Steve Eck's Blog

Chicago Trip

2009-11-09T21:12:00.000-06:00

Linzy and I were in Chicago this weekend for my cousin Susan's wedding and to see our family there. It was a quick trip, we flew down on Friday after work and then flew home this afternoon.

The wedding was in downtown Chicago, right on Michigan avenue, so we got to experience a part of the city that we don't normally. Despite having been to Chicago more times then I can count, we've mostly either been visiting people in the suburbs or going somewhere specific downtown. This was the first time in a long time that I've spent time wandering around downtown.

It was interesting to see all of the shops on Michigan avenue, and we had a tasty lunch at Gino's East. The wedding was a lot of fun, and was quite fancy. We had a good time visiting with family and also got to spend time with family on Sunday and Monday before coming home.

The flight home was interesting as we happened to get upgraded to first class, which was cool, except that the flight from Chicago to Minneapolis is only about 50 minutes. So it was mostly pointless. But we did get to sit in row one, and have fancy snacks.

It's nice to be home. That will only last until next Wednesday when I leave again.

House: Week Eight

2009-11-05T21:26:00.000-06:00

There's been lots of progress on the house over the past two weeks, but almost none of it is particularly photo-friendly.

The closest we've come is the shingles on the roof. But in addition, they completed all of the HVAC vents, plumbing, electrical, low-voltage wiring, and poured the front porch and basement floor. We've been through the pre-drywall walkthrough, and they start insulating the walls tomorrow. In addition the exterior coverings have been delivered, so I expect next week we'll have the start of siding and/or stone coverings.

We found out today that it is unlikely they will paint the exterior of the house this winter. While I would like to have it completed, I am glad that they aren't going to try to paint in temperatures that are far too cold for that to be effective.

There's a little over two months to go, but it is encouraging to see all the progress and feel like we're creeping up on the point where we can start locking down financing and other arrangements.

Movies

2009-11-04T20:38:00.002-06:00

I watched a few films on the flights back and forth to London, thanks to the on-demand movie system.

On the way over, I watched Terminator Salvation and was unimpressed. It was enough to keep me aware, and perhaps would have been more exciting on a larger screen with better sound, but it wasn't particularly good.

On the way back I watched two movies:

Fighting, which I had put on the Netflix queue a few weeks ago, and ended up liking. Terrance Howard annoyed me a bit, but the storyline was interesting despite being terribly predictable. And the fight scenes were pretty exciting. The plot was completely what you would expect, and gave me the impression that someone wrote Rocky + Fight Club on a napkin at the bar and out popped Fighting's script.

State of Play, which was entertaining but not terrific. I liked the twists the storyline took, as well as the way the investigation unfolded. It wasn't terrific, but it kept my interest.

There were quite a few other very reasonable choices, but after two movies on the way back, I had had enough and had to move on to other ways to pass the time.

Other Side

2009-11-03T21:50:00.000-06:00

One of the things that I was nervous about for our trip to England last week was driving on the other side of the road. I originally was going to drive from London to Reading and then Reading to St. Albans. I ended up changing plans and taking the train to Reading, but I still had to drive to St. Albans and then around that area to get to and from the office.

When I drove to St. Albans it was night, which made things somewhat more difficult, at least in terms of navigation. Without a GPS, and with fairly questionable directions from Google Maps, it was a bit of an adventure getting to the hotel. The following morning finding the office with written directions was again fairly sketchy. There were a few wrong turns and one near accident. Amusingly the guys in the office also made me drive everyone to lunch that day. Hazing the new guy, I guess.

After a day though, I pretty much got the hang of things and it wasn't a problem anymore. By the end of the week, it was starting to feel much more natural. I was quite surprised at how well it went overall.

I will admit though, the first night driving on a two-lane road with the headlights coming on the other side of the road freaked me out. My brain was firmly convinced that we were going to die.

