One thing my current employer’s doing right

Full disclosure: I work for Yahoo!, but no pimp-my-employer post here, simply an acknowledgment of a product the beleaguered yodeler can stand proudly behind as the Wall st torch-and-pitchfork set grows.

So as mentioned, I’ve bought a house. It’s a classic 80-year-old old Hogtown brick home (somewhere north of ‘dump,’ south of ‘featured in the Globe Real Estate.’).

We need to install ducts for our heating/cooling system, and after about an hour spent scouring the Web for specific duct information I can arm myself with when chatting with my contractor to sound half-way intelligent, i came up donuts, until a gave Y! Answers a spin.

See the operative word above is ’specific.’ I found out all sorts of general information on ducts, advertorial on ducts, technical information on ducts that didn’t answer my question and left me inclined to skewer my eyeballs with bamboo shoots.Then I posted my question on Answers, and voila – objective, valuable advice from the Answers community on installing ducts inside or outside your home’s existing walls (question below).

Sure, Answers has downsides: not in love with the user experience from a navigation perspective, has it’s fair share of ‘expert’ airheads, more than the odd attention-seeking freak and teens looking for quick answers to history essays, but it’s invariably a great place to get specific, decent info and opinions on any number of topics where a traditional algorithmic search engine ends in a series of dead ends or at least mired in a mass of loosely related topics.

Try it out next time you find yourself inclined to Google a question over 100 characters.

And it also proved that, yes, my wife is always right.

clipped from ca.answers.yahoo.com Better to install ducts on the inside of home walls, or outside the walls then encase them in drywall? hi, we need to install ducts for heating/cooling in our house (currently it’s just baseboard heating and are converting to a furnace). my contractor wants to install the ducts in the existing walls but I’m concerned we are going to open up those walls and create unintended, expensive problems trying to install he ducts around existing wiring and plumbing. I understand a lot of people avoid this by installing the ducts that extend through the house on the outside of the walls, then close them up again with addtional drywall. however, i fear this second option will take up living space and look ugly/odd. any opinions on what the better option generally is for an older house of about 1200 square feet (not including the basement, which is 400 sqaure feet) with 2 floors and a basement? much appreciated.

one thing my current employer’s definitely doing right…

clipped from ca.answers.yahoo.com Better to install ducts on the inside of home walls, or outside the walls then encase them in drywall? hi, we need to install ducts for heating/cooling in our house (currently it’s just baseboard heating and are converting to a furnace). my contractor wants to install the ducts in the existing walls but I’m concerned we are going to open up those walls and create unintended, expensive problems trying to install he ducts around existing wiring and plumbing. I understand a lot of people avoid this by installing the ducts that extend through the house on the outside of the walls, then close them up again with addtional drywall. however, i fear this second option will take up living space and look ugly/odd. any opinions on what the better option generally is for an older house of about 1200 square feet (not including the basement, which is 400 sqaure feet) with 2 floors and a basement? much appreciated.

My house is so web 2.0

So out of nowhere, the agent/owner we bought our new house from (bit complicated) up and informs us that our house has a website complete with blog/comment functionality, an embedded video player featuring of our pad, a blog roll (well, links to local clubs and newspapers).
It also has links to the house survey and floor plans.

How cool is that to happen upon? Sorry scooter, you’re taking a back seat (awesome) for a while to the wild and wacky world of home ownership. Figure I’ll bounce back and forth with updates here, and at the home blog. Hopefully blogging – and scotch – will assuage some of the stress bound to come in simultaneous renos on the basement and main floor starting in about a month.

Cut-and-paste blogging goes fancy pants

The results of my test using the Clipmarks google extension below, as per previous post. Love that Onion, still managing to squeeze yuks out of social malaise.

clipped from www.theonion.com Potential Employee Uprising Quelled With Free Pizza Just moments earlier, these passive and complacent workers were talking about setting fire to their office. NEW YORK—A massive employee backlash over low wages and increased workload was narrowly averted this week when company management arranged to have eight large pizzas delivered to the design firm Cobalt Media, instantly quelling months of mounting resentment and dissatisfaction.

ScribeFire – Blogging made 18 seconds more efficient

So I’ve now combed the entire Internet and completed the ‘great pimping’ of my My Yahoo! home page with every conceivable RSS feed i could possibly want to read. Indeed, I’ve been combing the web for what seems like 2.5 decades straight. One might say a tad obsessive, made all the more obsessive due to the fact that I can now blog directly from said home page now filled with endless blog topic sources using the fanc-dancy Google add-on app. ScribeFire. Very cool tool I’d forgotten about.
’bout to check out Clipmarks now.

Awkward moments in scooting history…

Yes, the scooter’s the one with the coke-bottle glasses in the schoolyard of 2-wheeled vehicles, invariably found pinned against the fence by a Harley looking for a free lunch. Yet it’s the scooters’ very ‘nerdish leanings’ (a term pulled from animated nerdette Lisa Simpson) that attract so many to the (usually) faux leather saddle and undersized wheels.

Fat guys with complexes ride hogs – it takes real guts to ride a scooter with defiant pride…

So let’s all celebrate these painfully awkward gods of the 4 stroke below. Ride on brother, ride on…or levitate, whatever the case may be.

(Speaking of 4 strokes, I found out the difference between 4 and 2 stroke engines. In short, in the case of 4 strokes, a ’symphony of mechanical events occurs.’ In the two stroke engine, this symphony downgrades to the hippie in the subway station with the harmonica and upward turned hat, wherein, events in the engine are ‘integrated into one simple downward stroke, and one upward stroke.’)

1) Mr. Hoover Scooter – his facial expression would suggest he’s actually hovering over the Grand Canyon. Not sure the bicycle helmet’s going to do much.

2) Rocket powered scooter – ride on buddy, right into a lifetime of of gauchies.

3) Me and the Segway incident.
yep, that’s this guy. Let’s just classify 2004 as a personal best in awkward, the one i should have had at 13.

Emissions efficiency battle royale

Not unlike when Andre the Giant took on half a dozen midgets, this battle royale pits 30 scooters against 1 Toronto city bus in a tilt for our times to see which side outgreens the other.

According to one commenter’s number crunching, the Wasps win:

Also, check out the Vespa ad here from their ‘go green’ campaign… if you dare. You think its catchy until it turns into the equivalent of auditory waterboarding once it latches unto your brain for the next 3 days.

As promised: A monkey riding a bike

in video format even

scratch that, I ride a Monkey bike

As fate would have it, my formerly parallel ‘interests’ in simians (especially those wearing tuxedos and carrying trays of martinis over their heads) and scooters have now neatly blended into one, elevating this new hybrid result to the status of ‘obsession’.

Behold, the Monkey Bike.

‘This gives the rider a crouched appearance, making him look like a stylized image of a squatting monkey, hence the name.’

….diligently hunting for a shot of an actual monkey riding a monkey bike.

I own a scooter… you gotta problem with that?

Oh yes, scooters can ride with the wolves any day my friend. If Quadrophenia didn’t sell you on that undeniable fact, then this bad boy sure as Shinola should.

If Peter Fonda’s ride had a sidekick in Easy Rider (to match his own wildly stoned sidekick, Billy, played by wildly stoned Dennis Hopper), it’d be this guy.

Think Scrappy from Scooby Doo.