The Empirical Manifesto

In this series:

Sensual Jade Office
Tangerine Kitchen
Purple Living Room
Ivy League Master Bedroom (Sneak Peek)
Ivy League Master Bedroom

Both my parents are always commenting, "Don't overdo it" when I mention some project I'm planning to undertake. I unconsciously verbalize some trite reply because, well, I never go into anything expecting to overdo it.

Saturday would be the exception. I knew the point at which I was doomed to overdo it; 1415. Parks was spending the night with friends and GBZ was at his grandmother's, so the night before I started pruning the trees. The problem with pruning is you can't just prune some - you have to prune all. Additionally, while appearing easy and uncomplicated in my head, it really wasn't.

I have 8 trees in my yard, all of which were either grown to the ground (making mowing around them impossible) or hidden from a dozen little trees which had sprung up around them, choking them out. I have not touched these trees for years, and my house was the embarrassment of the neighborhood. I'm pretty sure if I were my neighbors, I would think I was insane. My yard looked like a Guatemalan rainforest.

I'd bought pruning shears a couple months back thinking I would do some trimming after I mowed the yard one day, but in that oppressive heat I learned I could either mow, or prune - never both on the same hot-as-fuck day. But it was cool weather that night, and I wasn't drinking beer and throwing darts in the garage, which really opened up my evening for other activities. So I started pruning. I started small.

The next morning, after the requisite eight-hours sleep, I clipped my iPod to my hat and walked an hour or so in the cool morning air around the walking path behind the house dodging phantom helicopters. About this time, suzanne1945 showed up to work in the flower bed, so I continued my pruning. And continued my pruning, and continued my pruning. It was much more work than I had anticipated. Not only that, but I discovered the "huge fucking shrubs" surrounding the foundation of my house, wasn't shrub - it was elm, as in elm trees. Gigantic elm trees growing up against my house. I tried to prune those too, but they were far too thick at the trunks once I got to them, and while Hitachi makes many fine chainsaws, none of them are battery-operated to accept the same 18v pack as my hammer-drill, and Heston is the closest town to Newton which rents one, and I certainly wasn't in the market for a gas-powered chainsaw. So my neighbor showed up with his saws-all, and that did the job just fine.

The night before, I'd bemusingly assumed I would let the 8 small piles of branches sit in the yard until they broke down enough I could run them over with the lawnmower as I certainly wasn't going to put them in either the Tiburon or the Billmobile. But by now they were 8 rather large and ominous man-sized huts of thatch. I was at a complete loss as to how to deal with them.

It was now a quarter after two and I'd been outside five hours under the sun in a sleeveless shirt working my ass off. I was hot, tired, and ready to collapse. That's when my neighbor's son showed up in his jacked-up 4x4 quad-cab truck. I palmed him $20 to clear my lawn, knowing it would take both of us - and it did - another hour an a half.

All I'd eaten that day was a couple of bananas along with a shitload of iced tea.

Reaching up over your head while snipping 2-inch branches uses lots of muscles you wouldn't normally exert in such a way. And "snipping" makes it sound easy. It was more like using your arms and chest as the hydraulics in a Jaws of Life rescue machine over and over and over. My legs ached, my knees ached, my back ached, my neck ached, my forearms were spasming, my chest ached, and my biceps felt huge and powerful. I guess that last part was cool, but certainly not at the expense of all the rest.

I very nearly crawled into the bathroom, where I dumped two pounds of epsom salt in the whirlpool tub and spent the next 45-minutes hoping my kids didn't find me dead in it the next day.

The worst however, was yet to come. Even with 800mg of ibuprofen in me, the pain made it impossible to sleep. I wondered how much Vicodin I had - I think two tables of 10/325 I've been saving the last 18-months for such an emergency, but then it was morning and time to mow and weed-eat around the entire corner lot, so probably not a good idea to mix the two. Maybe afterward.

That said, I have managed to transform my house from the laughingstock, to a picture-perfect, well-groomed plot.

