Notice of Violation

The final rough inspection did not go well at all. We got a different inspector from the one who originally did the foundation, and he didn't really seem to like much of anything. We have to get Engineer/Architect redraw everything (IMHO, he's a bit of a hack and didn't do a decent job in the first place) and get a revised permit, before embarking on the expensive process of fixing things.

The only good point is that he did sign off on the upstairs and said we could close things up in the bathroom. That will at least move along the process of Dan, Carmen, and I moving into the upper unit. But it'll be a bit cramped until we get the lower finished (three people, two apartments worth of stuff).

Tonight I think I'll try my hand at making some panaeng curry paste from scratch. I'm out of the imported, store-bought stuff and really should be making my own so I can control the ingredients.

Weekend Update

Before working on the house, my brother and I went to a neighborhood meeting at Juri park on Saturday. We ended up getting pulled into a park cleanup project for most of the morning. It was fun, but we had planned on working on the house and that killed a good chunk of the day. We ended up just shoring up the bathroom wall after lunch at Papalote.

Our open wall inspection is scheduled for thursday. If it goes well, we'll be ready to dry wall and finish the bathroom. It'll be nice to see some progress again. Things should start to pick up now, unless holidays and contractor's schedules get in the way.

Yay Electrical

Our electrical inspection passed today. Only glitch was that the contractor needed to pull a second permit, because the first one was completed, but that will be taken care of on Monday. Now we need to get a general inspection, so we can close up the walls, and we'll be good to finish work on the bathroom and walls. (After that, we do the flooring and kitchen, and then we can move into my unit.)

I tried out the Flock browser today. It's interesting. It's basically just a modified version of Firefox, with some integration with del.icio.us, various blogging sites, RSS feeds, and flickr. It's just a beta version, so it's not quite ready for general use, but seems fairly polished. The del.icio.us support is the most interesting to me - it'd let me synchronize all of my bookmarks, and it integrates the bookmarks with the little search widget. The blogging functionality isn't spectacular, stuff like X-Journal do the same basic thing and grok more of livejournal's features. (Blog this page and Blog this picture are the only real integration, but I wouldn't use it.)

The RSS reader isn't too bad, it looks like it was copied from Safari. I wanted something similar for Firefox at one point, but I'm using Google Reader now. The key benefit for me is that it keeps track of what I've read and I can use it from multiple machines.

So the jury is still out on that one, we'll see how it develops. I can run piggy bank in both flock and firefox, so either is fine for now. (More on Piggy Bank and RDF later.)

New Book

lj-mood: happy

I got back to the office this morning and found that the book I'd ordered, Jamie's Italy, had arrived. I've only had time to briefly skim it, but it looks really good and is recipe- and picture-dense. I look forward to reading it, and trying out some of the recipes. It looks like it was worth having it shipped from Europe.

Conference Reports

lj-mood: awake

I spent the last week or so at the Ruby Conference and OOPSLA Conference in San Diego. The Ruby conference had a more grass-roots feel and only one lecture track. Overall it was quite interesting, especially the Rails stuff and the ad-hoc domain specific language stuff. It was also good to see that work was progressing on a byte code compiler for the language, although it's not rocket science and should have been done long ago. I dunno why nobody has bothered yet. (A speaker at OOPSLA pointed out that it's the slowest dynamic language, with a naive implementation, yet people still find it valuable.)

OOPSLA was much more academic. I came away with the vague feeling that it people were a little stuck on the OO stuff and should move on, but there were also a few talks to that effect, so maybe people already know this. The workshop I attended on domain specific modeling was a good experience, although a solid day of academic stuff can be wearying. Sussman's talk and Dave Thomas' talk were both good, too. I think Java Frameworks and over-enginering of tools and libraries has sucked some of the joy out of coding, hopefully we find our way back soon. I think I should skim SICP again sometime soon.

Conference

It's late monday. I'm in San Diego for the OOPSLA conference. I snuck
into the domain specific modeling conference with a coworker, which
was a lot of fun, the talks were mostly interesting, and the
discussions afterwards were fun. It's been a long day, though, and I
was too worn out to really read any of the posters at the reception in
the evening. They we went back to my bosses room for a brainstorming
session (which was productive, but tiring).

I'll give a little more context in the next entry, going to bed for now.

untitled

lj-mood: chipper

I've put off updating because too much stuff has passed by and I never had a big block of time to sit down and document it all. So I'll just forget it. :)

I'm going to Phoenix to see Emily this weekend. It's been a month and a half - too long, but we've both been busy.


The house is coming along, the plumbing is done except for a couple of gas details. I'll include a picture of the shower rough-in, not particularly exciting, though. The kitchen cabinets arrived, but I'll have to wait patiently for all the prerequisite work to be completed before I can put them in.

And now I'm off to work.