First of all, I love vacuums. They make me so happy it is sick. I went and bought a bunch of HEPA filters for them yesterday.



Our basement is almsot completely done, this is a tiny protion of it that used to be the forer owners marajuana grow room. I know tghis because the floor was littlered with pot leaves, rotting vegtable matter, and dirt. Of course, I verified what pot leave look like on wikipedia as I had never seen pot before. The were enough leaves scattered around to fill up a box of asbetsos laden leaves, which got me thinking that people probably bought this stuff as it seemed like a quantity growing area and that I wonder if people actually ended up smoking asbestos when they bought the schwag.



The little room was so moldy and smelled exceptionally terrible that it was affecting the house. I mean you could fucking taste it. We had shut the room off which made it even worse. Our handyman Pat said he would take the room apart and remove the entire room for $50. I think he got screwed on that deal because it was mega disgusting and a lot of work. We had him doing a lot of other work so its really part of the whole basement deal which was around $2000 for removing the old pipes, cleaning the basement and putting in new pipes. So anyways, it turns out that dirt behind the wall, had a freahly dead turtle in it and millions of maggots. In fact there are actually garbage bags full of maggots and they were clinging to all the woodwork.





Our basment is now totlaly hepa vacuumed and cleaned from wall to wall. It looks like a whole otherworld. You can't imagine what crap condition it was in.

Got this email a week ago but just noticed it yesterday after they calle dme on the phone.

Dear Mr. Visco,

We have received the electronic submission of your dissertation, and are in the process of reviewing it for formatting, etc., before we deliver it to UMI for cataloging. (This is routine - The Graduate School is required to review each submission for appropriate format, and then we will submit all the dissertations in a batch to UMI at one time after the 9/1/06 degree conferral).

In the process of reviewing your document, I note that there are a couple of problems requiring your attention and revision:

1). on the title page - you have "thesis/dissertation" -- you are supposed to choose one or the other; in your case, I believe "thesis" is correct.
2). On the Table of Contents, as well as on the corresponding page itself (page 4), you have misspelled the word "Abstract"...

Please go back to the submission site, click on "revise dissertation/thesis", make the revisions and resubmit your manuscript as soon as possible, since we cannot clear you for your degree until your thesis is formatted acceptably.
Thank you,

Jennifer J. Chazen
Assistant Director, Office of Student Services

I just resubmitted it. I can't believe that I nor anyone else reading the thesis had not caught these two typos during the whole process. I seriously cannot wait for it to be over. Is it possible that they are going to charge me again.

Manuscript ID buffalo:2051 Received

Thank you. Your submission has been received. You will receive an email from The Graduate School once the administrator has verified the internal checklist to clear the submission for delivery to UMI/ProQuest.

At work I turned my monitor sideways. Well, it swivels. It make programming so great and the sideways resolution is still 1024.

Here is a picture of all of the web team at Roswell and the Polish intern. on the right. I wonder how different we will look in ten years or 30.

Yes, this is still going on.

Hi Paul:

Jackie asked me to return your call. I have e-mailed Florence
Thompson for updates and she stated that she would send some documents
to our office for our title attorney to approve. As of today we still
do not have those documents. I will e-mail her again and ask for them.
That is all I know for now.

Caroline

I fell asleep around 8:30 last night, right after work, because I was so sick of thinking about the asbestos. The issue was freaking overwhelming me. I was overwhelmed because it was all gone already but there were other parts of the house that I thought may have contained asbestos material that would have been much more difficult to remove. I have been waiting for the test results the last 5 days.

I actually ended up having this elaborate dream for hours, I even woke up between segments where I was programming this amazing object oriented master thesis about asbestos removal. I got so far when I finally isolated the asbestos object in the controller and returned it to the script, then I realized that even though I had mastered removing the asbestso in the simulation, I was not able to remove it in the real world. The whole thing was very star trekish.

Soon after I had another elaborate dream about some other personal issues including missing my mothers birthday, having to tell people about the death of many mexicans who were collecting honey, and getting in a fight with matt because he took off of work to go to my mother's birthday and then I never showed up and the whoel time everyone was drinking or something, all of which never happend but just added to my stressful dream. I think out of the 12 hour nap, I had non stop elaborate dreams for 10 of the hours and woke up almost more tired than before I started.

The good news is that it turns out that the other stuff we were concerned about being asbestos was not. That includes the attic floor insulation material which would have been insane to deal with and the stupid pebbles on the main hall of floor two. Now we can scape those fuckers of and just start from scratch.



Ya for living an asbestos free existence.

