Brooklyn Row House

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3

Most Bizarre Use of a Shop Award
2009-07-24 18:02:00
There's no way I don't get nominated this year. As prologue, let's step into the WayBack Machine and bump the dial back to early June, when I casually mentioned to Doc Karen that I had seen several feral cats on my evening dog walks. In addition to being an MD, Karen is also a NYS licensed wildlife rescuer so I should have known that I was shaking a hornets' nest. A week later, over my fourth or fifth margarita, I found that I had agreed to allow my shop to be used as a holding facility for the Great Owls Head Cat Roundup. Karen hooked me with the Mayor's Alliance and the ASPCA for a trap-and-release campaign (called a TNR -- I learned some new lingo hanging with these people). The TNR would encompass at least two known colonies and four caretakers (again, lingo) over a geographic area of about five blocks. I was surprised to learn that feral cats aren't usually loners but are part of a loose colony of ferals. A cat that isn't part of a colony is called a rogue. Do I...
More About: Bizarre , Shop , Award

It's 2009. Time for Secession!
2009-06-18 01:42:00
Every presidential inauguration year seems to kick off another round of local secessionist talk. In 2001, it was about New York City seceding from New York and becoming its own state. I admit to a certain degree of sympathy for that given the fact that NYC is the revenue cash cow for the state. But few people took the talk seriously. Short of NYC becoming a hostile nuclear power, there's no way Albany would agree to let us go. In 2005, the local news was about Staten Island secession. Its promoters have a different plan. They want to leave NYC and become part of New Jersey. I didn't have a problem with that. For me, Staten Island is mostly just an obstacle to be navigated on the way to New Jersey anyway. If it became part of New Jersey maybe it would get better malls. Now Long Island wants to secede and become the 51st state. What kicked this off is a $1.5 billion payroll tax to bail out the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Never mind that the MTA is underwriti...
More About: Time , Secession

No brag intended.
2009-05-15 06:40:00
A couple of weeks ago one of my stained glass designs was picked for the Dragonfly Design of the Month, May 2009. I don't consider myself an artist in the visual sense so I was kind of embarrassed by the attention and decided to keep it to myself. But I wanted to publicly thank Michael Wilk, president of Dragonfly, for the honor. So here it is. I know I probably wasn't the most cooperative candidate he's dealt with. I also wanted to give a plug to Michael's Glass Eye 2000 stained glass design software. Believe me, if it can make a graphically challenged person like me create a nice looking design, someone with real talent will be able to do amazing things with it. One more announcement. I've been blogging for Old House Web for the past couple of months -- my first paid blogging gig! Unfortunately, I've been neglecting my own. So I also wanted to apologize to readers of this blog for the lapses in posting here. I've been very busy with Childrens Health Fund the pas...
More About: Brag

Tainted Drywall
2009-05-07 06:19:00
I ran across a story today about a new health threat from a strange source: drywall. My first thought was, "you've got to be kidding!" My understanding from watching the How They Make Stuff TV shows was that drywall was about as inert a product as you can find: gypsum slurry, a fiber binder and recycled paper. How can that possibly be a health threat? Tell that to the dozens of families who have been forced to evacuate their homes in Florida thanks to outgassing of drywall allegedly imported from China during the home building boom. Residents of these homes talked about a foul rotten-egg smell in rooms built with this drywall and, worse, whatever is causing the smell is also corroding metal in the homes: wiring, air conditioning coils, faucets, even table lamps. Testing agencies have tentatively identified the smell as being sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas which can cause breathing disorders and be potentially fatal to those already suffering from asthma. The chemical is also c...

