Ding dong, the bell is alive
Dec. 7th, 2009 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterFor as long as I've lived here, the doorbell hasn't worked. Lately, I've even missed package deliveries because of it: I've been right here in my room, the delivery person has rung the doorbell, shrugged, guessed I wasn't in, and gone about his merry way—even though I was sitting right here at the computer waiting.
Well, that's not going to be a problem anymore. I now have a working, loud doorbell, with a DING-DONG whose notes hang in the air for a good ten seconds or so after the ring. All that it took was replacing the button. To think I could have had that years ago if only I'd asked someone to replace it then, or even had Dad do it.
On Friday, the most bitterly cold day of the year so far, I woke up to find that a corner of the pane in my front window had cracked right off. I managed to fit it back into place, put duct tape over it to seal it off, and called for repair. The maintenance people came out this morning and fixed it. (They mismeasured the glass, as it turned out, and had to chisel out part of my window to make it fit. It was apparently easier/cheaper to do that than to go back and have the glass recut.)
I had them fix my doorbell at the same time, and they also fixed the fluorescent light in my kitchen, which has been out for weeks. I'm not sure whether it was the ballast or the bulbs, but whichever it was it lights up nice and brightly now. And they put weatherstripping on my front door, and plastic over my bedroom windows, so perhaps I'll lose a little less heat that way.
At the moment, I'm getting ready to head down to Wal-Mart to pick up my renewed Neurontin prescription, for my foot. I had emailed the doctor a few days ago about getting it done; now I had to go through half an hour of rigamarole to register with with Cisco Secure Mail, so I could read the reply…which turned out to be the words "Prescription has been called in. Thanks." They couldn't just have sent that in clear? (Yeah, yeah, I know. Hungry hungry HIPAA and all that. Still)
Something else I'll be doing in town is taking care of twelve rolls of 24-exposure 200-speed film I found in a box in my room the other day when I was looking for something else. (Isn't it funny how that goes? You always find the most interesting things whenever you're looking for something else.) Back in the old days, when I had a film camera, I would carry it on trips with me and take pictures, and end up losing or misplacing the film, or just not having the cash to have it developed at the time.
And here it's finally turned up. I suspect I know what's on at least some of those rolls—shots from my trip out to Seattle and Portland ten or fifteen years ago, for instance, and perhaps images from one of the BotCons I attended—but I hardly remember shooting up twelve whole rolls. It's going to be fun finding out what they contain—kind of like a little time capsule from myself.
But there's so many rolls that that having it processed at OscoDrug would probably run me over $100. Instead, I'm going to be sending it in to Clark Color Labs where, nearly as I can make out, it will cost about $32 for the lot if I just have them post the images on-line where I can download them instead of making a CD. It'll take a little longer to get them back, but they've been lying around for ten years already; I can wait a few days. So I'm going to buy a mailer at Wal-Mart, then drop by Kinko's on the way back and print off the order form and mailing label.
Dunno if folks heard about the big EtherPad uproar of a couple days ago. I wrote about it on TeleRead. Seems that Google bought EtherPad out in order to add its staff to their Wave team (and God knows Wave needs the help), and was going to close EtherPad down—but all of EtherPad's users screamed bloody murder, so not only did they open it back up again but they also declared they would be open-sourcing EtherPad and its underlying AppJet framework.
Aside from being very happy about that, as EtherPad is one of my favorite on-line tools and I use it often (and it is so much more useful than Google Wave so far), I just have to shake my head in wonder when I think about it: the AppJet framework is what the AppJet company was founded to create and market; EtherPad was a byproduct that ended up taking off and becoming the company's main product. And now the entire thing is going to be given away for free after Google paid $10 million to buy the company just to snag the engineers behind it. Wow.
Finally, as a reminder to folks reading this on my LJ: I may not have mentioned this in the past, but I have other social networking presences where I tend to write a lot more these days. Or at least a lot more often:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/robotech_master
Facebook: http://facebook.com/robotech.master (mainly used for echoing Twitter, but occasionally I post things there, like kitty photos, that I don't put on Twitter)
I also write a lot for TeleRead, http://www.teleread.org, and have an infrequently-updated essay journal at http://terrania.us/journal (which is also echoed in a feed on LiveJournal). And if you're reading this on LiveJournal, I also have a Dreamwidth account, http://robotech-master.dreamwidth.org, that I'm actually using to post this (it's crossposting into LJ).
