This is what the internet is for: pen reviews handwritten with the reviewed pens. I love it. I have to get a Pilot G-2 1.0mm Black and a Zebra Sarasa Clip 0.4mm (Black) now.

Some BEFORE and CURRENT photos of the first floor. AFTER photos are a long ways away.

In the CURRENT shots the original external wall to the house is exposed. Around the 1920s the house was expanded backwards into its lot— and apparently they just framed the back wall of the house into the middle of the house! Crazy. We’re going to span that chunk of brick with a steel beam to allow us to open the space wide up.

Photos below after the jump.

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Marty says:

Hey - how about some more pics of the new place? I’m dying to see it. I’d also love to live vicariously through you with a renovation blog story line, now that I’m 50% of the way done with mine…

The only completed project so far is the basement. A little “parging” and it’s gone from “Put the lotion in the basket” to “alien autopsy”. Before and after shots below:

Take the whole thing AND the kitchen sink!

Our new house has a never used builders kitchen that we’re going to tear out and replace. We hate to see the new hardware, granite-tops and cabinets go to waste.

For $500 you can have the new cabinets (w/under cabinet lighting), new sink (w/garbage disposal) and new granite top. Appliances NOT included (they’ve already hit the dumpster).

Everything must go with just a raw empty space left. Cabinets have already been uninstalled and just need carting away.

More photos and cabinet plans below.

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A quick sketch of the house we’re buying. It’s a classic Philadelphia Trinity townhouse that’s been expanded deeper into its lot. Surprisingly, it has a normal, straight staircase unlike most Trinities in the area. Three floors and a basement— 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths with a roof deck and a tiny little yard. It couldn’t be in a better neighborhood— a block from Fitler Square, 100 feet from a PhillyCarShare lot, and a seven minute walk for me to work. We plan to rehab quite a bit with new bathrooms and kitchen… so I don’t expect to actually live in it until mid-summer.

We completed the inspection yesterday and {fingers crossed} we go to settlement on Feb 29th. Settling on a day that only happens once every four years… I’m sure that’s not going to screw up a mortgage payment one day.

Jack has a little brother! Congrats Money and Patty!

After 14 years of renting… I think I just bought a house.

Anya Regan Boghosian born 2/5/08 (National Pancake Day). Congratulations Lloyd & Lorraine!

An apartment on the 5th floor of our building had a fire last night. We live on the 6th floor and missed the sprinkler water damage that flooded all the floors below the fifth. It was just a shock getting forced out of the building at 8:30pm on a sunday night and not getting back in until well after 10.

I had big hopes for the Flight of the Conchords, but I get the feeling their best material was used up in the first three episodes. The rest of the episodes have been moderately funny— but the songs haven’t come close to these:

• Think About It
• Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros
• Most Beautiful Girl in the Room
• Robots (The Humans Are Dead)

I’ve had Think About It stuck in my head for weeks… “There’s people on the street getting diseases from monkeys…”

Much later in the season than usual, I'm headed to Coney Island for the tenth annual (and possibly final) David Lloyd Coney Island Classic. It will be interesting to see how much of old Coney Island is still left after a summer of dismantling.

As over photoshopped as these pics look-- there not. These were taken at the May 2005 DLCIC during the most apocalyptic post storm sun-set ever. It was unbelievable. The same day an airplane crashed on the beach in front of us.

Some previous Coney Island snaps:

• The Plunge
• Live Entertainment for the Hole Family
• Not to scale
• On The Money
• Serpentina

On the train to the Jacob Javitts Center for the big FS Keynote presentation. I’m feeling lucky we won’t have any technical difficulties.

FS is giving a 3 hour seminar at the Fancy Food Show tomorrow. I've just put the wraps on their 278MB Keynote presentation that is chocked full of embedded video and clips. By far the largest slideshow I've ever built. Thanks to Keynote (and plenty of good content), it's going to be a show-stopper.

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

My nephew is number 25 in line at the King of Prussia store. There's about 150 lined up in total.

The sixth borough is shrinking. Philadelphia has moved from the nation's 5th largest city to the 6th and from fourth to fifth on the list of the nation's largest metropolitan areas.

Uncle Jack 1931-2007. The coolest uncle any boy could have. We’ll miss you, very much.

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Thank you.

We flew to Paris with all of Fishbone sitting just a few seats away. Huge CD release party in Switzerland. I guess they're big in the old world.

