Home Removation Project: Vault Removal: The War of the Floors
Our contractor (Baxton) dropped by this morning on his way to another job. We were discussing the tentative schedule about having the wood subcontractor come by this coming week to redo all of the floors, when we should expect to move out of the home, etc. Coincidentally, the subcontractor (Matt) showed up while Baxton and I were standing there in the entry way. Matt arrived with an "independent" colleague of his ("a competitor") to check out the floors and the shoddy work that I had been complaining about.

This new guy (Dan) walked around and looked at it and asked me some questions. I pretty much said when I sit down on the floor, I can look around and see scratches in the wood from the sanding process ("swirl marks" as it is called in the biz). I don't think I should see them so predominantly. The guy basically said that I can't complain because the job is not finished. After a couple more coats of the finish, I won't be able to see them hardly at all because "the finish has a diffusing effect" on the scratches... or so Dan claims.

Well, I disagreed based on the fact that the coat will be so thin, that any diffusive attributes of the finish will just not simply be enough to overcome the dark scratches in the wood. Of course, I'm not an "expert" and I haven't seen what 4 coats of this uber-$80-per-gallon finish we are using will do. The exchange was quite heated and everyone (except my poor contractor caught in the middle) was raising their voice.

So... the subcontractor is going to proceed with the next two coats. If I'm not satisfied with the final result then we'll revisit the issue (i.e. before the final payment for the services rendered is made). My impression however, is that even if I have him redo the floors, that this joker just doesn't have the skills to do a better job, since, well, he thinks they look fine right now! The floors look good enough, but they are definitely far less than perfect. My fear is that if anything, re-doing the floors will just make them look worse. Argh.

I'm shaking my head thinking about our options... basically, we just made the wrong decision about which floor subcontractor bid to take. This is the same guy who did the floors originally when the home was built new... and those floors looked great! So our hunch was to go with someone whose work we had seen; first-hand no less. Bah... I dunno, maybe the (Hoover Dam!) floors will look better after a couple more coats. It sure seems unlikely.

(Update Tue Mar 14 07:59:26 PST 2006 // fixed a grammatical error)
(Update Mon May 22 22:26:27 PDT 2006 // title formatting)

Baby Name Libraries
I scraped a few sites to build my baby name library, including the Social Security Administration. Direct downloadable copies of the "basic" versions of my boy and girl name libraries are available:

boy baby names (4043 boy names)
girl baby names (3122 girl names)

Baby Name Regex Search
As I mentioned previously, we are expecting another girl. Furthermore, our previous name of choice ("Olivia") is a very common one (at least going back for the past 5 years). So Kristy and I hunkered down around the computer and tried to find a good alternative to "Olivia".

While looking, I decided that the search interface at many of the baby name sites was just too limiting. For example, we like the nickname "Liv" but it is pretty hard to search for all names that have "liv" somewhere in the beginning, middle, or end of the name. Enter perl (see perl, see perl run, run perl run!).

Using a small script, I scraped a bunch of names off of a few web sites that seem to have a fairly comprehensive list. Using those names, I built a small local library for my own personal use. Then I authored a very simple interface to search the library using any (well... most any) regular expression. It makes baby name searching that much more fun! Here's the link:

Biff's Baby Name Search Utility

So if I punch in 'liv' and search (on the extended lib), I get a small set of alternatives to Olivia. I did a bunch of other regex searches. For example, the regex "^(a|e|i|o|u)[a-z]{4}(a|e|i|o|u)$" will yield all six letter names that begin and end with a vowel. If you aren't familiar with regular expressions, here are some other examples:

Regex	Functional Meaning
^z	starts with 'z'
a$	ends with 'a'
^z.*a$	starts with 'z' and ends with 'a'
^e.*ana$	starts with 'e' and ends with 'ana'
^[a-z]{3,4}$	all 3-letter and 4-letter names

The links provided by the search utility go to a handy little site that provides the meaning, origin, and relative popularity of the name.

(Update Mon Mar 13 14:34:22 PST 2006 // fixed an html problemo)