Category: Somerville

Blizzard 2016

Well, we got 27.4 inches of snow here in Somerville yesterday, according to the local news. It’s calmed down today, and everybody is digging out. I spent about 30 minutes digging my car out this morning, then another hour just before lunch. I’m actually kind of surprised I lasted that long. I’m still fighting a cold, and I’m still not sure I’d say I was 100% after my hernia surgery three months ago.

So now I’m trying to rest up a bit, watching TV and drinking coffee. (Starbucks is open!) I’m hopeful that I can work from home tomorrow, but we’ll see what they say about that.

Here’s an article on the storm from the NY Times that I’ll probably read later, after my head has stopped throbbing so much.

My Ongoing Parking Woes

I try not to complain too much about first world problems on this blog. But I feel like venting about the parking situation for my apartment building, so I’m going to go ahead and whine about it. (If not here, then where?)

I pay my landlord for a reserved spot behind the building. There’s a municipal parking lot right behind our building, and a portion of that lot is ours. I’m not sure if it’s technically owned by the town, or if our part belongs to our landlord, or how that works. But our area is basically our own mini-lot, with numbered spots that are all clearly marked as “reserved.” The rest of the lot is metered parking, with some other reserved spots for other buildings.

It used to be that the only time I had trouble parking in my own spot was on Friday nights during the summer, when Somerville hosts a classic car show. So, between the classic cars and all the people who come to see them, the lot fills up and people decide to poach the reserved spots. That was a pain, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, and it was only one day a week, for part of the year.

But it’s been getting worse over the years, for a variety of reasons, and, to make a long story short, it’s now pretty much guaranteed that I’ll lose my spot if I go out on Friday or Saturday night, any time of the year, and come back any time before 10pm. And if I’m back before 9pm, I might not find any available spot in the lot. Which means I have to park on the street. But it’s illegal to leave the car on the street overnight, so then I have to go back out again and move it back into the lot once spots open up.

And I’ll often lose my spot on a weeknight, if I go out, or if I get home from work late. It’s getting kind of ridiculous.

So the landlord came up with the idea of issuing everyone a traffic cone with the word “reserved” printed on it. The idea would be that we’d put out the cone any time we left our spot, then toss it in our car when we got home. Well, that lasted about a week before the rotten kids around here started swiping the cones. God knows why. (What are they gonna do with traffic cones?)

I think I need to hire someone to sit in a lawn chair in the middle of my parking spot all day and chase away anyone trying to poach it. And I’ll give the guy a Taser or a can of pepper spray to ward off the rotten kids. (Otherwise, I assume they’d beat up the guy and steal the lawn chair.)

So that’s my “first world problem” rant for the day. I feel a little better now.

Somerset Patriots

I skipped most of the Tour of Somerville today, in favor of going to my first Somerset Patriots game. A friend got some free tickets, and gave me a couple. It was a nice way to spend a warm Memorial Day afternoon. I’m going to use a photo from the game as a “featured image” on this post, and see how that looks.

Oh, and I’ve also just realized that I need to figure out if I can increase the max upload size for this blog. It’s currently 2 MB, which isn’t enough for a full-size photo from my iPhone. I’m not sure if I’m bumping up against some arbitrary WordPress limit, or if this is the usual PHP upload limit.

[Update: I increased the PHP upload limit by creating a .user.ini file in my WordPress root folder, as indicated by this StackOverflow answer. I was already familiar with doing this through php.ini, but I hadn’t stumbled across .user.ini before. So I learned something new today!]

upload_max_filesize = 4M
post_max_size = 8M
file_uploads = On

Sandy follow-up and more

I got cable service back yesterday, so I’m pretty much back to normal, at least as far as utilities are concerned. My goals for today were modest — I just wanted to get my laundry done, pay some bills, run a couple of errands, and then relax and watch some TV.

At work, over the last couple of days, we’ve been working on a web site to allow people to search for open gas stations in the area. Getting gas has been a huge problem here in NJ since the storm. The web site is live at http://findgas.org/ now. Unfortunately, it’s been popular enough that we had to make some adjustments, lest the site take down our main web server. Not really what I wanted to be doing today, but not a big deal either. In hindsight, we should probably have put the thing up on AWS, on a self-contained EC2 instance. Live and learn, right?

