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| Monday, February 8th, 2010 | | 8:06 pm |
February 6 House Update
Painted, mostly. I finished up the living room while Shaenon started the bedroom, and I helped her with that later in the afternoon. Shaenon bought an antique lamp for the foyer, and that was about it until our friends Mohamed, Pancha and Liz showed up. When they arrived, we drove to Home Depot to look at blinds, which took us through Saturday. We took Sunday off so that I could watch the Super Bowl and sleep in for the first morning since New Year's Day. The game was good, commercials were so-so, I enjoyed The Who's halftime performance, and Pancha and Liz came over to eat the pizza that I cooked and hang out, so it was a pretty relaxing Sunday for a change. Still moving ahead on clean-up projects, inspections, additional purchases, etc. It's happening a bit slower than I'd hoped (not all of the lights were hooked up yet, for one thing), but we're still making forward progress. We'll have the floor installed from February 15-17, and the stove and refrigerator will arrive on the 20th, so it should be looking pretty house-y by then. On that note, does anyone have any washer/dryer recommendations? Should we spend the extra money to get pedestals? Is it possible to get high-efficiency, eco-friendly laundry equipment for about a thousand bucks total? | | Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 | | 12:40 am |
| | Monday, January 18th, 2010 | | 10:29 pm |
House Update: January 16-18
Not much to report on the day-by-day aspect of things. I spent Saturday through Monday knocking plaster off of the ceiling, ripping walls apart, and chiseling off the tiles that were spread out absolutely everywhere in the bathroom. I removed the toilet on Sunday, and was hoping to demolish the tub today, only to find out that it was made of steel, and will have to be carried outside. I changed the locks on Saturday. Well, all but one deadbolt, which is giving me some trouble. All the different screws they gave me for the locks are slightly the wrong size, so the "snaps together and installs in five minutes" instructions I got are just a bit inaccurate. Hoping I can track down the right screws next week. We hired a contractor (Mario) on Saturday, and went over the whole project with him. He's willing and able to drive us around to pick out fixtures for the bathroom, which is another plus. Hired the contractor, Metin, today (Monday, MLK Day), and he should be able to get started right away. He's rewiring the entire house for a little over $6K. Our other estimate was around $4K, but that involved leaving all of the pre-WWII wiring in the house and just putting in new outlets and switches, which didn't sound like enough of a fix for that amount of money. Brought in someone to fix the furnace today, since that's been on the fritz. Really hoping that we don't get slammed with a big bill for it. I think it's covered (or mostly covered) by our homeowner's policy, but we're new to all of this, and don't know what to expect. There was a $55 service charge, so I'm hoping that we aren't on the hook for much beyond that. Shaenon got a lot of painting done over the weekend, and the house is looking a lot different already. She's frustrated that it's taking as long as it has, but we're making steady progress. Bought some bathroom and basement lights at OSH today, and now we just need some fixtures for the front porch. First really stressful day of home renovations, as the terrible rain, wind and gloominess (combined with Shaenon's not-waterproof-at-all shoes) hit Shaenon pretty hard, and the furnace guy was a couple of parts shy of getting everything up and running today. If we'd been able to dry off in a toasty house, I'm sure spirits would have been higher. The furnace guy is coming back tomorrow, though, so things should be fine when we return on Saturday. More to come... | | Friday, January 15th, 2010 | | 1:34 am |
January 15 house updates
We've picked a contractor, and I'm 90% sure about our electrician. I'll be making a few calls tomorrow to make sure that we want to go with this electrician, then it's full speed ahead. On Wednesday, January 13, Shaenon took the plans that I'd drawn up to the permit office and we got the go-ahead for our bathroom renovation plan. It costs just over $1,000 to file for a bathroom permit, which explains to me why so many people just do these projects without filing with the city. Our realtor says that we'll be much better off in the long run, though, since proper permits make it a lot easier to sell the house, if we decide that we want to do that at some future date. If all of your home improvements are up to code, the next owner can buy with confidence that the house is safe and in good condition. We're going with the contractor that we liked the best (personality-wise), and he happened to put in the lowest bid by a significant margin, which is an added bonus. He came recommended by a friend, and I already happened to know the contractor, too--but we didn't know about his day job until our other friend recommended him. I'm still waiting for e-mail confirmation that he's available right away and can take on the bathroom renovation, but I'll mention his name here once that's official. A really important thing with this contractor is that we know we can work with him. He's not going to tell us to put in things we don't want, he'll walk us through the things we can do ourselves, and he'll be really helpful when it comes time to buy all of the fixtures and things we need for the bathroom. Having never purchased a house before, having never renovated a bathroom before, and having never purchased a tub, sink and toilet before, we really wanted to have someone who'd be willing to walk us through this, make some recommendations, and really help us to make this project work. | | Sunday, January 10th, 2010 | | 10:29 pm |
January 10 house update
