The cabinet guy finally came. Should take two to three weeks to finish, a week to install, and then another two weeks or so for the countertop (hopefully, I haven't contacted them yet). That puts kitchen completion around mid-June. There isn't even a vague estimate on the yard at this point.

For those who call me on occasion, I no longer answer the phone if you have caller-id blocked. Sure you can always leave a message. The tele-marketers have gone way over the top. You would think that AT&T would stop calling after I told them "no" over a hundred times. Or at least after I started asking for names of the representatives to add to the lawsuit for continuing to call me after telling them time and time again not to anymore. This is no longer marketing, it is harrassment. And it's all automated now which is the worst part. They aren't waiting for you to pick up the phone. There's some big computer auto-dialing numbers and it connects to an available agent only when it finds a phone that is answered by a human. This discovery process takes a few seconds. Have you noticed this? You say "hello?, hello?" about three times before the person on the other side (who ostensibly called you) manages to respond.

What I want to figure out is the algorithm for detecting answering machines. That way I can answer the phone with the right phrase and have it hang up automatically without ever connecting to an agent. Think it has to do with the pause after "hello". If followed by another hello within three seconds or silence, it's a human, so I reason. Anything else must be an answering machine. I think I'm going to play with this a bit, and see if I can make the computer hang up with the right voice intro. Hope it doesn't get to be something like "Hi, this isn't an answering machine but I've got to ramble a bit to get rid of the marketers". The goal is to have the tele-marketers hang up on you and not the other way around. Well the real goal is to pass a law so that they'll never call in the first place, but the Supreme Court has usually ruled that commercial solicitations are protected free speech.

Now that I'm a fully-fledged indexee of the Google database, it's amusing to see some of the search queries which led people to these pages. I hadn't really used this (referral) log file before, but now that other sites link to mine in strange ways it takes on new meaning. "automatic javascript popup" landed somebody here, as did "shower cam" (top two searches leading to this site); as did "percentage of rich people vs poor people" and "russian sks accuracy" of all things. (It shoots like a weathervane...). Last week there was a pretty relevant hit for "specific gravity of bock beer" and I would think a satisfied visitor asking for a "double bock recipe".