jeffpollard.net

Get Mooooooving!

Not much exciting lately. Work. Come home. Go to the pool. Get all wrinkly. Go check on the house. No progress. Come home. Eat. Watch TV. Go to bed. Repeat.

Progress has somewhat stalled over at the house for the past few days. They started playing with the subflooring on house A in our building, but that's as far as they got. It's like they got occupied with something else and just stopped working on it. Or..maybe a swarm of Japanese Beetles started buzzing around in their faces and they didn't want to work anymore. Yeh, that's probably it.

For you custom vehicle fanatics, I've posted the East Coast Nationals show photos over on CustomTacos.com. Make sure you pay close attention to the beetle p0rn on there. It's quite entertaining. See Olivia's website for all the details on what we did this past weekend.

Wood. Lumber. Whatever. We got it.

The lumber for our house arrived either today or yesterday. We didn't go out to the house yesterday. It's pretty exciting to stand and look at a pile of wood and know that's our house right there. Check out the house photo gallery for all the photos.

This site? It's stale.

I did something that I do every once in a while: I went exploring through my own website. Yep, this very site. And the more I looked through the site, the more I realized how old and stale just about every single section of the site is. The only thing that isn't stale is, well, this section of the site- oh and the webcam. But that's only because it runs on auto-pilot 24/7. For example: The little Handspring icon up there at the top of the page? Yeh, I don't even own that Visor anymore. And then the other little ocon up there. The MacOS version of the site: it's still done in OS 9. I haven't run OS 9 in months and months. I really need to re-do that page in Aqua. Or do I? Do I even need that page? Sure, it was fun to make, but is it really useful? Nah. And then the resume. i won't even go into that. But, the thing is: why update my resume if I feel confident that I won't be switching jobs soon? Why even have it on the site at all?

The point of all of this is that I realized today that my website is very stale. And it needs help. I've been giving some thought lately to re-designing the site...again. I've been thinking that I may do something weird and different with it. You know how 99% of all websites scroll up and down? Well, I was thinking about making the next design of the site ONLY scroll horizontally. I wonder how many people that would confuse or annoy.

Be vewy vewy qwuiet. We're sewrching fowr wirewess networks...

Progress continues on the house. They poured the concrete slab yesterday. The lumber for the frame of our house still hasn't arrived. It looks like we're waiting for that and when it arrives, I imagine they'll begin constructing the first floor flooring and then the roof. The rest of my networking supplies have arrived, so I'm ready to roll as soon as the electricians finish their work. On a similar note, I've registered for yet another .Mac account (no, I'm not paying for it..it's a free 60-day trial account) where I'm posting a photo gallery from the photos that we take up at our new house. Check it now, and check it often. I'll probably be adding photos to it almost every day for the next month and a half.

Olivia and I had a fun experience tonight after getting some grub at Mexico Restaurant: We went sniffing around pricey west-end neighborhoods for 802.11 wireless networks. How did we do this? I used my PowerBook (with AirPort card installed) and a free piece of software called "MacStumbler". MacStumbler is the Mac version of a free piece of PC software called NetStumbler. While you have the program open, it constantly scans for wireless networks and notifies you when it finds one. It gives you a ton of information about each LAN too, like which company makes the access point, signal strength, and if encryption (WEP) is turned on or not. Very cool program. So, basically, it just sits there and sniffs until you tell it not to. So, what did we find? How about this: We found 32 wireless networks in about 5 or 6 different neighborhoods. Of those 32 networks, only 7 of them had WEP encryption enabled. The rest? Wide open. Wide open enough that we literally sat out in front of their house and surfed the Internet using their connection. It was pretty cool. Click the graphic on the right to see a screenshot of some of the networks that we found. If you find that you have some extra time on your hands this week, I HIGHLY recommend that you grab your laptop and go sniff some wireless LANs. By the way, we performed this same test downtown at work the other day and found some 17 wireless networks in downtown Richmond..only 3 or 4 of them had WEP enabled. Amazing.

Rack & Roll!

The above two photos show the exciting events from today:

All of the PVC piping appears to be complete for the first floor and they have now filled our foundation with gravel. Presumably, the next step will be to pour concrete over the gravel. Pretty cool.

The other photo shows my network rack and patch panel that I will be installing in the house. Thanks to Eric for saving me a bundle on this stuff. My 24-port Netgear rack-mount switch came in yesterday and my cable and other network supplies should be here early next week. We'll all ready to roll with the network now!

Get on da floh'!

Pretty boring day out at the houses. It didn't look like they made any progress today. They were, however, still very hard at work at 8:00PM on building D's 2nd story floor. We stood at watched as they craned the complete floor up on top of the first floor framing. Pretty neat.

