Last night, while in the crawl space, in total darkness, I managed to knock down and spill on me the only bottle of engine oil left by the previous owner. So much for not smelling like the next door gas station.

I hate even more the popcorn on the ceiling. I’m not talking about mistakenly popping the kernels and getting them on the ceiling, I’m talking about popcorn ceiling. Sometimes referred to as acoustic ceiling. I don’t need it for its acoustic abilities (unlike cement/concrete, drywall does a pretty good job of absorbing the sound). Some peope suggested it may be there as a fire retardant. That may have been true back in the time when they were putting asbestos in it, but that is no longer the case at least since 1976. To me it looks like styrofoam particles embedded in some gypsum-based compound.

From several sources I found out that, if you buy a new house, it will come by default with popcorn ceiling, and you have to pay extra to get the smooth ceiling instead. The only possible explanations for this, that I was able to find, are:

• builders are too lazy to properly finish the ceiling. Unlike popcorn, smooth celings show minor imperfections in the drywall patches.
• builders realize what a nightmare popcorn ceiling is for consumers, but they’ve purchased the sprayer and have to justify it. And they corner the buyer to fork more money for something that should be cheaper to begin with.

After reading directions on how to remove the nasty crumbs from your ceiling I’ve ventured to try it myself. It’s not really that hard, it took me about 2 hours to remove it in a medium-size room, but that’s just the first step. Second step is sanding, patching, sanding again. Repeat as long as necessary. Then two coats of primer and some flat white ceiling paint shoud do the trick. Once you get to the painting stage, the mess is gone.

Is it worth it? I don’t know yet. I do know painting it is just as messy as removing it, but once removed you don’t have to go through that pain again. Probably the place I noticed the most how nasty popcorn ceiling is was in the kitchen. Above the stove, it was yellow and probably saturated with 15 years worth of dirt and grime and food junk.

As I was inhaling dust while scraping and sanding, I thought popcorn ceiling must have been invented by a programmer (first intention was to say Perl programmer, but language doesn’t matter that much in my analogy). It’s complex to install, the benefits are uncertain and it’s a nightmare to maintain. Hey, I’m one of them. But then again it must have been the dust in my lungs getting me to think this way.

Today was merely a reminder – we just closed on a new home. We felt like Ioana’s school was not good enough, so we moved in a neighborhood assigned to Davis Drive Elementary (and Middle).

This will increase my commute by 50%, time-wise (from 10 minutes to 15 minutes). Ha. I’m sorry Todd.

We’re now in the process of beautifying the current house. After the sellers move out (since they’re renting back from us for 6 days), it will be time to repaint the new house. (Technically it’s the older house since it’s built in 1992 as opposed to 1996 – but it’s new to us).

And if you’re looking for a mortgage, a word of advice. Don’t go with E-Trade. I don’t know if they’re terrible all the time or I caught them with their pants down, but closing on Monday and them not having the lending package sent to the attorney by 6PM on Friday was not fun. Me calling the contact numbers I got and not getting through wasn’t either. The guy who processed my application is no longer returning my calls, he must be hiding from me. His manager promissed several times to call back on Friday and never did, and promised to call me back today after 10 minutes and that turned out to be 2 hours. His manager’s manager was helpful, but that was too late already – I was already fed up with them. Yes, they changed their processing to a different company and have backlogs. They told me I was one of the 7 clients in the same situation on Friday. Would you feel more comfortable hearing that? “You think we suck because of what we did to you? We do. But wait, there’s more! We did that to 6 other poor guys!”

Now I’m wating for them to sell the mortgage (because that’s what they said they will do), and not notify me who the lender is. Rumors are sometimes that happens. Just google a bit and you’ll see what I mean. This is shoing the wide range of opinions people have on them. Unfortunately they’re a 1 out of 5 for me.

Today liferea notified me there is a new release of WordPress that I should upgrade, so I figured I might as well post something.

First off, liferea is slowly becoming a habit. I use it to track announcements about new software (see paragraph above), keep in touch with my friends, read news from ./ and some other news sites. To the point that I have now to see how I can replicate the feeds on all of my computers. Maybe I should try a news reader from yahoo.

A lot of exciting things happened. We’ve finished upgrading rPath’s issue tracker, Jira, to the latest version. And we did it in a eat-your-own-dogfood way: it’s a software appliance living on a Xen machine, as a domU. I was involved in this initially just for the Mercurial plugin for Jira, but figured we might as well go to the latest version of Jira. I had to fix several other plugins that were broken by API change (yes I wish you didn’t have to touch plugins to make them work on newer versions). It’s pretty cool, if your reference a Jira issue in your mercurial commit message, it will get indexed by Jira and linked to the issue (viewable as the Mercurial Commits tab). This link is an example.

The software appliance lets you isolate the application from the base operating system, and it makes it trivial to update it. No mess left on the host operating system either. I know package managers are supposed to help there, I’ve been installing rpm packages for almost 10 years now, trying to achieve that. But the very moment you deploy the system in a production environment, you know things get installed that you didn’t plan for. Conary helps a lot here.

I am looking forward to version 0.45 of Inkscape to land in Foresight. The screenshots look awesome. Ken promises he’ll have it committed in a couple of hours. It’s very nice to have the latest and greatest software, and Foresight is doing a great job there. A big thanks to the Foresight community and to Ken for making Foresight a great distribution – which DistroWatch reviewed yesterday.

On the personal front, we’ve been unhappy with my daughter’s school (or maybe looking for a reason to move into a larger home). At any rate, we’re in negotiations for the repairs the seller has to perform before we close. This is exciting. Except for the hour I spent today with the heating technician inspecting the gas pack in a chilly 18 degrees Fahrenheit. And for the amount of siding that has to be fixed. Hopefully we’ll get to an agreement on this. But I had to spend a lot of time on the phone with lenders, insurance agencies, inspectors, real estate agents and the such.

But the kitchen looks really nice now. All that’s left to to is fix the threshold and paint the base molding. I will post pictures with the project’s timeline some time soon.

In other news, I ran a 5K this morning. I timed myself at 21:17, which is exactly one minute slower than my personal best, achieved 2 years ago in the same race. Not a bad result, considering that I’ve been sporadically running, trying to recover from my calf muscle injury. I believe it’s still faster than the result 3 years ago, which was 22:07 (but I can’t find the archives to back my memory).
That’s the reason I decided to not run the Inside Out Classic Half Marathon next week (that, and the conflict with the orienteering event on Oct 22).

Update: the official time confirmed my 21:17 reading. (I started 2 seconds later, hence the gun time showing 21:19).