Blog Master G

Last week we had our 80-year-old hardwood floors (red birch and douglas fir) refinished to their original glory. The three layers of polyurethane have lightened the wood and it is pristine. We mopped the entire floor twice before moving in to help seal the protective coat. It’s like a work of art.

So, of course, we’ve been incredibly careful about treating the wood well… the Velcro booties for the dogs, furniture coasters all around, and the like.

As is the way of the universe, the first scratch occurred last night (our first night here) — not by the claws of dogs but by my own carelessness. You see, we have this great new furniture (the kind you don’t even have to build yourself) and all pieces but one even came with their own little rubber pads on the legs. So last night I was rotating this end table and lo and behold, there was a nail protruding next to one leg.

Scratch goes the floor.

We’ll try to fix it. But, if not, perhaps it’s just a little mark that helps make this house our home — a reminder that nothing is perfect and that it’s OK to just let go of things.

So it goes.

I’m sitting in my office in my new house — my house. It’s strange and wonderful. It’s all so new and so overwhelming. But it feels really good. It feels like home. Knowing it’s our very own place is surreal. Still tons to do. Got all moved in today. Everything is still in boxes, of course, but the TV and the Internet work, so the important things are in place.

The dogs are wearing Velcro booties on their feet to protect the newly refinished hardwood floors. They hate it. Jen and I can’t help but laugh. Who knows how long it will be before we get lazy and let their claws on the hardwood?

Moving is, as usual, a big pain in the arse.

So much to learn, so much to do. Owning a home is good. It is a challenge.

I’ve been using Gmail for 10 days now and I love it. It seems that those of us who like being the first to try out new technology have, for the most part, had our chance to do just that. The eBay prices on the accounts have all dropped down to 99 cents or so, if that’s any gauge.

Though I’ve not made any official announcement to my friends and family — nor the mental leap — it seems that Gmail is gradually becoming my primary email account. It just makes sense. Here’s why:

In Pine, which I use on my Web server, I already keep all my emails — at least those I’ve sent (since any message to which I reply will be included beneath the response. In Pine, I have sent mail dating back to June 1999. I have collections of email in various other places (namely, my Mac) going back to August 1995 when I started college. I guess you could say I’m a digital pack rat. But it’s more than that.

Knowledge is power. Keeping a record of correspondences, email addresses, phone numbers, to do lists, Web sites, life events, etc. proves useful on nearly a daily basis. Whether it’s looking up how long it’s been since I last went to the dentist (December 18, 2003 — uh oh, time for a cleaning), last got an oil change, or even what was happening in my life on June 9, 2000 (coordinating the beta testing of a T1 line at my Treasure Island apartment with this guy from a sketchy company that never took off but gave me free high-speed Internet for a long time), my reasons for keeping a digital archive of my life are numerous. (Of course, this also makes me the ideal target of the Patriot Act, so I try not to break any laws… but that’s a different argument altogether.)

The problem with my digital archive is that it’s scattered. Check gabeanderson.com email for this, Yahoo Calendar for that. Then there’s all the localized data on my various computers (a different story). Centralizing and accessing digital data is key for me. Starting to sound familiar?

I feel as if I start down the Gmail path, I want to continue in that direction. In terms of text storage, Gmail offers more than I have anywhere else, though that 10mb file size limit for attachments isn’t great for storing other types of data.

When it comes down to it, most data are text-based anyway. If you boil it down to its core, Google is a way to help you find the text you’re looking for. Without text, you can’t find anything. Images and other types of rich media (SWF, QuickTime, etc.) can’t be found by a search engine without associated metadata.

So here we arrive: Gmail is a tool to organize your data with a built-in search ngine — the most powerful search engine on the planet, at that. Are you with me here?

Gmail is more than email. It is your own personal data organizer. It is your own personal search engine to your life. Think about it. With Gmail, you can send yourself notes, to do lists, phone numbers. You can jot down important information and find it whenever you need it with a simple search.