The Tormek Blade Sharpening System
2009-04-11 19:12:00
Shop owners love to brag about the incredible tool buys they've made on eBay, at flea markets and at estate auctions. Like my $50 Hitachi framing nailer and $125 radial arm saw. But most of us have also made purchases we're less proud of, like the $100 "miracle corner clamping system" I bought at a tool show which turned out to be utterly useless for anything besides building the tiny box the salesman demonstrated at the show. Naturally, we don't talk much about those overpriced white elephants, which is probably why these hucksters are still in business. Then there are those purchases that fall somewhere in the middle: useful tools with staggering price tags that don't really justify the tool's performance. When I purchased the Tormek T7 wet grinder at the International Woodworking Show in New Jersey, I was afraid I'd made just such a buy. After purchasing the optional jigs and accesories I needed for my planer and jointer blades, knives and scissors I walked out of th...
More About: System , Blade , Sharpening

Building stairs the EZ way
2009-03-15 23:36:00
Shortly after I took possession of my house, I was cleaning up the cellar one afternoon when I noticed my cat, Chopper, engrossed with something halfway up the old cellar stairs. I checked to see if he might have a moth and instead saw a pile of paint chips and wood fibers below the stringer he was pawing at. With the paint removed, I saw hundreds of white wormy looking things. Termites! How did this happen? I'd closed on the house nine months earlier. My inspector found some evidence of an old termite infestation and, to be safe, my lawyer made the closing contingent upon an exterminator's report. The report was so terse that the inspector could have Twittered it: "Found/killed two termite colonies. No evidence of internal infestation." Evidently this bonehead's inspection was as thorough as his report because the termites had dug a tunnel from the far foundation wall, across the ceiling through a 3" floor joist, and down the stairs. It cost me $1500 to have a license...
More About: Building

Warning: R-rated Geek Content Follows
2009-02-22 04:08:00
After three weeks of updates and upgrades to my Insteon home automation setup here, I ran across this YouTube video today which summed up the experience nicely. <!--break--> Okay, upgrading my HouseLinc software wasn't nearly as painful as trying to get that "Stupid Piece Of S**t That Doesn't F*****g Work" ISY99-i installed. But it wasn't a stroll on the beach either. HouseLinc v2 imported all my Insteon device settings from HouseLinc v1 fine, only to report that it couldn't communicate with three quarters of them. It took half the night to get everything working -- changing outlets for the serial PLM controller, rebooting it, resynchronizing the database, etc. Caveat: if you want home automation and none of this makes any sense to you, you might want to do yourself a favor and hire a pro. In the end, I don't have a clear idea what I did to fix it. It just suddenly stopping throwing errors and started working. It's bizarre, but the new PLM refused to work in sam...
More About: Content , Geek , Warning

The Key Food Disconnect
2009-02-17 18:26:00
In December, your wannabe Norm Abrams (me) tried a taste of old school investigative bloggerism and reported on the troubles with the construction of the new 69th Street Key Food supermarket. The local pols and press had been reporting that Key Food was on schedule for January opening. Problem is, I wasn't seeing any work being done on the place. Then the day after Christmas while walking the dogs by 244 Bay Ridge Avenue, I saw a stop work order from the Dept of Buildings plastered on the side of the building. Everything must have worked itself out, or one would presume so, because on Feb 10, 2009, there was a post on City Councilman, Vincent Gentile's, blog announcing the long awaited completion date for the 69th Street Key Food Supermarket. I want to update everyone with some good news: work on the site recently resumed, and the store is expected to open in the end of March. So in just a little over a month, Bay Ridge will have a new supermarket! <!--break--> It must...
More About: Disconnect

Beware the Sucker Holes
2009-02-04 18:43:00
No, that's not a pornographic double entendre. "Sucker hole" is a term I learned from an old flight instructor. It's a break in the clouds which beckons naive, non-instrument rated pilots to take a chance on finding clear skies through that hole only to have the clouds close in on them and leave them in zero visibility. Last week I said I'd post my progress with the new Insteon home automation device, the ISY99-i. Lemme digress for a second. Say what you will about marketing droids, but when a company goes to the trouble of holding a brain jam to create a slick product name for its baby -- like "Insteon" for example -- it says that someone was paying at least a little attention to the customer. Needless to say, this wasn't done with the ISY99-i. I've been through this so many times that I knew with 89% certainty what I was embarking on. Out of the box I saw that I was going to have problems. For one, the packing slip said that there was a DB9 serial cable. In fact,...
More About: Beware , Holes