A couple of months ago Neil and I were chatting about how Nike should have an API to allow you to publish your Nike+ run stats on your own site. I knew it was only a matter of time until someone started parsing the iPod's XML run data and did something with it. Runometer.com is a great start. I'm sure if your one of those GPS route runners, it's perfect for you.

Here's my stats. I only uploaded my last month of runs... Runometer needs a bulk upload feature. I'll try and keep it up to date. (moved below the fold... )

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Comments are enabled again. I’m trying out a new solution I hope will solve my blog comment spam problem. Just to be safe— I’m still moderating all comments.

The upgrade is done (more or less) and everything has gone smoothly. Unfortunately I’m going to have to keep the old server around as EMC (Dantz) hasn’t got their shit together to release a Universal Binary version of Retrospect. I’d prefer not to run my daily tape backups with Rosetta.

Zoom. I’ve just migrated this server from the client version of OS X 10.4 to the server version. I’ve also bumped up the hardware a bit.

Things might be a little rough as I finish off the migration. I had forgotten what a bear it is to get DBI::MySql installed.

This blog has been a little neglected for the last two months or so. I’ve been extremely busy with countless little projects, and a lot has fallen through the cracks as a result. Last week’s required security patch for movabletype finally got me to focus on this site and upgrade to 3.3. The upgrade sort of went smoothly. I’ve finally worked the last kinks out of my dated and tired old templates.

Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll begin to post here again— and maybe I’ll finally find time to start taking photos again.

The lighting Doodle Project

Bethany Beach, DE 2006

The Philly’s flood waters are rising. Our office has been evacuated— the management received a call from the Army Corps of Engineers that they will be releasing damns up river. They expect the Schuylkill to rise another 4 feet. XO, Qwest and Level3 run backbone switches in our building- they’ve begun sand-bagging the doors. The word is that the river will crest at 11pm tonight.

It’s currently low-tide and the Schuylkill River has already begun to break it’s banks from all the rain. The flooding has begun washing away the new Schuylkill Banks Park landscaping. We’re expecting our office’s storage space (along with the XO and Qwest datacenters and switches) in the basement of the Marketplace Design Center to go under water in the next day as upstate New York rivers flood and drain into the Susquehanna and Schuylkill. The debris clusters in the river (and the mud color) is amazing.

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A botched telephone number port with Vonage (from March) has resulted in countless hours either on hold or chatting with someone in Bangladesh. Their tier one support is useless. Escaltion to tier 2 takes almost an hour on hold— and they have no idea why you called.

Vonage customer service is terrible. I can see why the IPO tanked. They’ve never turned a profit— and the support is so bad they’re going to start hemorrhaging users to the bigger VOIP providers like AT&T and Comcast.

Searching for a way to talk to an American (or Canadian) support person directly, I stumbled upon this list: How to get a live customer service person in the US. The Vonage support number (888-250-1799) bypassed India and connected me directly to a management response team member in New Jersey. It’s amazing how fast a customer problem can be solved when both parties have a solid grasp of the English language.

Clothing for Reality TV shows. Genius.

Prison wine. Mmm… good!

Yesterday wasn’t Fat Tuesday, and this week isn’t Mardi Gras/Carnival. And to think what I did for beads yesterday…

Quick post before we leave— not only was the family stone pictured on the front page of a local paper— but my 12 year old nephew Sam provided a sweet sound bite on curling:

“It’s a fun sport,” says the Wayne resident. “More people should play it.”

Indeed. Sam’s complete 15 minutes of fame for the Philadelphia Curling Club is available here (350k PDF). You can also get psyched up for curling at the winter olympics with HammerFall’s music video (.mov). They rock. So hard.

Full Disclosure: I personally haven’t curled since I was 16. The rest of the family are still quite active.

Dear Shareholder,

We are writing to let you know that the IRS1099-DIV Tax Forms reporting dividends you received in 2005 were inadvertently sent to fellow holders of depositary receipts, instead of to you. The 1099-DIV Forms included your name, address, account number, social security number and the amount of your 2005 dividends.(click for full size letter)

My father received this on the 30th. Not only is his name, address, account number, social security number out in the wild— but they also refuse to provide replacements for his missing 1099-DIVs (needed for 2005 taxes).

Citibank
180 days of identity monitoring: Free.
Having your identity and account numbers blindly mailed to strangers: Priceless.

Voice over of Bill Gate’s CES presentation of the “revolutionary new features” in Windows Vista… applied to an OS X demo. Funny stuff.

