CJC.org

Grace has now fully moved in. Our combined furniture fills both apartments, not tightly, but enough so that it becomes difficult thinking about where to put an extra bookcase. We’re leaving the common wall clean, in anticipation of future construction, but beyond that, all the walls have some sort of furniture on them, mostly bookcases filled with books. We used Moishe’s Moving, and they did a great job with keeping the furniture from getting scuffed and the glassware from being broken. We spent our Friday night unpacking the many boxes of books (Grace did most of this while I was puttering around).

A few days before the move, one of the doorman found someone to sand and refinish the dark, neglected floor. It’s startingly bright, so much so that the floor in the old apartment now looks like the dark, neglected floor. When the wall comes down, there’ll be a contrast; we’ll live with it, because sanding the other floor will be more pain than it’s worth for such aesthetics. The cost was around $2.50/sq foot, which may be cheap by Manhattan prices, and perhaps around average elsewhere.

The kitchen has basically been moved: most of the cookware, plates and so on are now in the new apartment. (Yes, we’re preparing food in one apartment, and bringing it to the old one to eat the food.) The shelves were lined with left-over liner I had from five years ago, and are serviceable. The cabinet doors may get replaced sometime in the future; they’re identical to the cheap rental apartment cabinet doors I had many years ago, and they look more hideous now. The drying rack didn’t quite fit in the available space — it overhangs the sink by a few inches — but it’s good enough for government work, as they say. I’m curious about GE’s SpaceSaver Under-Sink dishwasher. I’d like to actually see one in BestBuy before more seriously thinking about buying one. Besides the sink, having a full-sized stove (with all four burners available), a full-sized fridge (and real freezer, rather than the dorm-style frost-accumulating freezer unit in the old one) and six feet of unobstructed counterspace is a treat. Sure, the stove isn’t a Viking, the fridge isn’t a Subzero, and the counter isn’t Corian, but I don’t care. Wonder of wonders, ice cream that stays frozen! Chopping vegetables and not having pieces fall to the floor because the counter’s too cramped! And I have to learn how to cook with more than two burners, it’s been so long.

The next thing to do in the kitchen is to get a wall grid, something about four feet wide and three feet high, where I can hang pots using S-hooks. The local hardware store has 2′ x 3′ pieces for $20 each made by Rovel. Google actually fails miserably on searching for grids by Rovel, because the hits on “grid” happen to be about Grid Computing, and Rovel is a French name. Also, the Rovel company may not have its products online. I’ll probably need to find the wall studs to mount this properly, since the grid will be load-bearing.

Moving the computers out of the master bedroom into the new apartment will probably take place in a couple of weeks. There’s already a co-ax cable in the new apartment, which presumably hooks up to Time Warner. When I dropped off Grace’s cable box at the 23rd & Madison location, the customer service rep told me that I should be able to just move the cable modem to the other co-ax, and it should work. There was a forehead-slapping d’oh: cable is broadcast, and they’re using the cable modem itself to identify (and bill) you. It should just work; if it doesn’t, it should be easy for Time Warner to put the co-ax cables in the two apartments on the came concentrator/router/whatever hardware they use in their office. This obviates the need for a wireless bridge between the cable modem and my router (my wireless topology would have been weird, or at least not common for consumer applications, since I want to keep the untrusted wireless connection outside of my firewall). The trick now is to get the co-ax cable through the wall into the second bedroom. I’ll need the appropriate drill bit for this, as well as about 15′ more co-ax, along with the proper heads and a coupler. Maybe a splitter also, so the TV in the second bedroom will have cable. The Time Warner customer service rep said that their people don’t drill through walls, at least not anymore. I did notice an old co-ax cable had gone through the wall at one point; it’s cut off and painted over now, but presumably I can drill near it and not destroy, say, the powerline that runs through that wall.

Speaking of power, my father and brother stopped by on Sunday and put in the usual three-prong grounded outlets, replacing most of the old two-prong outlets after chipping through sedimentary layers of cheap paint jobs. One of the old outlet boxes is deeply recessed into the wall, and we’re going to need a longer fastener, but that’s a minor issue. I now know a bit more about electrical wiring after watching my father work, and how not to electrocute oneself when working with the live wire. The light fixtures are on the list of things to be changed, the kitchen one in particular: they’re incandescents or nasty old fluorescents, and I should be able to put in CFLs in many places. EFI has a special on variety 3-packs right now. They also have ceiling-mounted fixtures available. Unfortunately, these fixtures aren’t dimmable.

