Elbie at Trig dot Net

Please excuse the mess while we renovate.

Houseness progresses. We occasionally find time to get yet another room fully painted, or set up rooms, or unpack and put various things away, or order a freezer. Whatever. There are a couple of really big projects which we'd really like to get done before Winter sets in. Namely to get our roof replaced, and there's a subset of the windows that sorely need replacing as well.

We're not the only ones mind you. The city's been doing some sprucing up as well. It's summer after all. Time to rip up every possible road you can, and make traffic a nightmare. Two key sections of streets nearby are all torn up, and cars are taking detours on tiny little streets in our neighbourhood. I'll be glad when the work's all done, and our quiet little street can go back to being a quiet little street.

So I took a vacation.

The closing date of the house ended up being the day before L had to leave to go to a conference in San Antonio, which I was going to tag along with in a vacationy sort of way.

The conference had been planned for quite a while, the house thing was sort of new. Part of the running around I mentioned in the last post was to make sure we could do as attractive an offer as possible, and that included a 30-day closing, which would have put the closing date smack dab in the middle of the time we were going to be out of the country so it ended up being a 28-day closing. We basically took possession, looked around to make sure everything was as it was supposed to be, then turned around, locked up and flew to Texas.

San Antonio was really really gorgeous. The weather, as you might have been led to believe was pretty damned hot, and we arrived not only in the week leading up to Easter, but in the week that had a lot of history closely tied to the Alamo and Texan independence. The food was fantastic, but there was a lot of it, and most of what we ate was pretty heavy. We saw a lot of very big people.

Of course, one of the first things we saw there was indeed the Alamo. Looking at all the history, you really get the whole mindset. Texas spent a lot of its time more or less getting the shaft from higher governmental bodies. It's no wonder they were independent for as long as they were.

We spent a huge amount of time walking. In fact a little too much time. We wandered down the Mission Trail, to look at a couple of the other historic missions, except it's not a walking trail. After popping out off the Riverwalk, into a beautiful older district of San Antonio, we suddenly found ourselves walking on exposed non-pedestrian-friendly arterial roads that went under overpasses, and at one point by a juvenile correction facility. When we told the grandmotherly park ranger at the first mission that we'd walked there, she just shook her head at us somewhat incredulously. We took the bus back to our hotel.

And then we were back home. Or at least back to our hometown. There was painting and packing and moving and unpacking and a seemingly endless list of todos. At least it's not ended yet. But there's occasional lulls. I was able to sit on the front porch of our new home this evening, watching the world go by, and reading. We're settling in.

Can't post. Busy.

Yup. A whole term has slipped by. A crazy crazy four months.

I took a course this term, CS341, User Interfaces. It was a significant amount of work, but quite interesting. I've been thinking on again off again about trying to get my master's degree. But working full time and doing this kind of course work would require me to be uber efficient, and I wasn't very good at it this term. Of course there were mitigating circumstances, namely that we bought a house.

So if taking a challenging course wasn't enough, yes, we were running around like mad in March and April getting all our financial ducks in a row, plus we were spending a huge amount of effort for a week and a half to get the condo ready to list. I've been living out of boxes for half the term. The cats are a little freaked out by everything.

The closing went pretty smoothly though. So... house! Hopefully the move will go as smoothly. But really, I could use a vacation.

Recap

So. 2010.

One of the problems with blogging so infrequently, is that I forget about a lot of things that happen between posts, let alone what's happened all year round. That said, I can sum up a few things.

At least one major organization change has happened in my work's department, that should help smooth things out between us and the academic departments. I've been working there for six years and a bit now. It's hard to tell if I'm senior or junior there sometimes, but on the whole, I think that I'm doing pretty well there.

Home and play was pretty good this year on the whole. I tend to not talk about my personal life much here, but I'm happy enough. Things certainly aren't bleak. I've bought a few toys. A reverse osmosis water filter in March was a fantastic success, and the Kindle towards the end of the year which I'm also more than happy with.

What's the plan for 2011? Well, a lot of things can use a face lift. Many aspects of Trig.Net have languished for far too long not the least of which is this blog. Also, I wouldn't mind having a better system for keeping my home in order. Not resolutions per se, but certainly things I should try to get done.

For all of you, good luck on your goals, and here's hoping you have a good year.

Dusk and taxes

Walking home this evening, at dusk. I've walked home at dusk a couple of times already this year, but that's because I'd left work late. Today it was the first time since the end of Daylight Savings Time. It was wonderfully mild, considering how cold it had been last week. Friday we actually had snow for most of the day, though there was precious little accumulation.

Walking home in the colder weather has meant that I've been catching up on my podcasts as well. There's been lots of Planet Money as well as the Irrelevant Show suggested by Thingo.

I just keep getting more poetry.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I spent most of yesterday traveling back and forth and eating. The weather has actually been ridiculously nice for most of the weekend, and driving around Southwestern Ontario has been quite pleasant. Today has been a little less nice, and I spent it staying home, curled up with some mulled cider and a cat or two reading.

I got the Kindle on Wednesday, and so far, I have to say, the experience has been very pleasurable. It's very light, and not too big, not too small, and the display is amazingly crisp and readable in all sorts of lighting conditions. I've been reading both indoors and out with it, and it's just been a joy to use.

Work continues to be pretty busy. Most of the start of term madness is easing off, but a couple of power outages, one planned and one not have left us scrambling a little to try to get back to operating at full steam.

The municipal election is coming up. It seems like the only news I really get is about the Toronto election, but then I don't subscribe to the local paper, nor do I listen to or watch local news/radio so that's pretty much my own fault. But it does mean that I'm woefully uninformed about the local race. I guess that's what I get for burying my nose in a, um, book.

By the book

I've been seriously considering getting an e-reader, and have been trying to make some decisions about which device to get, and why.

Living in a tiny place, there's always the incentive of getting rid of extra stuff. Granted, I doubt I'll ever go as far as this guy but there's certainly quite a few books that I re-read frequently enough, and yet take up quite a bit of shelf space.

There's something a little unsettling with the direction media is going in though. The increasingly restrictive ways in which video, music and even books are allowed to be used make me wary of making certain choices solely for the sake of convenience in the short term.

That said, the technology of readers is very attractive. I've taken a look at a couple of devices that use eInk, and the displays are very readable. At the moment, I'm looking at the Kindle, the Kobo, and Sony's eReader. I don't know if the nook is available in Canada, since Barnes & Noble is a US only company.

The Kindle really seems like the device to beat. But their inability to use the more widely used epub format is a mark against it. But their browser and ability to use the 3G networks for free is a huge feature that the other readers don't have.

It actually looks like there's some decent software to convert from most formats to something the Kindle (or other readers) can actually use, but only if the original format is unprotected.

I went looking at the Waterloo Public Library's eBook selection to see if missing out on the option of borrowed books is going to be an issue. As near as I can tell, borrowing e-books is no more convenient than borrowing physical books. You still have to wait for a book to be returned by the previous borrower before you can borrow it.

Usability is also something to consider. I'm hoping to get my hands on the Kobo and the Sony Reader to see how they are for uploading/downloading books, and the actual reading experience. Though I talked briefly with a friend of mine who is doing some research on the readers, and he did mention that the other readers don't have as nice a user experience. We'll see. I'm tempted to just go ahead and order the Kindle anyway at this point.

Still there still... wait, where is it?

A new year is underway. Frosh week seemed to go as well as one might expect, though for most of the week the Math Faculty had to do without it's infamous pink tie. I assumed that it was because of all the construction, there was no place to hang it, but after talking with one of the Orientation leaders, I learned that it was because the tie had sustained a huge gash of some sort and was being repaired.

There seems to be no shortage of construction these days, both on campus and off. There's at least four buildings in various stages of non-completion on campus, and three within a block of home.

With the start of the new school year, things have been busy enough at work, but this past week was really hard. One of my big projects has had so many setbacks. Like the albatross, it's just been impossible to rid myself of the thing. One problem after another, aggravated by a not-quite-campus-wide power failure this week has meant that I've had precious little time to stop and take in the bigger picture.

Really, though, this should be a calmer term than most. My drumming instructor is mysteriously no longer teaching at Long & McQuaid (I haven't actually had time to call them and figure out what's going on there) and a term without taking a course means that I might actually have more time to relax once the dust settles.