My new apartment is awesome in almost every conceivable way but one: the new paint job was not done right.  There is one cabinet that I cannot open, there are two I cannot close and there is one door that does not close correctly.  The culprit in all cases is the paint.  The permanently closed cabinet is locked with a fresh coat of paint along the bottom edge.  The cabinets and door that won’t close all have too many layers of paint to fit into their respective openings.  What gives?

Were I a painter, I would certainly want the reputation of doing a spectacular job.  To that end I would sand the edges of doors and cabinets to insure they would open and close without binding and I would remove all hinges and hardware rather than painting carelessly over them.  Doors would be reinstalled once they were dry, complete with unpainted hardware and a perfect fit.

Were I a landlord, I would seek out painters with that kind of reputation.  It would be well worth the money to know that my doors would close correctly, that all my cabinets would open and that none of these will have to be replaced prematurely because they were broken while being pryed open (for the record I have not broken the cabinet door (yet)).

But I am only a tenant.  Do I fix these things myself?  Do I barter my services for reduced rent?  Or do I just deal with this minor annoyance?  The opportunity cost is probably not worth the small improvement this would make to my life, except for the bathroom door.

I now live in San Francisco. I now have a “real” job. As of today, I have started full-time at Flickr in downton SF. The move from Kentucky/Missouri to California has gone less smoothly than anticipated, but Wednesday will put all that behind me when I get the keys to my apartment and all of my stuff from the movers.

It’s a bit nerdy, but this seemed like as good of a time as any to push out a new website. I’m tired of hacking around on my own code for just a blog (I have bigger fish to fry — more on that later), so I’ve built this new one on WordPress. The design highlights my inability to choose a good color scheme and my love of the plant motif in design. I will be tweaking the header image as I get better at pixel-art. I will also be releasing the theme soon sans-CSS because I took great care to get the markup semantically correct and XHTML 1.1 validated.

After a lot of debate with myself, I decided the easiest thing to do is to retire the old blog to a new domain and catch the 404’s this site generates. So my old blog lives on in all its Rails-y glory at old.richarddcrowley.org.

I hope to think more deeply soon but now I am gearing up for the Avalonstar Grand Prix tonight. I love this city.