I suppose this is the end of the beginning for the apartment alterations. The next steps will be a bit more difficult, and will involve real paperwork. I’m waiting to hear from the architect on any plans or proposals (this is fairly minor work compared to what the people immediately upstairs are planning — getting rid of closets to make a hallway! and expanding the kitchen — and what the people much higher up in the building have done — lots of wide-open space, with the B-line kitchen transformed into a utilty room, complete with a now-prohibited central air conditioning unit). There will be weeks of paperwork and a bit of time finding a licensed, bonded contractor to do the work. There will be some amount of time when construction is being done in the apartment. And then, the apartment should be close to done.

To update the story of the new computer I got my parents and in response to the various ValueDisk queries that Google sends my way, I’d like to note that my fears that the ValueDisk drive that shipped with the $200 computer were proven correct: the drive died within three days. Luckily, it died quickly enough for nothing to have been lost. The problem seemed to be stick-tion of something similar: my brother got the drive to spin up by tapping it.

Yes, the drive is under warranty, but do I really want another 10GB drive of dubious provenance? It still hasn’t been proven to me that these drives aren’t built by Chinese laborers out of parts salvaged from the Western Digital factory. At least it wasn’t salvaged from old notebook computers.

I replaced it with a 40GB Western Digital I picked up from Circuit City. It was about $40 after rebate, and it’s been working fine since.

There may also have been issues with the cheap power supply or perhaps more delicate power requirements of a 1Ghz box compared to the old 486 that was sitting at that spot in the basement, since the computer had cut off a few times without warning. Since the cut-offs coincided with the dehumidifier and sump pump going off simultaneously, they were probably due to brownouts. I picked up a small UPS from Staples to address this. Arguably, the $200 computer has more power protection around it now than my own collection of PCs in my apartment (although I noticed that Circuit City has a 350VA UPS on rebate for about $20; I should pick it up tomorrow).

I haven’t heard any complains, so I assume this is all working.

Lessons? I should have bought a $300 computer, if only to get a better hard drive. Excluding the UPS, the machine has cost about that much, given the replacement drive and the replacement case. Dell refurbs are actually pretty inexpensive. And you get to yell at Dell if things go wrong.

Trivially annoyed with the 404 “/favicon.ico not found” errors I get in http logs, I went and created a trivial favicon.ico file. This was about two minutes with MS Paint and cropping/saving with IrfanView. Now, on a par with Yahoo!, my website has a logo, all without the committee meetings Yahoo! must have had to get to the same point.

Here’s an article I found on Gizmodo. The main thrust of the article (and presumably its followups) is that we’ve been too limited in thinking about digital cameras. We’re locked into the notion of digital camera as “camera”, not as a general purpose data gathering device. Because the “capture” of information is separate from the “recording” of information on digicams — on film cameras it’s simultaneous because of the nature of the medium — you can trivially do stuff to the information before it’s recorded. Most digicams do the simple photo manipulation stuff of correcting color levels, rendering in black and white, and so on, and some of the more sophisticated tasks like averaging a number of images to remove digital snow (my Sony does that for low light shots).

But what’s just starting to be done is combining the image information with other data. Trivially, we can put time stamps on the image. Ricoh is deploying a digicam with GPS, so location information can be included with the image. The spectrum can be broadened to include UV and infrared light. Barcodes and RFID can be processed with the image, and so on.

But whereas film-cameras have been designed to control the exposure of a recording medium to light in order to create a perceptable image, digital-cameras are data-recording devices merely optimized for recording data from light in order to mimic the experience of film-cameras, including the production of a perceptable image.

Even for simple picture taking, people have been coming up with ever clever uses for instantaneously available images. The article and its followup comments note that people now take pictures of signs instead writing down what the sign says, and people are using cell phone cameras to send pictures of landmarks to friends to indicate where to meet. Cell phone cameras are now being used to send x-rays to radiologists for preliminary evaluations of fractures, and there’s a report of a shopkeeper quickly snapping a digital picture of a would-be robber and giving the photo to the police immediately. Photo cameras had a huge impact on how stories are told, how people are recognized, and so on. Digital cameras will have as great an impact. It’ll just take some time for people to figure out how to use them in ways that don’t necessarily have to do with the film paradigm.

This Gothamist article provides a helpful pointer to the City’s searchable database of restaurant health code violations. Unfortunately, the database appears down momentarily, or I’d be checking places we’ve eaten at recently.

The closing for the apartment was yesterday. Hallelujah! The whole process has taken about half a year, was at least a month past contract, and survived a last minute scare when it wasn’t clear if Washington Mutual, which holds the old mortgage for my apartment, would be able to get to this closing to hand over the co-op stock certificate and proprietary lease to JPMorgan Chase yesterday. But they made it, and I now have the keys and an official move-in certificate from the management company. The next move is to get a hold of an architect and a contractor to knock down the adjoining wall. More paperwork, but hopefully all the alterations will be done by December.

