Scott Bush

I vol­un­teered at Food Life­line this morn­ing, where we were label­ing bags of cit­rus cake frost­ing mix. There we all stood, in a big ware­house lined up along the metal tables, han­dling dozens and dozens of bags full of fine white pow­der. I couldn’t help but think of a scene from that 1987’s Robo­Cop where Clarence Bod­dicker meets with the leader of the drug car­tel. I half expected Robo to burst in and start shoot­ing. Only thing miss­ing was none of us had guns (except my huge biceps, of course). Ran­dom Robo­Cop quote: “Dead or alive,  you’re com­ing with me!” Ah, Robo­Cop. Why did your sequels go so hor­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly wrong?

It’s done. Finally. It wasn’t easy, but it’s done and we have many peo­ple to thank for bring­ing it about. I’m talk­ing about our new bam­boo floor­ing. Let’s start at the beginning…

Why get new floor­ing?

I bought my condo in 2001 as its sec­ond owner. The car­pet was even then less-than-stellar. Six years later, it’d been a cou­ple years since I’d been com­plain­ing about how we needed to replace it. After it became clear that we would be stay­ing in the condo another year or two, we began the odyssey of look­ing online and at big-box hard­ware retail­ers this past spring. (As an aside: why do peo­ple clean, paint, and re-floor their homes when they sell? Sure, to increase its appeal to buy­ers… but why not do it a while before you move so you can enjoy it?).

We decided on bam­boo floor­ing after check­ing out many sam­ples of it and its also-renewable cousin, cork. I liked cork, but to obtain it for less than $5/sq.ft. required your floor look like a second-rate bul­letin board. Bam­boo offered the nat­ural look we wanted and could be pur­chased for around $3/sq.ft.

I won’t go into the story here (but I will soon in another post), but suf­fice it to say we chose an online floor­ing com­pany whose excel­lent web­site belied its hor­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble cus­tomer service.

Instal­la­tion: or, what not to do

Prep was easy. Prov­ing that destruc­tion is always eas­ier than cre­ation, pulling up and cut­ting our old, worn-down car­pet was not only cathar­tic but kind of fun. Remov­ing the wall mould­ing was much more pain-staking since we needed to re-use it. But still, with a wedge, a ham­mer, and some shivs, they were off pretty quickly.

When the floor­ing (finally) arrived, we had our “instal­la­tion party,” think­ing it’d be a snap. It was snap-together, glue­less, float­ing floor after all. Fur­ni­ture was moved, lots of power tools were stand­ing by, and the bare Gypcrete was call­ing out for some new clothes. What could go wrong?

Lots. It was fine to snap in the boards together in the long hall­way. But when we came to the wall, with its many door­jambs and right angles, it got tricky. We mea­sured twice and cut once, but when we banged another board into the mass of engi­neered bam­boo, the whole thing shifted and moved our cut outs. Nor could we fig­ure out how to bang the boards together when we’d reached the edge of the hall­way (we didn’t have one of those lovely tools that enable this to be done; we in fact had no idea we needed it).

So we pulled the plug before it got too far. We knew we were over our heads and decided to call in reinforcements.

Hire a professional

It’s sound advice, which I’m happy to say we heeded. Luck­ily, our good friend Joe had a friend who had done plenty of floor instal­la­tions. We called Josh and within a few days he was here res­cu­ing us from our own (floor­ing) incompetence.

One of the things the pro­fes­sional told us that the floor­ing com­pany didn’t was that 30%, not 10%, is a good esti­mate of addi­tional floor­ing beyond your mea­sure­ments. Had we known that, we’d not have run out of floor­ing as we did… with only a few strips remain­ing to cover. But we were almost there and things were look­ing good, so the prospect of deal­ing with the floor­ing com­pany again was tol­er­a­ble. (Josh had already con­firmed he couldn’t order the same mate­r­ial through one of his sup­pli­ers.) It arrived via FedEx, unan­nounced (another rea­son to read my upcom­ing post about the floor­ing com­pany) the fol­low­ing week­end and Josh fin­ished the job.

Devil in the Details

Once the floor­ing was in, we nailed the trim pieces back on. The trick to this was our 3/8″ trim didn’t leave much room for any gap­ping, but it ended up look­ing pretty good. The trim wasn’t in very good shape after all those years sup­port­ing dust, then being uncer­e­mo­ni­ously ripped from the walls, only to be slammed back in with pneumatically-driven nails. Luck­ily, more help arrived: my dad, Stu, to res­ur­rect his paint­ing skills. Our trim now looks brand new thanks to his steady hand and a cou­ple of quarts of latex.

One thing that this new floor­ing has taught us: we have to not sweat the small stuff. Hard sur­faces can—and do—dent. We can try our best not to drop things off the counter, remove our shoes at the tiled entry­way, and put felt under our fur­ni­ture legs. But sure enough, we’ve already got a few nice trenches and craters that just couldn’t be helped. My solu­tion? Let it go… or at least try.

