Bad Dog Owner

Hey neighbors, watch out for this guy:

His dog killed another dog at Montrose Beach on March 17th, and he ran away instead of dealing with it. If I see him, I'm going to call the cops on him.

More info here and here.

This is a sad situation. And for anybody who would want to say anything about either dog or what somebody should or shouldn't have done differently; that's beside the point. The point is that this guy ran from the scene. And that is flat-out wrong of him.

Update: The guy has been identified as a Chicago police officer. What the hell was this guy thinking, that he could just walk away and that nobody would ever find him again?

Still No Internet

RCN rewired some amount of the internal wiring in our building, and we had internet for almost an hour yesterday. It was glorious. It was also about 1.15 meg, says Speedtest.net. Apparently there is a signal problem on the outside RCN line that has to be addressed. They're working on that over the next day or two, they claim. We shall see.

I found where the patch panels are for cable, and I tried connecting us back up to Comcast, to no avail. I can't figure out why we can't get that to work. We haven't canceled Comcast service yet. Maybe the wire I think is Comcast isn't actually Comcast.

Today I ordered AT&T U-Verse, 3 meg for $19/mo. That magic is supposed to happen on Monday. We shall see.

Living in a cave in the 1950s

So this is what it was like before the internet existed. Our internet (RCN) has been down since last Thursday. A week prior, we switched from Comcast to RCN, because we kept having repeated connection issues with Comcast and wanted to try something else.

Then, on Thursday morning, at exactly 7:30 AM, we lost the RCN connection, totally and utterly. A cable must be disconnected somewhere, as we don't even get the "night light" channel 3 TV signal. I call RCN, they send somebody out on Friday who spends a few hours tracing lines and trying to figure out what's what. He can't figure out which lead on the outside pole is ours. Not a surprise, since it took the installer forever to find it, because it's not labeled. The installer didn't label it, though. If he had, troubleshooting might have gone a little easier.

Both the original RCN installer and current tech kept asking where the splitter junction was located, and both were sure it should be inside my apartment. After again visually inspecting every closet a second time, I think we finally convinced them that we have no such device or panel.

No luck, he can't figure out what's up and has to leave.

On Sunday, a neighbor shows me the hidden rooms where various connection boxes live for phones and cable. The RCN tech returns on Monday, and our landlord meets us here to let them into one of the rooms with the panel. Except, the landlord's key doesn't work, he can't get the room open. I email the neighbor who has a key, and it turns out that he's out of town, so no luck there. My wife asks another neighbor who calls everybody on her contact list looking for the key, to no avail.

So the RCN tech can't do anything on Monday, either. Still down. After he leaves, I email the management company and ask them for help. OK, they can send out a maintenance man with the key to that room. Our building has a maintenance man? I learned something new today.

Now we're on to Tuesday -- today. Maintenance man stopped by, unlocked the room, and left. RCN tech is now here, and is running wires. Will we get lucky? Will we have internet again today? And if not, what do we do?

Should we call Comcast and ask them to come out and try to undo whatever happened here? Or should we call AT&T and get Uverse? Looks like it's available on our block.

Avoiding Pink Slime

Even McDonald's has said they'll no longer mix "pink slime" into their ground beef. ABC News says 70% of ground beef you buy at the grocery store contains this gross stuff -- yuck. Looks like locally, the easy way to avoid it right now is to buy ground beef at Costco or Whole Foods. No word on whether or not you'll find it in ground beef at Dominick's or Jewel.

Google Voice for your Building Intercom

This Apartment Therapy post has a pretty good and simple overview of how you can use your Google Voice # as the number you give your landlord or condo association for your entry in the security phone system. We've never actually had a landline, so we used this for our front door buzzer solution for a good long while.

Why not take it to the next level, though? Instead of having our cell phones ring when somebody buzzes our front door, why don't we fake it to the max and pretend we have a home phone? Back in August, we bought this thing -- an Obihai OBi 100 VoIP Telephone Adapter. What does it do? It connects Google Voice to old school wired telephones. If you've ever know anyone who has Vonage, this is the same kind of deal. A landline phone plugs into this box. You also connect the box to the internet. Log in and enter your Google Voice username and password and boom, you've got a fake landline. Pick up the phone, get a dialtone, dial it like normal, and everything seems to work.

Now when somebody buzzes us from the front gate, our actual landline telephone rings. And when we miss somebody's buzz, we get an email from GV saying "Missed Call from Front Gate." It works pretty slick. We've actually got it connected to one of those cordless phone systems that has multiple handsets, so it gives us a landline phone both upstairs and downstairs.

