Monthly Archives: December 2007

Throwing stuff to the wall

Via Marginal Revolution, here comes today’s quote of the day

Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

The market is a discovery process after all.

Freedom house and the basement of adventure!

As those of you who know me in the flesh have been told endless times, I’m still doing lots of work around the new house. My current mania is leveling out the floors (I’m almost done) via the use of a system of jacks.

On Saturday I was installing a new jack and was tilling the dirt floor of the basement to create a level spot for the jack. I came across what could have been a bone, and then the shovel struck a hard surface. I decided to dig out whatever it was while saying to myself “Please don’t be a body, please don’t be a body”. Did I mention that my basement bears a strong resemblance to the basement in Silence of the Lambs?

Happily it was only a lump of old concrete with nothing underneath. Later it occurred to me that if it were a body the police would have to dig out the entire basement to look for more, which would save me the trouble of doing it later.

Last night I was adjusting one of the jacks (the initial setup by a previous owner was done poorly) when the ladder turned on a piece of soft ground and I fell off the thing. The support jack I was adjusting then had no support and fell on my neck as I lay on the ground. Happily it didn’t land that hard and I’m just a little sore.

And that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

The sounds of silence

While I’ve been thrilled with the new place so far, one thing that’s been amiss the the fact that the State Patrol (headquartered behind my back yard, about 200 yards away) has run a generator every minute of every day since I moved in. The generator was not running when I looked at the house.

For the first time it has stopped. The silence and the other noises are kind of eerie.

For a historical trivia, the Georgia State Patrol building used to be the local Confederate widows home for Atlanta. The Atlanta Time Machine has a photo.