Neighbor Nicknames

We moved into our current house in 2006. So, by now, you would think that we would know most of our neighbors. But we don't.

We like the ones we have met, but we haven't met the vast majority of them. Many of them I have never even seen, and the ones I haven't talked to I obviously wouldn't recognize outside of the context of our street. So (like many people), we have come up with some nicknames for the neighbors we haven't met (since we don't know their real names). For instance there are The Rich People, who live in a house noticeably larger than any of the other houses on our street (actually, the footprint of their garage looks almost as large as our house's), drive a Lexus, and own a huge boat.

Recently, it occurred to me that our neighbors undoubtedly have created nicknames for Heimlich and I. I wonder what they call me?

Anal Lawn Guy?
Anti-social Weirdo?
The Guy Who Hates Dogs?
The Doofy Dresser?
Princess Hairgel?

Bose QuietComfort2 Review, Part 5

This is part 5 of a several part review of the Bose QuietComfort2 headphones. [Go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4].

One of the things that you will frequently see in reviews of noise canceling headphones (of any brand) is complaints of users feeling "pressure" on their eardrums. It's a sensation like you have just taken off on a plane and are gaining altitude. Your natural reaction to the sensation of pressure on your eardrums is to try to "pop" your ears.

However, the noise canceling headphones don't actually produce pressure on your ears. They just create that same sensation. I too have noticed the sensation and find it slightly annoying. What I find myself doing is taking short breaks from using them about once an hour. Anyone debating about buying one of these units should be aware of this potential annoyance.

I've also wondered whether that sensation is an indication that it may damage my hearing. I found this study [hearingreview.com], which seems to lean in the direction that use of these headphones at a reasonable volume will not damage your hearing. But it stops short of really being conclusive. I imagine that this will be a higher profile issue once noise cancellation starts being a standard feature in cars [motorauthority.com].

At any rate, use of any headphones probably damages your hearing. But it seems that these aren't any worse for you than any other type of headphone. And in most situations, they allow me to listen to something at a lower volume than I would have been able to with a conventional set of headphones.

[Go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]

This Is the Zodiac Speaking

One of the books that I finished recently was This Is the Zodiac Speaking: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer [amazon.com] by Michael D. Kelleher and David Van Nuys.

The focus of the book is on The Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the San Francisco and surrounding areas in the late 1960s (but has never been identified). The two authors combine their journalism and psychology skills to freshly analyze the evidence that Zodiac had left, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight. Zodiac not only left physical evidence, but also wrote a series of notorious letters to newspapers, in an effort to taunt the police and FBI. The authors delve into what these letters indicate about Zodiac, and why he couldn't be caught at the time.

Obviously, I wasn't alive during the time period when Zodiac was active, so I only knew the most superficial of details about Zodiac. The appeal of the book for me was a concise and objective accounting of the events and evidence. The authors do an excellent job of transporting the reader back to the time period, and the hysteria and fear that had gripped the San Francisco area at the time.

They run through a laundry list of theories that people have proposed along the way, as far as who Zodiac may have been, what his motives may have been, and how he got away with it. And most of those theories are discounted using an objective analysis of the evidence. I really enjoyed this read.

My only complaint is that it was annoying that the footnotes appear at the end of each chapter (as opposed to the page where they are referenced). As a result, you have to keep flipping back and forth to the end of the chapter as you read through it. Very annoying.

On Haggling

A few months ago, I mentioned that we were going to be redecorating our living room. Here's what it currently looks like:


As you can see, it's very cluttered and the furniture doesn't match with the room (because when we moved in, we just threw the furniture that we had in there). The TV is too low, and the entertainment center blocks the window on the wall behind, etc...

We finally made a little bit of progress on this front -- we bought some new furniture to replace all of the crap on that end of the room (surprising, because we never agree on furniture). We got a quote on the furniture, and then went home to discuss and measure the room. After deciding to go ahead with it, I called the salesperson and tried to haggle the price down by about 7%. She said that she would have to talk to her manager and then she would call us back.

She didn't call back for over 2 hours. Now, we had been in the store about 2 hours earlier, and there weren't that many customers. So, I can only assume that the delay in calling us back was because:

1. her manager is hard to get a hold of,
2. she forgot to call us back, or
3. it was a game to find out how eager we were to buy the furniture.

I don't know how these things work, but I reasoned that if we called her back first to find out what the delay was, she would know that we really wanted the furniture, and her counter offer could be higher (or possibly, I'm too eager to spot a conspiracy). In the end, she agreed to the price that asked for.

