that’s whacked

a hard day’s work

Sunday, Aug 22. 2004  –  Category: Musings

Spent a good long day getting tons of stuff done… I set Roomba about vacuuming our kitchen, living room, and bedroom and he (she?) did a great job. It’s funny how Wendy and I refer to Roomba by name. i.e.: we don’t say “use the roomba and vacuum the room”, we say “tell Roomba to clean up the bedroom”. bizarre. gadget freaks we be.

Zac & Jaime came over and we started the long task of finishing our basement. The basement currently looks like this. We managed to clean up and move all the stuff out (Wendy and I had dumped a lot of empty boxes, etc. in there), and put up all the insulation. Since we hadn’t put up the walls yet, I took the opportunity to start drilling and running cable drops for coaxial and ethernet (cat5) lines. I’m thinking of making the inner/shorter basement room a storage/server room. It’s central to the entire house, so it shouldn’t be too hard to run ethernet drops to all the rooms I want. We also started re-routing some of the electrical lines in order to remove the obstacles so we can mount all the sheetrock/dry wall flush against the walls. This is gonna be a long project, but a lot of fun..

I also bought a new water heater today… a monster 50 gallon one to replace our puny little 20 gallon one which isn’t enough for two showers. Zac & I moved it in, and I’ll probably hook it up in a week or two when I get the time.

… and last but not least, for the first time since I started downloading mp3s 7 or 8 years ago in high school, I finally properly tagged all the track name/artist/album, and most importantly: genres for my entire MP3 collection. I can now finally say “play all rock songs” and have it make sense. There’s nothing worse than having your entire collection playing on random, getting into a really cool ambient or trance groove, and then having Celine Dione (I keep it around for my mum, damnit!!!) come on.

row, row, row your boat…to dim sum

Sunday, Aug 22. 2004  –  Category: Musings

On Friday after work I met up with Wendy, Jaime, & Zac and we all went to the San Mateo County Fair. We gorged ourselves on fair food, rode the bumper cars, and had a fun time just relaxing at the fair. One note to the fair organisers though: when you have a food/cooking competition, throw the food out after a few days have passed. While I’m sure it’s nice to show the winners for the rest of the two weeks your fair is running… it makes me wonder when I see a green fuzzy fruit tart that won first place.

On Saturday we picked up one of Wendy’s college friends and another friend at SFO, and went back to Jaime’s place for dim sum. Jaime & Zac just excavated Zac’s dad’s old boat out of the backyard, so we dragged it to the dock by the river behind their condo and surprise surprise, it floated! We got in and rowed around for a while, heading out towards the mini-bay/lake by Foster City Blvd & Edgewater Blvd. Zac then pointed out that we could probably just row to dim sum, so we dug our oars in, and rowed our way across the lake and got out on the other side. It was a pretty funny sight to see 6 of us in that boat get out and walk across the street into a Chinese restaurant carrying 2 big oars and a smaller paddle.

A lazy afternoon of watching Olympics coverage, and then Wendy and I headed up to the city where Val & Jason had cooked indian food! yum! We gave them a TiVo for their wedding present, thus converting yet more unbelievers into the fold.

It’s a Sunday morning, I slept in ridiculously late, and am now puttering around in the study listening to Lighthouse Family. Very chill mellow music… quite content. Gonna try and cook some calamari steaks and crab for dinner tonight.