Today’s post is of the “That’s pretty cool” variety.
I came across this site while perusing my RSS feeds. I could struggle with a description, but I think you’ll have more fun just trying it out. You’ll need Flash and bit of imagination, but you’ll figure it out.
It’s Good Friday today, and I’m having a nice, laid back day. Hope you are too. This site should help. Enjoy the long view.
I promised not to keep talking about this house thing until it was all done.
Well, the sign says it all!
We sold the house last night, and everything went according to our plan.
We put the house on the market, asked a fair price, didn’t accept any offers until after the open house, then had several to choose from and took the best one. Seems easy enough, doesn’t it? In fact, we ended up getting more than our asking price, if you can believe it.
And best of all, we got the closing date we wanted (August 15) which means that Kelly and I don’t have to stay in a hotel this summer! And we sold the house to a nice young couple with a toddler. We didn’t really want to sell to investors who would have put a bunch of students in here. That wouldn’t have been a nice legacy to leave our neighbours, would it?
Anyway, that’s about it. I have a funny story about the trials of getting ready for an open house, but I think I’ll save that for a podcast down the road. Now we can resume regular programming in TheDailyUpload.
This is definitely one of those vanity posts. It has nothing to do with business, or anything like that (unlike the guitar video I posted on the weekend!)
But here’s a quick update to our “selling the house” thing. The sign is up front, we’re up and running on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and the calls are coming in. We’ve got four showings booked for the next couple of days and our open house is being held this Sunday. (You can visit our house online here.)
With luck, we’ll get someone interested early next week and we can get this thing sold. Then we can get back to living like normal people again.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a very, very clean office, which has never looked so good. Nor has any other room in this place. We’ve dusted and vacuumed and sorted and thrown away and hidden and – well, if it involves cleaning, we’ve done it.
I was up until 2 am last night finishing up. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except I had to be up to head into Toronto at 5 am! I’m a bit bushed right now.
But it was worth it. The house looks nice. In fact, I think I’m going to miss it when we do sell it. Given the price of houses in Victoria, I’m not sure we’ll be owning again for awhile.
But enough about this already. I’m not going to turn this blog into a daily update on Dave’s adventures selling his house. I’ll report back when we’ve sold the silly thing. Unless something really newsworthy happens in the interim.
My colleague, Michael, pointed me to a remarkable confluence of events which will happen this Wednesday morning. I think I’ll have to be awake then just to see whether anything unusual happens!
Michael noticed the original post on Phil Gomes blog which he was reading because I had pointed to it in a previous post, etc. etc. Funny how these things get tossed around, isn’t it?
Here’s Phil’s post (cue the Twilight Zone music):
From My Dad, Re: This Coming Wednesday
Got this in my email:
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be:
01:02:03 04/05/06.
That has never happened before and it will never happen again.
You may now return to your normal stuff.
I have had great ambitions to blog lately. In fact, I’ve got a couple of good posts mapped out in my little black book, where I keep my notes.
Unfortunately, we’re getting ready to put our house on the market, as some of you may or may not know. And it’s amazing how much work getting a house you’ve lived in for nine years ready for an open house can be!
However, we are getting close. Last week, we had most of it ready for the photographer. The house was supposed to be up on the realtor’s website this weekend, but it doesn’t actually go on the market until Wednesday. (I’ll post the link to the website here when it goes live.)
UPDATE — Here’s the link to the realtor’s site. Be sure to click on the “Gallery” link when you’re taking the virtual tour for the whole picture package.
So I spent the weekend sorting, cleaning and packing. We’ve got rid of a lot of stuff and put some more in storage and late last night, I was wandering around the neighbourhood putting bags of garbage out with other people’s trash. (We have a 3-bag limit here on trash bags.)
Anyway, that’s my long-winded way of explaining why my posts have not been as regular lately. But soon, we’ll be back to regular programming. In the meantime, I’ll update you on our excellent house adventure as things unfold.
Paul — This one’s for you. I’ve been playing a guitar, in one form or another, for over 40 years. But I have never seen or heard anything quite like this. Check out this video and prepare to be impressed.
Thanks to Eric for pointing me to Phil’s blog, who is pointing to the YouTube video. That’s how this “conversation” thing works.
If, like most of the world, you tend to do most of your document creation in Microsoft Word, here’s something you might be interested in.
AjaxWrite is a web-based word processing program that uses Ajax (a new “cool” language that’s pretty hip on the web these days.) This certainly isn’t the first, Web-based word processor out there. Writely was one of the first and it was bought out by Google a couple of weeks ago.
I particularly liked the FAQs on the site (which is still in Beta, but seems to work pretty well). Here’s an example:
I heard that Sun and Google are partnering to create Google Office. How does ajaxWrite compare?
Google Office is vaporware meaning people talk about it, but it exists only in the press’ imagination. People interested in a traditional office suite should absolutely try OpenOffice.org because it’s a capable office suite available at no charge. But not even Google’s engineers can turn the giant semi-truck like OpenOffice into a hybrid vehicle that can run over the net like ajaxWrite. The OpenOffice software suite is approximately 65,000kb in size while ajaxWrite is just 400kb or to put it another way 150 times smaller. Now it’s not an entirely fair comparison because OpenOffice.org is multiple programs, not only a word processor. But any way you measure it, it will not be possible to transform OpenOffice.org into a snappy web delivered software program like ajaxWrite.
