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February 20, 2006

Non-recommendation: Feige Grundman

When I lived in Pittsburgh, I had the bad luck to rent an apartment from Feige Grundman. I couldn't believe how much maintenance that apartment required. There were holes in the floor and wall. A part of the ceiling fell in. The sewage system backed up into the basement... twice. We had rats... twice. The water heater burst. Feige did fix these things, though not nearly as quickly as I would have liked.

I cannot recommend Feige as a landlord. If anyone's considering renting from her and wants more information, please feel free to get in touch (email andy at dullroar dot org).

February 12, 2006

Weekend update

I moved in early January. I've gotten no mail since the move, even though I filed a change of address with the post office. Why? I just found out: the post office has decided to forward all my mail to a completely different address than where I live. I've called the post office a couple times asking where my mail was, but they had no clue. Who did? The New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker) subscriptions department, which was able to tell me the new address to which my mail was being forwarded, a place not far from the yoga studio where the wife volunteers.

Speaking of which, Sidewinder's got a troll. Which means, hey, her site's troll-worthy. Nice to be able to raise that much of a reaction in a reader.

Finally, let me complain about one more thing: NTP, the network time protocol implementation, has let me down. Though its documentation is full of picture of cute smiling animals, it's pretty disorganized. Like, the configuration options are scattered across a couple different web pages. Even the wiki, put in place perhaps to deal with these things, has its problems. It says that stratum 2 servers ...directly sync to at least one upstream Stratum 1 time server... Actually, the server's stratum is exactly 1 more than its current best source, which means that a server can (does!) change stratum every time it picks a new best source. Two weeks ago I was blissfully unaware of these little details. Not anymore.

It's all about the infrastructure. You can only take it for granted while it's working.

February 08, 2006

Dios Malos

Last night the wife and I saw Dios Malos at the Bowery Ballroom. They rocked! The music was pure pop beauty and catchy as all get-out. After, we saw Matt Pond Pa, who were also pretty good. I think if I were 18 or so, I'd fall all over myself for Matt Pond, but now that I'm old and bitter, no deal. Still, more than worth missing my bedtime for.