I had the most unfortunate major computer setback today. It pretty much erased my progress for a whole day. I was using my normally fanastic IDE called Zend Studio when I renamed a folder that had a flash movie in it which was still open in flash. It decided not to rename my folder the way i wanted because the file was locked. No big problem, but instead of doing nothing it just deleted the entire directory I was working in. Normally, I save everyday thanks to a personal version of gathe rthat I run, but still that involves losing a hwole days work. I find that tragic. At least it was much easier the second time around but now it pushes back my production a bit, argh.

I doubt I am much slower than anyone else here anyways.

On another note, the house is being rid of its minor toxic underdressing as we speak. I hope I come home to a toxic free wonderland and not the site of a hazmat team and the EPA with a big bubble over the mansion, lol.

I wonder what it is like in NYC today.

Well not the school kind, but homework nonetheless. I didn't go to sleep until 5am yesterday because I was busy painting. Then I woke up and started doing the second coat followed by removing the enormous amount of trash in the basement into the backyard so the asbestos removal guy can work easier. I figure if everything is out of the basement than there is nothing to contaminate.

I simply wrapped the washer and drier in plastic drop clothes. I started to clean up the previous owners nasty marijuana grow room. It was molding so badly because they took all the plants out, obviously, but left lots of soil and rotting leaves all over the place. We didn't ever look in the room until after we moved in. Bad idea, always investigate everything.

I bought a new vacuum. Yes, that is vacuum number 9. I have a problem but I guess it is better than a drug addiction, although I can't say it is cheaper. I have every kind of vacuum. This one is meant only for the basement renewal project. I decided I am going to try and pay the asbestos guy extra oney to vacuum the whole basement.



The same guy who is going to be doing it, is our usual furnace repair man. The other day the furnace at the tenants house went out and we called him to fix it. Turned out that a bird flew in there and kind of fried into over time.



The painted office looks so much better. I wish that I took the pictures during the day so you could see it better.











I love Ivana Trump - here she is on her yacht called nothing other than Ivana.

The Kansas minimum wage is the lowest in the nation-- $2.65 an hour. A Kansan who works 40 hours a week at this level makes the unbelievably low salary of about $5,000 a year.

I have been sick to my stomach pretty much since camping at Vermont's Townshend (e:paul,4618) I have a feeling that it all goes back to this one drunken night when I filled up a water jug with creek water to put out a fire and then accidentally drank out of it the next morning.

My hands also had a horrible reaction to paint thinner and exposure to too much latex which I am becomming alergic too. They look disgusting. Am I falling apart?

Well I can't complain about my job as much as (e:zobar) who is working for $20,000 on web stuff worth way more, I am still going crazy with the slowness of some stuff here and this one issue specifically.

About 4 months ago I came up with this positively great idea for a web tool that I thought should be patented. I came up with my proof of concept and went to my boss. He refered me to the department that is made for handling patents here at Roswell. According to my contract anything I develop while working here needs to be patented by them and I split the proceeds. That is totally fine with me, in fact I like the idea of them getting some of the money to help cure cancer.

Well the patent office people just don't seem equipped to deal with computer tehcnology patents. They mostly just deal with medical technology. At first they sent me through a patent search with some company that they subscribe to for doing that - I thought it was a good first step. Then I found out there were no other patents that seemed to cover my idea. Then to my surprise and I believe my bosses's surprise, they just kind of dropped it there. I tried to email them and so did he.

Now other people at the institute are going to begin using the technology which is why I was excited about it again. I hope that someone sees a reason to take action because someone else is surely going to come up with it soon. I think for me right now there might be too many levels of beaurocracy within a state run company, someday when I want to slow down, I will think that is great, lol.

The Ladycroft Drama
I am not mad at you. I don't hate you. I was just saying (e:paul,4635) that I thought it was shitty that you promoted your's and (e:neijefer)'s birthday while not recognizing theirs. I am sorry if it came across as I thought you were a shitty friend or that I was really mad about the issue.

I never thought it would become such a big deal. I was only commenting because I value you as a good friend. I realize that people have obligations that make them socially unavailable. I was not mad that you did not attend the events rather that you didn't say anything about their birthdays, even after we got to yours. I was definitely not trying to "slam" but rather gently nudging you for not remembering.

Asbestos
We had a bunch of varying asbestos removal estimates. The highest of which was $4500 and the lowest of which was $1800. They are all NYS certified and since Monday, the home owner is responsible for hiring the air test people so I feel that any company is held to some sort of outside standard.

The Fireplace
60 hours later I am almost done. What a freakign process. I would say stripping paint is not worth the effort. I guess we will see once it is shiny and varnished.







Hopefully, this image of one of the other fireplaces is what it wil look like when it is done.