Krunch Kretschmar: Over the line!

So this guy Krunch Kretschmar, whom I've never met, is being sued by a woman for allegedly creating a fake blog purported to be written by her, and posting awful things to it. Things about her being on drugs and supposedly embezzling from her employer. He supposedly said to her, "Now every time a company for a job or someone searches YOU on google they will read my side of the story."

So, OK, here's my tiny little tribute to Krunch Kretschmar. Maybe when people search for him online, they'll find this post.

Read more at Boing Boing, or CBS Chicago, or the Sun Times.

It's Murray!

We were pretty sad after losing Solly, but knew that eventually it would be time to bring home a new friend to keep us company. We planned on picking out a random adult dog from a shelter, but when we saw this little guy was an option, we had to go check him out. He's part corgi and part pug, just like Solly. We brought him home when he was just about twelve weeks old, which means he was born back in July.

We decided to name him Murray.

We were hoping that going with the same breed mix would land us a dog with as calm and laid back as our last one. Not sure how true THAT turned out to be, as now we have a puppy who loves to run around in circles at 100 miles per hour and chew on everything in sight, when he's not barking at invisible monsters. I'm thinking we should have paid more attention to the warnings about what level of effort it takes to deal with a puppy. But, we're managing. We love him, he loves his new home, and we're slowly training him to sit and stay and go potty at the right time and in the right place.



And thankfully, he falls asleep from time to time.

A Rough Week

It's been a rough week. Last Sunday night, our dog Solly fell down the stairs to our lower level at about 11pm. He ended up spending the night at the emergency vet, and the next day the doggy eye doctor confirmed what we had feared, that the fall damaged his remaining eye. We decided that it would be too hard for him to try to recover from surgery at his advanced age (14 or 15), so we brought him home and spent the next day with him, making him as comfortable as we could, saying our goodbyes, then took him to the vet on Tuesday afternoon to have him released from his pain.

I can't begin to describe how sad this was for us. And still is.

He was a happy dog, and we had a lot of good times together. Lately he was wanting to snuggle more, spend more time close to us, and it made us so happy. He was an easy dog to please; we're lucky to have the beach, park and lake at the end of our block, and lately, we had been making an effort to take him down there a bit more often. I'm glad we did. The picture above is from just a couple of weeks ago when we went and sat on the grass together at the park, the three of us.

Kate adopted Solly from a corgi rescue over ten years ago. Also pictured there is Lucy, who left us almost two years ago. Dealing with that loss was also sad, but a bit easier, as the timing was more obvious and we knew it was coming. She had dementia for a while and really didn't have a clue where she was any more. But with Solly, he was still our little friend, and he still knew it.

Miss you, Solly.

Dumpster Diving for Furniture

One of my many hobbies is irritating my wife. One of the ways I do this is by finding furniture in the alley and bringing it home. The pieces are invariably dirty and beat up, which makes it hard for her to visualize what we could actually end up with. But, with a little bit of sanding and painting, most of these end up working out very well for us. We've gotten quite a bit of stuff this way -- to date: a cabinet for my home office (which holds my printer very nicely), a bookcase for our spare room, a large dresser (which I now love), a wrought iron end table (which might have been a plant stand), and now this:




Our lower level has these weird ledges along the floor. We believe that the basement floor was lowered, but that they weren't able to go all the way out to the foundation walls. The result is a 10"-12" deep ledge along outside walls. We've been on the look out for stuff that might fit on the ledges and help us better use space. Here's what we came up with, in our main downstairs room. Everything under the bookcase (wall, footing) is part of our wall.

Here's what that bookshelf looked like when we found it in the alley.Very dark wood, rough finish, but very sturdy.


It took days to pull this off. Lots and lots of sanding and filling. This is real wood, but it was probably something some guy hand built and hung on his garage wall 40 years ago. Lots of nicks and dings, and I ended up adding a few of my own, including accidentally ripping a chunk of wood off when trying to remove the cross-beam. Oops. But yesterday, I finally got it bolted to the wall, and applied the last bit of touch up paint and sanding, and today we've got a nice looking bookshelf that almost looks like a built-in.

This was almost too big of a project -- I'm not sure I have the patience to go through this again, but for sure, I'll keep an eye out for something else good in the alley, just in case.

My Rogers Park office was nice...

...but the view from my new office downtown is nothing to complain about!