My house "blue screened", or The Confessions of a House Geek
2009-01-25 02:27:00
I had my first Insteon home automation device failure this week. Unfortunately, it happened to the brains of the "automation" part -- the software/hardware combination that executes the timers that turn the lights on and off. Specifically, the culprit was the PowerLinc device that bridges my house to the USB port on my computer which runs the timers. Here's the little sucker. At 70 bucks, it's not like changing a lightbulb. Okay, I was pissed about it, especially as it's only a little over two years old. But, fact is, I was never happy with this automation set up. For one thing, it requires leaving a Windows box on 24/7 for the timers to work. And the House Linc software I was using must have some memory leaks in it because once I removed it from my computer it seemed to gain an extra half a processor. What I really want is an Insteon driver for Linux/FreeBSD that would let me build my own timers in Perl, which I could run under Unix cron. That's what I did with my form...
More About: Confessions , Blue , Geek , A House

Well, isn't this special?
2008-05-29 03:02:00
New York Magazine's cover story this week is The Brooklyn Wars. Is this ominously titled article about drug gang violence at the projects or the racial tensions in Crown Heights? Or maybe something really volatile, like another pizza shoot-out between Grimaldi's and Tontonno? Nope. It's a five thousand word feature about The What, an anonymous misanthrope who posts on a Brooklyn real estate blog, Brownstoner. Sheesh, I can't even get this blog mentioned as a footnote in a local shopping paper and New York Mag writes a cover article about a troll on another Brooklyn blog? It ain't fair. I guess I should be happy that the Manhattan media is taking such an interest in Brooklyn blogs at all. So congrats to... well, I'm not sure who to congratulate. The What sounds like a chronic malcontent who's pissed that he missed the gentrification boat and his detractors seem to be the same upwardly slithering, relocated latte sippers I moved to Brooklyn to escape from Soho. Folks, ...
More About: Special

Brooklyn's "Blue Thunder"
2008-05-28 02:53:00
While this is generally a quiet neighborhood, we get quite a bit of helicopter noise here. Traffic choppers hover overhead during the morning news to monitor the "Belt-BQE split" a few blocks away. I always know when Bush or Cheney is in town because Marine One and its small convoy of support aircraft are uniquely audible, even in my basement. Mainly, we're three blocks away from NYPD Aviation, where the police choppers refuel. So it's not uncommon to have the chirping birdies obliterated by the hellish thunder of a Bell 412 on approach, flying about 150 feet above my house. Fortunately, this only happens two or three times around mid-day. After the sun goes down they make their approaches over New York Harbor. Lately though, people have been upset by non-NYPD helicopters using that heliport, one of them a silver 412 with no markings. Rumors were flying (pun unintended) that celebs we're being allowed to use the secure police heliport to avoid the paparazzi. This morni...
More About: Blue , Thunder

"Starter house" for sale
2008-04-29 22:03:00
Got a pampered dog or a very small relative? This is believed to be Brooklyn's smallest house. Located near the intersection of Ave T and Van Sicklen in Gravesend, it occupies what used to be a driveway. It's a 1BR, 1 bath home sitting on a lot just 7.25 feet wide and 113 feet long. The interior area is just under 300 square feet. This is a shot of the living room looking towards the entryway. The window on the right looks a bit superfluous, doesn't it? ... and here's a shot from the opposite side. The kitchen actually looks fairly normal sized, at least by Brooklyn row house standards. There's even a washer/dryer. The sole bedroom is behind the kitchen, like any classic NYC railroad flat. Obviously, it would be a problem entertaining guests in the back yard with a double bed in the way so... Murphy bed to the rescue! I can't think an application more suited to it than this house. Speaking of the backyard, it's actually pretty cute. You won't be throwi...
More About: House , For Sale , Sale , Starter

Got a shop? You need this stuff!
2008-02-25 04:52:00
Last weekend, my boss and I made the trek to the annual NJ Woodworking Show. Jeb has a pretty nice woodworking shop but his passion is car and motorcycle restoration. He's done several old bikes -- Velocettes and Moto Guzzis -- but his current project is a 1955 Land Rover. The Rover looked like it had been parked at the bottom of a river for the last fifty years but after two years he's nearing paint and finish, which means he needed supplies, which means we both needed to hit the show. I've been looking for a decent steel tool deck cleaner for a couple of years. Nothing I've tried worked much better than WD40, #00 steel wool and carnuba wax. Jeb told me that he'd had good results with Boeshield and, sure enough, we found it at the show. It's expensive but it was worth a try. Boeshield was developed by Boeing for cleaning metal airplane shells. It's actually a family of specialized products but the T9 aerosol is the centerpiece. It's like a super deluxe WD40 with an...
More About: Stuff , Shop

