The Russians are coming and they want to FEED you and FIX everything!

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, but instead of landing a submarine off the coast of Massachusetts (or getting it stuck in the mud) they are flying in via New York’s JFK to Chicago’s ORD. And instead of the locals fearing an invasion we sent out a greeting party. In fact my live in Russian RB, drove to meet me in Milwaukee and we drove down to Chicago the next day to pick up her folks from the airport. It was around $500 cheaper per person to have them fly in there and we had to rent a car anyway, why not in Milwaukee. The first time I met the soon to be in-laws it was at after they had spent 2 days traveling to get to the states. Then they got to live the exciting drive from Chicago to Minneapolis. Welcome to America now we are going to drive 7 hours home!

The drive wasn’t that bad, I was lucky enough to be upgraded to a Chrysler 300c with all the options. Leather, sunroof, satellite radio, power everything, and a navigation system. So that was a bonus play. Traffic wasn’t bad and we made decent time, though I only understood ¼ of the conversation. Along the way we stopped at an Olive Garden and had some dinner. They liked it but were not that impressed. However it was a very long drive after 2 and ½ long weeks of work so I was exhausted by the end. In fact I think the father in law was a little worried that I would fall asleep at the wheel. Once we got home everyone pretty much crashed right away.

The fun began right away the next morning. I dropped RB off at work early, went to the gym and ran some errands. When I got back I tried to communicate with RB’s mom NB and I think we did a pretty good job of it. She was amazed that I went the morning without eating much and would not let me do this again while I was home on the weekend. In fact she loves to cook, 3, 4, 5 meals a day and for as many people that come over. You can’t complain the food is amazing and fresh. In fact the first thing we did when RB was done working was go to the grocery store. We filled a cart with more fresh vegetables, fruit, and butchered meat than I think I have bought in my trips to the store in the last year combined.

Most meals are built with three main components; fresh cut and cooked meat, fresh vegetables, and cooked potatoes, with some bread. Always good though, she boils things I would expect fried, fries things I expect baked, and bakes things I expect boiled so that all the meats have a different flavor than I am used to from the way I would normally prepare them. But she does cook a lot, and always thinks you should eat more! Every meal she tries to give me seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, I can’t eat enough to make her happy. So I assume that we won’t see many restaurants or go out much this month but that is ok. Come on over I bet she would love to feed you too!

More amazingly is RB’s dad’s attitude. SB wants to work on the house. He enjoys tinkering with everything so he wants projects to do. Actually he finds them on his own. The first thing he wanted to take care of was the squeaky doors. All of the doors in my house have the old style hinges with a pin used as a pivot for a piece of rolled metal on the door frame and the door. He went around and oiled all of the pins so the doors stopped squeaking. Next he wanted the screen door in the porch to close properly. So within two days of his arrival we cut a whole in the front porch’s floor to replace some rotten boards that kept the door from closing. He has also cleaned many of the floors and windows in the house. Now he wants the supplies to repaint the floor and wall in the front porch. The first task in this would be to sand down all of the old paint! I find it really amusing that this is what he finds to occupy his time!

So I have had many conversations, mostly through RB, with my soon to be in-laws and they are very nice and fun to hang out with. It is just interesting that instead of wanting to go out they want to do more domestic activities. What a vacation cooking, cleaning, and fixing up the house. I very much appreciate it but hope we can get them out and about for some more fun activities.

Changes bring Google Exposure

I don’t know how many people have noticed but I am slowly working my way over to a new website design. The purpose of this is not to make the site look better than it did before, but rather to move the site to free services on the internet. This will allow me to shut down the computer I have had running constantly for the last 6 years tucked away in a corner of my house. This will hopefully allow me to save a little electricity but really moving it of site has the bonus of not needing maintenance. Or rather I no longer need to spend time trouble shooting it. The Gallery software is a service, the blog is a service, and actually the way I have the new site laid out leverages free online services. Therefore if there is a problem it is someone else’s problem to fix. This is nice as for more than six months I was unable to upload new photos to the old site. Other times it was hard to keep the blog software running. With all of the changes in my life since I graduated I really don’t have the time to dedicate to keeping the software/hardware up to host my own sites anymore. So I am moving into the public domain.

The first step was finding sites that would allow me to customize the look and use my own domain names - for free if possible. I almost accomplished this feet. Using Google’s Blogger site I can create many pages and direct masked URLs to them. Hence the new http://www.mattglaeser.org, http://Blog.mattglaeser.org, and http://wedding.mattglaeser.org are set up as on Blogger. Two are static pages while one I routinely add content too. The link http://pics.mattglaeser.org will direct you to a site but the URL becomes un-masked to the service I was using. It seemed silly to spend another $60/yr just to have the name be perfect, the links work and the URL will let you navigate fine. The second step was trying to get them to look and work together seamlessly. I was also able to use the same template for all of these sites. That was nice. Unfortunately the limited options make it pretty plane and boring, but it works. Really for the use free services, I can give up some style. The third step was just setting up the naming services to point to the various service providers. Lucky for my I have a free service for that because I was one of the first people to sign up for dyndns.org and so I have a lifetime account that takes care of my DNS needs. So wa-la my new site was born. It does lack the “links”, “about”, and “games” section of the old site, but those were really space fillers. I may still bring back the games.

