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.

We now have a large hole in our front yard. It looks like the septic tank itself is there, although there’s still a lot of room dug up for the drain field that is yet to be put in. (I think they need an inspection from the town before they can put that in and cover everything up.)

Most of the woodwork (stairs, doors, moulding around doors and windows) has been stained to match the cabinets. They look really nice.

I signed up with GeekISP for my web and mail hosting needs. I figured out that it was cheaper to have it hosted off-site than to pay the electricity for my old FreeBSD box running things.

So now, http://www.cooperjr.name and email to pete@cooperjr.name is off-site. Plus, I’m now using TDMA, which will require a human to confirm that they’re a human before emailing me. (Most people I know should already be on my whitelist, though.)