Month: July 2002

Amazingly enough…

…I was right about the size of the cabinet I got. All my CDs fit—after I went through and culled the collection a bit. (BTW, if you know me personally and are interested in the discards, email me and I’ll put a list together; otherwise, they’ll probably go to the local record shop.)

I stayed up until later than I should have last night and got all the jazz, classical, world music, and miscellany filed, leaving the rock for this morning. I was hoping I wouldn’t get much of a chance to finish them before the cable guy came to hook us up with digital (yay!), but I’m still waiting…

James Beard rocks

Before I went to Ikea to get a replacement cabinet side, I put dinner in the oven. We had some brisket that I needed to cook, so looking over my newly unpacked cookbooks, I found a recipe idea from one of our James Beard cookbooks that looked good.

I put a long piece of aluminum foil in a roasting pan, sliced an onion and a half thinly and put half down in the foil, laid the brisket on top, put the rest of the onion on top with salt, pepper, a little olive oil, and a splash of red wine. Then I sealed the aluminum foil over the meat, put the whole thing in a 250° F oven, and forgot it for the next four hours. As I was putting rice on the stove, I just peeked into the foil after verifying the meat was up to temperature: it’s swimming in juices and smelling heavenly. Pot roast in a pan. This James Beard guy knows what he’s on about. (Surprising I don’t have a “food” category—I guess I’ll need to start one.)
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Ikea revisited

Customer service this afternoon at Ikea was pretty good, though it did take about half an hour to get me the right part from the other warehouse and bring it over. Bringing it home, I proceeded to start assembly. I managed to go for about two hours during which I assembled the bulk of the cabinet proper, except the butcher block countertop piece which tops the cabinet—I started the screws but was unable to finish screwing them in owing to poor upper body strength (the holes weren’t pre-drilled). I’ll have to dig out my electric screwdriver and see if I can make any progress.

By way of contrast, Lisa and I purchased an inexpensive small buffet at Crate and Barrel yesterday. I brought it home and had it out of the box and assembled in about ten minutes. I think Crate and Barrel could do a pretty good job of eating Ikea’s lunch if it really wanted to—and if it could get the capital to ramp up to that level of production and that big a product line.
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(Later) Holy cow…

…how in God’s name did I accumulate so many books? Every time I think I’ve found the last box another turns up. I think the Kirkland library is going to be getting a hefty gift from us. Even so, I’m going to run out of shelves soon. Thank goodness the room I’m working in has some built in shelves; I’m going to need them.

When I was single, I accumulated books like no one’s business. Lisa helped me to curb my bibliomania, but between us we’ve got 21 three-foot shelves just about filled and there are more that I don’t know what to do with yet.

The good news? In school I was complaining that I didn’t have any time to do leisure reading. Now I’ll have quite a few old friends to catch up with—even if house-buying finances don’t permit purchasing any more.

Congrats are in order…

… to our friends Kristen and Greg, who were married yesterday on the Cape. (George was there—look forward to the update on Monday.) Greg is one of those b-school students who got shafted by the bear economy and was still looking for the right opportunity at graduation; hopefully things will turn around for him soon. (If anyone reading this blog has a startup who needs someone to work connections with VCs, Greg is your man.)

Update: George writes about the wedding.
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Waking up slow

Looks like it will be a good house day today. We got much of the dining room/“sitting room” set up last night, finally moving the dining room table to its correct place and installing a new inexpensive china cabinet (now we just have to find the good china). Today: lawn mowing and garden maintenance, unpack my books, and trek to Ikea to replace that shattered part so I can assemble the CD cabinet and unpack my CDs. We’ll see how much gets done.

I’ll be flying solo today; Lisa will land in Boston sometime in the next few hours. I guess I’d better get to it; with just one pair of hands this could take all day.

Driving in Seattle: why all the fuss?

Funny article about Seattle driving “etiquette.” Lots of funny gripes about clueless drivers, including:

  • When it is raining, look over to the side of the road. If you are traveling faster than pedestrians, slow down.
  • If you see a giant ball of flame, that is the sun. It will not hurt you, but slow down, just to be sure.

Of course, as a recent Boston driver, I have to ask: why the fuss? After all, Seattle has broad, well marked, well maintained streets and drivers that can actually see, that yield right of way, that don’t treat running down pedestrians as a competitive sport, and who don’t knock bumpers with another car as a way to say “hi” …
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Congrats, Charlie

Almost forgot: congratulations to Charlie for finally landing a job in one of the worst MBA job markets imaginable. Better yet, it’s in Cambridge, so he and Carie won’t have to move very far!

Sometimes “affordable” really does mean “cheap”

Lisa and I went after work last night to Ikea. It’s been a while since we’ve done much Ikea-ing–the closest one to Boston was a state or two away. I always try to remember when I’m there that you get what you pay for, and sometimes particleboard breaks, so it’s better to spend a little more to get higher quality. Last night we just needed felt pads to put on the bottom of our furniture and a way to store my CDs in such a way that we wouldn’t have to dust them (when you have in excess of 800 in your collection and a dust allergy, these are the things you think about).

I found a really cool six-drawer cabinet that was big enough to hold the collection. Better, it was mostly solid wood. It’s supposed to be a kitchen cabinet, but it was just about perfect. We bought it, got it home (somehow–the thing came in three big boxes that weighed a collective ton), and went to bed.

This morning after breakfast I opened the boxes trying to find the instruction sheet, so I would know how much time to budget for assembly. And one of the cabinet sides–which are among the few particleboard pieces on the unit–was splintered where it joined to the wood frame. Sigh. Hopefully they’ll deliver a replacement today…
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That’ll show those eBay snipers!

MIT Center for e-Business: “Optimal Bidding in Online Auctions”. Dmitri Bertsimas (who taught my class on data mining), Jeffrey Hawkins and Georgia Perakis investigate published data on eBay auctions to identify optimal strategies for winning auctions–both one at a time and multiple auctions. They identify some winning strategies using dynamic programming algorithms.

Now, all I need is a way to implement the strategies so I can finally replace the busted DVD drive on my laptop…

Don Box blogs

Don Box has a blog at GotDotNet, the MS .NET evangelism site. It’s good to see someone at Microsoft, especially someone as high profile as Don, with a blog.

But Don, you need permalinks! I really want to link to some of your individual observations, rather than the main URL, but you don’t have any anchor links that will let me do that. Plus I don’t know what your archiving system looks like to allow me to link to content in a way that my links won’t break once the content leaves the main page. Fix it, won’t you? sideways smiley

Finally, IE compatibility for this blog

After much head scratching, I finally figured out why this site never displayed correctly in IE for Windows. I had some tags nested in the following order in my template:

<div class="grabber"><h3>Heading</h3></div>

After this line, text in the following part of the page drifted just slightly to the left, eventually getting cut off by the bounding box of the parent div so that it became unreadable. By reversing the order of the <div> and <h3> tags, so:

<h3><div class="grabber">Heading</div></h3>

it works on IE for Windows.

I should amend my first sentence. While I’ve figured out how to fix the problem, I’m still not sure why the order of the tags should matter—and why IE/Windows cares when other browsers (including IE/Mac) doesn’t. But the important thing is the problem is fixed.

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