Category: House and Home
Revisiting the HomePod at the Seattle Times
My editors at The Seattle Times get me. In my latest Practical Mac column, I take another look at the Apple HomePod, and what made me decide to buy one for my living room after owning a Sonos for years (which isn’t being retired, just moved to my home office): Why I bought a HomePod ...
Long Hours
Midnight Pavoni Rendezvous Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson On Saturday, I planned on going to bed at the same time as Kim and get a good night’s rest. We spent the day with family, watching my 2 year old niece for a few hours and then having dinner at my sister’s house. She lives in ...
Contracts can be fun, too
I have two contracts on my desk right now: one for a book project and the other to install hardwood floors on the main level in our house.* The first has a lot of standard publishing legalese, and although I’ve signed many similar contracts in the past, I force myself to read through it all ...
Decked
Deck Refinishing 3 Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson When Kim and I first looked at buying our house, the home inspector pointed out that the deck was in pretty good shape but should be refinished sometime within a year. That was almost four years ago. Each summer, I’ve vowed to take care of it, and ...
Qwest Is My Hero Today
More specifically, Wayne B. from Qwest is my hero today. For my Internet access at home, I use Speakeasy as my DSL provider. They’ve consistently been great, and I’ve had occasion to test them. Although I subscribe to their 768 kbps data plan, they’ve needed to throttle back my account in order to keep a ...
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Our Icy Street Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson. Looking to lock down a city? Throw some snow and ice at Seattle. Just as Kim and I were returning from a nice snowy Thanksgiving in Montana, we hit Snoqualmie Pass in the middle of a big snow storm. To my surprise, it was snowing ...
Snowy in Seattle
Was up late last night/this morning working on the last bits of my newest book, iChat AV 2 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide, and watched snow begin to fall around 12:45 a.m. It didn’t come down for long, but we woke up to a frozen dusting that reminds me that even though I ...
Surefire Wake-Up Technique
I now know that nothing can wake me from a deep sleep quite as effectively as my wife sitting up in bed at 4 a.m. and saying, “Do you smell smoke?” In about three seconds I was pacing the house, sniffing the air, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. Fortunately, it ...
Cult of TiVo
The New York Times has an amusing article called “Why TiVo Owners Can’t Shut Up“. We’re a vocal minority, to be sure, which could be one reasy why TiVo, according to the article, hasn’t done any advertising since 2000. In addition to talking about the benefits of TiVo, the article speculates that one reason people ...
Demolition and Kindness
When Kim and I moved into our house in October, we had a number of projects before us. One of those was to turn an area of the upstairs from a kids’ bedroom into my home office. It looked easy enough (famous last words): there were two built-in beds, so I just had to remove ...
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 