Monday, November 18, 2002

Part 1: the sneak preview Here's the scenario:  I live in a small urban house built as a duplex in 1917.  About all that's known about the history of the house is that it was built in 1917 and was converted to a single family house some time in the 1960s.  The house had fallen into disrepair (the tax value of the buildings was $0) by the late 1990s.  One guy bought the house and started fixing it up himself, but then ran into financial problems and had to sell the house before he finished it.  He sold it to another guy who does these real estate fix-ups for a living -- he finished fixing the house and sold it to me in early 2000.  Part of the fixing-up was putting in new generic blue carpet in all the rooms except the kitchen and one of the bathrooms, which were tiled.  My wife and I have had it in the back of our minds for a while that we want to nuke the carpet and put in wood floors. This, then, is the saga of the new floor.  The project began today with a visit from the selected floor guy, Marty, a FOAF (friend of a friend).  He told us that given what's in the other houses in our neighborhood, we probably have hardwood floors under the carpet.  He came by today and whipped out his Stanley knife and we started cutting up chunks of carpet to see what's under there.  The pleasant surprise was that there are indeed hardwood floors under most of the carpet anyway.  We've got original (or at least very old) pine floors under at least 3 of the 4 rooms we looked at.  One of the rooms, the front bedroom, looks to still be in reasonably good shape and can probably be repaired and saved.  The middle bedroom isn't in as good a shape.  In the section we checked there were two big half-assedly done patches, apparently where they needed to access the foundation piers to do some repairs.  That room may or may not be salvageable.  The dining room has a pine floor, but we can't tell what sort of shape its in.  Probably not good -- it has plywood over the pine and then vinyl tiles over the plywood (and then blue carpet over the vinyl).  If they did all that it was probably to hide problems with the original floor.  The living room appears to have plywood all through the room.  It is unknown whether there is pine under the plywood. Found under the carpet in the master bedroom: a single-edged razor blade, a Marlboro Light butt and a disposable coffee cup lid. Coming in a couple of days: Part 2, the ripping up of the carpet. 1:55:15 PM    comment []

Future war 60 Minutes interviewed Bob Woodward last night on his new book:  Bush at War.  It included snippets from an amazing recorded interview between Bob and George Bush.  It changed the way I am looking at the future in the following ways. Bush has a long-term agenda to eliminate the three major "named" sponsors of terrorism (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea).  He will not stop until all three regimes are "changed."  Invasion of North Korea is on the table.  This agenda is based on the idea that technology and geo-politics have changed in a way that makes the continued existance of nations that support terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction untenable.  This agenda will direct every aspect of his presidency. These conflicts, and potentially additional conflicts with unnammed regimes (Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Palestine), will drive global politics and economics for the next decade.  The global economy will likely suck during this period.  This series of conflicts will consume all of our attention span. We are in the process of re-allocating how we deploy our forces world-wide.  It is very likely that after an invasion of Iraq, that most of the forces currently in Europe will be permanently re-based in Iraq.  The same holds true with North Korea and the troops we currently station in Japan and South Korea.  Long-term pacification of rogue states and regional hotspots is the goal. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 9:09:43 AM    comment []