too awesome.

crappy neighbor water hazard

Three times over the last couple weeks, my and one of my neighbor's backyards have flooded. The picture is the view from my yard into the neighbor's. Our house isn't that effected... but the water is right against the neighbors foundation. Not good.

Seems another neighbor can't figure out their inflatable above-ground pool.

• The first time, I think they forgot to turn on the filter and decided to the drain the funky water
• The second time, they started refilling the pool and left for the day.
  
• The third time (two days after flood #2), they hadn't tightened a coupling and didn't notice the leak.

On the plus side... I've talked to my fellow-floodee neighbor more in the last week than I have in the ~2 years they've been in their house.

On the minus side. The flooder neighbor seems more annoyed that we're upset, rather than apologetic. I understand that once the water is out there isn't much they can do about it. But, it'd be nice if they seemed slightly concerned about things they do that effect their neighbors.

mmm... pie!

A friend helped us move our furniture around for the work we're doing on the house. Last time, he and his girlfriend raved about Left Fork Grill (68 W. 3900 South, 266-4322). We had him over again this weekend to move furniture back into the finished room, and as a reward for helping us we stopped there for breakfast.

I had a breakfast sandwich (sausage and egg), the lovely wife french toast, and our friend had a fried egg sandwich. Everything was delicious. And, they made hash browns correctly -- the right ratio of crisp to tender, and not greasy.

To top it all off, they have the best pie ever. The lovely wife had banana cream, I had raspberry-rhubarb. Excellent crust, freshly made fillings. Both were great. Many others think so too.

It's shot right up to top of our list of breakfast spots -- great food, reasonable prices.

A shame that it's only open for breakfast and lunch. Pie for breakfast may become a family tradition.

finally, a chance to wear a toolbelt

We've been thinking of moving for a couple years now. But, we'd wanted to get a few things fixed up with the house. I needed to get the yard and flower beds into better shape, and we wanted to replace some of our carpet.

A few months ago, we'd bought some glueless laminate flooring at Costco while it was on sale (ended up saving around $150 because of the sale). Finally got around to starting the project last weekend. Finally realized the extent to which one of our cats ruined the carpet. Ugh.

The flooring went down quick. Not as easy as the instructions make it seem. But, it looks nice, and gave me my once-every-two-years excuse to wear a toolbelt.









And, in odd things I've stuck in my pie-hole news:

• The 'Hog Burger' at Britton's (964 East Union Square in Sandy). A burger with grilled onions nestled between a grilled-cheese sandwich with bacon, and a second grilled-cheese sandwich with tomato. The first half was good. The second half was 'what have I gotten myself into?'
  

impatient book review

I couldn't be bothered to wait the year(s?) for the U.S. release of Steven Erikson's newest Malazan book, Reaper's Gale.

After comparing the Canada/UK prices on the respective Amazon sites, and plugging in the conversion rate, it was cheaper to order from the UK and have it shipped across the Atlantic. Odd.

It was very good. Heartbreaking (and other not-so-heartbreaking) deaths of main characters. Resolution of plot lines. Very enjoyable.

I also picked up Night of Knives, by Ian Cameron Esslemont. Also set in the Malazan universe. It was pretty good, but not great. It could have used another round of editing -- typos and a couple confusing sections. But, it was fast-paced and fun.

roller derby -- violence, short skirts, beer -- what's not to like?

The lovely wife and I went to the roller derby last night. Lots of fun. Lots of violence. Lots of hot chicks in short skirts zooming around the track and knocking each other down. And beer! Mmm... Beer.

It was an All Star match between the local league and their opponents from Idaho.

Salt Lake Software Symposium, day #2

Last day. Still pretty good, but didn't rock as much as the first.

Attended a couple more of Jared Richardson's sessions: "Agile Testing Strategies", and "Software Development Techniques". Lots of good real-world examples, and lots of inspiration for changing our processes. Definitely thinking of picking up Ship It!