*Shaenon painted the rest of the office space, minus a little bit at the top of the walls. Second coat to come next weekend. She also painted the wall at the outside of the kitchen space/far end of the living room the same color. *Installed two of those little things at the floorboards that prevent you from opening a door all the way and smashing your doorknob into the wall. Add those to the list of "weird things the previous tenants took with them when they left." *Had our first plumbing emergency. The spigot for the washing machine hookup was dripping even more than usual (add that to the "reasons to declare revenge on the people who did repairs to this house before we lived in it" list), so I cranked the handle on it. Water started coming out fast, so I turned the handle the opposite way, and water still kept coming out. Sprinted outside to the shutoff and turned off the house's water supply. Hope to get some tools tomorrow and make a quick trip to the house to fix that. I'm breathing a HUGE sigh of relief, since that spigot was going to fail sooner rather than later, and if it had blown out on its own, say, on a Monday morning, our house could have been flooding all week. Will make note to generally leave the house's water turned off if we're not in it. *Kept tearing apart the bathroom. They tiled every last surface in that room. Stripped the tiles off of all but the floor and the walls behind the toilet and on the wall that's got the bathroom window. Found the dryrot that the pest report had turned up. Cursed previous owners again, as there had been a bad leak near the showerhead at some point in the past, and no one seems to have fixed it properly. *Got lunch from the nearby Thai Temple for the second week in a row, and will probably do so again next Sunday. And that's the house report for today. | | Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | | 10:44 pm |
H to the Hizzouse
Weekend number two of home repair continues. I think I'll keep a running log of that stuff here, so that when the time comes, I can transcribe all of this into a notebook that we can refer to six months from now when we're wondering why we got so worked up about home repairs. January 2: First day visiting the house as owners. Met with two contractors and an electrician to discuss home repairs, specifically bathroom renovation and rewiring. Spent most of the day cleaning up, patching holes with spackle, dealing with a defective caulking gun that exploded on me, and looking for flooring and lighting places in our neighborhood. Removed chicken-wire from backyard. January 3: Bought a better caulking gun and dealt with some problem areas, and also bought a sledgehammer. Discussed paint colors. Demolished large, badly-constructed wooden porch-thing with bad plastic sheeting that was cluttering up our backyard. Removed more chicken-wire from backyard. Removed accordian door separating living room from kitchen. Removed old mattresses from basement, put into storage in garage (which is serving as a trash dump until we schedule a "Dump Day" with the City of Berkeley). January 6: Shaenon met with a contractor to discuss bathroom, wiring and other home repairs, and also met with a flooring expert to discuss our kitchen floor options. January 9: Met with husband-and-wife contractors to discuss bathroom options. Met with electrician to discuss wiring options, including complete removal of current pre-War knob-and-tube wiring versus repairing wiring and updating outlets, switches and fixtures. Mohamed and I set to work demolishing the bathroom--got as far as removing the medicine chest, removing the sink & vanity, removing all of the tile (and about half of the plaster underneath the tile) on one wall, while getting started on removal of tiles around the bathtub and the remainder of the bathroom. Shaenon, Pancha, Liz and Leia commenced painting of the spare bedroom/office area. Tried "Cheerful" yellow paint in the kitchen, but decided that we'd probably rather go with a more subdued blue, instead. First really cold day inside the house. Contractors and electrician had no guess as to why the furnace wasn't kicking on, so we put in a call to PG&E, who will check it out next Saturday between 8am(!) and 5pm. Hope to have a contractor picked out by next Saturday, with work commencing on the bathroom around January 18, and hoping that we can get the bathroom and wiring done around Valentine's Day. We're planning to vacate the apartment on or before February 28, so that would give us at least a week of wiggle room if something turns out to be more complicated than we'd planned. And that's the home report thus far. I'll try to update as we go from here on out, so if house talk bores you, please be patient. I'm sure I'll be talking about Spider-Man again before long. | | Thursday, December 17th, 2009 | | 4:39 pm |
| | Sunday, November 29th, 2009 | | 7:35 pm |
Question about "Mail" program
Does anyone use the Mac "Mail" program, the basic one that comes with the computer? If so, does anyone know how to export your address book, or otherwise copy it? It seems like it's designed to automatically save the e-mail address of anyone that you ever write or respond to, but there's nothing in the basic drop-down menu that seems to let you save addresses or create an actual address book. | | Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | | 4:25 pm |
Fun stuff from the Couscous Collective Store
I've got a new William Bazillion mini-comic, "Fatty Camp," that's now available in the Couscous Collective store! (Thanks to the lovely and talented Pancha Diaz for updating the shop!) Please check out the store here and load up on "Fatty Camp" (which is not available online, and probably won't be) and other fine Couscous products today. These make great stocking stuffers for those special comic fans in your life, and you should pick up on some of these quality items for yourself while you're at it. Orders will be extra, extra appreciated right now as our home computer is in the shop, and we're bracing ourselves for a steep repair bill. | | Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 12:06 am |
Wireless router? More like functionless router.