This past weekend was a blast in Bridgewater. We played lots of Koosh volleyball, ate some good home cookin' and relaxed with family. Always a good time. :)

MacWorld New York starts tomorrow. Tommy's leaving this afternoon to catch his flight to New York. Obviously, I'm very jealous. Not quite sure what will be announced at tomorrow's big event, but it should be an exciting time. I'm thinking I might just head down to the Byrd Theater to watch a live satellite broadcast of the keynote.

Lastly, I just want to say HALLLEUJIAH! The reason for this outburst? Yesterday, Microsoft released their Palm conduits for Entourage for OS X. This has been the missing link in my email/PDA/Palm situation for many months now. Now that I can synchronize Entourage (for X) with my Visor, I can finally start USING Entourage for X. What does this mean? it means that i don't have to use Entourage in Classic anymore. It means that i don't even need to load the (CPU-hogging, still very buggy) classic environment anymore. YAY! Bye bye, OS9!

Review, drill, some foundation

Well, today was a pretty exciting day. I had my review this afternoon with my boss, Glen. The review was (again) very relaxed and informal. That's what I really enjoy about working with Glen (and the rest of the ITS staff for that matter!) The review was favorable and although we won't be getting any raises right now, it energized me a bit. It reassured me that I'm doing a good job at what I do and that I have a bright future in the department if I stick around.

After work, Olivia and I made our (now daily) trip over to the house. I didn't expect there to be any work done for the simple reason that I figured the concrete footers that were poured yesterday would need more time to harden before they did anything else. I was wrong. They had already started laying cinderblock and some brick on top of the footers. Wow! Standing in the middle of our "space" (now outlined by a trench), we both commented that it made our house feel and look really small. Kinda scary small, even. Work is continuing at a rapid pace on the other buildings. Most of the units in building B have cabinets and some flooring, both units C and Q are well on their way to being totally framed, while the roofers began constructing the roof for building D today and will probably have it ready to frame by the beginning of next week. That leaves us, E, the next in line to get a floor, etc.

After drooling over our concrete, we went to the mall. Olivia wanted to finally use her fingernail manicure gift certificate that I gave her for Christmas. We ended up in Sears while we were waiting for her appointment and I bought a really nice Craftsman drill and a set of drill bits. I have been wanting to buy a drill for a while, but never really knew what was good and what wasn't. Thanks to my good friend Eric for educating me on the ins and outs of cordless drills. I purchased a Craftsman 14.4V cordless drill, complete with 2 battery packs and a recharger. VERY nice. And..the whole deal cost me $63. NOT BAD.

Well, we've got a staff meeting early tomorrow morning, so I gotta get to bed. Early for me! This weekend, we head to Bridgewater (Olivia, Jennifer, and me) for a belated July 4th family cookout shin-dig. Should be lots o' fun!

We've got concrete!

(Click the image for a larger view. The red arrow indicates approx. where our front door will be. Cool!)

Well, the trenches are dug and the footers are poured. Amazing. I didn't think we'd see this until later this week, if then!

The pre-construction meeting went well. Everything checked out OK as far as the specs (options, etc.) they have for our house. My question about wiring the house was deferred to the guy who will be taking over managing the job site soon. His name is Patrick. Sascha and Mike (the head contractor guy we spoke with today in our meeting) indicated that Ryan is stricter now than they used to be about letting people run cables inthe house before they put the drywall up. They're afraid that we may damage their work while we're running our cables, or hurt our selves. I assured them that we will be very careful, but they said that i will need to ask Patrick about this. I'm a little scared that they won't let us do it. Mike mentioned, however, that we can still run ethernet once we move in, it might just be a little harder to do. Mike will actually be living two doors down from us, so that's pretty cool. He said that if we ever need any help with anything he'd be around.

Pre-Construction Meeting

Remember how I reported here a couple days ago that we figured we'd hear from the Ryan Homes people that we'd be having our Pre-construction meeting in the next couple weeks? Well, we heard from them. The meeting is tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1pm. Yippie!

This is the meeting where we double-check that the options that we chose are correct and we can also ask the contractor any questions that we may have. I know my biggest question will be "Can I wire this joint?" Hopefully the answer will be Yes, and...I'm not sure what if they say no. They let Eric wire his house..so...I should be allowed, too....right?

I'm pretty exctied about the meeting. It officially marks the beginning of the building of our house. I expect that they'll break ground later this week or early next week.

Sheesh. All of the waiting. All of the suspense. All of the nail-biting. Here we are. Wow, are we really doing this?

Look for LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of photos coming up in the next few weeks. I'm sure we'll be visiting the house every day and taking butt-loads of photos.

We got flags!

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What does this mean? It means that our land has been surveyed and they will break ground on our building probably in the next week or so. It means that the excitement starts NOW. :)

Truck Pics and Bad News

Here's the photos I took at Carlisle this weekend. Great show, as always.

Also, we found out today that pay raises are being postponed until further notice for this year. So much for something (short term) to look forward to. :(