Vanderbrew

Last night we bought two courses from The Teaching Company:

• Great Battles of the Ancient World
• History of the English Language

We got the downloadable format for the English Language history and the DVD format for the Great Battles.

My father-in-law has been getting courses on CD for some time now and he’s been really impressed with them so Amber got a course on “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music 3rd Edition” and she’s been really happy with it. We’ve been inundated with catalogs from the company lately (3 in about 3 weeks) and many of the courses looked really interesting.

The English Language history one caught my eye in the catalog and while I was looking at it online, I saw the Great Battles course. We decided to go for the DVD format for the battles because it will probably be easier to follow if we have visual cues to battle plans. Also, it ought to be enjoyable to sit down together and watch it.

So, just a brief update. I’ll let you know how they are once we watch/listen.

I went to the dentist today for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit to. All-in-all, I got off pretty lightly. I need to get my old fillings replaced and I need a crown where one back tooth has broken off a bit around a filling. The dentist office though was really cool and a far cry from what I’d ever been to in the past.

It is fully networked. They have a digital x-ray machine and the shots go immediately into the computer. They can see right away if they have to redo a shot. There are LCD monitors mounted to the wall hooked up to a computer and you can watch a video while getting your teeth cleaned (Emma liked this part).

The monitors are tied into the computers that they use to take notes on and view x-rays. The dentist mirrored her work display up there while she was cleaning my teeth and I could see the diagram of my teeth and how her assistant was making notes about them as she went along. I remember the paper charts where my childhood dentist would write up notes on each tooth and it’s amazing the advances that I saw today. All of the record data is in the computer and tied together - x-rays, notes on specific teeth, general notes on visit, reminder to make sure I take my premeds (antibiotics because I have a heart murmur) - a really cool setup.

The really cool thing though is at the end, when she was talking to me about the work that they’d need to do and explaining about how some of my teeth have fracture lines because the old fillings don’t bond well to the tooth and generate additional stresses, she pulled out a camera in a large pen form factor. She switched the video screen over to take the camera as input and proceeded to show me images of my teeth in real-time as she pointed out the various things that were wrong and needed work. It has got to be the coolest dental visit I’ve ever been to.

Oh, and the dentist was really nice too!

So, if anyone in the Tri-Valley area is looking for a new dentist, I can highly recommend one.

So here’s where we are on the house.

* Post and Beam - we’ll do modern building with steel connectors, not joints
* Two story
* SIP panels for walls - probably roof
* Internal dimensions 32′ x 47′ (this is so that we can do 32′ x 48′ for the SIP panels that come in 4′ or 8′ widths)
* Cement slab for thermal mass and easier first story flooring
* Posts will be 8″x8″
* Beams will be 8″x10″
* 2nd story joists will be 4″x8″ and likely 4′ on center.

I’ve got two pics of our current plans online (up is North):
* Downstairs
* Upstairs (the dashed line in the middle running East/West is the ridge line of the roof)

The upstairs feels pretty well solidified but the downstairs is still in flux. Oh, and don’t try to match them up, I redrew the upstairs to match changed dimensions, but the lower story is still 30′ x 48′.

The entryway is to the north. Directly ahead is another entryway leading south. The open area is 14′ x 17′ and it goes all the way to the roof (approx 22′ high). We’ll be doing cathedral (I think this is the right name) ceilings so that it follows the line of the roof. Likely we’ll flatten the bathroom ceilings so that the space doesn’t feel odd.

The north and south walls will be 6′ high where they hit the roof on the 2nd story. Highest ceiling on 2nd story will be about 13′. On the first story, the posts will be 8′ with 10″ tall beams and 8″ joists so the bottom of the joists will be 8′10″ from the first floor and the bottom of the 2nd floor will be 9′6″ from the first floor.

We’ll just have a railing on the landing and hallway on the 2nd story around the open area. We’ll do bookshelves on the landing. I’m going to try to avoid having a beam across the open area.

We’ll probably do dormer windows on the two upstairs bedrooms that don’t have an East/West wall. Maybe on the master too. I know that there’s a post that’s not touching a wall in the master but we’ll be putting the closet somewhere around there.

