Imported From Livejournal

I normally don’t do these, but this was too interesting to pass up. I think the intent was to just use a first name, but this works just as well for my whole name, since it’s common enough.

So, interesting snippets from the top 10 Google Search results for “Peter Cooper is”:

• Peter Cooper is a venerated figure in the cultural history of New York. Among his many achievements is the invention of Jell-O®.
• That letter, which embodies so fervently the warmth, the humanity, and the high ideals of Peter Cooper, is here presented, 97 years later
• “Hiring Peter Cooper is a response to that challenge and continues our policy of building our team from the very best people the industry has to offer. …
• Mel Bay’s Complete Irish Fiddle Player by Peter Cooper is a treat!
• Peter Cooper is a freelance journalist, and is also an eBoz!
• Peter Cooper is currently the Chairman of the Department of Music and teaches piano at Andrews University.
• PETER COOPER is a researcher with Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch; he previously worked for the Laogai Research Foundation.

(You can actually find me on the Internet on Microsoft’s site and on Wizards of the Coast’s site, if you Google right. I’m also on some random other pages at WPI and elsewhere. Searching for “Peter Cooper Jr.” does a better job of finding me, since there are fewer people with that name.)

So, it seems like things are moving toward everything being networked. My phone service is already over the Internet, and consumer TV-over-IP can’t be too far away. That’s one of the reasons that I’m so happy that my house is so wired, while at the same time wondering if it’ll still meet my needs 20 years from now. (I figure that worst case is that I’ll need a switch in every room.)

It’s interesting how basically all investments one can make are based on somebody being in debt. Our economy runs off of debt. It’s rather… odd.

• The wood flooring is all the way in. It’s not stained yet, but it’s in.
• The kitchen and bathroom countertops are in.
• There is shelving in the closets.

And I took pictures today.

Those of you in the area know that last weekend was The 2005 Massachusetts Sales Tax Holiday Weekend. The theory is that this gives a boost to retailers, since it’s a sale at every single store, getting people to go out and buy things during a normally slow time. The long-term benefits to retailers, plus the short-term benefits in meal and gas taxes which are still collected, make up for the lost tax revenue.

The vast vast majority of the oak flooring for the kitchen/dining/living room is in and nailed down.

Still no word from the phone company. Interestingly enough, they seem to not return phone calls. Seems like a silly thing for a phone company to me.

Today I received my Dell PowerConnect 2716 that I ordered this weekend. It’s a 16-port gigabit switch and supports web management, cable testing, port mirroring, link aggregation, VLANs, QoS, and some acronyms that I don’t recognize. It’ll be the backbone of our home network once our house is done.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

And what the “big lie” is today…

The inside is mostly (if not all) painted and stained, and the doors, moulding, stairs, and walls all look wonderful.

The septic system is now in, and our front yard has been leveled to about the configuration it will end up in. They’ve also started reconfiguring the side yard by the stream, making the stream more visible from the porch.

The carpeting people are supposed to measure things this week, although I don’t know if they already have. The kitchen countertops should be arriving sometime soon as well.

Time for a mini-rant. If I weren’t at work, I might have bothered to expand it into a full-fledged rant.

Software is unreliable. Especially now that we have the Internet, the first version can be terribly buggy, but we can just download patches when they’re released, or even have the software update itself. How wonderful.

And this philosophy has taken hold in other industries too, especially and more and more things are firmware-upgradable. Even my keyboard has firmware updates now.