Hotmail and Yahoo are scared for a reason. There’s a reason why sending a Gmail invitation to a Hotmail or Yahoo account will end up in the junk mail folder. Who needs Hotmail anyway? And Yahoo? I will cling to their calendar and address book for now, but their notepad is now obsolete. Why should I jot notes in Yahoo when I can just Gmail myself a note, archive it, and find it later whenever I need it.

Conceptual reasons for loving Gmail aside, there’s a core usability in the tool that makes it great. This usability, for me, can be summed up in four major areas:

1. Speed. Find a faster server than the supercomputer created by Google.
2. Navigability. I work faster and more efficiently when I don’t have to take my hands off my keyboards. With Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts (as in Pine), I can work virtually mouseless. This is good.
3. Reliability. I want to be able to access my data whenever I need it.
4. Storage. A full gigabyte of digital data is a lot. And a year from now, when everyone has filled up his or her account, Google will likely increase it for free or for fee.

Bottom line: I like Gmail and I think it has great potential to change the way we think about not just email, but digital data overall.

Not everyone agrees, though, that Gmail is great, at least from an initial usability point of view. But remember that I’m looking at the bigger picture here and am less concerned with browser usability right now.

Last week was intense (so much so that I’m only now getting around to doing a recap).

Here’s the abridged, one-sentence version: We closed on the house just over a week ago (Monday), Jen was laid off the next day (Tuesday; how’s that for timing?), went out for happy hour (Thursday), had my brother Pete and his friend Matt in town (Friday-Sunday), watched the Giants-Red Sox game at Peabody’s (Friday night), painted the guest room in our new house with Jen leading the charge and with the help of Pete and Matt (Friday and Saturday), created a Web site for Pete’s business venture (Saturday night), went out for some drinks with more friends (Saturday night), then put some final touch-up paint on the room (Sunday).

This week has been a bit more chill as we prepare for moving day next week. We’re having all the floors refinished at our new house this week, so we can’t move in just yet. They seem to be making pretty good progress, as we’ve been stopping by each day to check on things, get the mail, and make sure none of our plants are dying (yet). The dogs also like to tear around in the yard.

Monday night we picked up our new furniture in Albany with the help of Jen’s parents, then went out for dinner with them at the Albany Pump Station. We’re so far procrastinating the finishing of our packing. We will likely finish at the last minute.

Conservative and former Bush voter Charley Reese on May 17, 2004: “John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush’s comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It’s unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry’s very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.”

On the state of our poorly educated country, I am reminded of something James said in Vegas a couple weeks ago as we walked past the massive Bellagio hotel: “It’s too bad our schools aren’t that big.”

The following guest post comes from Jonty:

Homes enjoy a unique role in our everyday lives. On the one hand, they are
inanimate objects (usage: house), and on the other, they are also a very
singular abstract location (usage: home). The process by which a house
becomes a home is embodied a very intimate and mundane set of experiences.

I will project my own history onto Gabe and Jen’s new home buying
experience.

At first glance, you walk through and come to develop an affinity for the
building, structures, landscaping and architecture. You like the way that
light dances on the glass. You think the room is adequate and the location
is convenient. On a certain day, you assume ownership of this new house, and
that’s when you roll up your sleeves and dig in.

You explore the place where the refrigerator used to be. Look how messy it
is back there. The kitchen cabinets will hold your food. but they have those
OTHER PEOPLE KOODIES. In fact, now that you really start to think about it,
so does the rest of the kitchen and the bathroom. How can you poop there?
Shower there? Get undressed and walk on the tile floor there? And have you
seen the basement? Surely, some evil apparition calls that place home. You
are CERTAIN of that.

So you break out the Clorox, Lysol, Pinesal, and every other cleaning agent
you can think of. You scrub, scrape and clean away all the koodies. Then you
lay down a fresh layer of shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets and you feel
ready to go. Perhaps to a lesser extent, you perform this clean sweep
throughout the rest of the house.