Neal Ford's "Pragmatic Extreme Programming" was good. But, I think it'll be easier to work in lessons from Jared's sessions (on days 1 and 2) into our existing process.

I wasn't going to attend Brian Sam-Bodden's "Complex Builds with Ant" session. From the slides, it appeared like I'd already knew the major tips on my own. But, I was wiped out by the last session. Decided it was worth going to a topic I was familiar with in order to pick an expert's brain. Only three attendees, so the session went fast and I was able to ask a lot of questions.

More sour-grapes today over all the Ruby rah-rah-rah. Again, Neal Ford declared Ruby the winner in the dynamic language race on the JVM. Neal is a very smart guy, a great presenter, and also great to talk to one-on-one. I don't have any issue with him advocating Ruby. Any language that makes developers more productive is a good thing. But, it seems disingenuous to declare a victor in a wide open race to a room full of people who have little to no experience with dynamic languages.

Personally, I prefer Python over Ruby. Others can and should disagree. Here's a fair, but slightly biased (since the author is familiar with Python), comparison of Python vs. Ruby.

I'm not sure who to blame for lack of Python excitement in the Java world (or at least at this conference). Maybe with the recent revitalization of the Jython project, it will get more Java developer's attention.

Microsoft's CLR (and the new DLR and Silverlight) seems very exciting. See here and here and here. The second link is a screencast showing interoperation between Ruby, JavaScript, Python, and VB.

All in all, the conference was very good. I'll definitely plan on going next year.

Salt Lake Software Symposium, day #1

Since this blog is all about (pick one):

• lame book reviews
• lame software conference anecdotes
• odd things I've put in my mouth
  

Here's more software conference anecdotes.

Spent today at the Salt Lake Software Symposium (aka No Fluff Just Stuff). So far, the conference is very good. Attended presentations by Neal Ford, Jared Richardson, and Brian Sletten. All great presenters, showing off great technology.

A friend has tried 2-3 times to explain Aspect Oriented Programming to me. It sounded... like more trouble than it was worth. Brian Sletten's AOP presentation was very useful in cluing me in. Seeing the AspectJ/Eclipse tools in action got me all excited to try it out. The immediate use-case I have would to remove a bunch of cut-n-paste concurrent locking boilerplate in my pipeline application. If I understood it correctly (always a questionable assumption), I can replace all that code scattered throughout my class with an aspect that'll do the

  writeLock();
  try {
       // .... do stuff....
  } finally {
       releaseWriteLock();
  }

logic all from a single place for all the setters methods in my class. And a similar readLock() aspect for my getters.

Brian also presented NetKernel. Also awesome. Still trying to get a handle on how exactly we can leverage it for our needs. His Mashup/SemanticWeb/RDF presentation was also good.

Jared Richardson's presentation Shippers Unite was very good. The best part, calling sales people 'Sales Critters'. He had lots of great advice, and great best-practice type information.

Neal Ford's SOA presentation, and his keynote after dinner were also very good. His keynote, "Polyglot Programming" was very interesting. Contrasted the increasing cruft, and complexity (and irrelevancy) of the Java language against the awesomeness of the Java platform. Described the increasing place Dynamic Languages will have within the software industry. In particular their place inside managed runtime environments (either JVM or CLR).

The only major disappointment I experienced was the (apparent) disdain the conference presenters seemed to show for Python/Jython. Lots of Groovy/Ruby/JRuby/Grails rah-rah-rah. I know Rails is the new poster child, and Ruby folks should be proud. But, to give Python/Jython/IronPython hardly a mention. And, the one time the word Python appeared on a slide, to explicitly declare Ruby the winner over Python... seems premature.

Yeah, yeah. Sour grapes. Maybe I should try Ruby before deciding I don't like it... but the Perl-like $ and @ syntax rubs me the wrong way. And, maybe I should just be happy about the rising tide of dynamically typed languages that'll lift all boats.