Meanwhile, I decided to take a shot at upgrading my main desktop computer (here at home) to Windows 8. I was originally going to go through and uninstall some old software first, but in the end, I decided to just start the upgrade and hope for the best. I didn’t even do a backup first, which is something I may regret later. Either way, it’s running right now. Previous experience from my laptop upgrade would lead me to believe that it’ll take an hour or two to finish.

Sandy

Just a quick post to say that my section of Main St in Somerville got power back at around 9pm last night. I’d lost power on Monday night, at around 9pm, so that was three days with no power. I know a lot of places got hit much worse that Somerset County. It was weird living without electricity for three days though.

My iPhone and iPad kept me connected. Both Verizon (iPhone) and AT&T (iPad) 3G stayed up most of the time. (AT&T disappeared for several hours at one point, but I never had a problem with the Verizon service.)

My cable service isn’t back up yet, so no high-speed internet at home just yet. Hopefully soon!

Reading and Music

I’ve been having a bit of a problem at home lately. They play music on Main St. now, for most of the day. They used to just do this around Christmas, but now they’re doing it all the time. They’ve got one set of songs programmed into the thing. It’s all basically soft rock, with a little jazz mixed in. Stevie Nicks, Seal, Sting, Sade, that kind of stuff. Lots of artists whose names begin with “S”, for some reason.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday night, the timer went wonky on it and it kept playing all night. Even with all the windows closed, and earplugs in my ears, I could still hear the music, and really couldn’t sleep at all that night. I (and at least one of my neighbors) called the police, but they didn’t know how to turn it off, or have contact info for anyone who could. (Supposedly, that’s been fixed if this happens again.)

While the music was bothersome before, this incident has reprogrammed my brain so that the mere hint of “Sweetest Taboo” (for example) starts to make me shiver and feel slightly nauseous.

This isn’t much of a bother on weekdays, since I only have to put up with an hour or two of it, between whenever I get home from work, and 8pm, when the timer (hopefully) turns it off. I’m generally watching the previous night’s Stewart and Colbert after work, so that drowns it out.

On weekends, though, I often like to sit around and read during the day, so this is a problem. I need to find some music I can listen to that drowns out the Main St muzak, but doesn’t distract too much from what I’m reading. I’ve been reading Zero History by William Gibson over the last week or so. I’m almost done with it. Yesterday, I used Fugazi’s Instrument soundtrack to down out the muzak. Today, I’m using turntable.fm, specifically the ambient/chillout and coding soundtrack rooms. I’ve discovered that I can get pretty good sound out of my iPhone by putting it in an old dock that I friend gave me a few years ago, and connecting that to my receiver via a mini-stereo to RCA cable, into the “tape” input. Previously, I’d just been connecting it by inserting the cable into the headphone jack, but the dock makes a big difference, for some reason.

I’ve really been digging Turntable.fm lately, by the way. This is one of those things that the internet is great for, but that usually goes wrong after a while. Right now, you can fire up turntable.fm, go into the right room, and there will be a few people with impeccable taste playing great songs for a crowd of maybe 50 or 100 people. No advertisements. No jokers coming in and playing Rick Astley. No spambots coming in and DJ’ing ads for boner pills. I’m not sure why it works, but I’m glad it does.

Also, about Zero History: good book! I’ve found that a number of things in it, sometimes just minor stuff, has sent me off to the internet to do a little research. Node Magazine and the Zero History blog have some good links. I’ve also found myself looking into Saharan guitar music and other odd stuff like that.

Walking

It was a great weekend, weather-wise, so I did a couple of nice long walks yesterday and today. I’ve been using the Runkeeper iPhone app to track my walks. It’s kind of cool to see them on a map. Yesterday, I stayed local. Today, I took the train into NYC, then a cab up to the Met.  I wandered around the museum for awhile, then walked back down from there to Penn Station.

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.