Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

August-September remodeling

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I haven’t been keeping up with the remodeling changes here on this blog, because they’re coming fast and furious now. It’s beginning to look like an actual house. If it starts to look any more like an actual house, I may move in much, much earlier than originally planned.

The cabinets are in! The wood floors are in (and hand-scraped, and stained, and coated with whatever they coat hardwood floors with). Lots of interior painting and staining and what have you is happening.

This is the current front of the house. And…this is pretty much what it’s going to look like (save some wrought-iron work that needs to be added, and lights.) The plaster is up. The color is great. We are loving the look of the house.

The current front of the house

Here we see one wall of the kitchen. The big hole is where our fridge will be going. Since this picture was taken, the island has been installed, so it looks a little more cramped now.

Kitchen one

The other side of the kitchen L. The space is for my range, still sadly unpacked.

Kitchen two

Just to the right of the above picture is the pantry/built-ins corner. For example, the built-in china cabinet.

China cabinet

And the pantry. This is one wall of the pantry. The other wall is shelves from floor to ceiling. Yes, my pantry rocks.

One half of the pantry

One wall of my office. Just look at those bookshelves. If you have to have built-ins, make them gorgeous, you know?

One side of my office

The other side of the office, a.k.a. the side I’ll look at every day.

The other side of my office

Most of the cabinetry (shelves, cabinets, bathroom vanities, etc.) looks like this:

Most of the cabinetry

The painted stuff looks like my office. The stained wood (like the doors, or the windowsills), will look like this:

Stained doors

Yeah. ROCK.

This house is going to be great. I CAN’T WAIT.

A year without TV

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We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

So I broke out of jail…

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…and then broke right back in.

Every single Apple blog I follow announced triumphantly that the one-stop-shopping for jailbreaking iOS 4.0 had arrived. Visit the webpage via Mobile Safari, move the slider, jailbreaking occurs. It’s all safe and legal and yadda yadda. (You know, because Apple had been taking a real hard line on jailbreakers, what with their sternly worded PR releases and all.) And I keep reading about how jailbreaking is the best thing since sliced bread because there’s So! Much! You! Can! Do! once you’re freed from the horrible, horrible confines of software that just works and looks pretty to boot.

I have to say that many of the customizations I’ve seen screenshots of look, frankly, horrible. I’m not a big fan of the new backgrounds that you can do via iOS 4.0 (I immediately uploaded this background, via Marco, because for some stupid reason Apple doesn’t include a black background as one of its defaults). But then I read about an app that lets you do lots more stuff with your texting (and I’m a 14 year old girl around my iPhone, I am all about the texting), and one that lets you blacklist phone numbers you’re tired of hearing from. Different sounds to indicate who a text is from! That could be awesome.

So I did it. I pushed the slider.

The install crashed.

So I pushed it again. And again. Because the jailbreak kept crashing. I had to check a couple of webpages to find out what the hell was going on, and after about 30 tries and at least that many webpages the answer came back: restore the software on the iPhone, retry the jailbreak.

Restoring the iPhone meant recopying all the applications and media files I have on it, so that was an extra 45 minutes or something, after having wasted about an hour on it so far. But what the hell. I wanna get different sounds for my texts.

I redid the jailbreak and this time it worked very quickly and installed the Cydia app. Apparently Cydia was getting slammed yesterday with jailbreakers, so I’m not surprised at the app’s slow performance. (No, really—no snark there.) I downloaded iBlacklist and BiteSMS.

Holy crap. Here’s my take on it, people: thousands of app settings, poorly explained and organized, are not equivalent to quality.

I played with BiteSMS for, I dunno, twenty minutes? Within five I was on their website, going through their forums, trying to figure out why I couldn’t, you know, WRITE A TEXT to somebody. I had to go to Apple’s SMS app to send a friend a text. BiteSMS never let me know when she responded. (I certainly didn’t get the cute QuickReply popup I wanted to check out.)

Then I played with iBlacklist and said, Well, this would be the coolest thing in the world, except it’s hard to understand and I have to spend a lot of time on various websites trying to figure out how X, Y, and Z work.

After another hour of playing with a few things, I said, “Screw this,” I hooked my iPhone up to my Mac, and I pushed the Restore button in iTunes. Restoring once is a pain in the ass. Restoring twice cured me of a need to try jailbreaking again for the foreseeable future.

This is why I have an iPhone. I want to download an app and have it work. I spent more time on webpages yesterday trying to figure out how to get stuff to work than I have the entire time I’ve had my iPhone. I don’t want to download MobileTerminal and figure out how to SSH stuff to my phone.

Should Apple let you have different SMS tones? Yes. And when they do, it will work seamlessly, and not with twenty different settings I have to read up on. Should they allow you to blacklist? Ohmygodyes. (Like I’m supposed to believe Steve doesn’t have blacklisting on his phone. Please.) But if these Cydia apps had to compete in the App Store they’d lose, because their UI sucks and I have to do too much work to get them moving.

I think I’m a pretty typical user. Jailbreaking was just too much work. Thanks for all the effort, guys, and if that’s what you really need from your phone, have at it. I’m glad I have a phone that works right the first time.

And themes suck. I’m sorry, themes are just the ugliest thing in the world. Android can keep those.