I had forgotten about one endearing aspect of home ownership: Since property transactions are matters of public record – there are advertising groups who scour those records with incredible efficiency in order to send out official looking letters offering products for your mortgage or house. I don’t mind the contractors who spend their marketing time sending a business card and a “welcome to the neighborhood, if you need plumbing done, just give a call,” letter. That actually strikes me as pretty smart. In fact, my company does something similar with recipients of bioinformatics grants from the NSF and NIH.

Others are a bit more insidious. They arrive on vaguely official stationary and include my full name, the amount of my loan, and various details to give the impression that the letter is sponsored by my bank. At the top are words like “Official Mortgage Document. Complete and return immediately!”

I’ve written a little response that sums up my feelings on the matter:

To Whom it May Concern,

I recently received your mailing about an “Affordable Mortgage Protection Program.” I assume that you obtained my name and address from the public records of property sales. While your advertisement claims that “[it] is not a solicitation,” it most certainly is. Even if you, yourself, are not a “licensed insurance agent,” you are working on their behalf to gather information about my family and attempt to sell something to us. Therefore, this letter applies to you and all of those associates.

I hereby instruct you, your associates, and your affiliates to cease sending me your unsolicited advertising at the above address. We have no pre-existing business relationship. Please remove me from all of your mailing and contact lists.

The fact that you baldly lie on the sheet of paper you sent goes beyond poor marketing for your products or professionals you represent. It is a case of false advertising and perhaps mail fraud. I am therefore inspired to report you to the better business bureau and the national authorities for mail fraud. However I notice that you did not include any identifying information on the letter itself. This led me to believe that I was on the right track by turning you in.

You protect yourself behind a pair of PO boxes, one on the return address from the envelope you sent, and another on your “Business Reply Mail” envelope. Those two PO boxes, plus the prepaid business postage account on your envelope, should be more than sufficient for the authorities to begin their work. I’m writing you as a courtesy, prior to beginning the formal complaint and criminal report process.

I spent most of yesterday working on the house. We’ve started dividing the world into critical-path and non-critical activities. Critical-path is “anything that is actively keeping us from moving into the place.” Non-critical is everything else. We then proceed to laugh at ourselves because we can’t seem to bring ourselves to do anything on the critical path. Really, all we need is to paint. That’s it. Even that is an affectation. We could easily move in and then paint one room at a time. However, that would lead to color-kitty … which isn’t the best.

Every surface in the house is covered in what might be called, without undue hyperbole, “the filth of a century.” There is this fine black soil in the window wells and on the walls. I don’t think it’s anything too creepy – just a mix of industrial pollution and general grime that has been allowed to accumulate over about 20 years. I’ve learned to clean the tops of things first (including the house itself, by the way) because when I clean anything – everything below that thing gets re-covered in this … soot?

The process of the cat dying of cancer has been stressful for both of us. Add to that redmeds usually stressful job and you’ve got a recipe for … bathroom demolition? We had been getting quotes and estimates to re-glaze the tile and tub … and otherwise do a quick once-over to make the bathroom acceptable for bathing. Instead, she decided to go ballistic on the tile and seems quite happy about it.

• Under the pink tile, there was cement-board.
• Under the cement board, there was painted plaster.
• Under the plaster, there was wallpaper.
• Under the wallpaper, there was drywall.
• Under the drywall, studs

So now we’re down to studs and, in the spirit of “it’s an opportunity,” are asking “hey, so since we’re here now, let’s go ahead and consider re-locating the tub or something. I have to admit that I agree with her – it’s cathartic. However, I have to note that this is much more damage than the woodpecker was able to do.

Below is a picture of where I spent my time yesterday. This chandelier is metal, and has been allowed to tarnish for, oh, say, perhaps 80 years. The bottom part is all shiny now. You take the metal polish and put it on a toothbrush. Then you scrub, and then scrub some more with a cloth. Then you repeat. Eventually, you move on to another square inch of surface.

The crystal dangly-bits were soaking in windex at this point.

And yes, dammit, it feels good to scratch the obsessive-compulsive itch.

We will not speak of the incident with the pressure washer except to say that:

(a) The outside of the house is cleaner than it was
(b) So am I.

I was awakened most horribly this morning.

My cat, Merlot, has a cancer of the jaw. It involves bloody drool.

This morning, I think that she was feeling sick and lonely, so she came and sat on the headboard above me as I slept.

Aaaaaaand she drooled her bloody drool on my face. That was how I woke up this morning. Bloody cat drool to the forehead.

It’s a freak-horror show around here, folks.

In other news, I can pretty much guarantee that the day is going to improve!