Yeah, that's not a very funny joke for the subject line, but I've got a boring, technical computer problem question. For the tenth time, I've tried setting up a wireless router at home, and once again, the setup process leads us all the way through, then has no useful troubleshooting tips whatsoever to explain why our system doesn't work. (Usually this involves us buying a router, trying to set it up, failing at that, exchanging the router for a different one, failing at that, then giving up for a few months until we decide to try again.) And please skip ahead to someone else's photos or Twitter-stream if this stuff bores you. I'll try to be brief, though. Anyway, we've got a little black box that provides us with a DSL connection for our "land" computer, and we're trying to set up a wireless router so that we can use that same DSL for our laptop. So far, so good, right? Here's what happens every single time: We go through the setup process, bit by bit, connect all the cords properly, and when we're finished, we end up with a slow (possibly non-existent) connection to the land computer. Our wireless router/network appears as a network option on our laptop (and it claims that the connection is at full strength), but we end up with that "trying to connect/rainbow pinwheel" thing for about five minutes, and no connection ever happens. The main thing that I notice when we go through all of the connections (as the setup disc instructs us to do) is that the green blinking "Activity" light on our DSL router/black box thing doesn't blink much at all once we've connected everything. If anyone has any good troubleshooting advice for router installation, please let us know. We've tried just about everything, and it feels like we're close to getting this solved, but it also feels like we might never get this problem solved, too. Thanks in advance for any advice. | | Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | | 6:23 pm |
For the three of you reading this who don't also read my wife's blog...
I may be biased, but my favorite comic strip these days has got to be Skin Horse, written by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Wells, with art by Shaenon. A brand-new storyline starts today, so if you haven't checked it out yet, please click on the link and bookmark it. You'll be glad you did. For those of you who don't want to read through the entire archive (and haven't ordered your copy of Skin Horse, Volume One yet), here's a brief recap from the helpful cast page:  If you are already reading and enjoying Skin Horse, please tell one or 500 of your closest friends. Preferably friends who like webcomics, buying print collections of webcomics, original art from webcomics, crossdressing, zombies, werewolves, and swearing Jewish helicopters. | | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 12:44 am |
| | Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 | | 7:10 pm |
Tokyo Drifter
Here's the first batch of photos from our recent trip to Japan. Cheers to Facebook for changing their programming so that those of you who haven't joined the Facebook cult yet can still look at photos that are posted there. Short explanation of our trip: In 2007, Shaenon and I curated an exhibition for the Cartoon Art Museum called The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. It was very well-received, prompting Studio Ghibli to plan their own much, much, much larger version. Shaenon and I were hired on as consultants, assisting Mary's nieces with the process of gathering all of the art together and making arrangements for the art to travel to Tokyo back in April. Earlier this month, we made a return trip to pack up the artwork and bring it back to the U.S. Fortunately for us, they held over the exhibition long enough for us to get a look at it. Even cooler, we got a private look at the exhibition on its final night with staff from Studio Ghibli, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Japanese broadcaster NHK, Disney, and the core crew behind Pixar's UP, which is already one of our all-time favorite movies. It was incredibly cool to be able to trade Mary Blair stories with Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Jonas Rivera and Ronnie Del Carmen as we walked through the galleries. Anyway, please check out the photos. More should be on the way soon. | | Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | | 8:01 pm |
Sequential Tart interviews me & Shaenon!
