September 2005 Archives

Mel and I are going to go see Serenity tonight, Lord willing. I'm looking forward to it. (:

I've installed Captchas onto the notblog blogs. MT-blacklist wasn't cutting it for preventing blog spam. I was having to do too much reactively, and it didn't give me any proactive solutions. Worse, I was spending a fairly large amount of time removing spam, and updating my blacklist, to no avail.

So now in order to comment on a notblog.com blog, you have to type in six numbers from the image below the comment box. I realize that this is a pain, but I'm hoping that it will cut off the comment spammers, at least for the time being.

Please feel free to comment if you have anything to say on the issue. I do know that captcha can be defeated in a number of ways (OCR, the porn attack, etc) but I'm hoping that any of those would be more effort than spamming my blog is worth. This is basically a last resort, before I either switch to something other than moveable type, or disable comments. And we all know how much it hurts to disable comments. (:

I realize that comments are not working correctly right now on notblog.com blogs. I'll finish working on them later. No time now. Carry on. (:

Today I received the USB data cables I ordered to connect our cell phones to our computers, for connecting to the internet from home. It works, and the bandwidth is decent, but it's a laggy connection. Typical one-way lag is 400-500 milliseconds. That means it's about a second for data to make a round trip. Yuck. At least we can get email, etc.

A nice side-benefit is that we're now able to edit our phonebooks, download photos, etc from our computers.

When I called SBC prior to offering to purchase my home, they told me in no uncertain terms that I could definitely get ISDN service at the home. That was good enough for me. I couldn't get DSL or cable, but at least I had one non-dialup access method.

A day after closing, they called back to inform me that they had cancelled my order (how kind of them) because it would cost them too much to install ISDN at my location (nice of them to realize this now). Needless to say, I'm annoyed.

All things considered, I really like my new house. I trust that God will provide for all my needs there, including showing me what things are needs in my life and what things are not. *sigh*

Perhaps the best explanation of the events in post-Katrina New Orleans to date.

I need a quick break from work, so here's a post. Fear the post.

Most all of our stuff is at the new house now. The corrolary to this is that most of our stuff is still ensconced in cardboard. We're slowly dealing with that. We've slept in the house two nights now, and it's nicer by the night. I really like the place.

Mel's parents just got here this afternoon. They brought our cat and dog that they've been watching, and they are going to help us (Mel mostly, since I have to work during the day) setup the house.

Last weekend was a flurry of activity with my family, getting all our stuff loaded into a rider truck and moving it down here. That truck was huge! That, and it cost me about $.50 a mile in fuel alone. (: Thankfully work is picking up the tab on that one.

All-in-all, I'm very tired. At least all the physical labor is helping me sleep really well at night (:

Yesterday I took the entire day off to get more painting done around the house. The first coat of ceiling paint didn't cover evenly, so I put up a second coat. For the second coat we got paint that went on pink but dried white. It made the job tons easier.

The we washed, taped and painted the walls in the family room. Oh! And we also got to have dinner with our new neighbors, who happen to be very nice people. It's a mother, father and four sons, and overall a very cool family.

After dinner I got all the walls in the family room painted (the color is supposedly "Emminent Bronze" in some gay man's chromatic fantasy, but if I were to name it, I would say dark olive green). It's really nice. I think it will look even better when we replace the worn carpet with hardwood (the next planned upgrade) because the color really set off the richness of the wood trim around the windows and doors.

Once the family room was painted, my last task was to paint the garage floor. I used Quikrete Epoxy Paint kits. So far I've only done half the garage, since I had to have someplace to put the stuff while I painted. This kit is really nice though. The kit I used in the basement in Francesville was about the same cost, but only included the paint. This kit included etching agent (I assume it was muriatic acid, but it had some brandname on it like "bondlok" or something) which really made a difference in cleaning the concrete up.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing how the garage floor turned out when I get back to the house. For now, I'm headed north with Melissa to go load up a rental truck with our stuff. See y'all later. (:

Mel and I have been working diligently on getting the new house ready to move into. Monday we spent the afternoon and evening pulling down wallpaper. We tried a product called "Diff Gel". It worked alright, but it was like $6 for a windex-style sprayer bottle, so it was going to cost a lot.