I got high praise at Judo today. A visiting judoka from our friendly neighbors to the north was working a particular throw. There was some discussion about whether said throw would work on someone taller than her – and it was suggested that she try it on me.

After a couple of tries (ow), she declared that it did indeed work on people taller than her.

A rejoinder was offered: “but is still on his feet.” (I had gotten back up after being thrown).

She replied something along the lines of “It’s . He always gets back up.”

So there you go – I may lack technique – I may not win – but at least I get back up when I fall.

P.s: Anyone who wants to make the sexual analogy with “getting up” is welcome to come to judo and see exactly how un-sexual this activity really is. By “getting up,” I do not mean “achieving viagra style sexual readiness.” I mean “standing up again after being thrown to the mat.”

So I’m coming back from lunch yesterday, having dropped off the check for the shiny new gutters on the shiny new house. I reach the path from the street to my door and I see this bird clinging to the underside of said gutters. I had just enough time to think, “huh, he’s hanging upside down but he’s a little big for a nuthatch. Hey, is he a wood …”

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BANG!

“Woodpecker!” My thoughts turned to vocalizations and I raised my hands to him. “Hey, buddy, that’s new … there’s no need to,”

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BANG! (he glanced at me contemptuously).

“Stop! Hey! Hey! Cease! Desist! New! Just paid!”

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BANG!

“AAAAA!”

And so on. I wound up chasing him around the sides of the house … but he wouldn’t let me even imagine that he was gone … since I could *hear* him chiseling around the corner. Gah.

In other news, I still have two cats. Merlot is on daily subcutaneous fluids (since she can’t eat or drink much at all anymore) and pain control. She sleeps a lot, but still bounces up to play with us from time to time.

Got my “Home CFO” hat on this morning, and I opened up a letter from redmeds employers. It was one page saying basically that they hadn’t received a response to their request for information about clinical privileges, and they were following up.

Then I got to the bottom, where they said:

If you do not intend to renew your clinical privileges, please email a resignation notice or, if you prefer, please complete the bottom portion of this page and fax it to ...

True to form, they included the world’s shortest “I resign my job” at the bottom of the page. Little line for “signature,” “date,” and “date of resignation.”

This struck me as some sort of pinnacle of bitchy administration. I mean, it takes some serious balls to send out a note with a post-script of “or if you would rather just resign your job, sign here.” This is doubly true given that redmed provides patient care. She’s billable. I would go so far as to say that if there were no medical providers working at the hospital, nobody else at the hospital would have paid jobs either. I.e: If the doctors follow through and resign – then the person who wrote this letter will shortly be out of work as well.

The people who sent this letter have a job, and that job is to do the administrative tasks necessary for redmed to do her job legally and (god forbid) efficiently. For them to send her a notification of paperwork-not-filed-in-a-timely-fashion that includes a pre-printed resignation letter … I mean … just wow. I’m not often left literally speechless.

Have you seen bitchier? Tell me about it.

I think that I get twitter – and there’s not much to get.

Back in the day, I was a luddite who thought that “the web” was just a massive ego trip. Seriously – I put up a web page on one of the umich servers in, like, 1994 – and wondered what the fuss was about. That lasted until a professor insisted that we get homework from his web page and turn in assignments by creating a (primitive by today’s standards) password protected page and giving him the password. That was when I realized that “the web” means “anyone can publish any document, instantly, for free.” The power of intellectual production was truly in the hands of the masses. That’s f-ing revolutionary, and we’re still dealing with what it means when “everyone” really seriously has the power of the press. Web 3.0? This is still web 1.0 people … we’re just finally hitting the knee of the exponential adoption curve on internet access in 2009.

Seriously. Did you hear the whinging last week about the digital conversion of TV? There’s a revolution going on – but it’s not twitter – it’s people finally realizing that you don’t have to own a million bucks of metal to broadcast yourself to everyone on the planet. The revolution is the stuff that is dreaming. Twitter is John the Baptist to his Jesus.

Okay seriously “tweeple,” shut up a second and let me talk. Put down the crackberry when I’m talking to you. Some thoughts take more than a sentence or two. If your philosophy fits on a bumper sticker, your philosophy sucks.

So then I started a livejournal, against my own better judgement, because this is just another ego trip. Why would I want the whole world reading my diary? Except that it turns out that the whole world doesn’t read my diary. There are maybe 30 of you, and I know the majority of you in real life. So while it’s theoretically possible for the whole world to read my blog … they don’t. Google skims me, and I occasionally get a hit from some real human who is constantly searching for (for example) co-working or something. This one time, I posted about giving a talk at a conference and a reporter covering the conference put 2 and 2 together and linked me in his article. So it’s there, but it’s not really the way the thing works. LJ at least makes a nod at concepts like privacy.

