This blurb is the eleven hundredth entry on this site.
I’m just saying.
This tongue-in-cheek look at the joys of building software has been floating around forever. I have no idea who the original author is or where/when it first appeared.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.
However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.
PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.
A day of steady rain, coupled with falling temperatures has resulted in the opening day of the 2006-2007 Kansas City Car Hockey Season. All you need to do to play is get in your car and head on out to the nearest inclined interstate on ramp and gun your engine. Forget driving normally, drive extra fast so that you can be home before everyone else. Remember, the laws of physics don’t apply when you have an over-sized 4x4 with dualies. Oh, and don’t bother to clear the wind shield. Just scrape a tiny gap in the middle and let the defroster do the rest while you blindly grope your way into moving traffic.
I figure the normal 25 minute commute will be closer to an hour tonight. Not including the 10 minutes or so to chip my way into the car and clear the windshield, side and rear windows, and outside mirrors.
One of the darker songs on the Johnny Cash album American IV: The Man Comes Around, is a cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, Hurt.
I hurt myself today to see if I still feel I focus on the pain the only thing that’s real the needle tears a hole the old familiar sting try to kill it all away but I remember everything what have I become? my sweetest friend everyone I know goes away in the end and you could have it all my empire of dirt
I will let you down I will make you hurt
I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar’s chair full of broken thoughts I cannot repair beneath the stains of time the feelings disappear you are someone else I am still right here
what have I become? my sweetest friend everyone I know goes away in the end and you could have it all my empire of dirt
I will let you down I will make you hurt
if I could start again a million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way
© Nine Inch Nails
Cathedral is an earlier work by one of my favorite authors, Nelson DeMille.
Rating: Good story telling.
I first learned of The Ghost Map from a posting on Kottke. Once the book was released I picked up a copy and read it from cover to cover. It is a thoroughly fascinating look at science, myth, cities, disease, and people. Steven Johnson is rapidly becoming the Tracy Kidder or John McPhee of my generation.
Rating: If you like fresh drinking water, read this…
In the past whenever I have had to be gone for more than a day I have asked a woman in the apartment office to empty the litter for me. This a person that Michele had become friends with and who always gladly takes on the task for me. Last week in preparation for being out of town for nearly five days I asked her once again to stop in and check on Taz and empty the litter.
She explained that she would be off Friday through Sunday, but that she’d have one of the girls in the office stop by and take care of it. I agreed and left it at that. Yesterday, Saturday evening, I called my voice mail at home and received a message from one of the “girls in the office” telling me that they had been “too busy” on Friday to check my cat and might be too busy again on Saturday to fulfill their responsibility.
Getting the message that my cat was being ignored, and having that message delivered in a rather cheerful, cavalier tone, while I was 400 miles away did not set will with me. After stewing for several minutes I called the office and left a rather terse message on their voice mail system. In no uncertain terms I expressed my displeasure that the responsibility they had been entrusted with had not been met. Their machine actually cut me off in mid sentience and I had to call back and leave a second message.
We debated returning from Illinois in the middle of the night, but once I had vented over the phone I was able to convince myself that Taz would be okay, and that even if the two litter boxes were full, that the worst she’d do is crap on the carpet somewhere. After a long and somewhat restless night the return trip to home was uneventful.
Shortly afternoon I received a new voice mail message on my cell phone from the apartment office explaining that the litter had in fact been emptied on Saturday. It would have saved me a long night, and whom ever took the messages this morning a scalded ear if only they had thought to call back and leave a second message.
In the end Taz was fine, the litter was clean, and the apartment in good shape. I intend to stop in the office tomorrow after work and talk to my friend there and put a final note on this episode. In the future when I am going to be gone, if the person I know can’t personally attend to this favor, then I will have to seek out a better solution. I feel a strong responsibility to my cats, even if the “girls” in the office don’t.
For too long now I have been ignoring a lack of style sheet on the individual category archive pages. Tonight I finally tackled the intricacies of MoveableType tags and CSS and built a proper page to display all the entries for each of the categories on my site. As a bonus these pages now include the code necessary for my page tracking system to track their views.
Of course now I am itching to revamp the entire site.
Participating in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) has been an interesting challenge. Trying to come up with some thing to say every day, and then remember to capture it here before midnight has been interesting. I don’t really mind, but I am glad that it isn’t NaBloPoYr.
The readership numbers for zanshin are up a bit as a result of the traffic from the NaBloPoMo randomizer. Already, with still six days to go in November, this is the fourth largest month for unique visitors, and the eighth largest month for total page views in the last twelve. While my readership numbers aren’t huge (we’re talking dozens not hundreds) there has been a jump in daily visits. Fifty or seventy visits a day is now common, whereas fifteen or twenty was common before.
I’d like to think that at least some of those visits are from new regular readers, but I guess only time will tell. Come December will my numbers dip back down to where there were twelve months ago, or will they stay at their new, higher level?