So much for convenience

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Mar 272006
 

I noted my annoyance at the old online catalog for APL earlier this year. The catalog no longer keeps banker’s hours, which is nice, but the new catalog breaks my LibraryLookup bookmarklet and the extensive research (10 minutes) that I spent trying to see if I could get it to work were for naught. Anybody else tried getting Jon Udell’s glorious hack to work with this particular brand of online catalog? Am I going to have to go back to doing searches by hand? The horror. I wish I’d realized that this was broken last week as I had a meeting that included the librarian for my local branch of APL. I need to send her an e-mail anyway, now I have two reasons.

P.S. My research led me to the interesting little tidbit that Jon Udell was a panellist at SXSW 2004 on the merits of his cool little hack. I’m sorry I missed out on that one.

 Posted by on March 27, 2006 at 11:57 am
Mar 272006
 

We started work on remodeling our downstairs bathroom. Well, the contractor started work, I wrote a check for half of his original estimate. Since starting at 8am, I’ve already received two calls from The Wife.

The first was to tell me that pretty much all of the framing behind our shower is rotted. This isn’t surprising as we’ve known for quite some time that the faucet/knob combo was leaking and that the grout between the tiles was missing in several places. We’ve been putting off doing anything about it until we had the time and cash to do the whole bathroom. Longtime readers will note that the one year anniversary of the flood just passed.

The second call was to tell me that the bush that’s immediately outside the bathroom window is growing roots into the foundation, so we’ll need to rip it out. I’ve been trimming it back from the roof for the past umpteen years anyway. I would’ve logged a third call about the fire ant mound in the water meter, but I already knew about that from before I left.

We spent all day yesterday rearranging and weeding through stuff in the kids’ rooms in addition to clearing out the downstairs bathroom in preparation for the remodel which we expect will probably take most of April to complete. Sounds like this coming weekend will be spent trying to get the backyard into some sort of reasonable shape. Ahhhh…homeownership.

Which reminds me. As soon as I have time, I’m on a mission against the neighbors across the street. This is the house that had been occupied by several St. Edward’s students and pseudo-students. It’s now housed by an assortment of christian dudes. They’re generally nice enough fellows, but the sheer number in the house leads to street parking issues. Our driveway’s on a hill and they’re always parking a car directly across from the driveway. This is minorly annoying, but last night, they had a bunch of people over until roughly 11pm. One car parked such that the entire back half was blocking our driveway. If we had needed to back the van out for whatever reason, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. I mentioned it to two different people entering the house, including one that I’m pretty sure lives there. Nobody moved the car until they all left. That’s some rude shit and I won’t forget it. Is there a city ordinance limiting the number of people that can live in a rental based on the size of the house? If so, what is it?

 Posted by on March 27, 2006 at 10:56 am