Facebook – same story. Except that the posts are shorter. Instead of having to read paragraph after angst laden paragraph, I can offer up a sentence or two in a status. “Got married.” “Had a kid.” “Cat dying.” That sort of thing. Once again, there’s a theoretical possibility that people could scope my statuses all the time – but they don’t. It’s a vehicle for me to communicate with (here’s the key) people who I already know. I’m not talking to the world … I’m talking to a few friends.

Implicit in both my blog and my facebook status is the fact that I know I’m talking to a small-ish audience. While both facebook and LJ give me delusions of my own globe-spanning importance, the reality is that we’re a single monkeysphere talking to itself. Maybe 200 of us. Tops.

Twitter is different: It runs under the assumption and the reality that I truly intend every “tweet” to go out to the whole fucking world … which just ain’t true. I have aspirations that the whole world will hear some of the things that I have to say … but it’s sure as hell not my stupid little posts that amount to me saying “hi, I still exist, and my butt kinda hurts today.” When I speak to the masses, it will use the same miraculous publishing power that was available to me in 1994 – and it will @not #include $txt @abbrviations.

When I preach, I intend to spellcheck.

Almost every time I post to twitter, some random ass web robot will say “hi” to me. Sometimes it’s a spammer who wants me to look at their product (hello “Boston Bread Company”). Other times it’s some aggregator who undoubtedly has a product under the hood. The most recent of these was “conference call tips.” I tweeted that I was on a conference call and was suddenly on an aggregator for everyone in the world who wanted to know about … what … people who used the words “conference call” in a tweet? Because there’s some sort of emergent global conversation going on about … conference calls? Give me a break.

Seriously. I get the difference … and I want none of it.

I had been abusing twitter by deliberately blocking all those jackasses … and then I realized: I’m fighting against the whole point of twitter. If I want to just “tweet” to my friends and family … I’ll use facebook. Given that the stated purpose of twitter annoys the crap out of me – the only winning strategy may be to not play.

Summary: I have no interest in being part of a chirping chorus of (to use the past tense): twats.

So, the reviews for the new transformers movie aren’t great:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

I still intend to see it.

Had a productive day at the house today. We:

* Removed all the flourescent light fixtures from the main floor
* Installed sliding locks on a couple of doors.
* Made a couple more doors actually open and close correctly.
* Took another layer of paint off the exterior door (obligatory stripper joke here)
* Measured and briefly scared ourselves that the refrigerator wouldn’t fit into the house … but it’s gonna be okay
* Removed the heinous pink sink (shaped like a seashell) from the upstairs bathroom
* Installed non-heinous light fixtures in the under-the-sink bathroom

And some other stuff too. At this point we’ve got a security system and the internet installed – and we’re getting appliances tomorrow. The hover-hive is coming online nicely.

Cancer cat had a rough day yesterday, which meant that when we got home from meeting there was blood all over the apartment. Ick. Took her to the vet, and once more decided to get some more food, subcutaneous fluids, and a pain patch and see what the week brings.

This evening involved watching Twilight. redmed has read all the books and I was feeling left out, so I downloaded it and we watched. I’ll say – not as bad as the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It actually had some redeeming virtues. Now, it’s not a vampire movie by any stretch of the imagination – but it was good clean fun. I dug the idea of vampire baseball.

Also, took a friend to judo on Saturday morning and was gratified that he didn’t just breeze through the workout. In fact, he whined about being sore the next day. Yeah, at first it hurts … but then you start to like it. Ain’t that always the case?

I don’t post much about work. Mostly this is because this is the internet and I assume that you’re all intelligent enough to figure out my real name and my real company and use that to email my real co-workers and my real customers, and tell them all that I’m talking about them. It’s not that I have anything nasty or even vaguely titillating to say about any of these folks … but I’m on a low drama diet. Plus, not that there’s anything spectacularly private or interesting about my life – but sometimes I don’t want to start business conversations with condolances for cancer-cat.

I also work on the theory that if I even glancingly feel an urge to friends-lock something then I should instead just not post it to the internet. I’ve accepted that I’m something of a data protection and privacy luddite. Still, I’ve got a pretty good track record with things that I don’t write down not showing up and biting me on the ass down the road.

Sometimes, however, there are things that are amusing even totally out of context. Today I’m writing a re-usable “terms and conditions” for our consulting work. How do we track “days,” (8 hours of non-consecutive work by remote OR a whole day where I’m 100% dedicated to you on your schedule OR any day where I have to go onsite); do we charge for travel time (not on the East coast); etc. Along the way I realized that I was simply writing down the way I do things.

My amusing thought was “well, since I’m perfect, I’ll just write down the way I act, and those can be the rules.”

I think that’s how most rules get made anyway.