The Greenville Horror
2008-01-07 00:04:00
A Google search shows that the house at #6 Whitten Street in Greenville, SC was sold to George C. Leventis on July 8, 2003 for $88,000. Flash forward four years. The home's new owners are the Browns, who purchased the Whitten Street house for $75,000. Cited text is courtesy of WYFF. Jason and Kerri Brown of Greenville found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase, and what was inside was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams. "This can't be happening. This can't be true. It terrified me," Kerri Brown told News 4's Tim Waller. A secret room! Who hasn't had fantasies of finding a secret room in their old house? But for Kerri Brown, it was about the worst nightmare a home owner could face. The secret room in the old mill home on Whitten Street in Greenville's Dunean section contained a handwritten letter from the previous owner titled, "You Found It!" "Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was ...
More About: Horror

Vincent Gentile's War on Illegal Curb Cuts
2007-12-22 06:02:00
Quality of life issues are the low-hanging fruit for low-rated pols looking for Page Two time. Like Rudy's crackdowns du jour, they rarely accomplish anything other than some wasted news print and an overnight ticket blitz. But Vincent Gent ile, city councilperson for District 43, seems to be a determined pit bull with one of these issues: the illegal driveways, curb cuts and careless parking in his district of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. Every month or so it seems there is another article about another initiative he's gotten behind to put a stop to the growing problem of antisocial parking. I like this guy. Today's Bay Ridge Eagle reports that Gentile will be introducing two bills to the City Council to put some teeth back into the curb cut laws. One will require homeowners with illegal curb cuts to restore the curbs back to DOT compliance. The other bill addresses a more serious problem that has been at the bottom of many of these illegal driveways, not to mention a lot su...
More About: Illegal , Cuts

Designing Stained Glass
2007-12-17 07:59:00
I suck at drawing. I can visualize things pretty well but there's a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn't work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together. My stained glass work to date has been pretty simple, angular and, yes, left brained. But for the new projects here I wanted something a bit more artistic. So I began the hunt for stained glass design software and settled on Glass Eye 2000 from Dragonfly. It's ain't cheap but it's not like stained glass people are a huge market. Nevertheless, it's a high quality product and the best design software I could find. This is a window panel I designed in GE2k in about three hours. GE2k is pri...
More About: Designing , Signing

New Stained Glass Projects
2007-12-12 04:09:00
I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place. While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects. The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art. While a Photoshop geek might be able to design stained glass us...
More About: Projects , Glass

My Odorific Old House
2007-12-04 04:50:00
I'll be posting a new series of articles on stained glass construction in a few weeks. I purchased some new ($$!) stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass 2000 Professional, to help me complete the half-dozen stained glass projects I've got on my plate. So I'll post a review of that as well. I'm gonna change gears and show a bit of my feminine side. I like fragrant houses. I spent my early years living in a small town in Japan, where my mother became a passionate connoisseur of oriental incense. She often had a subtle fragrance burning in the house long after we moved back to the States. For me, a fragrant house smells like home. Since I moved out on my own, I've usually had a cone of incense burning, mostly temple fragrances. It beats smelling the dogs' microwaved breakfast all day. After moving to Brooklyn I found myself estranged from my Manhattan oriental incense supplier. I tried buying it online but the stuff I was getting smelled more like a broth...
More About: House , Old House

Bay Ridge Hum
2007-11-07 03:52:00
Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters. Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one. In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts. A few months later, I read an article in our local paper, the Bay Ridge Courier. It was a brief interview with a resident on Colonial Rd complaining about ...

