Quote of the Day

“I wish manufacturing had continued or shutdown had gone smoother, but if we all cross our fingers, maybe the basic technology will not disappear forever” — Wayne Westerman, inventor of the Fingerworks Touchstream keyboard which I can’t work without anymore. (Quote Source)

The company, alas, is now out of business. Rumor has it that it may have been acquired by HP, but the evidence is tenuous at best. Hopefully, whoever bought them out will bring back better and greater products sometime soon.

House building update with *video*

There’s been a lot more progress on the house. The porch now has stairs and a railing, and it looks really nice. It passed several town inspections today. Soon, the well will get hooked up and we’ll have running water. Still no word on how long it might take Mass. Electric to get its act together.

See Today’s Pictures

I put together a quick video tour of the inside of the home. I tried out Windows Movie Maker so I have it in Windows Media format (2.3MB), but if you don’t like Microsoft formats I also have the 11 meg source AVI files of the downstairs and upstairs walkthroughs.

I’m using LiveJournal

Some of you may have noticed that I’m still posting to LJ, despite my threat to move to Blogger. Basically, cross-site blog reading just isn’t quite there yet. Maybe someday RSS will be working perfectly with everyone able to use it, but that day isn’t today.

Also, one of my annoyances with LJ was the lack of being able to track the discussions without constantly checking the site. You see, when first signing on to LJ, I unchecked the “Get message board replies” option. This option says “Check this if you want to get e-mail updates when people reply to your journal entries using the message boards (comments).” My problem wasn’t really with checking the comments on my posts, but on the replies to my comments on other people’s posts. So, I never tried the option. But I tried it starting about a week ago and have discovered that it does, in fact, email you when someone replies to a comment you leave on someone else’s post. Had the description of the option said that, I would have tried that much sooner, and been much happier with LJ.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that when writing software, make sure that the options actually say what they do!

More House-building pictures

More pictures!

I took most of them a few minutes ago, but some near the beginning are of the construction of the porch.

Also, since I’m on a slow-upload connection, I changed my album generator to have the thumbnails link to 800×600 size images, which in turn link to the full image. Let me know if you prefer this, or if anyone besides me ever looks at the pictures.