January 2004 Archives

To be able to park in the garage again -- what joy!

We've had garage problems for quite some time. Last spring (I think) I had to replace some sprocket thingy in Jfer's opener because it had gotten stripped. Then her door sort of fell apart which I fixed (quite well, I might say) with a highly unsightly piece of metal. Then my garage door opener bit the dust and finaly, while I was closing it manually, the door sort of fell apart in my hand.

We bit the bullet, did some research online and plunked down some serious money at Lowe's. After looking at the two brands they have and examinining the different models, we decided to go with an Amarr WeatherGuard door. We went with the Genie Excelerator for our new openers.

I originally contemplated installing this stuff ourselves, but in the end wisely decided that it was much better to let someone competent (and much faster) do it. Plus this way we wouldn't have to worry about transporting the new doors to our house and getting rid of the old ones. So this Wednesday and installation guy came by the house and replaced our doors. He did a great job. It would have taken us at least twice as long (not counting the multiple trips to Home Depot) and it wouldn't have ended up as nice.

So how do the doors compare? For one they're not rotting like the old wooden ones. They are nicely sealed all around and provide better temperature and sound insulation. The new openers are pretty cool, too. They use the quiet screw drive and open really fast. They also have a separate light switch, so we're no longer at the mercy of the fluorescent tube that more often than not refuses to work. And on Friday I figured out how to program the builtin remote in my car, so I don't even need one of the six(!) remotes that came with the openers.

Of course, now that I can park in the garage again, we're pretty much guaranteed that there won't be any more frost this year.

Last week's book group meeting was at our place. This was the first time I did not actually finish reading the assigned book, despite the fact that I had two months to do it. It somehow took us long to get it at the library and once I started reading, it dragged on and on and I was more than happy to hand Josephine B. over to Jfer. I did read the minimum 100 pages so I don't feel like a total dead beat.

This time we witched our book group hosting jobs so I was responsible for book selection while Jfer was cooking. Jfer planned to make an Italian mushroom soup that proved a great success before, but of course she had not written down the recipe, so we needed to get the soup book, Zuppa!, from the library again. As is my custom, I didn't start looking at books until Sunday before the meeting. After reading a bunch of reviews online, I came up with five books that had a middle eastern theme (for some reason, all but one non-fiction).

On Monday I tried to look up their availability at the Austin Public Library and discovered that the library was closed for MLK Day and that for some bizarre reason they shut down their Online Catalog (but not the website) on holidays. The catalog search would take a long time and then report that the book could not be found (as opposed to telling you that the DB was down). Maybe they feel that the DB server needs a day off or something.

So on Tuesday I looked up all the books in the catalog and visited four library branches to get three of my selected books and two cookbooks called Zuppa! (by different authors). I also had to stop by Border's to buy a couple of books that weren't in.

In the end, people voted for Persepolis closely followed by Reading Lolita in Tehran. These were the two books I actually bought, so I'm looking forward to reading them. Right now, I'm actually reading Jarhead which was also an option, but which I didn't really expect to be picked.

The soup turned out great, as did the Italian bread that Jfer and I baked the night before. And we had the special treat of Cynthia who was visiting at Elizabeth's and joined us at the meeting. I'm only sorry that she didn't get to come when we had a better book to discuss.

I went through an enormous amount of crappy and inept custommer support trying to move my sites to a new hosting provider. I'm finally there, DNS is resolved and I'm quite happy with the performance and the support of the new provider.

I could write pages about the suckiness of my previous host, but it's not worth my time. If you're curious, search WHT for the term MCHost -- it'll give you a (somehow biased) taste of that company.

I'll write a review of my new provider a year from now, especially if they turn out good.

Arianna Huffington's latest column Dean, Bobby, And The Ghost Of Landslides Past exactly expresses my feeling about the attitude of the Democratic "establishment" -- who "kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts, and an unprecedented deficit" -- toward Howard Dean. Instead of viewing Dean as another Dukakis or McGovern, she wants you to look at Bobby Kenedy's candidacy for a historical comparison.

I say go on being angry and different. Lieberman et all are a bunch of milquetoast putzes who simply don't seem to grasp that we should be angry about the way this country has changed under Bush.

So the site's been down since around New Year's. I've finally managed to have it rescued and hopefully it'll stay up for a while. Yay!

The experience with this makes me want to write a book call "How not to do customer support"...