It's been almost a year now, but I'm finally making progress on the second floor middle room that we gutted again. The wiring is done, the rusted out heating duct has been replaced, the bay window is insulated now, the closet has been re-framed and the wallboard is all up. Now I just have to get through getting all the drywall compound applied and sanded before the one year mark! In all fairness to myself (hey, it's my site), I did get distracted with some other house work over the summer... but I'm back on track and focused on wrapping this room up.

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Labels: home improvement, personal

I just published a couple of photos from our September trip to Barcelona on PicasaWeb here.

I really like the wacky parts of a city... In particular those that make an interesting photo to share later.

Apparently people in Barcelona require reminders not to step out into traffic or they might die.
And on the beaches... the problem people seem to be the Brits and Americans.
While not in Barcelona, our trip to see the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres was definitely a highlight.

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Labels: personal, travel

I was thinking about what a nasty little web (pun intended) of connections I've created recently with all the social media sites. For fun, I spent a few minutes diagramming the connections last night. The hardest part was laying out all of the lines and bubbles to make sense of the connections.

One thing that I considered after the fact was how I work with the tools. For example, I find it kind of amazing (even being a technology professional) that I can be anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage, and send a text message that gets propagated across several sites in one shot. The text message goes to twitter, which then gets pulled into FriendFeed and Plaxo. From FriendFeed, the message is then forwarded as my status to LinkedIn and Facebook. My website also shows that message via a FriendFeed gadget.

The interconnections in the web definitely represent something more powerful than what is accomplished with just one site. This is where the real power of the web is these days.

Update: Jon Udell has an interesting post about a similar concept. While I just marveled at the current state of affairs, John describes some goals that he wants to see fulfilled.

Labels: personal, social media, web 2.0

I had a chance to go to the Eagles game on Sunday night, courtesy of BMC Software. It's a shame that they lost, but it was fun anyway. The biggest problem that the Eagles had was stopping the Giant's run game (excluding some bad coaching calls), which made me think about similar scenarios in the business world. While you have to watch for the big market moves (the passing game) and prepare to make a few yourself, never forget to protect aginst the smaler moves that can become big quickly.

Labels: personal

I lost access to my work email account yesterday afternoon, and it has yet to be restored (IT has been working on it since then, but they haven't figured it out yet). I always laughed at the idea of email addiction, but it really is painful to try to operate in a modern business environment without that trusty "send" button. I'm up to four calls today where people have assumed that I have already read something that they sent me. When they say this, I have to sheepishly reply that "I can't get into my email today, so I haven't seen that yet." When I go on vacation, I happily ignore all of my email accounts, but this is like walking around a cave without a light.

Labels: personal

Back in August, we bought an old house in West Philly. Our best guess is that the house was constructed sometime between 1910 and 1915. It's a great old house, but has been abused over its life. While I'm sure that the original occupants were quite caring for the building, it seems like there has been a whole line of owners that did things "just good enough" to suit their needs. Over the years, that's become the biggest issue for us to deal with.

The house is three stories, with a basement and an attic. Since there's only two of us in the house (not counting the two cats), we think we have plenty of room to move around as we work.

Our first "full" renovation is the second floor middle bedroom. While the demolition work has been in progress for a few months now, I took two solid days this weekend to complete the “gut job” of the room.

You can see some great shots of the work here: Home Improvement Photos on Flickr
 

"Remodeled" rooms aren't always what they seem.

I thought that some special attention was worth while for this photo. A recent remodel of the bathroom led to some interesting results. As you can see in the photo, the new ceiling of the bathroom is attached to a new framing structure that sits about a foot and a half below the original ceiling. I guess it would make sense if you needed a cavity for electrical, mechanical or plumbing access, but it looks like it was just done that way in an attempt to be lazy. They set the new framing up about 8 feet from the floor, which you would expect to make the drywall process easier. The problem is that they didn't bother leveling the new ceiling, so it's visibly uneven from the inside of the bathroom. Even better? The work they did to make the drywall installation easier was negated by the fact that it wasn't leveled... they had to cut drywall to fit into a gap between the top of the 8 foot boards and the ceiling board.

I know there's going to be a ton of interesting decisions to laugh at as we go through the house, but this one may survive to be in the top 10.

Labels: personal

So I've got a new look and feel for the site, thanks to my wonderful wife (who's doing the same on her site right now). She made a shiny new logo (seen on the right) and a nice clean look and feel for everything.

Unfortunately, I've been totally quiet over the last year or so... basically work won in the battle for my "computer time". And since I refuse to spend too much of my day outside of work staring at a computer screen, it limits me in how much I can write.

My role at work makes it difficult to focus on the more architectural and technical things that I enjoy working on (and which would provide fodder for a blog), yet it certainly has it's moments of challenge, inspiration and frustrations. I guess it's allot like a pure development job in that respect, I just have different things to think about.

I wanted to try and spend the time that I used to spend on architecture and instead spend it on development process types of topics, however it's hard to seperate the generalities from the specifics at work... which is something that is very important to me. I believe that what we do and how we do it is an evolutionary answer (as in, it changes almost every week), however the topic of what we learned tends to include things that are personal to the individuals involved.

There are some very interesting challenges that we deal with in each project we work on and each day we support our production environments. I'll try to give a gist of the information here in the future though...

Labels: personal