01.07.10

neighborhood

Posted in house, programming at 7:50 pm by paul

I tweeted a few days ago about an article on SFGate about the little street we live on. A couple days after that, the SFist posted an old map of the city from 1862.

Take close look at the map, in the lower left corner. If you follow Market Street to the lower left corner, near a large number 11 is “Kate Street”. This street no longer exists, and it leads to an area labeled “Hospital Area”; this is now Duboce Park and three cul-de-sac blocks of homes, one of which is now Potomac St. It’s fun to see the map agree with what I read in the book by Harry Nimmo referenced in the article.

I am entertaining a fantasy of creating a Google Map of the area and replacing the tiles with the old map. Hopefully I’ll actually get to that.

UPDATE: I’ve checked the Google Maps API, and it seems what I need to do is a “Custom Map Type”, which The Google deems an “Advanced Topic.” They put this in red; I may be in over my head!

09.07.09

lighting

Posted in house, offline at 1:41 pm by paul

Lighting is a key component of a comfortable, relaxing room. We’ve always wanted some light coming from the kitchen end of the kitchen/living room/dining room. There are lights under the cabinets to provide “task” lighting but there are problems with that: they hilight any mess you left behind cooking dinner; they are directly visible when seated at the table; and they are not dimmable.

A while ago we took NERT training and bought all kind of stuff to prepare for an eventual/inevitable earthquake; while we were at it we got some LED lights. I installed them this weekend, which turned out to be relatively minor project since there was a handy way to feed an ordinary extension cord up from a countertop outlet to above the cabinets; all I had to do was trim off some extra cord length and replace the manufactured plugs and all was well.

Though still not dimmable, the results are pretty good:

They look a lot more blue in the pictures than they do to my eye. I’m thinking I’ll need to add some yellow gel over every second or third LED to sort that out and warm them up a bit.

06.14.08

ratified

Posted in Uncategorized, house at 7:43 pm by paul

As of about 6 p.m. today, we’re ratified! W00t! If you want to see more of the place, check out my Flickr photostream (look for a tag that is an address). You’ll need to be a Flickr friend/family to see them.

hitch

Posted in house at 10:00 am by paul

So the small hitch is that the buyers of the top floor unit (who beat us to the punch on that) have the exclusive right (from the seller) to build a roof deck. That possibility was a big attraction of the property, since a deck would have great views in all directions, and there is no other outside area of note … holding out the possibility this can be worked out.

offer

Posted in house at 9:50 am by paul

We’ll we have an offer in on a place near Duboce Park, here in San Francisco. We’re extremely excited because the place is in a neighborhood we neve thought we’d be able to afford.

Wow now I’m o the phone with the agent … seems like there is the possibility of a deal … butterflies …

06.02.08

deal

Posted in house at 8:56 pm by paul

The short version is, we have a deal. The house is sold. Not, of course, for what we wanted or were expecting, but it’s a deal we can live with.

We really could have lived without the shenanigans. Such as, telling our agent that their offer would be to close on August 1, after we protested over October 1. Then turn in an offer for October 1. I call shenanigans!

I shenanigans even more when they work, and against me. Anyway, it’s a deal and with any luck it won’t fall through. Fingers crossed!

05.25.08

harbucks

Posted in house at 6:46 am by paul

Uh hi largest coffee retailer in the world, or something: your web site is down. You don’t have to be a web guru to get that “Internal Server Error” isn’t a good sign! Anyway now I can’t figure out what it’ll cost me to linger at Starbucks for four hours while my house is open …

$ curl -I http://www.starbucks.com/
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 14:30:21 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
COMMERCE-SERVER-SOFTWARE: Microsoft Commerce Server 2002, Enterprise Edition
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Length: 108
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private