So, it’s all pretty much up in the air but that’s where we are so far. I’m sure that it’s overengineered but I’d rather have that and be able to go down than find out that I need to increase the structural support. We’ll definitely have an engineer review it and approve it but we’re feeling pretty good about how we’re doing so far.

So, comments? Feedback?

As I’m sure many of you are aware, we’re buying some property just outside of Nevada City, CA. I’ve had my eye on the area for quite some time as one of my aunts and uncle live up there. It’s a beautiful setting and I’ve posted some photos of it.

Yes, it is pretty well treed and it’s got a bit of a slope to it. We’ll need to figure out where we want to build the house and where to put the driveway - that will tell us which trees need to go. We’re really looking forward to it and are very excited about what lies ahead of us.

So, I’m reading Getting Things Done and I’m enjoying it. I think that there’s a lot of good info in it and it will be very useful. However, I’ve run across one snag…

The author, David Allen, is really big on having a good general knowledge filing system. He seems to think it’s the cornerstone of keeping your life in check, but the filing system described in his book is entirely paper based. He even talks about printing out emails you want to save so that you can file them.

I “live my life online”. I work on a computer all day. I telecommute. I deal with email, IM, PDF, HTML, etc. Almost all of the data that I would want to index and search on is electronic. To make things worse, I’ve got a work computer and a personal computer which are two different OS’s.

How does one keep all of his (or her) electronic bits in order and organized so that you can find what you want when you want it? I’ve got Google Desktop on my work machine and Spotlight on my personal machine but I’ve had less than stellar success with each of them. I do use Yahoo!’s MyWeb to tag and aggregate bookmarks that I care about but it’s an effort to go there because the system isn’t integrated with my desktop, it’s separate and online. I’ve heard about del.icio.us and ma.gnolia and they’re in a very similar vein to Yahoo!’s tool, but they all feel like they’re intended more for discovery and sharing, not storage and organizing.

Also, this completely ignores emails. I can use the above-mentioned tools to tag URLs and this provides a rather sophisticated, if simple, tool for organization, but I don’t have a similar means for email (that I know of). At work I use Outlook and at home I use Mail. I’d consider a different mail client at home if it was stable and did everything I needed but I don’t know of anything out there that meets my needs (IMAP is a big one).

Anyway, I don’t have a solution, nor do I expect to find the perfect one anytime soon. I’d be interested in hearing about how others are solving this problem and I’ll definitely let you know if I figure out a better way.

I’m a big fan of audio books. We’ve had an account with Audible for years and I listen to something almost every day - usually in the morning when I’m the only one up and am getting my breakfast together or at night when I’m washing dishes and/or picking up after dinner and the kids are in bed.

I just recently finished listening to the first three books of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series - all read by Roy Dotrice. The fourth book came out around Christmas time and I had it from the library and read it around then. I figured I’d just continue with the series so I got the fourth book (in two parts) from Audible - even though I’d read some bad reviews of the reader and had reservations…

Well, I should have listened to my reservations. This guy doesn’t hold a candle to Roy. It was so bad that I can’t even listen to it and so I switched over to The Dark Tower which I’d left off a while back.

I noticed something very interesting almost immediately. George R. R. Martin has a good story with some great characters, but Stephen King is a really freaking good writer. The words that the chooses and the way that he blends them together are truly amazing and you (well, I do at least) immediately recognize a master at his craft.

Then, I realized that I wasn’t really in the mood for such a dark story. So I switched over to Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

I think that the opening of that story is one of the most fun and interesting openings of books that I’ve read; and I absolutely love the main character’s name - Hiro Protagonist (say it outloud). Man, I get a chuckle over it every time I read it. Granted, Stephenson sometimes has a hard time ending his stories (as evinced by the gross deus ex machina that closed out Cryptonomicon) but I really enjoy Snow Crash and find the ending to be totally legitimate and in fitting with the rest of the story.

So, yeah, nothing earth-shattering, just some bits I’d been thinking about and wanted to share.

Oh, and George Guidall is a really good reader.

Well, I finally got the pictures posted for the trip that Adam and I took back in April. I wanted to move to a different solution for hosting the pictures and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted and then to do it.

