Author: Andrew Huey

time to move?

I woke up this morning to the smell of wet cardboard. My upstairs neighbor apparently had some kind of problem with his or her water heater last night. A bunch of water had leaked through the ceiling into my front closet. The only thing I store on that side of the closet is old cardboard boxes, thankfully. So I had to throw out about a dozen soggy cardboard boxes, and then do a bunch of mopping up, before I could leave for work this morning.

Apparently, they fixed the problem at some point during the day. I had a bit more cleaning to do when I got home, but not too much. This isn’t the first time I’ve had water leaking through from the apartment above. I’m starting to worry about what kind of shape the drywall is in, in a couple of areas.

My lease is up for renewal pretty soon. Maybe it’s time to move.

a minor milestone

I took care of a couple of estate-related tasks today, and I thought I’d write a short blog entry, since this represents a bit of a milestone, in terms of paperwork, if nothing else.

First, I wrote distribution checks to myself and my brother, out of my Dad’s estate account. This pretty much closes out his estate. He passed away in September 2009, and I originally didn’t even think I would need to get a lawyer involved in the estate, since all his assets would just pass to my Mom. Then, of course, things got complicated. When Mom passed away in February 2010, I just got all the paperwork together for both estates, and went to a law firm. They have been very helpful, and we’ve now got everything under control.

Second, I finally filled out, and sent in, the paperwork to put my parents’ home on the market. I feel bad that it’s taken me so long to do this. I meant to get it done over the summer, but somehow I just kept putting it off. With the first anniversary of my Mom’s death coming up in just a few more days, I really have to buckle down and start dealing with this. The home is a very big loose end for me — there’s still a lot of stuff down there that I don’t know what I want to do with.

Aunt Janet

My Aunt Janet passed away this week. I spent a bit of time tonight trying to find a good picture of her in my Flickr photostream, and this is the only one I could find. That’s Aunt Janet on the left, Uncle Archie on the right, and Tommy in between. And probably my Dad’s finger in the upper left corner.

goodbye, eMusic

I finally went ahead and canceled my eMusic subscription today. Looking back at 2010, I only managed to get on there and download stuff four times, about 12 albums total. Given that I’m paying the monthly fee whether or not I actually download anything, that’s a bunch of money down the drain. Sometimes, if you don’t download anything for awhile, they credit you with a free month, but that only partially covers you, if you haven’t been on in three months.

Their new fee structure was the last straw. It really seems like I can do just as good downloading MP3s from Amazon, and only paying for stuff I actually want to buy. When I first signed up, back in 2001, eMusic was a pretty good deal — 40 tracks a month for $10. And, back then, I was actually getting on there every month, downloading stuff, and listening to it. At this point, even though I’m not downloading as much, I find that I’m not even listening to a lot of the stuff I do download. Looking at my iTunes library, I see stuff I downloaded in 2008 that I haven’t listened to yet.

There’s some good articles about eMusic up on PaidContent, if you want to look back at some of the changes they’ve made over the last couple of years.

How Green Was My Valley

I saw “How Green Was My Valley” yesterday at the Walter Reade. There’s a bit of narration at the beginning that I like a lot. Here’s a bit of it:

There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.

I was going to file that away, and post it on Father’s Day, but I decided to post it now, while I’m thinking of it.

done with delicious

Well, I decided not to mess around, and just jumped straight into a different bookmarking service. I set up a new account with Pinboard. They charge a small fee to set up an account, and they have a weird way of calculating that fee — it rises as more people sign up for accounts. I think a lot of other people were jumping over from Delicious today too: I saw the fee rise from $7.50 to $7.57 over the course of about an hour.
My bookmarks are currently being imported. They have a note up at their import page, saying that it may take a while, due to all the new people signing up today. Imagine that.
I have a separate Delicious account set up on my work computer, since I like keeping work bookmarks at least somewhat separate from home bookmarks. (I use to Delicious “for:” tags to share between the work and home accounts.) I’m not sure if I’ll just use the same Pinboard account for everything, set up a new Pinboard account at work, or try a completely different service at work. I might try importing my work account into Google Bookmarks or XMarks and see how that goes.

Yahoo is shutting down delicious

…and a few other things. Darn it, I have 3500 bookmarks in delicious. I’ve been using it since 2003. Warren Ellis covers this eloquently: “Hey, Yahoo? Running del.icio.us cost you pennies, and bought you so much goodwill. Now you’re just another of those scumfucks who acquires great services just to bury them.”
Here are links to a couple of articles about possible alternatives:
5 Solid Alternatives to Del.icio.us
10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking