Author: cdwan

Got the lumber delivered yesterday. A dude drove up in an 18-wheeler, parked, climbed in the back, and drove out with our wood and concrete on a pallet. Put it in the driveway, handed me a piece of paper, and then drove away.

I coated both sides of the wood with sealant, then Jen and I spent the evening and this morning screwing it into place. So gratifying. The only issue is that at the end, we’re a little misaligned. Going to buy an 8″ piece of decking (the rest is 6″) to cover the difference. It will overhang by a little more than an inch at one end, and maybe a quarter inch at the other. Nobody will care.

Finalized the heating costs from last year too: We burned 868 gallons of heating oil this year, compared with 915 last year. It cost $2398, rather than $1479. Yes, indeedy, oil has gotten a lot more expensive. In July of 2004, we paid $1.40 per gallon. This year we had a locked in price of $2.50, and I just locked in next year at $3. Ouch.

The MN zoo needs to airlift a turtle. Where is this sea turtle coming from? Why, the Sea Turtle Hospital in Topsail, North Carolina, of course!

AOL Searchers identity revealed

excerpts

Some dumb kid got her hand bitten by the meercats at the MN zoo, and her parents refused to give her the rabies shots, so instead the meercats had to be euthanized to test them for rabies.

The whole family of meercats died because (a) the parents didn’t keep their kid out of the enclosure (which I’ve seen … it would be tricky to get in) and (b) because they would rather slaughter a whole family of animals than give little precious a series of shots. End result: The meercats didn’t have rabies. They died for nothing.

The humans should be euthanized. Not the meercats. I want that girl’s parents put down.

This makes me want to cry. I have pictures of those meercats.

I’ve been talking about the deck. Here are some pictures.

Been a while since I posted random links. Of course, all of them are ganked from jwz. Duh.

The funny

In which my whining at my registry company reaches a new peak

So, my web site is totally FUBAR now. I’ve spent a couple of hours on the phone bouncing between The old resistrar and the new one, and it will hopefully be resolved in the next several days.

I allowed my registration with Register.com to expire, before initiating the transfer to Godaddy.com. Once the registration expired, register.com moved all my records into an “expired” hell. This meant that the perfectly functional server I have sitting around to serve web pages and email is *still there*, it’s just that the internet doesn’t know how to route requests to it.

What I *should* have done at that point was to cough up the $35 to re-up my registration and make it “active” again. Then, I could have initiated a transfer with the thing in a working state. Instead, I started the transfer while it was FUBAR. Apparently, once you initiate a transfer, nobody can mess with the name servers until the transfer is complete. Further, transfers take “5 to 7 days, as clearly shown in the service agreement, sir” to complete. So, my server is in purgatory until that penalty time has elapsed.

Nobody at either company can tell me exactly what is being done that requires a wait of 5 to 7 days. Is it that only Teresa has the keys, and she’s only in on Tuesdays? Gah. I got irritable enough to play dumb and ask the guy on the phone if transferring the domain involved, like, shipping something on a truck … and if I could pay for overnight shipping or something. He was amused, but said “no, it takes 5 to 7 days, sir.”

Gah. Useless. At least I bought $600 worth of lumber for the deck. It gets delivered on Wed.

dwan.org suffered a catastrophic lack of attention over the weekend. I’m straightening it out with the hosting company now, but all email and web services there are offline for the moment.

Should be back within 24 hours.

Yesterday, redmed and I went after the deck, like a rat terrier going after rats, except in a more focused and obsessive compulsive way. The decking is gone, the steps are going, and two support posts have been set in 320lbs of concrete. We’re re-supporting the deck now that we’ve seen what was holding it up before.

Today, we go to Home Despot, buy a bunch of pressure treated lumber, and go wild trying to make it so that we have a deck again when we wake up on Monday.

See August 6, 2006