So I tried just water, and soked the wall. Actually, before spraying, we were using a little thing called a "Paper Tiger" to poke hundreds of little holes in the wallpaper to let the water soak through. That little tool is *required* for wallpaper removal in my book.

But basically, scored the wallpaper with the paper tiger, then soak it with a spray bottle, then wait five minutes. Soak again, then start at either the top of the bottom, and firmly remove the entire piece of wallpaper.

The first night we removed wallpaper, we were removing little chunks, and having to pick hundreds of tiny bits of paper from the wall. That is not the way to do it. The second day, we removed entire strips of wallpaper at a time. This saved tons of time, and made less mess....

The other things we've managed so far are patching all the nail holes and dents, and painting the ceiling. Needless to say, we're both a bit tired of body. Hopefully today we can get the walls painted, and the garage floor etched and painted.

Hey all! Melissa and I just got the keys to our new house this afternoon. In a few minutes, I'm going to head over there (Melissa is already there) and start working to get the place ready to move in. We're hoping to get some painting/cleaning done before we move in, mostly.

Very exciting. (:

I've been spending way too much time scouring the interwebs searching for some way to get decent internet bandwidth at the new house. To date, the only non-dialup option seemed to be ISDN. (ISDN, while much better than dialup, is twice the cost of DSL or cable and much slower)

Then, when I was trying to find contact information for my electric company so that I could get service switched to my name, I found this article which says that Cynergy (which I'm not yet certain is my electric company) did a test rollout of broadband over power lines (BPL) in mid-2004.

Hope!!

Now I just have to find out if Cynergy really is my electric company, if they still offer BPL, and if I can get it at the new house. With the way things tend to be, I probably can't, but at least there is some small hope. (:

Update: Cinergy (spelled correctly) really is my electric company. And they really do have a partnership (and partial ownership) of a BPL ISP called the Current Communications Group.

Still trying to figure out what their service area is.

Update #2: BPL is not actually available in my area. Apparently the only area that it is available right now (from this company) is in Cincinatti suburbs. If you're interested in finding more out, call the company at 877-775-8446

(poor me)

You can leave your friends behind.

The link goes to a downloadable video from the mercury probe that recently left Earth. It's small in size but beautiful in content. Download it and feel in a very small way what it's like to leave this place behind.

Link via Boing Boing.

Well, I had a wonderful Labor Day weekend. The Froyds brought their brand new little baby up from Texas to see us on the way up to their parents. Baby Becca is the cutest thing ever. So mild mannered. I'm very glad to have gotten to see her. It was good to see Nate and Tricia as well.

Mikey made it out for the weekend also, so that he could visit baby Froyd and the rest of us too. And of course, since Mikey and Nate were in town, much war3 was had by all. We managed to beat two hero defense maps, among other things.

The Foos clan, the Petersons, the Gibbs, Bryan Johnson and Ruth, and last but not least Matt and Laura all made appearences. It was good to see everyone, really. I love seeing my friends. (:

I also feel like I should mention that the Stoltzfus and Froyd children that were present this weekend were on their best behaviour. It's fun to be around kids that aren't horribly misbehaved, especially when there is a lot of chaos simply due to all the people being together in one area. I must say, excellent job the parents in the group.

Hopefully everyone has had, will have or is having a safe trip home! (:

True or no, it's a good story.

On the way into work this morning, I heard that the Governer of Louisiana is calling for an apology from the Speaker of the House (or was it the Senate?). Apparently the Speaker said something to the effect of "We need to think long and hard before dedicating funds to rebuild New Orleans".

The Governer went on to say how even thinking something like that was offensive both to her and to the reseidents of her state. I disagree with her. Given the enormous financial burden of rebuilding an entire city of the magnitude of New Orleans, I think the lawmakers should be very thoughtful about how they spend their money. Not so much that I have faith in the fiscal responsibility of our government, but rather that I find it more offensive that anyone would assume that we as a country should simply write the blank check to rebuild NOLA, as opposed to considering our options.

Sorry, I couldn't find a news story corraborating what I heard on the radio. If I find a link to clarify this later, I'll post it.