Since I already own multiple copies of Word for all of my various computers, I didn’t think I’d have much use for an online version. But when I tried it, I was pleasantly surprised. It really does work much like the regular program. The people behind it claim that the on-line version has about 85% of the features of the real program, which should satisfy most users’ needs.
What is really interesting though is that you don’t have to sign in or offer up your email address or anything. You just open the page and start working. You can load up any document off your hard drive (or a USB drive, if you’re working somewhere else) and save it back when you’re done. It’s cool and kind of fun to play around with.
Ajax is a very neat application and is one of the “go-to” products of the new Web 2.0 world that everybody loves to talk about. Right now, I’m having trouble keeping up with a lot of this stuff. But this is a program I could find a use for.
There’s nothing to it. Just go to the website and try it for yourself. I’d be interested to hear what you think about this. And if you want, you can submit your feedback to the site’s owners. They’re looking for comments on what they’ve done.
UPDATE — I didn’t realize it, but AjaxWrite requires the Firefox browser to work properly. If you aren’t using Firefox, my apologies. On the other hand, you really owe it to yourself to download a free copy and give it a try.
I’m writing this while I’m taking a brief break from a very, very busy day. I’m being pulled in several directions at once and being forced to make decisions in a hurry. Of course, nothing special in that. That’s the way life goes for everyone these days, right? It means we’re all doing great things and getting a lot of stuff done, I’m sure.
So coming across Be smarter at work, slack off I couldn’t resist taking a peek.
It’s a great read, but I’ve got to run. I’ll talk about it later. Read it for yourself.
Hmmm…there may be something ironic happening right now, but I don’t have time to figure it out.
Thanks to Kathy at Creating Passionate Users for the link.
I’ve just had the most amazing experience. I was watching TV tonight and I dozed off. When I woke up, there was an infomercial on about the songs of the ’70s. It’s one of those Time Life collections.
And here’s the scary part. I watched the entire half-hour and I knew EVERY FRIGGIN SONG!
I find it amazing how these 150 songs are so recognizable. I know there was a lot of other music (heck, I’ve still got plenty of vinyl records to prove it, although my 8-tracks are gone now…) but these songs have survived. Not that they were necessarily great songs (“Seem’s It never Rains in Southern California” or “Brandy”) but they have become memorable. (“Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting!”)
Waking up to an infomercial reminds me of the old Steve Goodman song, Vegematic:
Fell asleep last night with the T-V on. Oh, what a dream I had.
I dreamed I answered every single one of those late night mail order ads.
And four to six weeks later, much to my surprise,
The mailman came to my front door, and I couldn’t believe my eyes
When he brought the Vegematic, and the Pocket Fisherman too,
Illuminated illustrated history of life,
And Boxcar Willie with a Ginzu knife,
A bamboo steamer, and a Garden Weasel too,
And a tie-dyed, dayglow souvenir shirt from Six Flags Over Burbank.
There’s a larger point here about the power and the place in our society for music. It’s not a new thing, of course. It’s been a part of society for as long as we’ve been around. And each generation finds its own identity through the songs they grow up with. And even if I would never say I “liked” these songs, at least not all of them, I can’t deny that I recognize — and identify with — them. Interesting how powerful this linkage is.
Here’s a few items, not necessarily related.
ITEM 1 — It looks like Canada has accepted Clara Hughes’ Olympic challenge. You’ll recall that after she won a gold medal in the 5,000 Metre long-track skating event, Clara Hughes pledged $10,000 of her own money to a charity called Right to Play. Well, as of today, Canadians have pledged more than $307,000. What a tribute in response to a selfless gesture. Kind of makes you proud, doesn’t it?
ITEM 2 — Have you ever wandered through a cemetary, just for the quiet beauty of it? I like to, from time to time. When I was a reporter back in Saskatchewan, I often visited cemetaries in small towns, where you could see the history of the community revealed in the stone markers. So A dream lies buried here, a wonderful article from the March 17 edition of the Globe and Mail’s Facts and Arguments page, is one of the nicest pieces I’ve seen on the beauty of cemetaries and well worth the read. (I’m not sure how long it will be up on the site.)
ITEM 3 — I was talking with a former reporter colleague yesterday and it brought back lots of memories of life as a reporter. But compared to this series of articles from Salon.com (Part 1 and Part 2) on the bleak life for reporters in Baghdad covering the Iraq war, my time covering politics in Saskatchewan was a walk in the park. Iraq is a mess, and this excellent series makes clear just how desperate things have become.
ITEM 4 — In a similar vein, I tracked down Christopher Allbritton’s fascinating blog, Back to Iraq 3.0. Allbritton now lives in Iraq, after making news back in March, 2003, when he raised enough money from readers of his blog to go to Iraq to cover the war. He’s now living in Iraq, working for Time magazine. He’s earned a reputation from people who seem to know as a determined and honest journalist, who delivers a view of Iraq that you don’t see as often as you used to.
Together the two items above make me appreciate just how difficult life has become for journalists trying to do their job in Iraq. Their world is a dangerous grey area, where nothing is quite what it seems and disaster can strike at any time. They deserve our respect, no matter what we think of the war itself.
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