Just a little out of my way

Yesterday we drove to Grand Junction, a four hundred mile (650 km) round trip (see the map below), so that I could be fingerprinted for my citizenship application.

I find several things about this annoying.

First, the appointment process. This consists of sending you a letter with an allocated date and time. No pretence of trying to match their availability with your convenience. If the allocated date and time don't work for you then you can ask for it to be rescheduled. But that just results in them sending you another appointment time to which you've had zero input.

Second and more importantly, why do I need to drive four hundred miles for this in the first place? The fingerprints are submitted for checking to a national database that is used basically by every law enforcement agency in the United States. My local sheriff's office (five mile round trip) has the capability to capture and submit prints in the standard format.

And third, why do I have to be fingerprinted again. I submitted fingerprints to the same agency when applying for my green card. Why not just use those (fingerprints don't age the way faces do)? There are lots of functions within the Department of Homeland Security which are integrated in name only, but these two, Immigration and Naturalisation (now called Citizenship) were part of one organisation (the INS) long before DHS was even a bad idea in some neocon's crazy mind.

Apart from those frustrations, the service was excellent. I expected to arrive to find a situation that would make queuing at the driver licensing office look good but was pleasantly surprised to find that there was not a single other applicant in the office and so I had a total wait time, even though I was early, of zero minutes. In fact in the 15 minutes I was there it was just me. Hard to reconcile this with the reports of enormous backlogs in naturalisation processing and advice from CIS itself that the expected wait time for my interview is somewhere between nine and twelve months.

The very nice woman taking the prints had a hard time though. She's trained to take prints from people who've typically never had their prints taken before, or if they have only once or twice in their life. No I'm not a hardened criminal in the habit of being fingerprinted. It's just that I design biometric systems for a living, and in the process of testing and demonstrating such systems I've probably taken my own prints hundreds of times, so I found it really, really difficult to adjust to having someone else guide my fingers during the capture process.

Fortunately we took the opportunity while in Grand Junction to visit Home Depot. We've been thinking for a while about remodeling our kitchen but the price we got from a local kitchen store was just too much in relation to the value of our condo or what future potential buyers would be willing to pay extra for. Looking at the products available at Home Depot convinced us that we could do it at a price we can live with (about half of the previous estimate). Now we just need to decide if we can live with the disruption.

Lighting project

Today I replaced this very ugly original fitting...


...with this rather more attractive one

Builders use ^*%# like the original fitting to save money, even though the difference in cost at trade prices is probably four dollars, which is exceeded by at least ten times by the value of the labour involved in replacing the fitting after the fact.

Shopping trip

We took a trip on the weekend to Glenwood Springs to buy some furniture and to the Home Depot at Avon (near Vail) to buy some new light fittings. It reminded me once again how beautiful Colorado is and how lucky we are to live here.

We started out taking CO 131 south to join Interstate 70.


Then we followed I-70 through Glenwood Canyon.



And then back to Avon where the aspens were at their peak.



Sure it was a 250 mile round trip, but are your shopping trips this scenic?

My holiday weekend project

This weekend I completed a handyman project that I've been saving for a long weekend - tiling the landing at the bottom of the stairs where you come in from the garage. In the winter when you tend to get a lot of snow and mud on your boots the carpet in this area was impossible to keep clean.

I also had to wait for the summer to do this, because tile cutters use water for lubrication and it's impossible to stay dry while cutting tiles. I know this from bitter experience because my Dad and I once made the mistake of cutting tiles while it was snowing!

As you can see from the fact that some of the grout (on the right hand side) is still wet, I've literally just finished, ahead of my expected schedule which means I can relax for the rest of today and tomorrow (except that I need to start packing for my upcoming trip to New Zealand and Australia).

It's a pretty good job, even if I say so myself. That's because I had good teachers - my Mum and Dad (who have done some really intricate mosaics on their floor) and my brother James.

Wired for sound

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Decked out

It's the start of summer in Steamboat and the condo we bought last September has a very nice deck, so that means it was time to get "decked out".

Here's the deck with the gas barbeque and outdoor dining set we bought today.

Let's eat!

Update: The BBQ works. Or at least the burner on the right hand side does. Since we don't have gas in our kitchen I got a BBQ with an external burner (on the right hand side) for stir frying (and a new wok). The inaugural dish? Pork and vegetable stir fry with teriyaki sauce. Better than anything you can get at our local chinese restaurants!

Don't try this at home

I'm deriving a sort of guilty pleasure from watching my neighhbour Dave remodel his bathroom, because I felt the same pain this time last year, except doubly so because I was dumb enough to remodel two bathrooms simultaneously.

I have a pretty good track record in running large IT projects to schedule and budget, but I made most of the classic project management mistakes when I embarked on this project: I didn't have a clear idea of what the finished product should look like, I didn't have a budget worked out in advance, as the project progressed is grew steadily larger (in my defence that happens with old houses - as you pull things apart you inevitably find other problems that you just know you should fix rather than cover up), and despite the complete lack of a fixed scope I had a fixed deadline. I only got through it in the end because my Mum, Dad and brother James are absolute gems.

Not an experience I plan to repeat any time soon!

Network upgrade

I've just finished upgrading my home network router and wireless access point from an old Intel 802.11b unit to an 802.11g DLink DI-624 which is light years ahead in terms of speed, capacity and features but cost me about half of what the old one did three years ago.

DLink have their own proprietary extension to the 802.11g standard called Xtreme G which supposedly doubles the potential bandwidth to 108Mbps when used with other DLink components. I haven't switched this feature on and I have no plan to since as far as I'm concerned proprietary technologies are the work of the devil. At the moment I'm running a mix of Intel, Linksys, Dell and DLink network components without any problem because they're all standards compliant and I want to keep it that way.

I did have some trouble connecting my two TiVo's to the network because it's hard to tell the difference between an alphanumeric key and a hexadecimal key that is composed entirely of numerals (it would have helped if the error message was useful, like "invalid WEP key", rather than the generic "couldn't find gateway"). Once I sorted that out it has been running like a dream.

Unfortunately TiVo doesn't yet support 802.11g which is a shame since transferring recorded programs between TiVo's and to my laptop takes way too long at 11Mbps.

The next thing to look forward to is Comcast's planned upgrade from 4Mbps to 6Mbps which is scheduled for September.

Update: It seems my new wireless hub has a much stronger signal. So now I can sit by the pool while I "work" and blog. Life really is tough!