London Trip

2009-11-02T22:08:00.001-06:00

Last week I had to go to England for work. Linzy was able to come along and so I went a little early so that we could spend a weekend in London. After a few days of commuting out to Reading, we went up to St. Albans to visit another office. We stayed there for the rest of the week and then flew back on Saturday. It was a pretty busy trip, between the traveling within England, work, and trying to fit in some sight-seeing. But it was fun nonetheless.

London was interesting because I haven't been there since Brian, Chris and I went back in 2000. Since Linzy had never been there, we did a lot of the normal touristy things like visiting the Tower of London, going across the Tower Bridge walkway, and seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

St. Albans was interesting because it was a much smaller town in the English countryside, so it had a completely different vibe then being in the center of London. Linzy did far more sight-seeing then I did in St. Albans, but I was able to go visit the Cathedral with her, which was very cool.

The Tower Bridge at night

The changing of the guard was exactly like I remembered it being: packed with people.

The St. Albans cathedral had some underground tombs that were visible through grates on the floor.

Sheep grazing in the countryside.

Charlie the peacock putting the moves on the Puegeot.

Lots more pictures in the Flickr set.

Time Change

2009-11-01T20:40:00.000-06:00

I woke up this morning at 5:30am thanks to my normal returning-from-Europe jet lag. Apparently 7.5 hours of sleep is plenty as far as my body was concerned. Unfortunately with the end of daylight savings, that was actually 4:30am.

The good part of being wide awake that early was that I got a ridiculous amount of things done this morning. By 10 o'clock I had already done two loads of laundry, read the paper, did work e-mail for a few hours, exercised, and paid the bills.

If I needed so little sleep that I could get up at 4:30 every morning, I could probably rule the world.

House: Week Six

2009-10-21T21:10:00.000-05:00

This week progress on the house was painfully slow for the bulk of the week. The framers spent most of the time plugging away at finishing the roof sheathing, which took far, far longer then I would have imagined. This appeared to be because of the slow nature of making all the angle cuts where various sections of roof met and also because they seemed to run out of wood not once but twice.

Then, on Monday there was a flurry of activity as the last pieces of wood finally showed up so they could finish the roof, the windows were delivered, the eaves were finished, and the house was wrapped.

On Tuesday they installed all of the windows in the house except the one over the garage, and had the shingles delivered.

Then on Wendesday, they didn't work again. Two steps forward, one step back. But at least we are really, really close to being sealed from the weather.

LED Lights

2009-10-20T22:13:00.000-05:00

I watched the first season of Big Bang Theory on my iPod going to and from India earlier this summer. Prior to that I had seen a few episodes here and there, but hadn't watched it regularly. Lately, Linzy and I have been watching it pretty regularly.

I get a kick out of the humor, particularly Leonard in season 1, but now Sheldon in the current season. Linzy also seems to enjoy it. Although I regularly get the feeling that to some extent she is laughing at me.

One of the things that I am regularly amused by is the Dell XPS laptops that they frequently use on the show with LED lights and colorful add-ons. We bought a dual-SLI XPS laptop at work for a new particularly graphically intense application's on-site sales demonstrations and the sales team mocked it mercilessly. In the end we settled on sweet Sony Vaio laptops that are probably somewhat slower then the SLI monster, but work much better for the sales people.

But watching Big Bang Theory, every time they show one of the XPS laptops I envision a buttoned down English sales guy pulling out a 17-inch noisy laptop with a power brick the size of a college textbook and having the rear LEDs start flashing during the demonstration. Totally unrelated to actual humor on the show, but it still makes me laugh.

Subconcious

2009-10-19T20:27:00.000-05:00

Normally once I fall asleep, I sleep like the dead until the morning. Because of this, I very rarely actually remember any dreams that I have, and even more rarely actually have nightmares. My sister remembers all kinds of crazy dreams, but I don't remember a thing except turning off the light the night before.

Last night for some reason I had a terrible time sleeping. I kept waking up cold, or hot, or at some unexpected sound, and because of this I remembered a few of my dreams. The strangest one was not strange in terms of what happened, but it was basically a nightmare, that when I go to do my presentation next week in London, that I looked like an idiot and mess it completely up.