I caught up on quite a few household chores. Other than upturning the entire flowerbed with my back, I also completely rearranged the master bedroom, hung curtains, disassembled the PC staging area in my office, and mowed the front and back lawn. At one point, I decided boiling my carcass in the jet tub was no longer a nicety, rather a requirement. Sadly, its been stacked with boxes for the last two years, so created even more work getting it operational, and running it through a rather labor-intensive cleaning cycle.

The end results were, however, fantastic:

With all the epson salt, I emerged feeling like a crustacean

A local copy of my entire iTunes database running in the garage on the Powermac G5; 2x2GHz PPC procs and 3GB RAM running OSX 10.5.8. And of the many circa 2005 Netgear dongles I have laying around the house, I discovered there is an OSX driver for their RealTek chipsets!

Not that I'm going to host any Anna-level events in this garage.

Not shown in the rack are two Dell PowerEdge 2950's (one is running a Win7 remote browserfarm, the other a stupidly overpowered externally-facing openSUSE Minecraft server), an HP DL360 (my kids' internal Win7 Minecraft server), and one of my Itanium boxes - I decided to reinstall HP/UX 11iv3 here at the house as a test box since we don't have any at work.

I also enjoy using the SSH client on my iPhone to send "say" command to the G5 to freak out the kids when they're outside :)

The day after I put the beat down on the Dyson I took it to the garage to vacuum out the car as I was driving to Texas the next day. Funny thing that Dyson, since it was now operating at peak performance, the moment I disengaged the roller and transferred suction to the hose, it collapsed. The hose, it sucked itself shut, and wouldn't open. The vacuum overheated seconds later and powered off. There was simply no fix for an old, pliable hose not collapsing in on itself. So I drove straight to the store.

They were out of the portable Dyson D44 I so envied (drax0r has one at his house, showoff) but they did have one last Shark Rocket, the knock-off equivalent. Seriously, click one of those links so you'll know what I'm talking about; they're handheld dynamos with outrageous reach.

I got it home and did a bang-up job cleaning the car. Weeks later, it was still in the garage. Sunday, after working a full 8-hours on Non-Prod Maintenance (which surprisingly went really, really well) then mowing the lawn, I stood on a chair and managed to vacuum the ceiling fan blades with it. It was the easiest I've ever done that. Then I vacuumed some cobwebs which have been on the kitchen ceiling for the past year or so. I've wondered and wondered how to get cobwebs off the ceiling - vacuuming them off was easy and simple with this.

They even make (sold separately) a keyboard and car detailing kit I'm thinking about ordering, for those tiny, hard to reach to places.

All of a sudden, I'm finding new places around the house to clean!

Vibrancy! Those who desire it sometimes have to work at finding it. The first time I was in this house the walls were a flat gold which sucked life out of the room, and out of your soul. The second time I was in this house the walls were a flat white, which was slightly better than the flat gold from a illumination/soul-sucking perspective. When it was time for a complete transformation however, HIGH-GLOSS PURPLE. The walls practically shimmer in sunlight. I wish I could accurately depict the various and undulating hues this paint reflects dependent upon lighting conditions. The super gloss finish was chosen so the depth of the color wouldn't steal ambient light from the room, rather just borrow it and give it back in a slightly modified way. Also - kids. Dude, they can touch the walls and it won't smudge or discolor. Its the finish of the future.

So now, when my #1 response, "Seriously?" is replied to my statement that my living room is purple, again, I have somewhere to point them. A little girl came in the house the other day looking for her brothers and announced aloud, "WHY IS THE HOUSE PURPLE?" I had to cover my mouth from laughing out loud :)




In this series:

Sensual Jade Office
Tangerine Kitchen
Purple Living Room
Ivy League Master Bedroom

When I lived in England I openly laughed at their screen-door tax, white-picket fence tax, outdoor-spigot-for-a-hose tax, and even a television tax - you weren't allowed to steal the Queen's airwaves. Trip-Trap, trip-trap, trip-trap went Big Billy Goat Gruff. The whole Boston Tea Party and Sheriff of Nottingham were suddenly very real and very current.