A cast of thou­sands a dozen

We couldn’t have com­pleted this project with­out lots of help from our friends and fam­ily. Thanks every­one! They are, in order of appearance:

• Joe and Heather (paint­ing and prep)
• Larry and Susie (prep)
• Dylan (aborted first install)
• Damien, Beth, and in-utero Django (aborted first install)
• Josh (actual install)
• Stu (trim paint)

My wife and were walk­ing around Green­lake after din­ner. We stopped at the restrooms near the bleach­ers on the south­west side of the lake, and while she was inside I noticed some spi­der­webs. Actu­ally, that’s not strong enough… it was more like a thriv­ing spi­der metrop­o­lis at rush hour. Around each of the lights along the side of the build­ing was a mass of intri­cate webs weighed down heav­ily with hun­dreds or thou­sands of gnats, mos­qui­tos, moths, and other fly­ing bugs. The spi­ders could barely keep up!

It was at once both hor­ri­bly repulsive—especially to an arachno­phobe like me—and awe­some. To see the frenzy of life and death, of feed­ing and prey, was amaz­ing. But did also men­tion gross? I got the shud­ders tak­ing these cam­era phone pho­tos, so I hope you appre­ci­ate them dear reader, poor as they are.

It’s been a while since I posted any­thing tech­ni­cal, so here’s some­thing for the web geeks: an ana­lyt­ics def­i­n­i­tion. Granted, if you’re into web ana­lyt­ics you prob­a­bly already know this. But I found myself explain­ing the dif­fer­ence between a bounce and an exit to my col­leagues at a recent meet­ing where I was pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion about vis­i­tors to our company’s site. A pic­ture dia­gram is worth a thou­sand words, so I sketched some­thing out that illus­trated the dif­fer­ence. It was use­ful, so I thought I’d do it up right and post it here.

First, the tex­tual definition:

• Bounce: vis­i­tors arriv­ing at a page on your site, then leav­ing with­out vis­it­ing any other page within your site.
• Exit: vis­i­tors arriv­ing at a page on your site, vis­it­ing one or more pages within your site before leaving.

Pages with a high bounce rate can indi­cate the page doesn’t have what the per­son wants. For exam­ple, they hit that page from Google or other search engine because they thought it’d be rel­e­vant to what they’re search­ing for. They arrive, scan the page and real­ize it’s not what they want and hit back. That’s a bounce in the neg­a­tive sense. But, a bounce can also be pos­i­tive. The per­son arrives, reads the page and has their ques­tion answered, so they close their browser, type in another web­site, open a book­marked site, etc. To dis­tin­guish between “pos­i­tive” and “neg­a­tive” bounces, you’d have to eval­u­ate the con­tent on the page and the aver­age time spent on the page. But I digress.

On the other hand, all sites have exit pages… vis­i­tors aren’t going to only visit pages on your site. Even­tu­ally they go to another site. But ide­ally they do so after they’ve com­pleted a con­ver­sion process of some kind. For exam­ple, they hit your page from Google because they’re inter­ested in, say, some soft­ware you wrote and sell on your site. Ide­ally, vis­i­tors would arrive on the site’s info page, then click around to fea­tures, demo, and pric­ing pages before hit­ting the purchase/download page. You’d expect peo­ple to exit the site from the “thank you for purchasing/downloading” page because they accom­plished a goal: get­ting your software.

Here’s a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the dif­fer­ence between a bounce and an exit. You can also read this suc­cinct post over at the Google Ana­lyt­ics forum.

Q: Do you lis­ten to podcasts?

Q: Do you like strange/scary/weird fiction?

If you answered “Why, yes, I do!” to both of these ques­tions, you should be lis­ten­ing to Pseudo­pod, a weekly pod­cast of short hor­ror fic­tion. The term “hor­ror” doesn’t really cover its con­tent, though, as many of the sto­ries fall into the cat­e­gories of strange or weird. All of it aims to dis­turb you, how­ever, so it’s not for the squeamish.

I intro­duced my long-time friend Tara Kolden, a tal­ented writer, edi­tor, and one-time Jeop­ardy con­tes­tant, to Pseudo­pod a month or two ago. We lis­tened to “We Are All Very Lively” while run­ning an errand in my car. A few days ago she announces to me that she not only sub­mit­ted one of her sto­ries, it was accepted! I’m not sure when it’s going to run, but I’ll update this post when I do.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Tara!

UPDATE: Tara’s pod­cast was aired on 19 Oct. on Pseudo­pod.  The story was episode 60, titled “The Heart of Tu’a Halaita”

No, not the small, green fruit—I’m talk­ing about the comedic musi­cal duo from New Zealand, Brit and Ger­main. Stop read­ing this and imme­di­ately watch one of my favorite songs:

I could embed a lot more, but why don’t you go see them all for your­self? I highly rec­om­mend “The Humans R Dead” (ecsta­tic robots cel­e­brate after the “upris­ing”; lis­ten for the “binary solo”), “Busi­ness Time” (a deluded, long-married hus­band who thinks he’s Barry White), and for those LOTR fans out there, “Frodo, Don’t Wear the Ring.” (One lyri­cal excerpt bears men­tion­ing despite its lan­guage: “I don’t rap about bitches and hos, I rap about witches and trolls.” Good stuff!)

The folk com­edy group now has a show on HBO that con­structs elab­o­rate plots around their songs, which are done in music-video style. Some of the links on YouTube are from live per­for­mances, oth­ers are from the show. Both ver­sions are worth watch­ing as some­times they dif­fer slightly.