The whole process took about two hours. I arrived at Penn Station about twenty minutes early and picked up an iced chai from the Starbuck’s in the lobby before heading up, the sugary sweetness meant to power my forearm for the signing marathon to come. The sellers were already there, and our attorneys soon afterwards. The bank’s attorney called and said that he’d be about half an hour late. We waited for a few minutes for the management company to prepare the room, etc.

The management company’s office is a bit different from the ones I’m used to. Most of the places I’ve gone to have been modern offices of financial companies, cube farms built in expensive Class A buildings with open floors and clear lines of site. The management company was in one of the older buildings near Penn Station, presumably a Class B building: it was a rabbit’s warren of small offices and two-to-four-person cube gardens instead of farms. Our conference room was located at the end of three right turns that took us to through a good deal of the office.

WaMu’s attorney actually arrived before the JPMorgan Chase guy did. I felt a little sorry for him: he was basically an expensive gofer, there to deliver papers, receive a payoff check and sign on a couple of dotted lines. He only had to be present for about fifteen minutes, really, but had to stay for the whole process.

There was some yelling at the beginning of the closing when it turned out that the seller hadn’t brought the proprietary lease for the apartment. Their attorney was under the impression that this wasn’t necessary, and hadn’t asked the seller to bring it. The management company insisted it was necessary, and, because the document was missing, required the seller to sign an affidavit and pay a $150 fee for the lost document. After fifteen minutes of yelling and bringing the manager to explain the situation, the seller signed the affidavit, and the management company signed a hastily drafted document saying that the $150 fee would be refunded if the seller sent the proprietary lease via FedEx by the next day. Possibly, the management company’s agent felt vindicated when the JPMorgan attorney (who missed the altercation) asked for the lease when he was doing his paperwork, and, when told the lease wasn’t there, made sure there was an affidavit.

The amount of paper signed (in several duplicates) and exchanged and copied is simply astounding to anyone who hasn’t been to a closing. This closing was actually more complicated because of the combined refinance and purchase, so there was more paper to be signed. I’m not sure how people did this before photocopies were invented. Yes, all the documents I had to sign could have been carbon copied or simply typed in triplicate, but the management company made all sorts of copies of checks and certificates during the closing.

Also, watching the attorneys work, I can see why laptops weren’t used. They were doing calculations for various fees and adjustments, and something like Excel would have helped there, but there was a great deal of notetaking and some scribbling in the margins, something that’s both difficult and inefficient on computers right now. There was a New Yorker article last year on efforts to clear the paper clutter on desks with computer software, but it turned out that the piles of printed documents and the little notes on stickys attached to the monitor better reflect the cognitive process of people. Seemingly disorganized notes may represent the mental “to do” stack, with both the mental details and the paper reminder of these details in easy reach, both physically and imaginatively. Also, it’s damn easy to scribble a note. Right now, with a computer, you have to make a new file, type, then save it. Someday, there may be a more paperless office, but it’ll require the obvious stuff, like a critical mass and agreement on authentication standards, and the less obvious stuff, principally software that’s at least as good and efficient as simple notetaking in the margins.

The other thought I had while waiting for the next stack of papers to sign was de Soto’s arguments about property rights. Advanced economies are underpinned by clear property rights, something developing economies don’t have. Here I was, participating in the invisible rites of advanced capitalism, the transfer of abstract property rights from one party to another; there is perhaps no better demonstration of this transfer of abstract property rights and claims that a co-op closing. The seller brought a stock certificate, a physical representation of the right to occupy a residence owned by a corporate entity. The management company cancelled that right at the end of the closing, and issued a new right for occupancy to me, which was promptly transfered to the bank as collateral for a loan. The loan itself was represented as a set of checks on the table (a claim on funds), and a stack of papers with my signature on them. We won’t bother to mention the interbank refinancing and payoff between JPMorgan and WaMu. At the end of this exchange of abstractions, I got an envelope from the seller containing the keys to the apartment and a piece of paper from the management company authorizing my entry into that apartment. The keys will jangle when shaken, but the important thing in our world is that piece of paper that represents the distilled processing of ownership.

We spent Saturday on Fire Island: some friends have a quarter share in Fair Harbor, and did the day trip thing of having some barbeque and spending time on the beach.

There must have been some sort of air show that weekend. While walking along the beach, we saw a trio of Great War biplanes performing mock dogfights over the ocean: mainly lazy turns to try to get on each other’s tail. They didn’t do corkscrews or loops or all the other maneuvers that I’m only familiar with from playing flight sims a long time ago.