And while we certainly have our share of death and taxes in America (I actually wondered on a news alert that said Texas executed its 500th inmate whether they meant since the beginning of time, or just so far this year), what we haven't had is a history of crushing taxes without due process.

So our city councilmen and women, congressmen, and senators have been proposing something with far less baggage than taxes. Fees! Fees are okay :) Fees are expected, and friendly. You wouldn't want to not pay a nominal fee would you? Fees for this and fees for that. Sure it all adds up, but its not like its a tax, right?

Wrong. Its a tax under the guise of a different name.







So when my renter in Anna called about a leaky hot water heater, I got a reference and called to see about it getting replaced. The guy actually started with the new "permit" Anna required. I thought to myself, "Waterheater permit? That's odd." Until he told me how much the permit was - then it made perfect sense: Money. The Sheriff of Nottingham sits on the Anna City Council and robs from the poor.

Tax. To replace your waterheater. I also appreciate the thoughtfulness that I don't really have to worry about paying this tax until I am already burdened by the cost of parts and labor. The only bright-stop in this $1400 hell was my plumber, a local named Robby at Genzel Plumbing. Awesome tech, really appreciated him.

The house goes on the market July 17th.

Good riddance.

Back in 2007 I purchased this desk from OfficeMax. Or at least, I thought I did. I couldn't find any reference to the story in the annals of this blog, but they shipped the main desk, and the corner piece. They never shipped the smaller attachable side desk. When I contacted them the first time they told me the desk had been discontinued. I communicated with them for awhile explaining how the corner section, in order to be usable, required both pieces and asked them to come pick up the corner piece and refund my money. Those emails remained unanswered.

I have been carting around this corner piece every time I have moved, unopened in the box. Its even gone unsold in three garage sales. Once, I tried to give it away.

Fast forward six years and I'm walking through OfficeMax and saw my existing chair coupled with my existing desk. I thought, "Hey! That looks familiar." I then stopped dead in my tracks and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. It was my full, L-Shaped desk, only...it wasn't. It was very similar - nearly identically so - except the legs were in a different configuration. Same color wood and trim, same glass, different desk. I found the tag and saw it was a different brand, but seeing how all this crap probably comes out of the same Chinese manufacturing plant, that's not so unusual. Mine was branded "Sharper Image" this was branded, "Brenton Studio." I borrowed a tape measure from one of the staff and measured the distance between the retaining screws, then went home and measured mine. They were identical.

I decided on the "full size" desk rather than the smaller side desk, and it was on sale $50 off. My new office - back in Newton - is the fulfillment of my realization back in 2007.

And since Ralph Laruen no longer makes paints, I settled on Valspar Signature "Sensual Jade."









Click for FULL VIEW goodness

In this series:

Sensual Jade Office
Tangerine Kitchen
Purple Living Room
Ivy League Master Bedroom

There are, arguably, lots of different reasons for bad behavior. That of course doesn't excuse the bad behavior - it never does. It just means that generally you suck as a human being - if you use your upbringing or your stressors as an excuse. Maturity, in part, is the ability to identify and over come bad behavior. Some can do it, some cannot. I'm really okay with that. As long as I don't have to interact with you.

But sometimes its inevitable. And even I, it would appear, am still not above being surprised at depths of psychosis of some people. I would have to say that I am generally trusting of everyone. But the longer I live, the less true that actually is. I saw a beautiful blonde at a stoplight several months back and my second thought was, "I wonder if in her world-view she suffers from expectation, having rigid rules which she believes will always apply no matter what external circumstances are?" It made me sad to think of her as unhappy in her needless frustration, always wondering why things never worked out the way she thought they should.

And I certainly didn't expect my renter to spray blood and urine all over the house requiring a Texas-law biohazard cleanup or to stuff a chain into the garbage disposal until it burned out because he believed he should have had a free-month's rent rather than returning his not insubstantial security deposit, which all of a sudden I'm glad we had. Taking the money was a lot easier (and cheaper) than suing him.

We also have a overwhelmingly efficient and magnificent property manager. I wish I was rich enough to give her the money!