So an interesting side effect of being on public hosted sites is that these sites are indexed. Due to this fact I have now created an actual on-line presence on search engines such as Google. In fact my blog/website is now the number 1 hit if you type in Matt Glaeser and search: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=Matt+Glaeser&btnG=Google+Search
The old site never ended up in the public domain because there were no links to it and as it was a private web server it was not indexed on search sites. So there was no visibility to the site. To access it you literally had to know the website address or randomly type or enter www.mattglaeser.org to access the site. Now if you search for my name on Google, Yahoo, and even MSN my site shows up in the ranked listings. So as my photo gallery is part of the listed site I have locked down the family sections and I am considering doing the same for the rest of it should anyone complain that their photo may be online. I really don’t think this is a problem as none of the photos have names, addresses, or other personal information but if asked I can lock it down. But never having much exposure on Google before I thought it was interesting that I now am at times the number 1 result.

Alice Cooper has a radio show?

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?
Alice Cooper: Well, I'm a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.
Pete: Hey, isn't "Milwaukee" an Indian name?
Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact , it's pronounced "mill-e-wah-que" which is Algonquin for "the good land."
Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.

This is a favorite quote of mine and others from the movie Wayne’s World. It happens after a concert that Wayne and Garth drove up from a suburb of Chicago to Milwaukee for. They had back stage passes and got to meet the band. Because of this scene in the movie I always think of Alice Cooper when I think of Milwaukee. So it was incredibly amusing the other night when, while I was driving to the hotel, I heard his voice while I scanned the radio channels in town (Milwaukee). At first I figured it was just a Wayne’s World quote or an interview so I stopped flipping channels and listened in.

It wasn’t an interview though. It was a radio show. Apparently Alice Cooper has a syndicated radio show that he does on a nightly basis. He is actually a very articulate fellow and a pretty good DJ. His show is nothing crazy or over the top, just a selection of hard rock music from the 70s and 80s mostly. He also interviews bands from time to time just like any other show. I find this really funny because not to long ago he would have been the person being interviewed. The most surreal part of listening to him on the radio is when he starts quoting facts. Serious facts about the music industry or history of some bad, normally talks about these as strait reference as if he wasn’t in the think of it for years. Like a professor in college talking about events out of a book - very matter of factly and very-very similar to the joke being made on Wayne’s World. I guess the joke wasn’t as much of a stretch from reality in this case.

I just keeping waiting for the next lesson about "mill-e-wah-que" every night as I drive!

Going to Milwaukee to Get Wood

So with the wedding coming up I am very busy. One of the things that is occupying most of my time is getting ready for the soon to be in-laws. They need to have a place to stay. Since they are staying a whole month we decided they should stay at our house. On top of that we decided to try to completely redo the middle bedroom for them. Well that decision was made months ago but the work didn’t get started until about 7 weeks ago. As I am out of town most of the time this means that most of my waking time home has been spent on the this not so little project. However it is finally coming to completion and it really is shaping up nice.

The biggest challenge of this project is finding supplies. We decided after fixing up the front bedroom that in most cases it wasn’t worth stripping pine woodwork just to repaint it. It makes a difference, but not a WOW difference I like to obtain. So for this room we decided to pull out the old woodwork and replace it with oak to match (as close as possible) the rest of the house. Unfortunately many of the old cuts of wood are no longer made in mass production and finding items that work has taken up a 3rd of the effort. For instance while baseboards are easy to get as they are just standard 1 X 8s the cap the originally completed this piece is no where to be found. Instead I had to buy a more modern version that is latterly ½ the height so now we have to patch some nail holes and do some extra touch up work.

Some of the pieces I actually had to custom make. Props to AP and his dad who spent ½ a Saturday ripping and routing oak boards to create custom casings for the doors in that room. Though I have since found a local family owned lumberyard that will do this work pretty cheap. FYI guys I found a shop in town that will do it cheap, I think it’s worth the $11 to just have it cut while I wait. This lumberyard also makes the picture rail for the ceiling I can not longer get anywhere else. Other pieces I had to pull some old woodwork in the garage down, strip it, clean it, de-nail it, take it apart, and reconfigure it to work. This process was used to create the headers for the windows and doors. It’s funny because before staining these pieces they where try color due to coming from three different sources.

Finally the hardest pieces to find, that finish off the look, were the plinth blocks at the foot of each door. These are decorative pieces that sit right on top of the floor and under the casing that runs along either side of the door. I just could not find ones that even came close to fitting. I drove all over town, twice at least looking. Since the casings around my doors are 4½” I needed plinth blocks at least 5” wide and as tall as possible. Menards had some that looked like they would work unfortunately one kind was too small in general for the correct effect and the other fell apart when you tried to install them (read JUNK). So as these pieces were holding up the work in the room because I couldn’t finish putting in the baseboards or even start the door casings until I had them I got a little frustrated to say the least.

So as I was frustrated and didn’t want to waste anymore of my weekend time trying to find these parts I figured I could look in Milwaukee while I was there working. This is exactly what I did. After an hour or so research on Google I found a place that looked promising. So I MapQuested the directions and headed over on my lunch break. This place was amazing. It had every single piece I couldn’t find in Minneapolis. Unfortunately you can’t take long sections of lumber on a plane. But what I could take on the plane where the 4 plinth blocks that I needed, and that this yard had! So I purchased 4 that were over sized so I could cut them down to size and brought them home. They worked perfectly. Now since we need to drive through Milwaukee twice in the next month to pick up and drop off RB’s parents I think I might just have to swing into this lumberyard and stock up on some hard to find pieces.