mdlbear | Done this week (20170416Su

Another long month this week. Guess we're going to keep having those for a while. Didn't finish doing my taxes, but figured out an upper bound and filed for an extension. OK, that was the easy part.

Wednesday, on short notice, Naomi and I went to Whidbey Island to look at houses. The first was quirky and magical, especially the land, but it would have taken quite a lot of work to make it habitable. The second was move-in ready and a safe bet, but it's never going to be much better than what it is now. The safe one was going to be looking at offers Thursday, so we put in a bid for asking price. We got it.

Thursday, in addition to finding out that our bid for the Whidbey Island house had been accepted, we got the counter-offer from the buyers for our Seattle house. We now have the choice between getting the work done ourselves, which would get us more money but has some risk, and giving the buyers a price reduction. It may come down to cash flow.

Saturday, Colleen and I decided to go out for dinner... and found the elevator broken. You can read about that little comedy of errors (none of them ours) downwhen in my previous post. A few things stand out:

An SOP that includes "call the fire department" for after-hours elevator maintenance is clearly wrong.
If you're going to have maintenance people "on call" but don't have an SLA for them, you have a problem.
If the only contact information on your website is a phone number, a twitter handle, and a facebook name, something that would otherwise result in an annoyed email is instead going to make you look stupid in public.

Still worried.

Notes & links:

0416Su
% woke up 3 something, but got back to sleep.
* up 7am; W=198.8;
% back pain ~4 - naproxen helped.
* Added a command hook to the collection of stuff on the wall next to my laptop table,
to keep the phone charger cords off the floor. A Lenovo charger is attached with a
dab of silicone to the top of the outlet extender. The whole thing works remarkably
well for containing the mess.
@ (7) Song of Durin (Complete Edition) - Clamavi De Profundis - YouTube (ysabetwordsmith)
* entered mortgage interest into TaxCut -- didn't help as much as I'd hoped.
* take bus to RE to pick up Van and drop off Tiny House letter of agreement.
-> brought back signed letter, a pillow, and a bag of ruffles. Stopped at Walgreen's
for a prescription that had been sent there by mistake.
* Although my MFP claims to be able to scan two-sided, neither XSane nor simple-scan
appears to be able to accomplish this feat.
-> it may require flipping the pages over to scan the other side. Not clear. The
user's guide does not mention this.
@ Harness goats: basic info
% not much progress on taxes. Or much of anything else. I'll have to file for an
extension. Probably cost me ~5K.

0417Mo
* Up 6am; W=199.2;
@ Remembering Bob Taylor - I, Cringely
* call Jerad at Firestone
* Made my retirement announcement at the team lunch
* Picked up N's phone. It is charging (on only one of the two cords on my charger)
% 7:55 feeling a little shaky -- dehydrated? Not clear. Poured myself a glass of ice
water. No effect yet. Headache. -> lying down for a while helped.
: cleanup.
@ solarbird | i've made the navbar less hideous via css hackery
& ought to print form for tax extension. -> done.
@ Stanford microbiologist creates 'resistor' hats for the March for Science | Stanford
News f(Cat Faber)
* mortgage preapproval application

0418Tu Tax day
* up 5:50; W=199.4;
@ Does the Furry Community Have a Nazi Problem? - Rolling Stone (@ solarbird)
* applied for tiny house loan from Lightstream.com, for $50K/60 months.
Used the house, and Amazon.
: schwab.com's signing certificate expired yesterday. :P www is still ok, though.
They had it back online around 8:50am. Login broken, presumably they had to bounce
their servers. Oddly, client.schwab.com is available from Amazon's VPN.
* supporting docs and signed forms sent to Jason at National Finance. xsane is
confusing and I never did get it to work; simple-scan works just fine for multipage
docs.
* Lightstream approved my RV loan, but Jason told me to hold off until the new house
clears.

0419We
* Up 5:50ish; W=198.4;
* 9am meet N in front of apartment for Whidbey expedition
Ferry! I think the last time I was on a ferry I was too young to drive.
-> two places, completely different. One is safe, but not magical. The other is
risky and quirky, but magical. The safe place is looking at offers today, so we
are putting one in. But we'll be happy with either, for different reasons.
6:30 offer almost ready to sign. (Would have been ready, but they spelled our last
name wrong and had to redo it.) $5K earnest money -- could have done 10K if I'd
done as I'd intended and sold my remaining RSUs last week.
8:00 offer submitted
@ 4414 SKYLINE DR, FREELAND, WA — MLS# 1099556
* sell remaining RSUs
& spent a long time -- much longer than it should have -- trying to figure out how to
change the shipping address on my subscribe + save items. Turns out you have to click
edit on one item, and it will ask whether you want to change just that one or all of
them. But it's NOT obvious; the help pages didn't have anything on it, and even the
customer service reps I chatted with didn't know it. Some team is getting a ticket in
the morning.
& WiFi has been incredibly slow and flaky -- I eventually had to sit on the floor with
my laptop balanced on a cat litter jar so that I could use ethernet.
% 8:53pm me: it feels a lot later than it actually is
Colleen: that's because you've been working really hard. And spent a lot of money.
me: Oh.
: the phone battery packs take a ridiculously long time to charge.