Well, that's not going to be a problem anymore. I now have a working, loud doorbell, with a DING-DONG whose notes hang in the air for a good ten seconds or so after the ring. All that it took was replacing the button. To think I could have had that years ago if only I'd asked someone to replace it then, or even had Dad do it.
On Friday, the most bitterly cold day of the year so far, I woke up to find that a corner of the pane in my front window had cracked right off. I managed to fit it back into place, put duct tape over it to seal it off, and called for repair. The maintenance people came out this morning and fixed it. (They mismeasured the glass, as it turned out, and had to chisel out part of my window to make it fit. It was apparently easier/cheaper to do that than to go back and have the glass recut.)I had them fix my doorbell at the same time, and they also fixed the fluorescent light in my kitchen, which has been out for weeks. I'm not sure whether it was the ballast or the bulbs, but whichever it was it lights up nice and brightly now. And they put weatherstripping on my front door, and plastic over my bedroom windows, so perhaps I'll lose a little less heat that way.
At the moment, I'm getting ready to head down to Wal-Mart to pick up my renewed Neurontin prescription, for my foot. I had emailed the doctor a few days ago about getting it done; now I had to go through half an hour of rigamarole to register with with Cisco Secure Mail, so I could read the reply…which turned out to be the words "Prescription has been called in. Thanks." They couldn't just have sent that in clear? (Yeah, yeah, I know. Hungry hungry HIPAA and all that. Still)
Something else I'll be doing in town is taking care of twelve rolls of 24-exposure 200-speed film I found in a box in my room the other day when I was looking for something else. (Isn't it funny how that goes? You always find the most interesting things whenever you're looking for something else.) Back in the old days, when I had a film camera, I would carry it on trips with me and take pictures, and end up losing or misplacing the film, or just not having the cash to have it developed at the time.
And here it's finally turned up. I suspect I know what's on at least some of those rolls—shots from my trip out to Seattle and Portland ten or fifteen years ago, for instance, and perhaps images from one of the BotCons I attended—but I hardly remember shooting up twelve whole rolls. It's going to be fun finding out what they contain—kind of like a little time capsule from myself.
But there's so many rolls that that having it processed at OscoDrug would probably run me over $100. Instead, I'm going to be sending it in to Clark Color Labs where, nearly as I can make out, it will cost about $32 for the lot if I just have them post the images on-line where I can download them instead of making a CD. It'll take a little longer to get them back, but they've been lying around for ten years already; I can wait a few days. So I'm going to buy a mailer at Wal-Mart, then drop by Kinko's on the way back and print off the order form and mailing label.
Dunno if folks heard about the big EtherPad uproar of a couple days ago. I wrote about it on TeleRead. Seems that Google bought EtherPad out in order to add its staff to their Wave team (and God knows Wave needs the help), and was going to close EtherPad down—but all of EtherPad's users screamed bloody murder, so not only did they open it back up again but they also declared they would be open-sourcing EtherPad and its underlying AppJet framework.
Aside from being very happy about that, as EtherPad is one of my favorite on-line tools and I use it often (and it is so much more useful than Google Wave so far), I just have to shake my head in wonder when I think about it: the AppJet framework is what the AppJet company was founded to create and market; EtherPad was a byproduct that ended up taking off and becoming the company's main product. And now the entire thing is going to be given away for free after Google paid $10 million to buy the company just to snag the engineers behind it. Wow.
Finally, as a reminder to folks reading this on my LJ: I may not have mentioned this in the past, but I have other social networking presences where I tend to write a lot more these days. Or at least a lot more often:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/robotech_master
Facebook: http://facebook.com/robotech.master (mainly used for echoing Twitter, but occasionally I post things there, like kitty photos, that I don't put on Twitter)
I also write a lot for TeleRead, http://www.teleread.org, and have an infrequently-updated essay journal at http://terrania.us/journal (which is also echoed in a feed on LiveJournal). And if you're reading this on LiveJournal, I also have a Dreamwidth account, http://robotech-master.dreamwidth.org, that I'm actually using to post this (it's crossposting into LJ).
