Alkahest

One advantage of being in IT is that you often at least hear of cool things before other people do. You may or may not choose to adopt them, but at least you’ve got a choice. Thanks to Mr. Icon, I got an early gmail account, firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Great, unfortunately, I don’t have […]

For as long as I can remember, any time I spent more than an hour or so walking (or hiking), my legs and feet have felt sore and tired.  Never having been very athletic, I assumed that I was out of shape or needed to exercise more.  But even with as much exercise as I’ve […]

The roofers finally finished our new roof last week.  They started on February 28th and finished on April 2nd - five weeks.  I’m pretty certain they only expected it to take about three weeks, but between the rain and the level of detail on the roof, it didn’t quite work out that way.  Everything seemed […]

For the most part, the old roof has been ripped off and we’re looking to start laying down the new roofing on Thursday.
Several lessons learned so far in getting the roof replaced:

all contractors have different prices, shop around
drought is bad for roofers (and for that matter gravel driveway repair folks)
having your roof torn off is […]

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the […]

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past […]

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that […]

The ISP move went reasonably well.  There were a couple of minor glitches.  One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky.  I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks.  Rather than spend too much time with […]

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and […]

So, John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primaries today.  It’s a shame.  In one sense, I was more excited about Obama or Clinton as president(ial candidates).  Their candidacies would be a) history making for their race/gender respectively; and b) about freaking time!  Hell, Turkey and Pakistan have had female heads of state for well […]