0420Th
* up 5:40; W=198.4;
! still scared
& wikipedia dive starting from Angora -- cats, goats, and rabbits; angora, mohair, and cashmere.
: The limeade battery pack is still not fully charged; I suspect it's dying. It's over
three years old at this point, so, yes. Probably. -> ok, now appears to be charged
* Looks like they may accept our offer on Whidbey Island. They want a 2-month leaseback
(actually more, but 60 days is all we can legally give them. Their problem.)
* 7:30pm conference call to discuss offer on RE
There is ~$35K worth of work that needs doing. It would work better if we can get
them to take the $35K off the price and do it themselves. We may be able to get off
cheaper if we have it done.
* 8:30ish conference call to discus counter-offer on Other End. Signed. Main change is
leaseback to July 23rd, 59 days. We can do that.
* The new sarongs arrived. Very comfortable; I think they're a little warmer
than the rayon ones. (I thought both were cotton, but the elephant one turned out to
be labeled as 100% polyester.)

0421Fr
* up 4:40; W=196.6;
: It seems that only one 802-11a/b/g/n card will work in my thinkpads; ordered one.
Annoying -- there's a whitelist in the BIOS.
@ IBM Lenovo ThinkPad ... X120e Dual Band Wireless N Card | eBay
Also found and ordered the same card on Amazon.
* set WAP mode to g/n in hopes that that will fix the connection problems.
Well, Raven connected on boot-up, and it never had before, so that's probably an
indication that the fix was effective.
* Did the little utility package split-out that I'd been meaning to do for a while.
I'd been doing it using git subtree, but it turns out to be cleaner to use git
format-patch and git am.
* Did a little guitar at work after Beer30. Sang "When I Go", which has for obvious
reasons been much on my mind of late.
: The network adjustment may have helped, but not all that much. I have a pretty solid
connection, but DNS is still flaky. I suspect Comcast of messing with it.
-> setting google as the first dns server seems to have helped a lot.
% getting a little use out of the sarongs today -- it was warm in the morning, and
downright hot when I got home. They're not really as comfortable as a yukata, at
least in the configuration I'm using, and lack pockets.
: I've been getting many notifications from DW of people finding me and subscribing/
granting access. I have been reciprocating, of course, and removing people from my LJ
list if they're no longer expecting comments there.
: Colleen (with G') made acorn squash and stuffed pork chops. Yum.
@ Stonekettle Station: Two Wolves Jim Wright nails it, as usual. Optimism is now
derided as liberal propaganda.
* Cleaned Clea's cage, scooped Ticia's litterbox. I'm not fond of the physical stress,
but I really don't think I mind doing it. Clea was almost affectionate; I didn't try
to pet her, but she came up to my hand and brushed against it a couple of times.
: Raven's screen has the same number of pixels as Cygnus's.
It still doesn't have a particularly good net connection. Grump.

0422Sa
% some nice cuddle time, spooned between Colleen behind me and Ticia in front. Mmmmm.
* up 5ish; W=198.2; Shower, laundry
: Raven is still having severe wifi problems; combined with the oversensitive trackpad,
size, weight, and limited number of pixels, I'm better off sticking with Cygnus.
If necessary, connecting via a USB tether to a phone would work -- I tested that. The
phone has 802-11a, so the connection is solid. I can also route through Whitewood or,
when it gets out of the pod, Blackroot.
: Blackbird works ok on 2.4GHz, too. So it's just Raven. Hmm. Starting to smell like
a hardware problem.
* Put the towel from Ticia's desk-top box into the green plastic basket that Colleen had
been using for some random stuff. Instant hit. I showed it to her and she climbed
right in and let me carry her to the living room.
& Wikipedia dive starting from Porcelain by way of ysabetwordsmith
and extending into kaolinite, minerology, gas turbines, and high-speed bearings.
@ Why Have a Life Purpose? 5 Reasons You Should Have a Purpose (ysabetwordsmith)
also other links around finding one. This may become important a week from today.
@ Personal Development Worksheets - FREE (from response to comment)
: 5:30 we wanted to go out for dinner, but the elevator isn't working. Blanton-Turner's
maintenance/emergency hotline told me to call the fire department. The only number
available for doing that is 911. They, of course, will only come out if somebody is
actually stuck. Called B-T back and got somebody to dispatch a maintenance person.
They called back 6:30ish to say that they were still trying to contact a maintenance
oncall; I asked what their SLA was and got total incomprehension.
Maintenance guy called and said that they had to get the elevator company out. No ETA
7:40ish maintenance guy called back to say that the elevator company had been
contacted and they were sending someone out tonight.
8:20 maintenance guy called to say that the elevator had been fixed.
@ mdlbear | Broken elevator, broken SOPs
@ update: 04-23t0840: heck with it. If the only contact info they provide is twitter and facebook, I
guess they want me to use it.
" you might want to fix your call center SOPs before they get you in more trouble than
simply looking stupid on Facebook. And maybe find a maintenance company that's heard
of SLAs. "