Michael A. O’Neill

Author: Michael

  • 70 hits today

    I started mucking around with blogging about the transit situation here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This blog averages a couple of hits a day. The new blog got 70 hits. Yeah, 20 are from me, reviewing what I wrote. But man, the traffic is high.

  • ARGGHH!

    http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/28/free.ride.ap/
    http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2571332
    http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-01-28-free-space-ride_x.htm

    Nothing I can say. Oracle gave him $30K in cash to pay the taxes. Which would have been enough for most people.

  • Crashbars WORK!

    When I bought my new Vespa, I made sure to buy crashbars–steel bars that run along the cowls and legshields, and are supposed to protect the paint job from roadrash in minor drops. Today, I discovered that they worked!

    I had to drive to work today, and pulling into the parking garage, I took a bit sharp of a turn with the throttle open a little bit. With all the snow and ice, WSDOT has laid down a lot of sand and gravel (no salt: all the salty runoff kills the salmon runs), so I was accelerating and turning on dirt, basically. And I dropped the bike.

    I was only going five miles an hour, so I scraped my knee like I was a seven-year-old tripping on pavement while running. But there’s not a scratch on the body of my Vespa. The crashbars took all the road rash!

  • Pictures of Ellie

    I never seem to notice when the light is right for portraits. But it was right at one point this past weekend when Ellie was sitting on the couch in Chanel & Trish’s living room in Portland.

    I just love how pensive she is. It captures her quiet, gentle nature, I think.

    Ellie2_2Which one do you like more?

    Ellie1_1

  • Seventh Birthday

    Finn had his seventh birthday today. He wanted to stay six, however.

    Bday2      Bday

  • A Street Downtown

    A Street
    Downtown

    That was my favorite street sign in the Bay Area. But I think the one below, which I snapped this weekend on the way back from Mount Hood with the girls and their two little ones takes the cake.

    Boring_oregon_city_small_1

  • Amtrak Cascades…

    …is always 30 minutes late, give or take. Why don’t they just change the schedule to reflect that it takes 4 hours? Then they’d be early sometimes.

  • Inspection

    The inspection on Wednesday was fascinating: Faren West, the inspector, was incredibly thorough, right down to finding the rats in the attic. The tally:

    • One broken window pane
    • A tiny leak in the drain from the tub
    • Broken window springs
    • Broken seals on a couple of the double-paned windows
    • A dishwasher hose not up to spec
    • A gas line that’s pretty much ok, but not up to spec
    • An electrical line under a kitchen cabinet that should be in the wall
    • A hole in the floor near the bedroom radiator
    • A broken knob on the radiator
    • No ventilator for the gas range/stove

    I requested that the broken window pane be replaced, the broken window springs be repaired, and the leak on the tub fixed. The tub was the big one–Faren warned that there’s a slim chance the entire tub would need to be replaced.

    The owners agreed to repair the broken window springs and have a plumber look at the tub. They’re issuing a credit for the broken window pane. I’m worried about the credit for that: I doubt it’ll be sufficient, but I can’t prove otherwise.

    As to the other stuff, I’m thinking of having the bedroom radiator removed and a theromstat-controlled electric heater installed in the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom, so I’ll need to have the floor repaired anyway. 

    I’ll have the hose to the dishwasher fixed when I have a garbage disposal put in, so that’s not a big deal, either.

    The good news is that someone re-wired the entire place a few years ago. There’s a home-owner’s assocation rule that one can not use bulbs greater than 60 watts. But it doesn’t apply to my new wiring!

    I saw one last unit before the inspection. It was larger than the one I’m buying, and southwest leaning west, rather than southwest leaning south. It didn’t have a dishwasher, but it had lots more closet space and even a little nook for my diner booth. But I can’t live without a dishwasher, and I don’t need more space for junk. Less is better.

    We’re on our way.

  • Tuesday is always better

    I woke up to snow this morning. It was beautiful. I sat in Bauhaus from 7am on, working, watching the snow fall around the Space Needle and the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound. OK, I couldn’t see the Olympics, but I knew they were there.

    With snow, I had an excuse to work from home today. Tomorrow, I won’t go in until late afternoon. Monday meeting went well. I drove it like I drove Java PM meetings at Oracle. Boss agreed to final, minor changes to my marketing plan, and complimented my work. Yeah, he still thinks I can execute on the unexecutable. But we have a lot more time left to play this game.

    I always feel better after a couple of days. And Tuesdays are always better, somehow.

  • It’s the little things

    Today was my first meeting with the product team where that one individual didn’t make any disparaging remarks. OK, not true. It’s just that the disparaging remarks were directed at someone not in the room with us, instead of me. Which is a distinct improvement.

    We’ll see if this keeps up.