Month: February 2008

Response from Senator Allen

Thank you for your email regarding Leesburg Pike. I appreciate your concerns and value your input on this important matter.

While safety on our roads is one of my highest transportation priorities and I support initiatives aimed at protecting all highway users, this is an issue that falls under the jurisdiction of State and local government. In fact, I feel that this is a matter in which federal involvement would not be appropriate.

As a common-sense Jeffersonian conservative, I strongly believe that the reach of the federal government ought to be limited in nature. States and localities understand the needs of their people better than a remote federal government.

Please be assured that as a citizen of the Commonwealth, I will closely monitor this issue. However, while my staff and I are more than happy to assist you with matters involving federal legislation or agencies, this particular issue should be dealt with at the State level. I encourage you to contact your State and local officials, should you need further assistance in this matter. These officials may be identified through the citizen services page of the Commonwealth of Virginia website.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact me. If you would like to receive an e-mail newsletter about my initiatives to improve America, please sign up on my website (allen.senate.gov). It is an honor to serve you in the United States Senate, and I look forward to working with you to make Virginia and America a better place to live, learn, work and raise a family.

With warm regards, I remain

Sincerely,

Senator George Allen

The Atrocity at Seven Corners

Dear Congressman Moran

I am writing to request that something be done about the Seven Corners intersection Leesburg Pike, Route 50, and various other roads. I’m sure you’re familiar with the intersection, although I’m not sure it’s technically in your district.

I drive through the intersection nearly every weekday after dropping my wife at East Falls Church Metro on my way to my office in Bailey’s Crossroads. And nearly every weekday, someone turns into a lane which I am currently occupying, and to which I have a legal right, and they do not. I have consulted with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and in this particular case, I am entitled to the lane while they are not.

I understand that reworking the entire intersection would be quite costly and would cause impossible traffic delays while work was being done. And while I think that the intersection is an embarrassment to the state of Virginia, a monument to unchecked growth and poor planning, I would be satisfied if there were simply signs clearly identifying which lane a driver should be in to end up in a certain spot.

I am a more observant driver than most people. And if I can’t figure out the proper flow of the intersection after six months of driving through it and a request for clarification from the DMV, then I find it hard to fault other drivers for not knowing which lane to be in.

I truly believe that the only reason there are not daily accidents at the intersection is that there is too much traffic for anyone to build up any speed.

Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to your response.

Im with you on everything but the Mac part

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

You could remove many electronic boxes from our home and we would not miss them. But if you took our kitchen computer away, it would hurt. In fact two weeks ago the Mac had to go in for repairs, and we kept turing to its vacant spot for help, only to groan. It felt a little like some feel without their cell phone.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.  I think a small form factor box (Like a Mac Mini, since you all know what that is, but not a Mac, because Macs and I have a mutually antagonistic relationship) with a small touchscreen would be perfect to mount underneath a cabinet in the kitchen.  You could use it for recipes (We constantly bring a laptop into the kitchen for this, but I don’t like my laptop on the counter.).  You could use it, as mentioned in the linked article, for watching movies and YouTube and whatnot while cooking.

The kitchen has always been the most sociable place in the house for me, and probably for lots of others.  I would love someday to build a house centered on the kitchen, where the layout of the house encouraged everyone to congregate in a huge kitchen designed both for cooking and for relaxing.

Now I just have to convince the wife that this is a great idea.

Drupal coming along nicely

I tweaked my strategy to import this blog into Drupal, and it’s working quite well on my local machine.  I had wanted to go with the brand new Drupal 6.0, but it’s not quite finished, and many of the modules that I might want to use haven’t been updated yet.  So I think I’ll go with 5.7, and then upgrade down the road a little when 6.0 is more mature.

My big problem is the permalinks.  I don’t want to have to write individual .htaccess entries for 700-some posts – I can’t imagine that’s a good idea.  So I need a redirect rule, and I don’t know much about writing them.  I think I can figure it out, though.  I think I’m going to have to map http://www.blog.complainthub.com/?p=123 to http://www.complainthub.com/node/123 or something like that.  I don’t think that will be hard, but you never know.  Luckily my webhost uses nice, sensible Apache servers, instead of some hideous abomination.

Anyway, my next challenge will be scraping together a new theme.  I have some ideas, but I need to execute them.  And I need to pick a color scheme.  You can leave suggestions in the comments, which I’ll probably ignore.  But you can leave them.

Saving money through credit cards

When I finally got fed up with hearing, “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t accept Discover”, and went looking for a new credit card, I started off at Fatwallet, looking for a good deal.  I looked through their list of rewards cards for something with a 2% return on something that I would actually use.  The one that jumped out at me was a Chase/Countrywide card (Even though I hate Chase).  If you, like me, have a mortgage through Countrywide (Which I do, on our rental condo in Falls Church), this card will pay $50 towards that mortgage for every $2500 you spend on the card.

