And the floors are finally done.

I think that refinishing floors is one of the key motivators for people to get higher-paying jobs. After refinishing my own floors, I can tell you that, next time, I want to be able to pay someone else to refinish them for me.

I am now the proud owner of my first house.

And I am so tired.

In the last 24 hours, Laura and I have ripped up carpet, ripped up carpet tacks, removed tacks, sanded, stained, and we’re still not done with the floors.

Beth drove all the way from Boaz, AL, to help us, because she’s special, and also because I was holding her old computer for ransom. Hopefully we’ll be mostly finished by tomorrow night.

I’ve found some interesting new apps for OSX:

Fugu: After months of looking for a nice, free Secure FTP client [or one that doesn’t nag the hell out of you while you’re trying it out], Laura linked me to this nice freeware front-end to the SFTP and SCP command-line apps included in OSX.

Celestia: This is a Mac OSX port of Celestia, which is a free real-time planetarium that renders objects in gorgeous 3D. With it, “you can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across.”

Just in case, here’s a list of default passwords.

Problem:

You have over 15,000 mp3s that exist on a remote server, and you want to relocate them to your local machine while keeping your iTunes Library information (mostly) intact.

Solution:

After moving the files to your local machine, iTunes will stubbornly look for them on the remote host. If said host no longer has those files, iTunes will ask to locate each individual file (which is bad.)

Export your iTunes Library from the File..Export menu. I recommend doing this twice, just in case.

Operator: “[Apartment complex] Emergency Services, how may I help you?”

Me: “Yeah… I’ve got an emergency.”

Operator: “Ok?”

Me: “Well, the front gate to the apartment complex isn’t working and it’s locked a lot of people out. This happens once a week.”

Operator: “I’ll page someone out right away.”

Me: “That’s not really the emergency.”

Operator: “Oh.. ok?”

Me: “This is kind of embarassing..”

Operator: “Go ahead.. ”

Me: “I just drank a huge bottle of water and .. well.. I really have to pee.”

If you’re running Mac OS X (Jaguar), click here to access your internal CUPS admin page.

“The Common UNIX Printing System (“CUPS”) is a cross-platform printing solution for all UNIX environments. It is based on the “Internet Printing Protocol” and provides complete printing services to most PostScript and raster printers.”

Looking for some good Sci-Fi/Fantasy reading? Check out The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List.

It looks like I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

On his album “American IV: The Man Comes Around”, Johnny Cash covers “Hurt”, from the Nine Inch Nails album “The Downward Spiral”. The video was directed by Mark Romanek, who directed the original NIN video of “Hurt”, as well as “Perfect Drug”. The video can be found on Romanek’s site, along with others.

Sam has been playing with Photoshop, and sent me a link to a good Photoshop Tutorials site.