Author: Tim Jarrett

(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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What the heck, here’s my blogchalk

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Kirkland, Norkirk, Tim, Male, 26-30!

What’s that all about? Well, as explained on the site:

I miss … a region-sensible blog-search engine, [which] would make easier for me to know blogs owned by people that live near my home, and then, increase the possibility of real meetings. What would probably end in new and great friendships.

After seeing this kind of hard mapping implemented by people at NYCBloggers.com and watch to the rise of WarChalking (in my opinion, an idea that best express, today, the beauty of large public networks), I noticed a possible way: if all bloggers mark their sites with a special sign and geographic information, maybe it would be possible to improvise such searching system.

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