Biplanes fly shockingly slow: all that lift keeps them up when other, more modern planes would have stalled. And they turn tightly. But with the speed they went at, you can see how fast monoplanes could have dove on them to win. I suppose biplanes existed because engine technology couldn’t deliver enough power in a small enough package to dispense with the extra lift from the second wing.

I don’t have pictures of the biplanes, but I did go back to the house to get my camera shortly after coming on a strange sight: a World War 2 era monoplane stuck on the beach.

This was perhaps a half mile west of Fair Harbor. I’m not sure what kind of plane it was, perhaps a trainer since the rear seat didn’t face backwards to accomodate a gunner protecting a bomber’s tail. Someone with a better sense of airplane history can identify it. Or someone with a Jane’s lying around. In any case, I believe the colors and insignia are British; I’m sure the bright yellow comes from it being a replica.

My friends mentioned there was a loud fire alarm/air siren on the island at around 9:30AM, presumably calling the town’s VFD to the crash site. The pilot was probably OK: the landing gear didn’t look damaged — in fact the pictures show the local police about to tow the thing using the landing gear — and the cockpit cowling was fine. The propeller was chewed up on the ends, but it wouldn’t have taken much for the nose to pitch foward when the landing gear dug into the sand. Certainly, enough to take a foot off the length of the prop.

I didn’t stick around to see if they managed to get the plane off the beach, but I assume they did. It’s not the heaviest machine: three men were able to lift the tail and turn the plane a bit to help hooking it up to an SUV (the rudder appears to be missing because they took it off to better access the tail hook or at least lift it). High tide was very high that evening with the full moon, and it surely would have been up to the level of where the plane was.

Update: New York Newsday has a story on the incident. Sadly, it wasn’t obviously a World War 2 plane, but a more mundane skywriting plane that had mechanical problems. As suspected from the minimal damage to the plane, no one was hurt.

Just notes to self on setting up an Oracle 9i/Solaris server to do native compilation instead of interpreted PL/SQL, since I spent a couple of hours on it last night, and I can see this coming up again in the future. The main source is this Oracle document. A set of $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin scripts can be found off of this doc, which will convert existing Oracle-internal stored procs and such to native compilation.

The first part is to add the following parameters to the init.ora/spfile:

plsql_compiler_flags=NATIVE

plsql_native_library_dir=some_directory

plsql_native_library_subdir_count=1000

plsql_native_make_file_name=some_directory/spnc_makefile.mk

plsql_native_make_utility=/usr/local/bin/make

The spnc_makefile.mk can be found in $ORACLE_HOME/plsql, and can be copied to the appropriate directory and modified for local usage. By default, the Makefile uses Forte as the C compiler. I pulled down the 64-bit GCC 3.3 from sunfreeware, or, rather, FTPed it from the sunsite.unc.edu mirror.

The modifications to the Makefile are relatively simple, though not obvious for the first time through: CC has to be set to gcc, of course, and the OPTIMIZE and PIC options for gcc have to be uncommented, and the Forte ones commented out. 64-bit gcc also requires the -m64 flag, which can be put in the OPTIMIZE variable; this is apparently necessary for 64-bit Oracle or there’s an ELF class error when running the make.

Note that a whole bunch of subdirectories have to be made in the plsql_native_library_dir. With the above parameters, 1000 are needed, with names in the form of d0, d1, d2, … d999. Clearly, something like a perl script is the best way to do this. Oracle puts the resulting .so files into these directories, apparently randomly. 1000 subdirs is apparently what you want for production boxes. I’m not sure what the rationale is; presumably something along the lines of directory listings being read quickly, or something similar.

At this point, go into sqlplus as sysdba, and do “@?/rdbms/admin/dbmsupgnv.sql” to start off the compilation of the PL/SQL packages. If there’s a real problem, the compilation bombs out after a few minutes. If it works, it runs for quite some time, though there are a number of warnings on mv commands, as Oracle tries to backup non-existent files before recompilation. On a Sun E480, running the make took about an hour.

I finished the new Harry Potter just before the 4th of July weekend. I was one of those people who pre-ordered from Amazon shortly after the book was announced instead of camping out at the local Barnes & Noble at midnight, and it arrived the morning after. The US Post Office had some sort of big shipping contract with Amazon, with the ridiculously inconvenient “security measure” of requiring me to sign for the book, rather than letting the doorman do it. Luckily, we got back to the building while the postman was still there; it spared me a trip to the Post Office a few days later.