Patti Martinson of Sequential Tart has been interviewing all of the Couscous Collective members (minus the elusive Konstantin Pogorelov, who lives in a small cabin in the woods with Bill Watterson, Steve Ditko and J.D. Salinger), and she's kicking off October with me and Shaenon. Enjoy these, then meet us in person at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco on October 17 & 18. Shaenon's moderating a panel, I'm moderating a panel, and I'm actually *on* two panels, which is a rarity. If all goes well, I'll have a new print-only William Bazillion mini-comic, entitled "Fatty Camp" on sale at the con. We'll be loaded with stories from our (currently ongoing) trip to Japan (wrapping up a project for Studio Ghibli and Disney) and copious amounts of rum. Miss it at your peril! | | Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | | 5:49 pm |
So that's what he sounds like...
I was interviewed by Tom Racine for his Tall Tale Radio program a while back, and forgot to post the link. Click here to find out everything you ever wanted to know about my job. I also turn up again in a newer broadcast, at the tail end of the Nick Gurewitch/Monsters of Webcomics feature. Shaenon's on that one, too, so it's obviously worth a listen. | | Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | | 11:36 am |
A hit! A palpable (press) hit!
Gary Tyrrell of webcomics news site Fleen has read the entire archive of The Chronicles of William Bazillion, and apparently he liked it enough to write about it at length on his site. He does a pretty good job of summarizing the plot, too, so if you've been on the fence about checking it out, you can tell at a glance if you're likely to enjoy it or if it's something you really need to avoid at all costs. I'm in the planning stages for a new comic, though, so it's hard to say when I'll get back to William Bazillion and his crew. I'm a bit tempted to go back and re-do the first story arc in a more easily-digestible (more printable/publishable) version, but I'll see how I'm feeling after I've gotten this new idea off the ground. | | Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | | 1:14 am |
"You did it, kid!"
At long last, the thrilling and probably not-all-that-shocking conclusion to The Race for Santa's Nazi Gold. At least, I didn't think it was too shocking. Pretty much in character for everyone who's still alive at this point... With the Alternative Press Expo coming up fast, gradually preparing to move from San Francisco to Berkeley, the need/desire to pursue some paying cartoon work, and the other webcomic idea I've been wanting to put down on paper for a while, this marks the end of the weekly William Bazillion updates for now. I've got the characters in a pretty interesting position when I'm ready to get back to them, hopefully something that will lend itself to stories that won't take nearly three years to unfold. Thanks to those of you who've been reading, and for those of you who haven't, there's a whole archive with a (currently) definite ending, so please give it a look and tell your friends to do the same. And if you want to support the comic financially, please visit The Couscous Collective Store and buy boatloads of mini-comics, plus all of Shaenon Garrity's books. I'll also do commissioned work for rates that are pretty much the same as Shaenon's, on the off-chance that your wall really needs some drawings of an evil Richie Rich knockoff knocking Hitler's block off. Excelsior! | | Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 | | 11:31 pm |
| | 10:54 pm |
"Welcome back, Santa."
Another installment of William Bazillion is now online for your reading pleasure. I think I should be able to wrap up the current storyline within a few installments now, honest. | | Monday, August 17th, 2009 | | 9:42 pm |
Phone update
I went to the AT&T store to find out why my bill was so much higher than it should have been. First of all, I'd apparently logged on to the Internet--or attempted to--even though my phone isn't set up for that, and apparently I get charged 50 cents or so every time that happens. Step one, then, was to block my phone from doing that. Secondly, and this was the big one, I was getting charged $20 a month from a company called FlyCell for ringtones, downloads and stuff like that. This was news to me, so the store people had me call customer service and get that straightened out. Apparently FlyCell gets your number off of the Internet (probably through Facebook), then sends you a text message. Since that's the cell phone equivalent of junk mail, I dumped the message without reading it, but the gist of the message is "We're signing you up for this service unless you tell us not to, and we'll be charging you $20 a month whether you use this service or not." So, fortunately, AT&T has dealt with this before, so they credited me $40 and blocked me and Shaenon from getting fraudulently signed up for anything like that again. Given how this resolved itself, I wonder how many people just end up paying these fees every month without reading their bills, how much money companies like FlyCell get through sheer apathy, and how companies like that manage to not get sued out of existence for their shady business practices. Anyway, we'll stick with our cell phone plan for now, and AT&T has won a few good-faith points by squaring all of that away for us. |
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