Which is just bizarre, because I'm really not worried about the presentation. Or at least I thought I wasn't, prior to this, when clearly I secretly am.

Poor Planning

2009-10-18T21:26:00.000-05:00

For several reasons, I've had a bit more free time on my hands the past month or so, which has allowed for some more video game playing then normal. A couple weeks ago I finished Shadow Complex and then finished Gears of War 2 (which I was about 50% finished with already) the following weekend. Since then I've been trying to figure out what I would be playing next as Grand Theft Auto 4, the other game I didn't put in storage, wasn't really keeping my interest. Eventually after some thinking, I settled on Fallout 3.

I decided to hold out for the Game of the Year edition, because that came with all five DLC packs and so seemed like a good deal. That version didn't come out until Tuesday (10/13) and I decided to save some money and finally use the credit I had gotten from trading in old DS games this summer.

Now in general I am morally opposed to used game trade-in business, for more reasons then I could list here but primarily because I feel that it takes advantage of young kids who have games but no money. They have limited options for getting rid of the games (especially before the rise of Craigslist) and the used game stores give poor trade-in value and over-charge for used games. Including charging more for used games then the going price of a new copy. There's a benefit of convenience, but the stores have various means to lock their customers in so that they are more-or-less forced to keep their business at one chain.

Anyways, one of these means is to stock few if any new games, and push consumers to used games. Which I am well aware of, but didn't really think through relative to wanting Fallout 3: GOTY the week that it came out. Of course the store didn't have any, and would have wanted to sell me a used copy instead (despite the fact that wouldn't have had the DLC).

Since I failed to consider this problem, I was in a position of wanting the game so I could play it this weekend, but now couldn't even get it from Amazon and save a few bucks, so I ended up paying more at Best Buy. Plus I didn't have my gift cards on me at the time, so instead of getting it for free (at the used game store) or for a reduce price (through gift cards or Amazon), I ended up paying full price for it just to have it 'now'.

Very poor planning and patience. And on top of that, I haven't been terribly impressed with the game, as the pacing is fairly slow and combat is far too frequent and takes forever to beat even weak enemies (fire ants for example). Perhaps I should have bought Borderlands.

House: Week Five

2009-10-14T20:54:00.000-05:00

As you may remember from week four, last Wednesday after a two-day work week the new house had exterior walls on the second level. This week we made quite a bit more progress.

First they built all the interior walls on the second level and finished up the main staircase

Then they added most of the roof trusses

For the past two days they have been working on sheathing the roof, which turns out to be far slower then I was envisioning.

They're actually a bit further then that picture shows, about two-thirds of the roof is complete. There is also some work being done with the HVAC and/or sewer, but no one can quite put their finger on what is being done. The house has also become quite the muddy mess after all of the rain and snow. I imagine that will only get worse before it gets better.

[ Total days spent framing at this point is 11 ]

Ear Trim

2009-10-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

Pippen went in today for her twice yearly haircut. Around 11am Linzy called me at work to say there had been an accident at the grooming parlor and they had cut Pippen's ear. She described them as having 'glued the ear', which I was envisioning as them having totally snipped the ear off and were trying to glue it back together.

Apparently there is a vet right next door, and since they couldn't get the bleeding stopped they took Pippen over there for assistance. It was the Vet who was doing the gluing, not the grooming place thankfully. They had originally told Linzy that if we wanted there not to be a notch, they had to put Pippen under so that they could stitch up the ear.

We made the call more-or-less sight unseen to not put Pippen through anesthesia. Which after seeing the cut would have been totally ridiculous, because it is very small. Pippen appears to be no worse for wear after the injury, and in fact was claiming to me tonight that it gave her 'street cred' and made her look more rough-and-tumble.

Clever

2009-10-12T22:19:00.001-05:00

I've been amused lately at the onslaught of Verizon ads trashing AT&Ts 3G coverage.

