Author: Tim Jarrett

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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Getting started

First day at work. I’m a little nervous. Needless to say, expect very little if any blogging today.

Quick house update (couldn’t let the opportunity pass): the floor guys are just about done and the plumbers are starting this morning in our second bathroom (we’re ripping out paneling, fixing a hole in the wall, and replacing the senior citizen-unfriendly clawfoot tub with something a little easier to get into and out of). Unpacking is going well so far except for one broken dish–which unfortunately was a piece of porcelain we hand carried back from Capri and never got a chance to use. We might be able to glue it back together.

We got stuff

I was very excited to be actually mowing my own lawn with my own lawnmower this morning, while our floor guys were laying down the final coat of finish on our new floors. I had just finished showering and changing when I heard a big truck outside. Yes, our stuff had shown up with no warning at all!

Fortunately, we had enough room in the rest of the house and garage to hold all the stuff. Our living room is basically set up and Lisa is thrilled to have TV. I think this might conclude the hardcore “houseblogging” I’ve been doing for a while. Thanks to all of you for putting up with me as I go through this transition.

iRock or not iRock

Doc Searls sez that the iRock should let you select any channel on the FM band. I have one of those. It cost about $20 at Best Buy, and is called the SoundFeeder.

As always, though there’s a trade off between features and ease of use. This thing has a four position switch, to let you select between four ranges of FM frequencies, and a dial to let you tune precisely within that range. Or sort of precisely—it’s not really precision engineered or anything, and sometimes the signal drifts a little.

Driving on a long trip can be an exercise in patience. As you drive in and out of range of different stations, the frequency you chose on the SoundFeeder will inevitably get interference. Then you have to find an empty spot on your tuner and fiddle with the SoundFeeder again until the signal comes in—using the two controls without taking your eyes off the road is pretty tricky.
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