Crazy blackbird attacks

Yesterday, I woke up with one of those stupid 1-day colds I get once in a while. I felt horrible, and by noon I needed meds. I pack up and drive to the Safeway. I remember to go to the Starbucks nearby, and just as I get out of the place, something scratches my head very briefly. Everybody around me is snickering.

I look around, see nobody. I look puzzled to the cute girl sitting at a table, doing her assignments. She smiles, points to somewhere in the air and says there is a bird defending a nest.

Google Maps updated

Google has updated the satellite images for Ninole! Here is a link link to the house. Notice the incredibly red roof, and the pyramid look (only from space…).

Back to the Mainland

The dice are cast, and the house is clean. From a process perspective, Wells Fargo says they just need the appraisal and the insurance policy, and then they can convert the loan. The appraiser is going to show on Saturday, while I am still waiting on Brad to come through with the final inspection (which was due out two months ago) to be able to get an insurance policy.

Sigh. Still a dependency on Brad. This time, it should be the last one. From now on, I can build on my own.

Sweaty

Sitting here in front of the computer, with sweaty eyebrows and wet clothes on a rainy Saturday morning.

It’s done. I have still some cleanup to do, but most of the work is completed. The bathrooms are tiled, grouted, caulked, and sealed and look positively gorgeous (waiting for the sun to take pics). The house is cleaned up, and I even found the time to wash some of the windows (i.e. the ones that didn’t force me to climb on the roof). Most importantly, I have talked with the appraiser, who is going to come next Saturday. She seemed to have a much nicer attitude than the other lady I talked with a month ago – she was upset because the site was not cleaned up and thought that was reason enough not the give me a loan.

Building your own juggling balls

I always wanted to learn how to juggle. Daniel, a friend of mine, is really good at it, and it’s one of those skills that stay with you and that give you something to do when you are bored (not that that ever happens).

I once went to Cirque du Soleil, and they sold juggling balls in three packs. I bought a set, leather balls filles with lightweight material. I juggled them for a while when in Hawaii, but never got good with them. I can juggle six throws easily, but eight is still elusive.

Cane spider in the car

Have you ever seen a cane spider? They are humongous spiders (well, maybe four inches wide) that live in the grass, actively hunt for food, carry their litter of eggs in a sack on their belly, and otherwise bother me when I have to pee in the grass or, as of lately, in the car.

Someone mentioned there was a cane spider in the car. I paid no attention, having seen none. Tonight, as I was leaving the Home Depot, I noticed something yellowish on the driver’s seat side, but before I could do anything about it, it was gone, crawled up in the console.

Surviving a Catastrophic IMAP (Cyrus) Crash

In a similar post I described what to do in case your IMAP server crashes and it still behaves well. This time, though, Cyrus crashed and burned beyond recognition, and there was nothing I could do to save the databases. All utilities in the books simply told me the db files were corrupt, and I should run recovery. I ran recovery, and nothing happened…

This time I found a two-way approach helped a lot: first, I instituted nightly backups of my email server, and keep the last three days, three weeks, and three months on file. I created a script (attached below) in TCL to do the trick.

Blink! (M. Gladwell)

The Tipping Point was already a real pleasure, and (I won’t make you wait for the verdict) Blink! is even more coherent.

Malcom Gladwell, well respected author for the New Yorker, decides to go out and explore the power of intuitive thinking. Unlike his first big success, this book talks about one thing only, and succeeds in captivating with concrete examples.

Of course, this captivation is entirely of desire: we want to be dazzled by our own ability to understand things we can’t possibly understand, and now we have a logical reason to do so.

Loser

See, it wasn’t too bad that I didn’t get to take a lot of pictures last time: nothing happened at Hau`Oli in the past two weeks. Brad must have forgotten to show up, must have given up on the house, and now I have to figure out who is going to do the remaining little pieces.

There is a bunch to do. To get through final, I suppose:

• One or all of the bathrooms have to be tiled
• The door handles have to be put on
• The doors to the lanai have to be lockable

To get the house through a clean appraisal:

Running with Scissors (A. Burroughs)

Renowned because of the shocking content, this book was an excellent follow up on Frey’s {moscontentlink:A Million Little Pieces}. Another crazy autobiography, this time of the kid of a psychotic mother who is brought up by the crazy family of the mother’s shrink.

Now, the premise sounds interesting, and there are lots of sound bites and stories that are captivating and novel. The mother will formally hand over guardianship over her only son to the psychologist; the psychologist’s family is as crazy as any of the patients; and the little kid discovers at 13 that gay sex is not all what he thought it to be.