The furniture isn't going to arrive for another 7-8 weeks, unfortunately. Apparently, the economy isn't working in our favor (they don't have lots of inventory laying around). How could it possibly take that long to get non-custom furniture? I can only assume that amount of time is needed to harvest the wood from some endangered Amazonian rain forest, ship it here in a hermetically-sealed and climate-controlled container, before some carpenters specially flown over from Japan painstakingly hand carve each piece using only tools from the 18th century.

House and Gas Bills, Part 2

Yesterday, I posted about the odyssey we have been having with our house. If there is a silver lining to this story, it's that the insulation we installed on our third floor has greatly reduced our gas bill (we have a gas furnace). Here's a copy of our gas bill from 2008, showing our usage for the previous 12 months:


We used 74.3 MCF (thousand cubic feet) of natural gas over the previous 12 months. Over that period of time, we paid an average of just over $10/MCF -- meaning we paid roughly $750 in natural gas usage over that 12 month period (plus fees).

At around that point, we fully insulated the third floor of our house (at a cost of maybe $120, plus all of our labor). Our latest gas bill shows our gas usage for the 12 months since we installed that insulation:


Wow! What a difference! The amount of gas needed in 12 months dropped from 74.3 to 10.5 MCF (a reduction of 85%). Some of the difference is certainly due to temperature differences between the two years. Some is also due to different thermostat settings. But clearly, the majority has to be due to the insulation we installed.

The latest graph looks a little strange. It looks like we used gas in Nov and Dec 2008, and then none since. In actuality, the Nov and Dec numbers are based on an estimate of our gas usage based from previous years. Of course, this estimate was waaay too high. The graph shows we haven't used any gas in the months since Dec, because we have been living off the credits from being overcharged. For this reason, our annual usage may have actually been lower than 10.5 MCF for the past year (because that 10.5 MCF includes gas we have been charged for, but haven't used yet, since we still have a credit).

Ok, so our house isn't quite a passive house [wikipedia.org] yet, but we just took a huge step in that direction. We just saved ourselves several hundred dollars in gas bills every year.

[Back to Part 1.]

House and Gas Bills, Part 1

I wanted to post an update about our house, but first a recap of the odyssey:

In February 2008, the water pipes above our kitchen froze and then burst. It's a long story that you can read about in my previous posts. The contractor who fixed our house told us he thought the problem was the full bathroom that we have on our (uninsulated) third floor of our house. He thought the pipes froze on the third floor, and then froze downward.

During the summer in 2008, we fully insulated the third floor of our house (or as much as was practical to insulate). It ended up being a big job, but it was worth it if it would prevent our pipes from freezing again. Well, it turns out that wasn't the cause of the problem, because in December 2008 our pipes froze again. Since we knew exactly where the pipes were, we opened up the ceiling in the right spot, and Heimlich thawed out the pipes with a hairdryer before they burst. In the process, we discovered where cold air was entering our house and fixed it, hopefully preventing our pipes from freezing again in the future.

For the past six months or so, we have been living with holes in our kitchen ceiling. We had gotten to the point where we didn't even notice them anymore.


Well, I finally got around to fixing the holes (see above picture). We also placed a (borrowed) remote temperature sensor in the ceiling near the pipes. We will monitor the temperature near the pipes over the next winter, and if everything is hunky dory (translation: if the pipes don't freeze again) we'll finish off the job next spring.

More tomorrow.

Bose QuietComfort2 Review, Part 4

This is part 4 of a several part review of the Bose QuietComfort2 headphones. [Go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3].

In Part 3, I had talked about the compartment for the battery that powers the unit (see below picture). I have some concerns about the durability of the battery door (particularly, the clip that holds it closed), but so far it has held up well. Apart from the battery door, the quality of the construction of the entire unit appears to be solid. Many reviewers have complained about stress cracking developing in the headband, and I am going to treat these headphones very gingerly for that reason. No doubt that could become a problem in the future.


Another feature that I was delighted with was the airplane adapter that these headphones come with. You know how on many airlines, you need a special set of headhphones to use the onboard entertainment system? I usually just use my own headphones (and suffer through only hearing the audio in one ear). Well, this set of headphones comes with a 2-prong adapter that allows you to use this (or any other) set of headphones with an airline entertainment system, and hear the audio in stereo.

I'm not exactly an audiophile, but my opinion is that the sound quality is excellent. It is certainly better than any pair of headphones I have used in the past few years.

[Go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.]