Doug’s World

Painting continues

We’ve come up with a logical division of labor: Doug paints walls, Megan paints furniture. So far, so good.

Ike, Fish, Murg

Chillin’ in the new pad …

The painting begins

The cats have landed

As of last night everyone’s here. My friend Stephen Peront is visiting from Boston, and with his help we got the cat door installed and the cats moved. Thanks, Stephen!

Most of our furniture is still at the old place, but after we paint a few rooms we’ll finish up those details.

HDR from Malaysia

It can really be a drag taking long trips to work long hours in hotel rooms, offices, meeting rooms, and airports. But sometimes you get to stay at a hotel next to something cool like Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, where photos can be found in a 15-minute walk. The shot of the towers below is after midnight last night, so the lights are off. With the low cloud cover, I like that shot even more than the early-evening photos I took last year when I was here. (By the way … look close in that shot from last year, and you’ll see a lighted room on the second floor from the top of the hotel to the left of the towers, on the left side — that’s the room I’m sitting in right now, as shown below.)

It’s not raining tonight, so I might even get in one more quick photowalk before I check out early tomorrow morning.

Day 2: the Ides of March

Happy National Pi Day!

As Ken and others have warned me, it’s National Pi Day again today, 3/14. It’s also the day we closed on our house. We signed papers and transferred money throughout the week, and today it’s 100% done and we have the keys and the place is empty and it’s ours.

Here are a few shots of us doing what we did today. What will we do tomorrow? We can’t wait to find out.

We pick up the keys … today

This is the part of the blog post where we exude that world-weary hipness that tells you “moving into a new house is no big deal to really cool people like us.”

We want you to believe that we’ve never looked at any of the above pictures since taking them 62 days ago. Roughly.

Please play along. We’ll have new pictures soon.

Back Online: finally

Things have been clumsy for me on email and the blogs over the last week, because I’ve had some extremely inconvenient connectivity problems. Ever since I spent a night in Copenhagen, I’ve not been able to connect to any wireless network except for corpnet in Redmond. Every network says it has been blocked:

I’ve spent time on several different days playing around with this, both on my own and with the enthusiastic assistance of various long-suffering phone support types. I’ve logged in as local admin, I’ve deleted and re-installed my network adapter and other things, I’ve played around with Windows Defender, and nothing made any difference. I’ve done lots of searches on the net (while at work, sigh) and found that others have had this problem although I never found a solution mentioned.

But today, with some great help from my new favorite Windows guys Kalmesh and Wai, I’m back online. And here’s how I did it, for my own future reference and for others who might want it too …

First off, this is all stuff you have to do at a command prompt running as administrator. If you don’t know exactly what that means and how to get there, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff.

When the problem shown above is happening, type the command netsh wlan show filter and you should get something like this:

Allow list on the system (group policy)
—————————————
SSID: “A-MSFTWLAN”, Type: Infrastructure
SSID: “MSFTWLAN”, Type: Infrastructure

Block list on the system (user)
——————————-
SSID: “”, Type: Infrastructure
SSID: “”, Type: Adhoc

That last bit about “Block list on the system (user)” is the problem. It says that ALL networks should be blocked. Somehow this setting changed while I was in Copenhagen a week ago. I have no clue how or why, but in the future I think I’ll stop giving my password to young hotel employees until I get to know them much better. (LCA: that was a joke.)

Anyway, the solution is very simple. You just type these two commands, at that same administrator command prompt, and suddenly all the wireless networks are un-blocked:

netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype=adhoc
netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype= Infrastructure

I’m online, getting caught up on important details like this blog post, and feeling more productive than I have since Geneva. If you’ve emailed me in the last two weeks and are still waiting on a reply, the chances of that happening have gone way up!

Saturday Afternoon

Ah, a lazy Saturday at home. What a treat. We slept in late, then went out and wandered around a bit through the south end, Des Moines, down to Tacoma. We drove past the new house (closing is within a week now!) and saw the prior occupants loading their moving truck. Life’s good.

A few photos from the weekend …