Google deletes messages from my spam folder that are over 30 days old. Currently the folder contains 8,108 messages, for an average of about 270 spam emails per day.

I'm wondering where my Google Spamometer lies in comparison to other people's email addresses? My mouser.org email address is plastered all over the older sections of my website, made at a time when spam wasn't a problem and no attempts to disguise the address from spam harvesting robots was made. So I imagine I get a fair amount compared to the average user. How many messages are in your gmail spam folder? (sorry about the lack of comments, that hussy Wilke is supposed to be hooking us up with some spangly new comment engine RSN. just email me)

Three more spam emails were tallied during the time it took me to type this.

15 hours, 3 gallons of paint, and 4 rolls of blue tape later, my living room is now gray. Still needs the odd touch-up here and there, but the bulk of the work is done. This is one step closer to a home theater (and being able to unpack some of the stuff that needs to go into that room).

For those of your who aren't complete geeks, the title of this post is the units equivalent of one Joule per kilogram, or, as we say in the nuclear engineering community, 1 Gray. Little joke, there. But I find it unintuitive that a measurement of energy deposition in matter can be expressed in area per square second. Sometimes, using the right units can transform the completely inscrutable into something quite simple. But no unit transformations known to man can explain why I'm writing this rubbish. Time for bed.

The product itself is weird enough, but Engadget's headline is even better:

SolidAlliance coughs up 1GB of USB Horse Mackerel

I now have DSL service at my house. A highly-skilled Covad employee arrived at my house this morning and performed a "professional installation," which I was unable to opt out of.

On the one hand, I was told beforehand what the charge would be and for some reason agreed to pay it. On the other hand, I was told that the exorbitant cost was the result of some mystical and highly technical procedure that had to be performed by a high priest of Covad, which mere mortals such as myself could not possibly comprehend. When the service technician arrived this morning, he plugged the router into the wall, put an ethernet cable in it, and connected the other end to his laptop. The pre-configured settings of the router worked just fine. We tested it on my laptop as well, with a similar result. That was it for my professional installation. It lasted approximately three minutes and cost me roughly $75 per minute.

I was livid, naturally.

I had a few rounds of email back-and-forth with the ISP, during which they became quite defensive and their attitude was made clear: I agreed to pay the price, as per the signed contract, so it doesn't matter what they said the money was for.

I convinced Minesh not to use the same ISP, which I'm sure will cost them well over $225 in the long run. Then I flamed them forcefully on DSLreports.com, a sort of Better Business Bureau for DSL providers. If they hadn't given me nothing but utter bullshit when I complained this morning, and been rather condescending about it, they'd be making more money right now. For now, I'm going to spend some of my 21 day grace period, during which I can cancel my contract at any time, looking for a provider who has a bit better sense of customer satisfaction.

Sorry for the lack of updates; phone and DSL service at the old place has been cut off, and I won't be up and running with service at the new place for at least another week.

I'm basically fully moved in at this point. I have a couple of random things to move over, but the new house is fully armed and operational. The great gutting of the living room is going well. Soon there will be home theater, and it will be good. And angels will sing.

The electrical panel replacement took place the day after I closed on the house, so I now have reasonable and extensible electrical service coming into the house. Today the phone company came by and replaced the ancient phone demarcation terminal on the house (which was really just four screw terminals in a cheesy non-weather-tight plastic box) with a proper CLI. They said the wire connecting my house to the nearest junction box (which is basically in my back yard anyway) was no longer up to spec, so they're going to replace it as well. In the meantime, they strung a nice fat cable across my yard. So there's some work to be done there, but in the meantime my phone service up to the CLI is working and up-to-date. The subscriber lines shall be digital, and yea they shall be asynchronous. For it has been foretold that there will be a great flowing of bits.

So I was vacuuming some random spider webs that had accumulated in the ceiling corners during the 10 month vacancy at my house... and knocked a big piece of ceiling trim down. Turns out it wasn't nailed in or glued or anything. They cut it to fit snugly and just left it hanging there. Nice.

Mark your calendars, there are some important holidays coming up. For starters, Wednesday is Pi day. I'll be wearing my Pi T-shirt, Pi-apron, and baking a pie in my Pi pie plate. Yum. Thursday is the ides of March; watch out for anyone you know named Brutus. Yes, him too. Saturday is St. Patty's day, wherein everyone should make an attempt to eat Scottish Eggs, possibly the least healthy food item ever invented. It's basically a hard boiled egg wrapped in a meatball. But man are they good.

I seem to own a large flat panel LCD all of the sudden. That's going to bite me in the ass when mortgage payment #1 comes up here in about 2 weeks...

Let's see... what else. Aside from moving, the only thing of note I've done lately is some mad geocaching on Saturday. I left my house at 5:30am for a marathon day of caching in Santa Fe. Collected 36 caches in one day, nearly doubling my previous record. This included several caches done on foot while my truck was in the shop for service. That evening there was an event cache at the SF Brewery, which was fun. Met lots of of the heavy hitters of Santa Fe geocaching and made some new friends. Did my first night cache, with a crowd of about 3,000 people. It was a mess. Anyway I had fun.

I closed on the house Wednesday afternoon and it's all mine.

Since then, I've been making numerous trips there and back with Minesh, using our twin Tacomas to transport the bulk of my stuff. I was planning on having a bunch of people help me move tomorrow (Saturday), but we've basically moved almost all of the bulky/heavy stuff that requires more than one person to move. Tomorrow we're going to try to figure out how to move my mattress (the one item too large for the Tacomas (with the camper shells on, anyway)) and then I will officially change Mouser HQ over from Los Alamos to White Rock.

The cats are really freaking out due to the sudden lack of furniture in my apartment. They're going to really go ape when I bring them down to the house this weekend.

I've made some baby steps towards my goal of structured wiring in the house. So far, this consists of ripping out the baseboard along one wall, cutting the drywall behind it, and drilling a 2" hole in the top plate of the wall for a future conduit install. Cutting drywall with a circular saw, by the way, makes an incredible mess. This prompted today's purchase of a sweet shop vac.

And, as required by local statutes, I air-guitared it.

Badass.

I apologize for the lack of posts here; I don't yet have internet available in my new house, and I don't have anywhere to sit in my apartment, so there's isn't much computer usage going on. Also, I left the SLR down in White Rock with all the real pictures of the interior. Some day...