They just applied the first payment to my mortgage, and I was wondering what my long term savings were.  I have 27 years, 8 months left on the loan.  The wife and I intend to continue to rent out the condo as long as we can afford it (And that should get easier from year to year, as rents inevitably go up while the mortgage stays basically the same).  Now, it’s likely that we’ll refinance at some point, although the rate is 5.375%, so it probably won’t be until we can get a 10 or 15 year fixed mortgage instead of the 30 year.

Anyway, I found a mortgage calculator that would tell me my savings based on a one-time extra payment.  I don’t know how accurate it is, but it tells me that my one-time payment of $50 in the 27th month of the loan will save me $177 over the full remainder of the loan.  So my 2% reward turns into a 9% reward (I know, adjust for inflation, present day value vs future value, blah blah blah I dropped my econ major, remember?  It’s not a perfect calculation.).

So that’s pretty awesome.  And it shows how much a small early prepayment can help in a long-term loan.  So, while Chase’s customer service is, in my experience, unbelievably bad, this credit card is a great deal if you have a Countrywide mortgage.  I have no idea whether Bank of America will mess with this or not, but I hope not.

Columbia Heights lost a theater

DCist: Rorschach Gets A New Home (For Now)

The scrappy theater troupe has been hunting for months for a temporary home to finish out its 2008 season, after being bumped from its former spot at the Sanctuary Theater in Columbia Heights, a converted church space.

That sucks.  I hadn’t been paying a ton of attention to what’s going on at our local theater because the last few times I looked at their website, they had no announced dates for new shows.  And now I find out they’re no longer our local theater.  We went to one show a while back and really enjoyed it, and just hadn’t gotten around to going again.

I hope this works out for them, but it sucks for Columbia Heights.

Someone stole my cherries!

I had some frozen cherries in the freezer at work to eat with my oatmeal in the morning, and someone stole them.  I was looking forward to oatmeal with cherries today.  But they’re gone.  Now I have to eat plain oatmeal.

A coworker tells me they sent out a notice a long time ago that they were going to clean the fridge, but I never saw it.  So I suspect that those jerks threw out a half a package of organic frozen cherries just because there might have been a little bit of cherry juice on the bottom of the freezer.   I hope they’re happy with themselves.

Wow, that was easy

I did a test import of Complaint Hub into Drupal on my laptop.  It worked nearly flawlessly.  It’s going to be a little tough to keep up the permalinks so that any links to the current site redirect to the new site.  I want to move everything back to complainthub.com (You’ll notice the URL here is blog.complainthub.com), which makes it harder.  And then there are still the posts from my old From Harvard Street blog that are all forwarding from harvardstreet.complainthub.com to blog.complainthub.com.  I suppose I could probably just fix that to go directly to complainthub.com.

The import module for Drupal also does not import multiple WordPress categories for a single post.  It only imports multiple tags.  Unfortunately for me, I use categories almost exclusively.  There is a way to convert categories to tags, but there’s a big disclaimer about backing up your database first.  I guess I could just do that.

Otherwise, it was pretty awesome.  I still need a nice new theme, but otherwise you may be seeing the changes sooner rather than later.

The future of Complaint Hub

I’m thinking about migrating the site from WordPress to Drupal. For many of you, that sentence may make absolutely no sense. If you don’t keep reading, I won’t blame you. If you do stop reading, you should make it up to me by going and buying John Scalzi’s special edition book that he’s auctioning off for charity. Get him to inscribe it to me, with some really inscrutable saying. Bid quickly, as it’s already over $2000.

Anyway, if you’re still reading, I got a little infatuated with Drupal while doing some work for a project that never panned out. It doesn’t do blogging as well as WordPress (At least not right out of the box), but it does a lot of other stuff much better. And I think it would be perfect for a project I’ve been thinking about.

Some of you may know that I’m MUCH better at thinking about projects than actually doing them, and I have a bunch of stuff still in the thinking stage. I have a money-making venture with a friend. I have an online economics course to take with another friend. I have the science fiction novel I’ve been plotting out. I have an 8K in March and a 10K in April. I have my real job. I also have a wife, and a family, and some friends, all of whom require and deserve some of my time.

In any event, the project could be really cool, and a nice side effect is that I’d probably bring back the complaint submission page that people have been missing. And I’ll update the theme of the site – at least one friend insists that his eyes bleed when he reads it.

So that’s in the future.  I don’t know how long it will take to happen, but be prepared.  If you subscribe via RSS, the feed might change, although hopefully FeedBurner will take care of that transparently (To you, at least).  But I’ll keep you posted.