When I finished Book 4 late last year, I really, really wanted the fifth book: why hasn’t Rowling been chained down to her desk to finish the fifth book already?! This frantic desire for Book 5 was partially caused by my little spate of literary bulimia — I plowed through Books 1 through 4 all at once and pretty quickly — and partially because Book 4 ended in a sort of brilliant cliffhanger. Not a strict cliffhanger, with Potter clinging to life by his fingernails as Voldemort brings his wand to bear, but an equally effective feeling that events were rushing forward and about to come to a head, despite there being three books left in the series. It was Luke and Leia looking towards the distant galaxy at the end of The Empire Strikes Back: significant events have happened, and still more significant events will happen in the uncertain future.

Sadly, I don’t have the same feeling right now: there’s no hunger for the next book. The mood of the book is different: it’s about Potter’s emerging adolescence, and all the periodic loneliness and anger that entails. It’s about the flaws and mistakes of the heroes in Potter’s life: the miscalculations with the best of intentions, the thoughtless cruelty of youth. Potter is no longer a child, and, while he (and we) have already seen the dark corners of the world, he (and we) must now see the messiness of the world that has nothing to do with evil. I’m not saying that it’s a bad book — it’s actually an enjoyable read, especially towards the end — it’s just that it’s a different book.

Reading this 860+ page book, carrying it around on the subway in the first week of publication, was a strangely communal experience in the midst of anonymous crowds. You see the blue cover without the dust jacket from across the subway car, and there’s a momentary recognition of shared experience. How far has that person gotten? And at least one stranger asked, how is it so far? I’ve heard of at least one city that tried to do a “book of the month” where the municipal arts council would recommend a book for everyone to read at the same time. I see now that it was perhaps as much an attempt to get more people to read as an attempt to create momentary communities bound by literary ties.

In terms of how this book compares to the others, I still like Prisoner of Azkhaban the best, followed by Goblet of Fire, and perhaps this book tied with the Chamber of Secrets. Oh, Slate’s Book Club has a nice exchange between David Edelstein and Polly Shulman that ranges up to considerations of the political message (anti-EU?) of this recent book.

I started this post as a note to myself almost a month ago, thinking it’d be useful for the upcoming alterations after I close on the neighbor’s apartment. “I’ll wait until after the closing before posting”, I thought.

It’s been a long month of waiting for the bank’s underwriter to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of whatever paperwork they require. It’s been a long month of waiting, punctuated by frantic activity to give supporting documents to the underwriter: getting an architect to write an estimate of the alteration costs, having that architect drop the project because it was too small, faxing floor plans to another architect, getting the president of the co-op board to send email to say that the board has approved similar alterations in the past, sending email myself to say that I don’t plan to turn the neighboring apartment into an undersea-grotto-decorated swimming pool, and, finally, sending copies of my most recent pay stubs to show I was still gainfully employed.

But the closing is now set for next Monday, and it’s time to start thinking much more seriously about architects, alteration plans and contractors, so:

Here’s an article in Habitat Magazine about the process of combining apartments.

The paperwork and waiting for this was horrendous, mainly due to the bank. I didn’t have a co-op board interview since I was already in the building (And I recently joined the board when they needed a seventh member at the annual meeting last month — when the bank asked for a letter from a board member on similar alterations, I suppose I could have written it myself, but that would have been too cheeky. Coincidentally, my first board meeting is on the day of the closing.) There was some drawn out haggling over the price at the beginning, but nothing out of the ordinary. The co-op management company paperwork took longer than expected, mainly because I was doing it myself without support from an experienced real estate agent, but not significantly longer. All in all, the extra month’s delay was due to the bank.

At the end of all this, I think three or four times as much paperwork has been spent on this process than it would have taken to buy a house in the suburbs somewhere. I think it’s been not quite twice as much paperwork as a standard co-op purchase. We haven’t gotten to the point of submitting alteration plans as of yet, but the architect will be helping with this, so thankfully I won’t be by myself with the paperwork.

Was it worth it, compared to buying a two-bedroom elsewhere? Yes, I still think so, since by all my calculations the combined apartment will be worth between 15 to 25% more than the individual apartments, which is a nice one-off gain financially. I’ve also seen some of the guts of the purchasing process that was shielded from me by the real estate agent last time. I’ve gotten on a co-op board instead of being interrogated by one for a new purchase. And the paperwork, while taking longer, wasn’t going to be worse than it would have been on a sale of the current place and purchase of the new one (along with coordinating both sale and purchase so I’d be able to live someplace while having the funds to buy the new apartment).

So, time to give the architect a call and set up an appointment for next week, now that I’ll have the keys.