5 gallons of water-cooler water broken on the office floor. Doh.

Machine guns mounted on an inflatable boat. I hope no-one shoots back.

Directing another photo shoot today. This time at the beach. It’s been a busy two weeks. Hopefully I’ll get back to regular posting soon. Work and blogging don’t mix well.

The bird flu has reached Europe. During Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend we stumbled upon 4 dead ducks on the shore of Lake Ontario. 33 years of going there, I’ve never seen a dead duck. Top news story on Yahoo: Veterinary workers place a dead duck in a plastic bag after suspicion of bird flu disease. I’m wondering if there’s more to the dead ducks on the beach than coincidence.

This blog has been stagnant for the last few weeks. All of September my D100 has been at Nikon for repairs. I’ve been extremely busy with assorted projects, a charity event last Wednesday and three weeks of building Keynote presentations for Food Shelter. On top of all of this, I’ve been sick as a dog. I think I’m finally kicking what felt like the bird flu.

Friday we’re headed to The County for Canadian Thanksgiving. I’ll be back on Tuesday afternoon. When I get everything under control— I’m hoping to help Neil with some projects… and maybe I’ll finally be able to devote some time to revamping this site and my portfolio. There never seems to be enough time these days.

Billions of dollars have been spent since 9/11 to plan for catastrophic events in metropolitan areas. What’s the result? It takes 5 days to evacuate the population of a mid-size city. A mid-sized city with decent roads. Philly— the fifth largest city in the U.S.— has a tiny 2-lane-in-both-direction expressway (76). There’s no way it’s going to be able to handle an evacuation. Do you think the GW Bridge and the tunnels are going to handle the millions trying to escape New York? Hasn’t anyone figured these details out yet?

Terrorist attacks don’t build over the Atlantic and give you a week notice before they hit. What have they been doing? Billions spent on Homeland Security. Billions spent on FEMA first responders. $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans. Sunday we’ll find that another $100 billion is needed to rebuild Houston and Galveston. Where’s all this money coming from? Not from tax breaks.

$200+ billion to plunge Iraq into civil war and ultimately build another Iran (Islamic Fundamentalist regime). I’m thinking that probably wasn’t the best investment.

I’m still trying to work out the obscure bug that has hampered my blog posting. SixApart support has been excellent. I’m very impressed- my support ticket has been elevated to the top!

Also, for anyone that hasn’t heard— here’s an update on New Orleans update from Tracy:

all of my family has evacuated new orleans and are safe. everyone is in different locations throughout the south. it is very difficult to keep in touch with everyone due to the down cell towers and overload of the system that is still in place. it is much easier for my family and friends to get in touch with me than for me to get through to them. therefore, i am the contact for my family - everyone must check in at least once a day & update me on their situation.

returning to new orleans and the metro area at this point is impossible, and illegal. everyone that remained is now being physically forced to leave. the flood waters are rising due to levee breaks and a minimum of 9 feet of water is expected EVERYWHERE on the eastbank (new orleans, metairie, kenner, etc.) the westbank, where my mom & jerry live, has much less water. there home has only minimal wind damage considering the storm that hit. however, no one is being allowed back. the clean-up and rescue efforts will take weeks, if not months, before the homes are inhabitable and power/water services are restored.

i am hoping that my sister and brother will be up soon to stay with us for a while. we are working on that. they are at this point homeless and jobless. my mom and jerry will be staying with a friend in baton rouge. everyone is still trying to figure out what to do!

What Would Jesus Bomb? (via uncrate) I’d also like to know WWJA (Who Would Jesus Assassinate?)

Just unfolding in front of my window. Schuylkill River and Market Street. Very sad. This is the 4th Market Street Bridge jumper I’ve seen in 3 years.

Warning: Graphic images below.

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Another unsuccessful attempt at becoming a property owner. The Chestnut street condo fell through due to a couple of unforeseen circumstances— including the fact that we wouldn’t be able get our furniture into the unit due to some poor design decisions by the developer.

I’m glad we measured everything before we got locked in.

To a de-lux apartment in the sky.

Fish don’t fry in the kitchen;
Beans don’t burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin’
Just to get up that hill.
Now we’re up in the big leagues
Gettin’ our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it’s you and me baby
There ain’t nothin wrong with that.

Movin on up
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

A water main has just broken on Bonsall and Walnut in Center City.

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Doh!