Fixer-Upper

In day 1 of year 2, I have resolved to listen to my readers. I don't mean the ones who shouldn't be readers. N. asked that I post at least three times a day. While that is not practical, I am going to try to post every day for a little while. At least every day that I have fifteen minutes to write something that will hopefully garner a chuckle from someone, or at a minimum, make me chuckle to myself. (As long as I make myself laugh, even a little, it was worth the time.)

There will be two important consequences to this pledge.

1. The quality of each post is likely to decline. I will repost the Reader Warning Label periodically in case you are unsure how to handle yourself as a result of this.

2. The length of each post is likely to decline. I expect this will mean that the chance of anyone getting to the end of each post increases above 12%.

Today's post was mostly an excuse to share the cartoon you see above, which so perfectly sums up my life with N. that it is, in fact, the only thing on my refrigerator. The fridge is stainless steel, which means that securing things to it cannot be accomplished with a magnet. No, it's a major commitment involving laminate and tape. So far, this is the only thing that has made the cut.

Even though I find I rarely have time to read the New Yorker these days, I am going to renew my subscription, just because of this cartoon.

Anyway, in order that those out there can have some glimpse of what life in a fixer-upper is like, here's a summary of my home improvement projects to date. I am approaching the 3-year anniversary of owning this home.

Kitchen: I like to describe it as "the death star from Return of the Jedi." That is, even though it looks like a major construction zone, it's fully operational. I can't blow up medium-sized planets with it -- yet -- but I can make awesome pizza from scratch.

Bathroom: 99.5% finished. Total time from start to 99.5% finished: seven months.

Basement: Minor improvements in terms of removing unwanted walls, unfortunately including the one around the basement toilet. Added a washer and dryer, the latter free from Craig's List and still working fine 3 years later.

Bedrooms: Partly done renovating one of three bedrooms, project temporarily delayed due to deprioritization. Now looks like a diaorama of a painting project, frozen in time. Other bedrooms mostly untouched.

Floors/woodwork/windows/finish work: You're kidding, right? Actually this stuff ain't so bad, it's kind of why I bought the house. It all needs some attention, but compared to most everything else, it's the nicest stuff in the house. The only painted door was the one on the bathroom, which is now stripped and refinished. Given that I hate nothing more than stripping paint, this is a major milestone.

Back yard: Still looks very much as it did the day I moved in. That is, no organic life except the invasive kind, impassable for several days after each rainstorm, no fence, several pieces of old hand-me-down lawn furniture, and more bugs than the Amazon river basin.

Front yard: Removed unidentifiable, mismatched hedge things and replaced with azaleas last summer. Said azaleas killed by snowstorm and new puppy early this year. Added french drain and new azaleas last weekend, attempting to grow grass. Will report back. Signs point to "iffy at best."


So much for short posts.... until tomorrow.

Why I Heart Why I Hate DC

"Dave" over at the blog why.i.hate.dc finally managed to come up with this hilarious commentary this week, after months of the blog itself being high on my list of things I hate about DC. You see, this blog has had a number of different writers since the longtime guardian Rusty checked out a year or so ago. Yes, things have been a little rocky.

Writers on why.i.hate.dc must meet a number of criteria before being allowed to take the helm of this venerable blog:

1. You must not be from DC.
   
2. You must be under 26 years old.
   
3. As a consequence of #1 and #2 you must have lived in DC for less than 4 years.
   
4. The exception to #3 is if you went to Georgetown, GW or AU for undergrad. It is acceptable, and even ecouraged, to have lived in DC between 4 and 8 years if you meet this qualification.
   
5. Your hometown must be in a midwestern state.
   
6. If you live in DC, it must be west of Rock Creek Park. Otherwise you must live in Northern Virginia or Bethesda.
   
7. You must bitch about crime constantly, even though you have probably neither witnessed nor been a victim of one.
   
8. If you ever actually become a victim of a crime in DC, despite living in AU Park or thereabouts, you must move out of DC within three months and find someone essentially similar to yourself to replace you at why.i.hate.dc.
   

A candidate meeting these qualifications is generally well suited to write snarky, long-winded missives that detail the trials of the five-minute delay they experienced on their rush-hour metro ride from their apartment in Van Ness to their desk job at Metro Center. Yes - this is the perfect why.i.hate.dc writer.