I used to say in the lines of this blog too often that in general, I hated people. But the more distanced from them I became and the more I sought the middle path, the more I've let go of it. Its times like these that help bring me back to center - that even though his "needs" may have not been "met" immaturity and bad behavior is the retarded offspring of kissing cousins and probably make up a greater percentage of the general population than even I'd like to admit.

Since I'm in Newton, I snapped a pic of our new rent house for the houses blog, Edifaces: 1969-2009 / A 40-Year Retrospective.

Year #42; House #42.

1982 Dallas, TX - Home

My first "workstation" was in 1982; long before there were multiple color televisions in every room of the house. Ergo, I had to place my TI 99/4A adjacent my 13" B&W. I remember putting it all on a black trunk I created a desk from. My little brother hated watching television on it, but there was really no other choice. I think later my parents actually moved in a folding table for everything to go on.




1989 Rhome, TX - Home

By the time we moved into our second house in Rhome, I had a proper desk and spent most of my formative years writing apple basic programs. I was still very active on the computer as a Senior in 1988, doing most of my projects on it, while my classmates had moved on to things such as the IBM, Jr. *shiver* You can see the corner of the fancy color-monitor I hooked up as a dual-screen back in 1989 I got on sale at Dillard's for $200. What. A. Geek.




1991 Germany - Dorm

Yes, I brought the Apple IIe to Germany with me. A couple of things: There was no real room for it in the dormitory, and I discovered German bier. I don't recall ever using the computer during my tenure in Germany.




1992 England - Dorm

The computer got a lot more use in the UK as I was there quite a bit longer. I wrote volumes of letters to everyone I knew, running that old Okidata dot matrix ribbon dry. This was the beginning of the end, however, for the old Apple IIe. I moved it to Virginia and set it up in my bedroom, but I was roommates with photogoot and he had other ideas how to spend our time. When I wasn't deployed (and I was TDY a lot in Virginia) we were playing games on our Super Nintendo, or partying with hordes of lesbians.




1997 Maple Shade, NJ - Home

I purchased a new computer right before I left the Air Force, and used it to secure a job. When I arrived in New Jersey, I purchased what I was sure was The Ultimate Desk. We had a small one-room apartment at Fox Meadow and Feng shui be damned - there was a lot of thought and creativity that went into crafting a usable and livable space. It appears here that a rear-speaker is placed above the coffee mugs adjacent the couch.




1998 Irving, TX - Home

Turns out that desk didn't like being picked up and moved, even if you disassembled it first. Nonetheless, I must've done that three times or so before she finally just disintegrated. Here is the reassembled monster in the living room of our first house. Later, it was (disassembled, moved & reassembled) relocated to the "office" we made from the spare bedroom once we found we were going to have a baby.




1999 Irving, TX - Home Servers

1999 also marks the first year I got a unix server. My first was the behemoth HP9000/755. It was much heavier than it looks. And because they required their own keyboard mouse, monitor and external disks...I had to rethink the role of the workspace.




2000 Andover, MA - Hotel Stay

drax0r and I were sent to Massachusetts for six and three months respectively. There, we chose to simulate best we could, a working environment. Most of the furniture in my room we moved under the cover of darkness to his room, and set up a rudimentary network, complete with a fileserver, shared printer and scanner, and connected A/V equipment to rip and burn movies from VHS. It was a sight to behold. In fact, unbeknownst to us at the time, two managers were staying in the hotel as well, and had walked by the room when the maid was cleaning it. One said to the other, "See that? That's what we need!"




2001 Boyd, TX - Home + Servers

At my most expansive. Too many monitors, too many discrete boxes requiring their own peripherals. You can see "The Ultimate Desk." It finally gave up the ghost after I pulled all those heavy monitors off it. I traded in the IPX & Rack-mount SPARCstation-2 for my dual-proc SPARCstation-10 and that helped cut down some clutter.




2002 Wichita, KS - Home Server

I took a job in Kansas while living in Texas and commuted for 14-months. During this time I was in used-unix Mecca and finished building out my SPARCstation-10. A buddy in Kansas hung it off his broadband, and unixwolf hosted my DNS. This box was everything to me during this time, keeping me sane during an insane year that also coincided with the birth of my daughter. My Kansas workspace at work was the best ever! I had a Dell XP box, an Ultra-60, and an HP/UX box. I called danzigfried last night to try and scrape up something for this entry, alas, no pictures of that exist.




2004 Boyd, TX - Home Servers

Then I hosted the MUD for about a year when I returned from Kansas. The MUD server had lost its home and was on its way to New Mexico with a 400% increase in hosting fees so I traded in my ADSL for SDSL and with a partnership with dentin and drax0r built-out its new home.




2004 Boyd, TX - Home + Servers

Hanging a head off the back of a rack is something I would turn to again in 2007 for simplicities sake.




2005 Boyd, TX - Home Servers & PC

We moved everything into the formal dining room for awhile. I don't remember why. I think my wife was re-doing the den. As this location had the greatest visibility in the house, she worked double-time on the den project. She hated that the house looked like a data center when you walked in.







2004 Allen, TX - Startup Business

Then drax0r and I became partners in the startup company Wild Damn Texan. Here's a shot where I spent six full months working instead of sleeping or being with my family. It was a hectic time. We later found out we had it easy...




2005 Arlington, TX - Startup Business

...as we later relocated to much tighter quarters! Here's a shot of squackle working some voo-doo for us in a rare Texas visit capture.




2005 Fort Worth, TX - Work PC & Workstation

One of my client sites. This is where I learned of the hell which is knows as Sun Blade 100/150. I heavily modified everything I could in that box to give something even close to performance.




2005 Fort Worth, TX - Temp Home setup at celtmanx's.

Then I sold my house and lived at the Arlington Data Center and with celtmanx as I awaited my new job in STL. Many, many hours playing Star Trek Elite Force here.




2005 Saint Louis, MO - Hotel Stay

I was in this hotel for six months. Thankfully, little mini there is a fully-functioning unix box and the hotel provided me an externally accessible private-IP. I still had my server quark in Dallas at WDT for everything else until that venture dissolved.




2005 Saint Louis, MO - Work

At work, I required a unix box for projects which never came to fruition outside my XP laptop. This was the "office" when I arrived.




2006 Saint Louis, MO - Work

Later, they moved galinda822 and I into our own hard-walled office during a reconfiguration move. Those who used to poke fun of me for running linux (like bigdog_etc) stopped doing so when my blocking tar solution was able to perform >2GB file feats their cut & paste could not.







2006 Saint Louis, MO - Home

My home computer in STL was set up, at one time or another, in every room of the house (or so it seemed). I have those examples, but they're all as equally boring as this, where it ended up: In a basement office my wife & galinda822 created for me while I was away on a business trip.




2007 Anna, TX - Temp Home + Servers at drax0r's.

Moving from STL back into the DFW metroplex three months ahead of my wife required that I travel with all the computers I would need. Here they are set up in drax0r's house, where he graciously hosted us until our house sold and we closed on ours.




2007 Anna, TX - Home Servers

My office today is painted Sun Microsystems colors, and I've culled my collection down to the basics.



2007 Anna, TX - Home Workspace

Simplicity. No visible boxes. Just keyboard, mouse, and speakers. The small size of my office led me to hang everything off the back of the rack, out of sight.



2008 Anna, TX - Home Workspace

Moved my wife in, replaced CRT's with widescreen LCD's, and zip tied all cables to the desk. Moved into the nook to free up wallspace and better utilize the small space in the turret.

2011 Newton, KS - Remote Home Office

Took my job 100% Remote (Work From Home) and moved into the basement of the rent house. (Servers here.)



2012 Wichita, KS - Remote Home Office

MOVED TO WICHITA.



(Click for FULL VIEW goodness)
2013 NEWTON, KS - Remote Home Office

MOVED BACK TO NEWTON.



(Click for FULL VIEW goodness)
2020 ELLINWOOD, KS - Remote Home Office



2020 ELLINWOOD, KS - Basement Server Room

Moved to Ellinwood.