For some reason showing the coverage map seems to be a highly effective way of differentiating the coverage. I assume AT&T would claim that their coverage includes X% of their subscriber base (where X is large) and it is therefor irrelevant whether they have 3G coverage in central Wyoming. But since AT&T already has quite the reputation for shoddy (at best) coverage, it seems to hit home and play to Verizon's "It's the network" trademark.

Still doesn't address the lack of an iPhone killer, but Well Played.

Apology Accepted

2009-10-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

On Saturday night Brenden, Allison, Fred, Robin, Linzy and I went out to eat at Crave at the Mall of America. The evening had been in the plans for over a month, due to all of our busy schedules, and Linzy and I were looking forward to it.

We had made a reservation for 7pm, which turned out to be good because the restaurant was packed. After starting the wine that Fred and Robin brought, we ordered our meal and then waited for our starter salads. And waited, and then waited some more.

Eventually it got to the point where I was commenting to Fred and Linzy that I was starting to get worried that the salad would end up coming at the same time as my steak. Shortly after, however, our salads came and everything seemed OK again. We ate the salads and then waited for our main course. And waited, and then waited some more, and then waited even longer.

By this point the tables around us had been seated after us, eaten, left, and had the second round of guests well on their way through dinner. We started looking around trying to figure out what was going on. Our waitress was spending a lot of time checking over meals on the counter, and discussing something with the chefs. At the end of one of the conversations, she handed the chef a list which he grabbed and threw down on the counter in anger.

At that point the waitress talked to the manager, which was clearly not a good sign. The manager came over and explained that they had thought they lost our meal order, found it but had thrown away the food because it had sat too long, and had just figured all of this out. She was very apologetic and immediately offered up taking care of our entire meal including wine (which happened to be only a corking fee, but she didn't know), and desert.

While they were remaking the meal, the executive chef came out and apologized profusely, they brought two baskets of bread (which are extra cost) and brought everyone at the table another salad. In addition we ordered another bottle of wine.

Our dinners came eventually and were very good. My steak was perhaps not quite on par with Flemmings, but was certainly as good as Porterhouse in Lakeville. Then on top of two salads and bread, we all couldn't resist ordering deserts to share. I was extremely full, but it was a very tasty dinner.

None of us could believe that with no complaint, or suggestion they picked up our entire bill that probably ended up pushing $400. The consensus was that we would have expected free desert, or perhaps a discount or free bread baskets. But covering everything we had ordered plus allowing us to order more was more then anyone would have expected. It definitely took a situation where we would have been frustrated with the experience to one where all we could talk about was how well they treated us.

Which I suppose was the point, and probably something that a restaurant that is charging the prices they charge needs to do to maintain a reputation for service, but it was still a pleasant surprise. Overall it ended up to be a very enjoyable evening with friends, regardless of the fact that dinner took well over three hours.

House: Week Four

2009-10-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately this week, they only worked on the house for two days. The other days were rained out. The first day they put in floor joists for the second level, along with almost all of the decking. The second day they built all the exterior walls for the second level.

For those of you keeping score at home, so far they've spent 6 days framing the house. That makes my original claim of 10 days for framing look pretty accurate, since all that is left is the interior walls and roof rafters plus roof sheathing. Depending on how much they work, we could be getting close to being sealed in next week.

True Fan

2009-10-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

To some extent on my fantasy football teams I try not to have any Vikings players. I've found that it usually ruins watching the game for me, because if the Vikes are doing poorly then so is my fantasy team. Of course this still doesn't protect me from the awkward situation where my opponent has Vikings players and I'm subconsciously rooting against that player even while cheering the team on.

This week my team was leading my opponent by 20 points going into Monday night's game, and I still had Ryan Grant left to play. Unfortunately my opponent had Bernard Berrian, Percy Harvin, Vishante Shiancoe, and the Minnesota defense left to play. Needless to say, I ended up losing by quite a bit.