I’m pretty pleased with the result. I’m using gullery from Geoffrey Grosenbach. I’ve got some grand plans for integrating my blog and photos and I needed a more dynamic platform for the photos to move it along.

Please let me know if you’ve got any suggestions about the gallery software or comments on the pics!

Blogs are funny things. They can be even funnier when you use a web analytics package to track traffic and search terms for the site…

I use Google Analytics and one of the things you get is a report of what search terms people are using to find your site. I check it out every day or so just because I’m curious what interest is driving traffic to my site. As I mentioned before, there’s been quite a few hits from various gardening and pest problems. There has also been some hits due to interest in Ruby on Rails and various locations where I’ve been hiking and/or camping.

So, I was looking over the terms the other day and one of them jumped out at me - “how to kill someone with a cucumber”, huh? Two things:

1. Why would someone be searching for this…
2. Why does it lead to my blog?

Well, number 2 is much easier to answer than number 1 (which I’m not really sure I want to know…). A simple Google (the verb - should it be capitalized in verb form?) to see just where it appears and, hey! what do you know? I’m the first hit for that particular set of words…and, it’s a mix of my Boondock Saints post which discusses killing someone, and my garden post, which discusses cucumbers…

As I said, blogs are funny things. I supposed that my First Lines just make it even worse because I can get some odd words thrown in there for no reason. I imagine that with themed blogs or sites you get more consistent hits. I’ve read things in the past where people were concerned that blogs would pollute and ruin search results because of the randomness of the content. While I don’t think it’s really happening yet, it’s very interesting to see a real example how you can get a “false positive” hit like this.

A house is a place. A home is an idea.

We’ve been renting a condo since we sold our house in Felton and moved to Livermore. It was always intended to be a temporary situation while we figured out what we wanted to do. Two years still feels pretty temporary in the grand scheme of things and I think we’ve figured it out - it’s just a matter now, of figuring out how to make it happen.

Housing in California is ridiculously expensive. We’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that any place in the Bay Area that would meet the needs of our current and future family is out of our budget. Sometimes it seems like anywhere in the state, where you have a livable structure on the land, is out of our budget. The very act of putting a house up seems to imbue the land with an enormous extra value, no matter the size and condition of the structure. So, we’ve decided that we’re going to look for land and build.

Interestingly enough, this seems less scary to us than buying a, umm… “rundown” place and magically (read: lots of effort, vision and perseverance) turning it into a home. Ideally we’d like to find 1-5 acres with a nice buildable space, decent conditions for gardening (cold frame acceptable - we just need to get enough sunlight) and not be tooooo removed from civilization.

I know that it’s a bit cart before the horse, but we’ve already found a house plan that we really like. We’d have to make some modifications so that I had an office in the garage, but we’re really attracted to the design and the construction method. It’s a “kit home” and you get all of your walls shipped on-site already framed and with all windows and exterior doors hung. “All” you have to do is tilt them up get’em, straight and nail them down. Since you’re buying the kit, you get everything perfectly cut and put together and it saves a ton of time and waste on the building site.

We’d like to do most of the work ourselves. I know that we’ll need help with some things (Amber has mostly convinced me that it’s a bad idea to try to pour our own concrete slab) but I think we can do a lot of the interior and finishing work ourselves.

Speaking of the concrete slab, we’re really interested in getting a radiant heat system for our heating. Most likely we’ll be in a place where we won’t need to worry about cooling and we won’t need to do any ductwork (yeah!). From everything we’ve read, radiant heat provides a nice, even heat and doesn’t dry out the air like a furnace and forced air does. Plus, the floor will be nice and toasty and you can do nifty things like heated towel racks (not that we will).

So, I’m really excited about the idea of building. It’s likely that we couldn’t start building until Fall of 2007 because we need to find a place, get plans, go through county/city/state approval process, etc. - but it’s nice to feel like we’ve got a plan and a direction.

Enemy at the Gates (recommended by Dy) came via Netflix today. It looks really good and I’m really interested in seeing it. However, since the US week doesn’t start until tomorrow, I’ll have to hold off.

Sigh…is there a calendar where the week starts on a Saturday?