The future of consumer electronics, with desired toy

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.)

House Progress

  • 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.

The 2005 Massachusetts Sales Tax Holiday Weekend

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.

We’ve got a floor

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.

Gigabit Happiness

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.

House building update

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.

This post is provided “as-is”, and confers no rights.

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.

House Building Update

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.