physical windows

When Dani and I bought our house, we noted that almost all of the windows were original to the house (built in 1910) and that we'd need to do something about that. Two were bad enough that we replaced them immediately, but we were spending a lot of money on other renovations (and a wedding) so we held off on the bigger problem. But during the winter we get nice "refreshing" breezes from the outside, and our heating bills were astronomical this year, and we've recovered from the last round of major expenses, so it's time.

We called the company that had replaced some windows for me in my last house, because absent prior experience or a trustworthy recommendation, you may as well throw darts at the phone-book listings. I was happy with the work, so we figured we'd just have them do it unless they said something astonishing as part of the quote.

So someone came out last night (same person I had dealt with 8 years ago, as it turned out) and measured every window in the house. (We knew we weren't going to be able to do them all now, but I suppose this will make it easier when it's time to do the next batch.) We targetted about a dozen windows for the first round and the guy sat down to do computations. Sadly, he was missing a key price list, so we did not get the instant gratification that we were expecting. Dani and I went to bed wondering how much over our target this was going to be; we figured we might have to skip a couple windows or cough up some more money.

The man called back this morning (at 7:30am -- gotta make sure he doesn't make a habit of that), and the total was actually under our target by several hundred dollars. That's pleasant news to wake up to!

clean sweep

A couple of years ago, I created a moderated mailing list to act as a filter on an existing unmoderated SCA list. (The owner of that list and I have very different ideas about appropriate content, so where I (were I list owner) would have posted the occasional "let's bring this back on-topic or take it to email" message, he posted things like "please label your off-topic posts in the subject line". He sees no inherent problem with off-topic banter that goes on for 20 or 30 messages in a single day.)

Usually the list is well-behaved and gets maybe half a dozen posts a day. Occasionally it flares up.

I think this is my first "clean sweep" of a moderately-sized approval queue, though. 10 messages this morning and not a single one appropriate for passing through. During the past few days only about a quarter of the messages have made it past the moderator, so this isn't too surprising I guess, but it still startled me. It hasn't been this bad since all that virus-related traffic came through last month. (I didn't think we needed 60+ messages trading virus horror stories, either.)

I've come to realize that if the moderator of a mailing list is doing his job, most subscribers have no clue that he's doing his job. :-)