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.