Clearly my opponent had embraced living and dying by the Vikings. Of course, he was 0-3 at that point in the season, but maybe now things will turn around. At least I've gotten through Adrian Peterson last week, and basically the rest of the team this week, so I should be safe from conflicts of interest for a while.

Double Tap

2009-10-05T19:45:00.001-05:00

This weekend Linzy was out of town, so I was left mostly to my own devices. For the most part I did miscellaneous solo activities like cleaning the house, going on ridiculously cold bike rides, or finishing Gears of War 2. But on Saturday night I had enough of the house and decided to go see a movie.

I went to go see Zombieland, because I thought it was a safe bet Linzy would never want to see it. Five seconds into the opening scene, that was affirmed and I knew that Linzy would have hated it. I, on the other hand, was thoroughly entertained. The movie made me laugh, kept my interest, and was generally amusing and fun. I liked Woody Harrelson's antics and Jesse Eisenberg's phobia-ridden character.

The movie was definitely not something that everyone will enjoy, but I liked it.

Hardbat Classic

2009-10-04T19:44:00.000-05:00

Today in between watching some football, I watched some of the Bud Light Hardbat Classic table tennis tournament. I stumbled upon the tv coverage randomly while flipping between channels and then ended up being hooked. Growing up we had a ping pong table and I spent played pretty regularly with my Dad and family, and then played a bit when I was in the college dorm.

Watching the long rallys and crazy return shots brought back memories of playing in our basement. Perhaps not accurate memories, but at least memories of trying to make those behind the back looping returns.

Looking at the details of the tournament handicapping system after the fact took some of the magic out of it, because it explains why the Pro players had such a difficult time playing the average players, and why some of the matches were not as close as you would think they should have been. But I still found it interesting to watch and start thinking about whether I can fit a ping pong table in the new basement.

Meet Klaus

2009-10-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

For the past three years, I've driven about two miles each way to a bus park and ride and then ridden the bus to downtown. This use of a car always strikes me as sort of silly, but at the same time it is just a little too far to walk, riding a bike has all kinds of complications, and in general it is just far more convenient to drive. Even if it does seem ridiculous.

At my new bus stop, I've been noticing a lady driving what appears to be a Porsche Cayman coming and going at around the same time as me each day. This amazes me for many reasons, and not just because of all the door dings I can imagine on the sides.

It looks sweet and all, but is the right use of your shiny $60,000 sports car really driving two miles and then getting on the bus?

House: Third Week

2009-09-30T21:58:00.001-05:00

This week was all about framing at the new house. Or at least four days worth of framing, as progress got rained out last Friday.

Last Thursday they framed the basement walls and placed all the floor joists

Then on Monday they did all the rim joists, decked the whole first level, built walls around the garage, and assembled three or four other pieces of walls.

On Tuesday they finished all the exterior walls except the front entry piece, and pput up the fiber board around the walls.

Finally today they finished all the interior walls on the first level, except the stairs to the upper level, did all the rafters for the garage and built the front porch ceiling.

It's starting to look a lot like a house!

Two Movies

2009-09-29T21:58:00.000-05:00

I watched two movies over the past couple weeks.

Glengarry Glen Ross was the first one. I picked it up because it was mentioned in Boiler Room or some other movie and I had never heard of it. When I looked it up and saw all the big names in the film, I was like "Oh, must be good". Unfortunately it was far too slow for my tastes. I enjoyed Alec Baldwin's opening rant, and a few of the other parts, but in general I was bored and wishing things would move along.

Get Smart was the second. This was chosen because I thought Linzy and my Dad would enjoy it, and actually it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. You had to be in the mood for silly humor, but that was true of the old TV series so that shouldn't come as a surprise. The physical humor was pretty good, and I also enjoyed the two computer geek characters. All in all it was far better then I thought it would be (but keep in mind I was expecting cringe-worthy terrible).