While Rusty himself sucked in his own uniquely hypocritical, sheltered, suburban-transplant way, I had a soft spot in my heart for him. Sometimes, his predictable rants would make me laugh. The rage with which he would declare DC uninhabitable over such rare events as a power outage in the middle of the summer would make me chuckle. So I missed him when the blog floundered following his flight to Columbus, Ohio.

As of late, though, we have seen a single guardian replaced with five others who share the burden - nay, the responsibility - of keeping this blog alive. Which is why it has been so troubling to see so little of the old DC anguish and fire from a Chevy Chase perspective that we once hated but loved. So it was a sad day when I read a post that began with "I Love WMATA" from "Dave," one of the five new writers. What a change from the glory days of why.i.hate.dc when a typical post would be entitled "I Still Hate WMATA."

Well, Dave finally got it right today. Some genuine sarcasm with a post that stabs right at the heart of the corner-bodega-shopping, ANC-meeting-attending, gentrifying-neighborhood-living, Bethesda-moving-when-kids-go-to-school DC resident.

That's right - he made fun of neigborhood bloggers. And even more importantly - I resemble those remarks. So let's see how my blog stacks up against Dave's list of tips to making a successful neighborhood blog.

Your blog's banner must include a photo of either the local Metro station, or a group of rowhouses. Check!

You should only live in a neighborhood that's considered "gentrifying." Only fellow gentrifiers read blogs. Columbia heights? Check!

At a minimum, one post per week must be dedicated to the discussion of dog parks. I don't give a crap about dog parks. No points.

You should always discuss how awesomely friendly your neighbors are, in so much that the people who have "lived there forever" say hi to you. Good grief I mentioned my awesome neighbor yesterday! Is this guy actually using my blog as a model?

Hearing gunshots warrants an immediate "live blogging" event. You should definitely make note of how long it took the police to arrive. You should also mention that while you aren't sure what actually occurred, you intend to call the police station to find out. You may or may not post a follow up, explaining how unhelpful the police were on the phone. Well, there were no guns and I can't live-blog since I detest large, internet-enabled phones, but I have definitely discussed my near-involvement of crimes and police response time. Check!

Highlight how much the neighborhood has changed since you moved in, and how you now feel comfortable "walking anywhere you want" before 7 PM. I got that blown out of the water, here's a post with pictures of Columbia Heights in 1913!

You should lament how despite the growing number of restaurants and bars, you have yet to find one that's "cozy" or "neighborhood" enough for you. Don't mention that any place that would meet this criteria is EWWW waaay too gross for your taste. Can't get on board with this one - I love my neighborhood joints.

Post a lot of poorly composed, low quality photos that you took with your iPhone/cell phone. I think I get bonus points for this post which involves poorly-composed cell phone pictures, a fire, and police.

Lament the lack of a good (name brand) grocery store in your neighborhood; when a new, name brand grocery store arrives, lament the harm done to local grocers. I'm not actually that kind of whiner. I want as much new stuff to open as possible and I have no use for crappy businesses.

Talk endlessly about how you ride your bicycle to work, and how much you hate DC drivers. Leave out the fact that you most likely don't even ride on the street, and you mow down a few pedestrians each week. Check!

Refer to your neighborhood with a ridiculous acronym (i.e. BloMi for Bloomingdale). Check! Though it was tongue in cheek...

Attempt to have constructive dialogue about race relations on your blog. Check!

Become frustrated about the lack of constructive dialogue about race relations on your blog. See above post.

Highlight the fact that you have, on at least three occasions, ridden on the city bus. Check!

If you follow these tips, you should find yourself linked by DCist and The Washington City Paper in no time! Maybe you can even become blog friends with Tina.

Got not one but two pictures in DCist just last week. And I've been quoted in the Washington Post Express blog log a half a dozen times. Do I win? I have no idea who Tina is, though.

Well, anyway, that's not even the whole list from Dave's post but it should be pretty clear that my blog is, in fact, the archetypal neighborhood blog. Thanks, Dave, for finally making me laugh. You were one dc-loving post away from the "unsubscribe" button.

Metapost

I decided to look at google analytics for my blog today after I finished watching this useful, if unbelievably dry, video about using the "ASP.NET AJAX CascadingDropDown Control Extender." Don't ask. It's my job. Anyway, it nearly fused my synapses. Not because of the complexity, but rather because of the monotone of the delivery... can we have just one wisecrack please? So I needed something to wake up my brain before I could begin creating cascading drop down controls. Yes, somehow, web site usage statistics fit this bill for me. I'm a geek.