My Product Review
2007-10-23 19:05:00
The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out. My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test. I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic. I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I'v...
More About: Product Review , Review , Product

Stripping a Door: Part 1
2007-10-21 05:41:00
I brought in an amateur stripper, Doc Karen, to serve as my photo model for this two part pictorial. Even anesthesiologists have to moonlight to make ends meet these days <grin>. I was gratified that she took our tutorial seriously enough to wear her surgical scrubs (mismatched as they were). I guess that makes me "House". Karen's own house is full of painted architectural woodwork so she wanted to learn how the paint stripping process worked. Since it's her door now I was only too happy to hand her the tools and take my position behind the camera, tucking an occasional dollar bill in her rubber glove and yelling, "Take it all off, baby!" until she threatened to beat me stupid. The first thing she did was get the door in a comfortable working position on a pair of sawhorses. Whenever possible, try to remove the woodwork and get it horizontal. This applies to baseboards and casings too. If you don't, you'll know why this is a good idea about twenty minutes into ...
More About: Part , Door , Stripping

Saving The World: Black Pixels and Termite Farts
2007-10-14 20:23:00
Tomorrow, Oct 15, is Blog Action Day and tens of thousands of bloggers like me have each committed to writing an article about the environment. BrooklynRowHouse is about old home renovation and improvement so this topic is a low, slow ball over the plate for people like me. (Do you like how I worked in a baseball metaphor during playoff season? I actually couldn't care less about baseball but this will be a long article and I need to use whatever cheap literary devices I can to hold your interest because there are thousands of bloggers out there who write better than me and we're all writing about the same thing.) I think a lot of us old house shut-ins are going to contribute something along the lines of this: If you're thinking about downsizing from the SUV parked in your garage, consider what's possibly parked in your utility room: a 30 year-old, low-efficiency heating system and a 20-year old water heater. Unlike your gas guzzler, your heating system is cranking 24/7 ...
More About: World , Black , The World , Saving , Term

Cheap digs
2007-10-05 05:33:00
Jeannie from Houseblogs.net challenged us blogger monkeys to write a show-and-tell post. Considering the probably millions of bucks that we housebloggers collectively squander annually on new roofs, new additions, central air and glass door knobs, if there was a ever a low, slow ball over the plate for this group, this was it! Bragging about my tool collection was the first thing that popped into my head. but I just got off a nine-month drunk bedroom reno project where I blabbed relentlessly about them. What about my central vac? Nah, I did that one recently too. My dogs, Jack and Auggie? Furry pets are always a safe fallback post when you've got nothing else to talk about. I wish I could boast about my auction and flea market finds but I've been pretty disappointed by them the past year or two. All I bought at the last one was a bag of kettle corn. Home automation? Not again. Instead, I want to talk about something I've had since I was 11 years old: a book that my da...
More About: Cheap

A Prodigal Door Returns
2007-09-29 04:21:00
Okay, it's a lightweight job and it's not even for my house. But after several months of heads-down work on a software task for my client, The Children's Health Fund, I've got another DIY project. Maybe it will kick me back into gear to finish the cabinet doors and stained glass projects that have been dogging me all summmer. Well, some of it for a lot longer than that. The job is stripping an old interior door and replacing its center panel with some sort of a screen. Karen is a licensed wildlife rescuer and needs this door so her animal room has adequate ventilation. She wanted to install an aluminum screen door but my relentless bleating about what a hideous scar that would leave on her old house succeeded. I suggested that she instead do some dumpster diving for a 30" door and we'd modify it so it would at least have some architectural integrity with her old federal style house. She agreed. More importantly, I figured that would keep her busy until sometime next ye...
More About: Door

Tin Roof Expert visiting: Anyone want to learn?
2007-09-10 17:59:00
October : Lady Liberty?s Tin Man ?Ternes? toward Howard Hall Farm Our House at Howard Hall Farm has a Terne Tin roof, so over the years, Reggie has done a lot of research on it. He?s been looking for an expert for quite some time now, so when he read an article in the New York Post about THE TIN MAN who is the fourth generation of a line of tinsmiths (dating back to 1892), and Lady Liberty?s personal assistant, he couldn?t resist getting in touch with him. Incredible as it seems, Dennis Heaphy has agreed to come work on Howard Hall Farm?s tin roof! He?ll be working here for a week in mid-October. During his stay, Dennis will be conducting a presentation for children (on October 20th) about the making of the statue of Liberty. In an interview for ?The Tin Man:Metalsmith puts best face on Lady Liberty?, by C.J. Sullivan(New York Post) , Mr. Heaphy said, ?This truly is my dream job. It?s an evolution of everything I?ve ever done. It?s an opportunity to use an esoteric knowledge, combin...
More About: Roof , Learn , Expert , Pert