We're in. Closing was the smoothest I've ever attended. Using my bank as my lender was brilliant on many different fronts. First of all, they required zero input from me whatsoever. Second, the rate was unbeatable. The new washer and dryer were delivered and installed yesterday, cable modem (7mb down/512k up) gets installed Friday. Final P.O.D.S. delivery is Friday. My folks are coming up Saturday. drax0r and I have been pinch-hitting for each other, working on the arrangement of both homes. Holmes... Everything is coming together smoothly.

Closing was cheaper than I anticipated and I didn't even touch the $10k loans...those will be going back to you shortly. Thanks again, for everything.

I'm 10.3 miles from my driveway to a parking space at work, averaging 19.5 mpg on a 15-minute drive @ 41.2 mph.

---

Prior to the first day of school, we were given placards to hang in the window of our vehicles to verify which children went with which car. The children were required to memorize these numbers to ensure smooth operation of after school pick-up.

It was anything but smooth.

On the second day of school, different numbers were assigned to the children. Numbers which were NOT the same numbers they had to memorize for the first day of school. No reason was given for this change. None whatsoever.

This didn't help things either.

On the third day of school it appears that they're considering scrapping the entire "Number" thing altogether. Apparently, school administrators have decided on a different type of structure - one which, to my small, non-school administrator mind seems to have far-reaching consequences, and is, quite possibly, the most progressive ideas I've seen from an institution such as this:

They've decided to simply use the students name.

*sigh*

---

And - just to mix things up a bit, I've decided against the office being Hunter Racing Green & Tan and have instead decided to paint it in a Sun Microsystems color scheme. My wife thinks this is a wonderful departure of the norm, and is very excited about painting the office these bold new colors. Though I must admit, I haven't told her that they're Sun colors. I just picked them out from the paint chits. The last colors were from Ralph Laruen's "Thoroughbred" line. These are from their "Urban Loft" series:

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Introduced my wife to The Boys from Brazil last night. Asked her to watch a movie with me; didn't tell her a thing about it. She was into it almost immediately. She still doesn't know what all is involved. We stopped last night at the halfway point - can't wait to finish it up tonight! I don't think I've seen the movie since the early 80's; I think I caught it on its network television premiere. Its like a new movie to me.

I wondered how they could even think of releasing a sequel to Starcraft, one of the most perfect games ever. I was insulted that they'd even try. That is, until I saw this:

Click to see map in motion...

I want.

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Haus

We had a house picked out prior to moving to Texas. It was grand, all was good. It makes moving easier when you already have something in mind. We saw the house, it was beautiful. But...just in case, just for giggles, we chose to continue to look. Deciding instead on something large and pretentious, we scoured the local area. Nothing quite suited us (or was out of our price range) until we found the house. Granted, at 2100 sq/ft, it was quite a bit smaller than we wanted, but I can't imagine finding a more perfectly laid-out home for our needs.

The Master Bath is much smaller than I was anticipating, and I had to give up one of my core requirements: Private throne. I just love the ones which are behind their own door. But this is a custom home, built with $20k worth of options, which they're taking off the price of the house (as it is a buyer's market and they want to move pre-existing inventory) plus $10k cash at signing. What a deal.

My last custom home was on half an acre. This one is not. In fact, this one has the potential to be everything I hate: A long & narrow houseplan on a zero lot-line. This house differs from the crowd by being more of a custom home, and using non-contractor grade amenities. Those who have purchased homes before know exactly what I'm talking about. The floor plan is broken up into four discrete areas, allowing it to be both very open, and yet separating key components of the house per my expectations. There's a door we're having put in to completely cut off the family room & children's rooms from the rest of the house. In addition, we're turning what they call the "Children's Retreat" into the den - a major plus we took advantage of at our house in Boyd. This affords us our formal living area. Most homes we looked at had the option of turning the formal dining room into an office, or I had to buy a 4-bedroom home and use the 4th bedroom as such. This one provides both an office and a formal dining area.

So it costs more than other houses in its size, and its smaller than what we wanted. It's also in a very quiet, very beautiful part of Anna, and under 10-minutes to work. That's less driving time than when I was in STL! I present to you, what is currently our first choice as a new home: