Although it feels a little early for it given our lease constraints, we started home shopping in Altoona today in a slightly more serious way. Today, we visted the first house that we actually went inside. We took several pictures [link since removed since we didn’t buy this house -ed] but even as many as we took, I still want to have taken more.
House summary: Built in 1983, it’s a 3 bedroom, 3 bath home with oversized 2 car garage on a 100’x120′ lot on the corner of Lloyd St and E. 22nd Ave. It has attic storage, city water/sewer, a wet bar, a hot tub and was re-shingled in the fall of 2004. There are 2 decks and a gazebo. There’s a privacy fence around the rear of the property. There is 200 amp electrical service. They are asking $149,500. I still don’t know the real estate market in this area well enough to know if that’s good or not. Since Albemarle county just re-appraised my townhouse for $193,000, it feels like a good deal. It’s hard to say, though.
Already, I’m glad I entered the Google AdSense program. I’ve been crawled by googlebot a fair amount recently, but apparently, they still don’t have enough info to put together real ads for my page(s). Instead, I can either run a background color (which I had been doing) or public service announcements for which I don’t get paid. As you can see, as of this writing at least, I’m now doing the latter.
This morning, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was reviewing a Java Web Services Tutorial and it was making sense. I tried the examples, and with a little bit of classpath fudging, I got them to work. I tried a quote generator I found on xmethods.com and got it to work. I was impressed with myself. Then I looked through the “additional resources” section at the end and found my way to a book on XML-RPC. Generally, this would be a good thing. I like books on stuff I want to learn — particularly O’Reilly books as they’ve been stand-up publishers of computer technology books since I’ve been in the market for computer technology books.
On a lighter note, I applied for Google AdSense ads today for the blog. I have no idea if they’ll take it, and I’m sure I don’t have the readership to actually generate enough money to care about. But, I thought I’d try it.
I mention this partly because I think it’s noteworthy. But what cracked me up was when I found the online version of the Wired print article concerning the postal monopoly for my previous blog entry, I saw that the wired article also had Google AdSense ads. And on the page calling for the end of the postal monopoly, the top ad was for US Postal Job Info.
When I was a young ‘en, maybe about 16, I lived in (two of) the poorer sections of the richest school district around. A school district my parents had moved into three years earlier – and shortly before their divorce — specifically so that I could go to the good county schools instead of the crappy city schools. All, in all, it was not bad. I got the fancy education, but I was not as insulated in my upper-crust world as other school-mates of mine.
I’m not exactly sure when I first put up the picture of me bicycling on my home page, and titled the page “The (hopefully quite temporary) home page for AC Capehart” — probably some time around 1999, maybe 2000. When did I do the MS 150? I bought the bike I’m pictured on partly for that ride. Anyway, somewhere on the order of 5-6 years ago. I intended it to be a placeholder. Something to stick on my home page until I came up with something cool. In the meanwhile, I created other webs, but never figured out something sufficient for my home page.
I suppose that one never really knows what one’s impact on the world will be.
In anticipation of heightened traffic as bk’s blog readers were notified of the existence of my blog, I installed awstats. I had done that a few machines ago, but at the time doing even a basic config for a web server was a PITA. Or, at least I thought it was then. Now, it’s pretty trivial, and I’ve lumped all my *accapehart.com hosts into a single log file, so I can look at it all.
I made a promise that I regret. I told bk that if I posted two more blog entries in the coming 7 days that he could announce my (unread) blog on his (somewhat more read) blog. I regret this not because I fear my voice being heard by the unwashed masses — it’s been too long since my shower anyway — no, I regret it because it’s got me thinking about number and size of blog content in a way that feels inappropriate to the spirit of blogging. Already I’d thought of (and released) probably half a dozen things that I wanted to say in this forum but didn’t because I was second-guessing why they came up. Am I trying to have something to say to make sure bk blogs about my blog? Does my new phone really matter to anyone besides me (and bk)?
In setting up a wiki for a client (PeopleSpace), I was reminded about how terribly cool this technology is. So, I set myself up one using a Ruby Wiki called Instiki. It’s here: http://wiki.accapehart.com/
I’m writing this after the fact (by a couple of days) instead of as it was intended (by a couple of hours). Still interesting (to me).
I’m on a vacation of sorts, in Southern Maryland, or SOMD as I’ve taken to calling it1. I decided not to bring my laptop because I had a certain confidence there would be no Internet connectivity where we were staying. My cell phone broke, so today, I’m really disconnected. But, even though it was raining this morning, and hovering just above freezing, I went outside and walked a seven-circuit labyrinth that the B & B owners had carved through lawn maintenance in their back yard. Once in the center, I stood in Tadasana with hands to heart center for several minutes just listening, and then did a sun salutation modified to limit the extent to which my whole body was on the freezing, wet grass.