Of course, I have no scientific backing for this, but I am convinced that a
tiny part of our brains and olfactory nerves are able to smell the lingering
scent of THOSE OTHER PEOPLE who used to live there. Following the cleansing
process, that scent is gone, and we are somehow placed in a “neutral” mode.

So then you set to bringing in all of your belongings. the boxes, bags,
trunks, plains, trains and automobiles.

THIS HOUSE IS NOW YOURS.

You then spend the next few weeks unpacking everything and somehow in the
process, this place becomes more than your house. It becomes your home-and
when you come home from work, you’re home. It’s great.

The light still dances on the glass, and it tickles your face to wake you up
in the morning. Your room is a little cramped now that you have unpacked
everything, but somehow it’s the perfect size because it’s YOUR room, and it
could be no other way. The location is not just convenient. This is the
place you come home to every night, and that’s the Chinese place you get
dinner from sometimes. The hardware store is just down the road, and before
you know it, you have every back road and side street memorized. It’s like
you’re going home on cruise control sometimes. You plant a garden in the
back, and you look forward to mowing the grass in the front.

And when you come home.. You’re home. And it’s great, because you’re home.

Congratulations, Gabe and Jen A_nderson.

Love,

Jonty Yamisha

Having not yet moved into the new place, it’s a bit odd to own an empty house. So we’ve been going there each evening to bond with our new abode. The dogs saw it for the first time yesterday and immediately fell in love with the yard (they christened it promptly). I think it will take some time to connect with the house and get to know it.

Tonight marked the official start of our first projects as home owners. While I walked around our yard watering the plants and flowers and fighting to get the hoses wound back up (I want a hose crank or whatever they’re called), Jen took a razor blade to all the windows that had been painted shut. She succeeded in opening all but one window.

It’s all at once an intimidating, overwhelming, challenging, and exciting feeling — this new adventure of owning our home.

Yesterday the imposing work that’s been going on around the apartment building hit a whole new level with a giant dent in the right fender of my car. To my surprise, I’ve been pretty zen about the whole thing so far. I showed the damage to the property manager right away and have left a message for the building owner.

They’re selling on eBay for as much as 60 to 100 bucks. They’ve inspired a swap site dedicated solely to them. They’re fast. They’re in demand. And they’re not yet available to the general public.

Yes, I’m talking about the coveted Gmail beta accounts.

I got mine tonight (directly from Google).

Some people seem to have the ability to invite others to join; I do not. Regardless, I’m glad I got my gabeanderson at gmail account. After all, I do tend to have the market on the gabeanderson real estate on the Web (all you other Gabes are too slow on the draw, I guess) — the dot com, the Yahoo account, the Fastmail account, etc. So if nothing else, I now have rights to that name on the hottest new Web service.

Oh yes, and I suppose I’ll also get to play around with a fun, much-hyped, powerful new email tool. So feel free to drop me a line in that account (see above paragraph if you missed the address — it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out).

It’s official: Jen and I are now homeowners. It’s surreal. The closing was this afternoon. Aside from a bank teller who handed me a Treasurer’s check for the amount of our down payment without asking to see ID, everything went just fine. (I reported the lack of ID checking to bank VP. Good thing I didn’t lose my checkbook prior to today, or anyone apparently could have walked in there and cleared out my account if they had gotten this teller. And yes, in small towns, the VPs sit in the branches.)

After some excellent hibachi tonight, we began to soak in the new place. I think it will take a while, this mental shift to home ownership. So much to think about.

All this after getting in from Vegas after midnight last night. Not quite sure while I’m still awake, besides that I wanted to get these photos and a couple blog posts online.

Sin City. Awesome. Party. Great friends. Kick-ass times. Packed in too short a weekend. What a whirlwind. The tradition continues.

Pictures here | Pictures on Ofoto
(Same set, but perhaps you want to order prints from Ofoto.)

[ Vegas 2003 ]