Live from Austin!

When I moved in with rothko, we bought a vacuum cleaner. At the time we were living in a fully carpeted apartment in Malden, MA. Money was tight, so I did some research via Consumer Reports and bought a Sharp vacuum cleaner.

Unfortunately, I overlooked one detail. While excellent on carpets, the vacuum cleaner was entirely unsuitable for hard wood floors. After a couple of years we moved into an apartment with wood floors, and the Sharp took up residency in the basement. But I was loathe to part with it, because it was a perfectly good vacuum cleaner, and vacuum cleaners are expensive.

Then we moved to Texas. The faithful vacuum came with us. It’s still in fine working order, and we now have carpet again, which it does a good job of cleaning. But the problem is, we also have stairs. The trusty Sharp is about as suited to vacuuming stairs as a Dalek. And downstairs is wood floors again.

So for a while now, I’ve had plans to get a vacuum that actually does a good job of hard floors, stairs, and carpet.

Obviously the Dyson range appealed as soon as I saw it. But I heard that the early Dysons were heavy and awkward, and often unreliable. So I waited.

After a couple more years, the Dyson ball was launched, which was more maneuverable. Then this year, the Slim was launched in the USA. It has a smaller version of the ball mechanism in a vacuum that’s light enough to pick up and carry up and down stairs without my back hurting. It also seems as though the reliability issues have been dealt with.

Searching on Google, I saw ads for a company offering “Worst prices on Dyson”, asking “Don’t pick on us”. I wondered whether it was a mistake or a joke, clicked through, and discovered it was an independent retailer in Austin called ABC Vacuum Warehouse. It’s a store I must have driven past dozens of times without ever realizing it was there, partly because it’s in a nondescript shack-like building in front of a warehouse, and partly because the windows are all covered up with blinds so it looks like it has been abandoned. Inside is a small store filled with nothing but vacuum cleaners, accessories for vacuum cleaners, and spares for vacuum cleaners.

At the store’s suggestion we took a look at a Sebo vacuum cleaner as well as the Dyson range. Fine German engineering, but there were a few things I didn’t like. First up, it uses bags and filters. Secondly, the main upright piece detaches from the brush head for cleaning stairs, which sounds good, but I could see it would be annoying and require a lot of bending over to detach and re-attach it. I prefer the Dyson wand, which doesn’t require any bending over at all.

So, DC-18. I took it for a thorough trip around the house this afternoon. It does indeed do a good job on all floors; it’s great on the hard wood floor, will remove the gifts of the pube fairy from the tiled bathrooms, and does at least as good a job as the Sharp on carpet. Time will tell how reliable it is, but so far I’m satisfied: I ended up with a full cylinder of hairy filth.

I just went to weigh myself, and a tiny gecko shot out from under the scales and crawled part way up the wall. I’ve managed to catch him and reunite him with his lizard friends on the back porch. I’d love to know how he made it upstairs.

The squirrels have been leaving us alone since we came back from England. I wondered if they were sulking, but then I saw that the trees were all suddenly bearing black walnuts and live oak acorns. The squirrels have such abundant food right now that they simply don’t need to visit us.

We had a landscape gardener come to look at the front yard. We’re definitely going to get some cactus worked into the plans. The back yard is now entirely horse herb for ground coverage, which is working very nicely.

I’ve had a stressful couple of weeks.

At work, on the 1st we rolled out a brand new replacement I had built for a heavily-used database system. It’s now in use across the USA and Latin America to manage high profile events leading to multi-million-dollar business deals. Everything went fairly smoothly in the end, but still–stressful.

Then last week I had a business trip to Chicago. My hours there were pretty much 100% filled; although the scheduled meetings ended early on the second day, I then had a server crash and some network problems to deal with, plus a new server build that I confirmed was OK just in time to get in a cab and dash to the airport.

I am now trying to relax and not snap at the spouse.

The Church of Scientology is probably the only place where you can take a personality test and fail.

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity.—Werner Herzog

Next door’s chicken didn’t get the memo. Not only does it run from me when I try to catch it and return it to their yard, it has now taken to hiding under their car so I can’t get at it.

It has also developed its flying skills to the point where it can fly over the fence and into our back yard. I don’t bother returning it from the back yard any more, it’s safe enough there and only comes back if I take it home.

I’ve heard that you’re supposed to wash your hands after handling chicken. I’m assuming that’s even more true if it’s ambulatory.

Yesterday, a server died. Turned out it had bad RAM too.

Today, someone deleted 100MB of files from an important database, and I had to do another restore on the System i.

This afternoon, it was noticed that some config documents were mysteriously not restored by my previous efforts. After investigation, I discovered that someone had helpfully copy-protected a random assortment of configuration documents. I have no idea why.

Experience how much Blu-ray sucks, without spending $1,000 to do so.

And that’s after installing the mandatory firmware upgrade to reinforce the DRM.

I rarely pay any attention to web stats for my personal site. I think the last time I checked was 2004. At that time, I was getting about 800 page views a day.

I just checked again, and it’s now about 10× that, with a page-to-visitor ratio of about 1:2. It seems to have leaped up since I switched to WordPress, which suggests that either typo was more unreliable than I was aware of, or that WordPress is doing a better job of pinging aggregators, or quite likely both.

Anyhow, even allowing for spambots and other crawlers, that’s a lot of people. I wonder who they all are?

A while ago I realized that if I really wanted to go for popularity (or what passes for fame on the Internet), I’m going about it the wrong way anyway. Successful sites generally pick a single area of focus and stick to it, whether it’s writing about gadgets, reviewing movies, or playing spot-the-next-big-trend.

Here, it’s a bit more random. One minute it’s physics, the next it’s cute squirrel anecdotes, then we’re back to politics by way of the latest Apple software. I’m reminded of comments Berkeley Breathed made about Bloom County: he said a lot of newspapers put it on the op-ed pages because it was political, then had people writing in asking “What is this crap?” a few weeks later when it was all about penguin nose jobs.

But that’s the thing: I find most subjects interesting. I want penguin nose jobs in my political commentary, so long as it’s interesting. I want to learn something unexpected every day. And that’s the kind of person I’m writing for.

If there’s a site out there that’s like I want this site to be, it’s probably Boing Boing. Only without the Disney obsession.

A couple of months ago, 15 UK troops were taken hostage in Iraq. They were eventually freed. Then I started seeing news stories about how everyone was furious because the troops were selling their personal stories to the highest bidder.

Maybe I’ve been in the US too long, but I didn’t understand what people were upset about. I still don’t.

Those troops went through a hideous ordeal. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to get money in return for telling people what it was like? If everyone can agree to give JK Rowling ten million quid for writing a bunch of guff about kids learning to be wizards, what’s the moral argument for not allowing troops to sell true stories for a sackful of cash? (I note that they even had explicit permission from the MOD to do so!)

Or maybe it was all faux outrage manufactured by the newspapers who lost out in the bidding war?