Anyway, the majority of my traffic is still dominated by people reading my April 5, 2007 post about removing Spector Pro, a keylogger tool that people generally use to spy on their kids and spouse's computer activities.

Really, though. I have had 1,915 page views in the month of January. 627 of those were the keylogger page. Almost 1/3 of my traffic is for a nearly two-year old post!! There must be a lot of paranoid people out there. I hope I've enabled countless people to surf porn, buy drugs from mexico, or meet "friends" online without fear of being spied on by their spouse or parents. Don't thank me, I'm just a philanthropist by nature.


In this same timeframe in 2007, I had a total of 187 pageviews, 21 of which were the spyware page. Well that ain't bad, a 10-fold increase in traffic in one year. Too bad it's mostly people trying to cheat on their wives. Oh well.

I also now have 16 google reader subscribers, up from about 3 a year ago. Yay! And I think I only know about half of them personally. I feel like that is a tremendous victory.

In January:

• Nearly half (47%) of my traffic came from google.
  
• 13.6% or 198 visits was direct traffic. That is probably some of my luddite friends who don't know about blog readers and therefore just go to a bookmark once in a while to see if I've posted.
  
• 11.68% or 170 visits came from Prince of Petworth, probably because I comment there all the time and he links to me.
  
• 7.14% or 104 visits came from dcblogs.com. I got "noted" once this month.
  
• A paltry 6 visits, or 0.41% came from expressnightout.com! That blows. I mean, you get printed, on actual paper, in the Washington Post Express and a miserable 6 people linked from there? Or maybe some people actually made that impossible paper-to-internet leap of faith and typed in the URL. Let's count them as part of the 13.6% above.
  
• The rest is mostly other people who link to me, or a random blog where I commented, or a random geek forum linking to the spyware post, or some non-google search engine. (Didn't know about those, did you?) The grey wedge is "everything else" even smaller than those little slices.
  

And what the hell does all this mean...

Well, commenting and/or being linked from PoP generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in dcblogs generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in the Express Blog Log is fun, if you find out about it soon enough to grab a copy to put on your fridge, but it's impossible to know whether or not it generates any traffic. I'm guessing not so much. Need to do a covariant analysis of months where I was not in blog log. Does anyone know how to do that...

Finally, and most importantly: I should be selling spyware removal products and services.

Small Time Celebrity... Two Weeks In A Row

Today's post will be entirely self congratulatory. I made the WaPo Express blog log last Friday, and my pictures from the Mt. Pleasant fire got published in the April Intowner! There is no question that before long, my name will be as much a household word in DC as Vermin Supreme.

First, my little writeup of the Widespread Panic show at the Warner got quoted in Express. You can download the whole issue here.


Next, my pictures from the fire at The Deauville in Mt. Pleasant were printed in the April Intowner. It's online here.


Update 2:29 PM I have been recognized by DCist for the comment of the week. I expanded on that in my last post here. This, combined with my having twice transcended the virtual/physical barrier by having both my words and pictures appear in print, I feel that I deserve the title of "king of geeky bloggers and amateur photographers" for this week. Next week: I shall be attempting to obtain the elusive DCist "avatar of the week" award. If successful, that would be essentially the equivalent of a PGA grand slam and my blogging career would be complete. I shall then slip into obscurity and blog anonymously about pet peeves mostly involving Apple products.

I'm famous!

Well, maybe just a little. A photo I took was picked for DCist's Morning Roundup today. Coincidentally it's the one I used for my new banner above. OK, not like winning a Pulitzer prize or something, but not bad considering it's the first one I ever submitted to them...

I've got thousands of pictures I've taken over the years on a hard disk at home. I'm slowly going through them to pull out the ones I want to keep or print. This happened to be the first one! Anyway, to aid in this effort I set up a flickr account and will have begun putting up some of my favorite photos from over the years.

The picture above, by the way, I took in 1999 from my old house in Mt. Pleasant. So it's not exactly fitting since I live in Columbia Heights now, but my house looks like shite right now. When the front is fixed up (probably in about 4 years) I'll revise the banner with that one...

My flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamietre