Imported From Livejournal

It turns out that there are some places that the town clerk didn’t search before, and in 1955, Charlton Town Meeting discontinued Berry Corner Rd., from Ayers Rd. to the Sturbridge town line, from being a town road. Had we discovered this much earlier in the process, this all would have been much more difficult. However, finding it now, they can’t retroactively revoke our right to build, and it’ll be easier to get telephone poles put in because they’ll just need permission from us, and not from the town. So I guess things are going alright with it, it’s just… odd.

Drywall is expected to be delivered late this week, so it looks like the internals of the house may be done in just a few weeks.

The main problem, as one might expect, is with Verizon. They need to put a telephone pole on our part of Berry Corner Rd. in order to give us power and data lines. However, they hadn’t realized that it’s a town road, so they hadn’t started the process of asking the town for permission to place the pole. (That involves a public hearing, with probably registered mail to the abutters and such. Luckily, the abutters probably won’t have a problem with it. :) They still haven’t been convinced that it’s not a town road yet, but we’re working on it. (We have documentation from the Charlton town clerk.) But it could be 6 weeks before we get our power and data lines in.

We now have insulation in our house!

Apparently, Verizon doesn’t yet believe that our road is a town road, so it may be a while before we get wires going to the house. *sigh*

So, LJ has recently announced a new feature where you can categorize your posts with tags, which people can then use to find related items and such. It seems like a nice idea. So, I’ve gone through a lot of my postings and added some tags that might help. Let me know if you think that some additional categorization of my postings might be helpful.

I’ll be helping out at BattleCry @ WPI 6 this weekend. People should come and watch robots try to stack piles of tetrahedron-shaped objects. It’s a lot of fun!

I’ll be running several tournaments at Card Stop in Dudley over the next couple months as qualifiers for the North American Challenge. We may also be starting up Friday Night Magic there soon.

I found this joke quite funny for some reason.

“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.

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.

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.