The Flamingo Kid Rides Again
2007-08-28 05:49:00
This weekend I was invited again to my neighbor's annual court party at her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club in the Rockaways. Breezy, a/k/a the Irish Riviera, is as definitively "boro" as it gets and as timelessly shabby as a summer camp. Anyone who's seen Garry Marshall's 1984 movie, "The Flamingo Kid", with Matt Dillon might be able to imagine the place. In fact, that movie was filmed on location only a mile down the beach from Breezy at a similar, although higher-end, beach club. My buy-in for the annual invite is my sangria, which I immodestly admit has few peers. It's loaded with good wine, brandy, Triple Sec, at least six fresh fruits and a few secret ingredients. (I'll cop to one of them: cinnamon sticks). I come laden with six gallons of the stuff, both red and white. It's too easy to take cheap shots at Breezy. After passing through the gates, it looks less like a beach club than a refugee camp with tiny, cluttered wooden cabanas abutting the parking lot...
More About: Ming

Pet peeves
2007-08-13 05:53:00
"Pet peeve" is a terrible metaphor. Pets are warm and drooly and something you like. Peeves are something which irritates the hell out of you, sometimes to an unnatural extreme. What annoys me to an unnatural extreme? Tonight it's pinheads who have garages but instead park their cars on the sidewalk because they think they have a right to do so by virtue of having a legally protected curb cut. More often than not, they've converted their garages into attic extensions, packed full with boxes of Christmas decorations and forgotten bicycles. They have no intention of using those garages for their vehicles, which was mandatory for city approval of their curb cuts. Then there are those black belt twits who not only park on the sidewalk but park their second cars at the curb cut so pedestrians have to walk into the middle of the street to pass by. Or, worse, rent out their curb cuts as parking spaces. You just know they're the first to cry foul when someone crowds their driveway...
More About: Pet Peeves

A Tree Blows Down in Brooklyn
2007-08-09 03:04:00
About 5:30am this morning I was suddenly awake. I'm not sure if it was the threatening thunder approaching from the northwest or my shivering, hundred-pound Newfoundland desperately trying to crawl under the covers with me. Outside, it was like War of the Worlds... real Wrath of God stuff. Lightning was flashing like a paparazzi frenzy and the thunder was getting progressively angrier. I heard the rain starting. Within minutes it was coming down in buckets. Seriously, that's what it sounded like: someone dropping buckets on my roof. By now, most of you have probably heard that Brooklyn experienced its first tornado since the 19th century (and that one was barely a dust devil). Because modern Brooklyn doesn't like to do things small, this one was an EF2, as classified by the National Weather Service this afternoon. My immediate neighborhood was its landfall before it worked its way north-northeast and into Sunset Park, Boro Park and Kensington. At 5:45am I crawled out o...
More About: Tree , Rook

Test, test... is this mic on?
2007-08-05 06:29:00
It's been a month since my last blog post. I'm touched that people have emailed to see if I'm okay or if I fell under a lumber truck or something. I'd like to say that I'm on an extended vacation, motorcycling in the Andes or taking an expert seminar on timber frame construction at Howard Hall Farm but, no, this is my typical mid-summer geek fest. It's when I put down the tools and immerse myself in overdue computer projects, a/k/a working for a living. For anyone who's interested, I'm building my first "Web 2.0" project for The Childrens Health Fund and it's seventeen affiliates. It's a referral and transportation management system (TRMS) to track patients, mostly kids from medically under-served communities, through their encounters with our byzantine health care system. And get them to and from their appointments. Another "first" is that I'm a one-man band on this project -- the organ grinder and the monkey. Usually, I'm spoiled with having a designer or two, ...
More About: Test