Rants and musings, without care for substance.
Posted in housing, life in general on Oct 10th, 2009
After eleven hours, I managed to replace my garage door opener. At last, the old Craftsman chain drive — which was having fundamental problems staying powered during such routine actions such as opening and closing, as well as non-correctable problems closing evenly — has been replaced by a new Genie PowerLift H4000 screw drive [...]
Posted in housing, life in general, oddities, troubleshooting on Mar 30th, 2009
I had a small group of people over after we closed out the show. At one point during the evening, one of my guests approached me and whispered into my ear, “your toilet is broken.” It was in the same tone as someone would use when they say, “where’s your plunger?” Fortunately it wasn’t a [...]
Posted in housing on Jan 17th, 2009
So I picked up a cheap self-adhesive door sweep from Home Depot today. I was skeptical since it’s definitely below the recommended temperature for the adhesive to adhere properly. But I didn’t feel like drilling holes in the door today, so I stuck it on the door. Lo and behold, it came unattached before my [...]
Posted in books, housing, life in general on Jan 17th, 2009
I got my DTV coupons in the mail and headed over to Amazon and what do you know, most of them are sold out. Figures.
I discovered that my front door isn’t snug against the frame and it is letting a cold draft in. The entryway has always been a colder than the rest of the [...]
Posted in housing, idiots, in the news on Nov 20th, 2008
There’s been a lot of people renting out their houses and apartments for the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, asking for ludicrous amounts of money. Thousands of dollars per night with four- to five-night minimums. The only people more silly than the people who think they’ll successfully negotiate a non-cash short-term sublease without a contract, legal assistance, [...]
Posted in housing, in the news, money, politics on Sep 25th, 2008
I usually don’t watch the news, but while at the car dealership yesterday I had some time in the waiting room. On the one hand I don’t feel that the taxpayers ought to be bailing out either individuals or corporations that made poor financial decisions. Like a friend helping out your friend because they made [...]
Posted in housing, in the news on Mar 6th, 2008
It seems that the local police department has a Vice Squad and that they’ve recently been active in my community. My HOA just sent out an email stating that the squad started an investigation based on a resident’s tip.
“As a result of this investigation the following female was determined to be managing this sexual enterprise [...]
Last year I scored a bag of incandescent light bulbs when the ACW household replaced all of their bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. Those bulbs got gifted to another friend of mine, since his house — when purchased — was devoid of light bulbs for some reason.
I went to the bank this afternoon to deposit [...]
Posted in food, housing, life in general, plans on Dec 27th, 2007
I had a nice time at home with the family. Went for a bike ride before presents and dinner. It was my first bike ride in years, which made me consider — as I have been lately — getting a bike and getting some exercise thataway. It’s low-impact and I always enjoyed riding as a [...]
Posted in housing, life in general, oddities on Dec 13th, 2007
The overhead fluorescent light in the kitchen has been acting up for several months now. It hums a little more than normal and the tubes flicker dimly when you turn them on. Light output is cut in half. Besides complaining I haven’t done anything about it until the other day when the single flood in [...]
Posted in healthcare, housing on Nov 19th, 2007
Joel Spolsky recommended a neat mashup today, rating the “walkability” of an address according to how many places of interest (stores, restaurants, etc) are nearby. The area surrounding my house has a Walk Score of 23. That’s pretty low, but if I use the address of a house nearby the entrance to my community I [...]
It astounds me how many young people don’t have a clue when it comes to money and taxes. Fewer still know how both relate to being a homeowner. It feels like some people go out of their way to know as little about finance as humanly possible. I don’t know if its a generational thing [...]
Posted in housing, life in general on Sep 7th, 2007
It took us a few hours, but we successfully replaced my hot water heater with only one minor injury. I assisted my buddy with much of it; my soldering skills are horrible, but I was fine with the 240V line. It didn’t go quite a smoothly as we had planned, but the solder is holding [...]
Posted in cars, complaints, housing, life in general, music on Sep 5th, 2007
Listening to the soundtrack from Garden State, grooving to Thievery Corporation. That obviously doesn’t suck, but it certainly helps insulate me from the following.
My hot water heater is leaking water and might be on its last legs. The base shows signs of rust and the concrete below has signs of calcium build-up from water that [...]
Posted in housing, legal rights, politics, privacy, the system on Sep 1st, 2007
Due to a poor laptop security policy, here are some snippets from the diary of an American Community Survey (ACS) Field Representive.
Friday, 6 July 2007, 5:55PM
Every single time I want to take the wife down to Rehobeth for the weekend Mr. Fancypants Fitzpatrick strolls into my cubicle like the boss from Office Space at ten [...]
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