Joel Stevens

For the past week, Elly and I have been working on the house. Pictures can be found here. I'll break this up into three sections:

Section 1: rearrange
We made our larger bedroom into the music room and guest bed room. We weren't really using the bottom half of the room in the old bedroom so this bought us a ton of room. We also got rid of a lot of furniture and stuff and gave it to GoodWill/relatives.

Section 2: a whole bunch of new stuff
We also bought a bunch of stuff:
1) A 42" Westinghouse LCD (duplicate of our current one). We mounted this on our new bedroom wall a la the commercials.
2) A mac mini. Our new bedroom computer / media server / thing of awesomeness. Got wireless keyboard and mouse as well. We hooked up our 1 TB external hard drive to it.
3) new bedside tables.
4) new end tables for the living room
5) new lamps for bedroom
6) guitar hangers for new music room

Section 3: patio!
We decided to lay down some flagstone as a patio in the backyard (we have no grass there). Since I've been doing steps, here's some more:
1) measure it out, came to ~400 sq ft
2) dig 3-4" in the area and desperately try to find places to put dirt from said digging
3) put more different dirt in dug area (actually decomposed rock)
4) place stones (in this case 5.7 tons of them)
5) realize that takes forever and decide a nap is needed
6) desperately hope you finish soon

And I didn't mean to. At first, it just started with my roommate buying a PowerBook and telling me how awesome it was. I was dubious about laptops and about Macs, 'cause I hated everything before OSX. I don't know why I hated it exactly, but I didn't like how it felt, and at that point I was a hardware build-it-yourself type which wasn't really all that macesque.

Anyway, I started doing some website coding with my friends, and they all had the new MacBook Pros (right when they came out), so I bought myself one. Then I realized that laptops were awesome (mostly so I could mess around on them, code, whatever, while watching TV or sitting in the living room, flying, etc.) I didn't think it would be awesome, but it was. Also, I like OSX. I really liked Debian when I ran it for a while, and having a terminal is strangely comforting. That was my first Apple purchase.

I then got an iPod Nano. I didn't buy it; I won it at a christmas gambling party. I thought iPods were stupid honestly, but it grew on me (especially while snowboarding). I think after that, it was the iPhone (it was the first cell phone / plan I was willing to spend money on, before that, I didn't really use or like cell phones). Then I decided to go with the whole AppleTV thing to make my all my videos digital, which in turn resulted in me getting the Apple Extreme for attaching a large harddrive to the network and having a happy 802.11n household that would be all compatible since it was all apple right? Not really. I had to manually install a 802.11n card in my MacBook Pro to get it to stream to the AppleTV right. Guess what, no more repairs from apple (offically) since I had modified the MacBook Pro (jerks). Anyway it is all working. Then I got Elly a MacBook Air when it came out (so I could use it when traveling or whatever, and she could use it at home). Did I mention she has an iPhone too? See what I mean? I didn't mean for it to happen, it just did.