Um… personal?
I’m a weak but aspiring runner who hasn’t done it much lately because I’m anti-cold weather (I bike on a trainer during the cold months). Considering I struggle with form and technique (eg: I have a tendency to be sloppy and wind up with sore knees and/or illotibial bands) I found this interesting:
“What happened to the floors?” asked the imaginary people who visit this site. Well, the flooring company miscalculated their estimations on square footage and came up lacking. We had to wait an additional 2 weeks for more flooring to arrive and acclimate before the downstairs could be completed. But it’s now finally done.
Now we’re in the midst of trying to finally move into our house proper – 4 months after arriving.
There’s still a LOT left to do. Tons of painting. A new water heater. Eventually a new stove and hood. A fence. The exterior of the house needs painting desperately. A fix for The Door To Nowhere. Welcome back to home ownership! I’m split between hoping Bend grows so that this investment pays off and hoping Bend stops growing so that I’m not wanting to leave at all.
And on it goes…
Our room, complete save for trim.
Riley’s…
Guest…
The hall…
And the unfinished bonus room.
The stairs are a complicated affair.
We repainted all the removed trim. amazing how much of it came off without trouble.
The guys worked a full day yesterday tearing out the foul carpet and pad and preparing the place for new floors.
Finally, after way longer than intended, the disgusting carpets are being replaced with hardwood. We spent the weekend basically moving back out of the house, emptying all the rooms into the garage, storage crawls, bathrooms, laundry room and my office. I discovered that we don’t own a lot of stuff (which I’m absolutely good with) and that this house has ample storage. We didn’t even use attic. Mom and son are staying at a hotel down the road. The cat and I are holed up in my office, camping luxury style.
My first Fishbone show was a transformative experience. Prior to it I had been a metal head with punk and hardcore overtones. The show was as intense and physical as any hardcore set, perhaps even more so. As opposed to other shows, this one was overflowing with positivity. Slamming and diving were encouraged. So was supporting one another and keeping each other safe. Unlike punk or metal shows, if you fell in a Fishbone pit a sea of hands were instantly there to drag you back to your feet. Midway through the show the whole of the crowd in attendance – young and old, black and white, male and female, punk, metal, funk – were inducted into the Fishbone Familyhood. We became Fishbone Soldiers, sworn to protect one another and stand up for what was right. Later in the show the band encouraged a young man to attempt his first balcony dive while the pit below was commanded to ensure the nervous boy’s safety. He was grinning ear to ear as he leapt into the void and touched down on his new familyhood. In the end it was less a show than it was a religious experience. Fishbone broadened my horizons. Fishbone changed my life.
Continue reading
New hard drives have arrived for my workstation and laptop. They’re desperately overdue for a rebuild. I love rebuilding and I hate it. I love it because newly built machines run so smoothly, so cleanly, and have that new-machine smell. It’s like virtual spring-cleaning.
I hate rebuilding because there’s so much stuff on my machines. I’ve done a better job over the years of compartmentalizing (and even backing up) my data, but there’s still a lot of it – more than I’d like. And the applications. I use so many applications! Every rebuild I think “I don’t need 3/4 of these apps. I’m not putting them back on.” But eventually, inevitably, as I work on this and that my installed app list grows, and I find myself installing a significant amount of the apps I insisted I wouldn’t. Such is the curse of the breadth of things I work on, I suppose. Just this morning a coworker from a completely different department commented that I’m the bitch for my department. I work on whatever needs working on. My boss generously calls me his “tool belt.” Bitch is, honestly, more accurate.
Anyway, here are a few things that make my rebuild process less arduous.
- Open a command prompt with elevated rights (Start > Run > type in CMD. When the CMD icon appears, right click and Run as Administrator).
- Type in WMIC.
- Type in /output:c:\path\to\installed_list.txt product get name,version where path\to is, well, the path to wherever you want to write your installed_list.txt.
- Wait for it to finish. Enjoy list of apps.
I’ll add more to my list as my latest rebuilds commence.
After a failed experiment in Arizona, we’ve moved. We bought a fixer in Bend, Oregon, threw all of our shit into a truck, and marathon drove it up the west coast shortly before Christmastime. Roughly 2 years after starting over, we’re starting over.
There is some solace to be had in having experienced starting over once before, and understanding that the negatives of doing so aren’t permanent. Even so, it had only just begun to feel like things were looking up when we left Arizona.
Here are some random observations from my experiences since leaving our hometown of Atlanta.
So what’s next? Work on the house. Work on our lives. I often make the mistake of forgetting the world is what you make it, and wind up being the guy who lets things happen to him rather than the guy who makes things happen. It won’t be easy, but I’d like to flip that script.
Happy New Year. Welcome to the rest of our lives.
When it comes to anti-virus, I’m a cheapskate. I’m always using the latest highly rated free option. And these days, that’s Avast. I installed it on the little media box I run awhile ago. Today I gave it a reboot per updates and – surprise! – SickBeard refused to start. Port 8081 – the port I configured SB to run over – was in use, it said. A quick netstat proved otherwise.
Avast does a redirect on a number of ports, it turns out. So if you’ve recently installed Avast and have discovered port related problems, here’s your fix:
In the Avast console (obtained by double clicking the Avast icon in your tray):
After you OK your way out give it a couple of minutes for Avast to pick up your changes.