Eighteen Days

2009-09-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

The topic of much conversation at the Eck household these days is the progress on the new house. Specifically, how long framing is going to take. Even after framing there is a lot of work to do on the house, but given that it is nearly October in Minnesota a key concern for delays is the weather. And having the framing complete means that delays will back to things like "We can't find the right ceramic tiles", or "The HVAC guy totally said he would come today and then didn't show", but not "It's rained all week and so we couldn't do anything".

Framing is something that, while involved, should actually be pretty quick especially if you are banging out another copy of a house you've built 8 of in the past three years. So as the builder was getting ready for framing last week, there was much debate about exactly how long framing should take.

The consensus for Linzy and I was about two weeks with a crew of around 5 guys. In talking with the builder, they say 18 days. And it wasn't a 'think about it' type answer, he knew immediately. Having never framed a house, nor watched a house be framed, I have no sense of whether this is long or not. But to my totally uninformed thoughts it seems long.

It seems to me with a crew of five guys you could have one guy cutting boards to length and two crews of two putting the sticks together. Since a significant portion of the boards are the same length it seems like the cutting would go fast. And then with nail guns the assembly would go quick. Assuming lumber keeps getting delivered as you need it, a day or two for the basement/foundation, four days for the first floor, four days for the second floor, and a day or two for the roof seems like it would pretty much get it done.

It's all academic at this point, but I will be interested to watch the progress and compare it against my official schedule of where my crew would be.

New Record

2009-09-27T19:55:00.000-05:00

At work we don't have a specific dress code, but as with most things that I can control, I tend to follow a routine. In the summer I usually wear polo shirts and in the winter I usually wear button-down dress shirts.

For the dress shirts, because I'm far too cheap to pay for dry cleaning and too lazy to iron my shirts, I am pretty particular about what kind I have. They need to be made of a material that doesn't get too wrinkled even after months of no ironing, and ideally I like button-down collars. Again, because I'm not going to iron anything, don't wear ties, and the button-down collars tend to stay a little nicer looking then the regular collars with plastic straighteners.

The trouble with the plastic straighteners is that in a lot of shirts they aren't stitched in, so they get lost in the washer/dryer. A few weeks ago Linzy bought me some new dress shirts she found on clearance at Macy's. Last week when I went to wear it for the first time, I realized that one of the plastic collar straighteners had already been lost. At that point it had only been washed once, and never worn, yet already the plastic piece had been lost. Which had to be a new record.

Luckily the shirt came with two extra collar pieces, but at this rate in a couple weeks the shirt's collar will be a lost cause.

House: Second Week

2009-09-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

Only a bit of progress on the house this week, several days were lost to miscellaneous tasks that had to happen in a specific order.

Last week they insulated the foundation.

On Friday they hooked up sewer system and water pipes, which didn't make for interesting pictures. The foundation inspection on Monday didn't either.

Backfill on Tuesday made a big difference though.

It was surprising how much of a difference the backfill made in terms of making the foundation look like a basement.

Wednesday was lumber delivery

According to the jobsite inventory list, there will be 508 2x4s delivered at some point. Right now it was mostly floor joists, flooring, beams. And fiber board, for some reason.

Today the framing started, which should make for more dynamic progress next week.

No Jaywalking

2009-09-23T20:45:00.000-05:00

On my way home from work today, I was stopped at an intersection and watched a lady jaywalking across the street at an intersection. This was across half a four-lane divided highway, and while she was crossing at a crosswalk, it was against traffic. After she made it across the first two lanes and had stopped in the median to wait for the light, not one but two cops pulled up and stopped in the middle of one of the lanes of traffic to question her.

And not just roll by slow and say "Don't Jaywalk" or something, but actually turned on the flashing lights and stopped right in the middle of an intersection blocking traffic and got out to hassle her. By the time the light changed they had already gotten her id and the second cop was getting out of his car to 'assist'.

It seemed pretty crazy. Admittedly she shouldn't have been jaywalking, but having two city cops blocking traffic on a busy road seemed unsafe as well. I guess things were slow on the police patrols this afternoon. It's also a reminder that jaywalking with two cops sitting at the light on the other side of the intersection might not be the best plan.