The builder wanted to start our new house back in mid-January. But, the constant rain and snow (and sleet) has completely stopped him. The trees where the house will go have been cleared. That probably only took a couple of days, weeks ago. So now the lot is a slope with many thousands of square feet of very deep mud, with scattered boulders and a huge pile of tree roots waiting to be chipped and hauled away. So, no real progress.

The house next door is going up, though, since that lot was already cleared and smoothed. I wouldn't have thought it was a good idea to try putting up a concrete and cinder-block foundation when the temps are below freezing. But that's because I don't know anything about concrete, I guess.

A couple of weeks ago, we went out to the new house site to check out the progress. While we were there, we met one of the neighbors. We talked about the neighborhood, etc., and he mentioned how the trucks for our build were starting to tear up the road. This was a problem because the road is owned and maintained by the residents. So, we were costing everyone money. Now, the damage in question was some crumbling of the asphalt on the edge of the road where our driveway will attach. So, it looked like something that could probably be fixed when we pour the concrete for the driveway.

Then, we get an email from the HOA telling us our road maintenance fees are due soon: $200 per lot (some people there own multiple lots, for privacy). There are about ten houses on this half-mile road. I don't know how many lots, but a couple thousand dollars doesn't buy a lot of road work.

Then we get an email from the HOA's "Architectural Review Board" telling us that they've approved our house plan and its location on the lot. Yay. In that email, they complained about the road and how the builder should work to minimize damage, yada yada yada. It's a fair request, obviously. But here's the thing: the road is already in pretty lousy shape; in some places it's all torn up and buckling with gravel heaving out through big holes in the black top, and in those spots the shoulder is rutted and worn out by people trying to avoid the holes. And it's been like that since before we bought the property. So, that's not our problem. But we're getting the feeling that they would like it to be.

Our builder, who was one of the recipients, replied to that email very diplomatically, saying he would tell all his sub-contractors to avoid parking on the edges of the road and to try to clean up any mud, etc., etc., but the road is in bad shape as it is (and went into some details about road construction and repairs). And then, the bit that made my morning bright: he closed saying he'll take some pictures of the road in its current condition, "just so everyone is on the same page" (and then sent us an email telling us to take pics too). Yesssss! It's so nice to have someone take our side in this crap.

On the other hand, in the past month they've only been able to do one or two days work on the site because the weather has been either too wet or too cold or both.

So, I've decided to put a Sonos system into the new house. For now, anyway - it will be many months before I have to actually buy any components. Maybe I'll find something else. Maybe not. Can't never tell.

From what I've read, Sonos can use your iTunes library. And since that lives on a NAS it will be available 24/7. So that's awesome. What it can't do is read songs that have been 'protected' by Apple's DRM stuff - it doesn't use your iTunes account, so it can't unlock any protected songs. It can only read the DRM-free songs.

Luckily, Apple stopped using DRM on music in 2009, so I only needed to worry about stuff purchased through iTunes before then.

iTunes can show you if a song is protected or not, and you can sort the songs using that as the criteria. Doing that showed 3,700 protected songs - out of 22000.

The easiest way to strip the DRM from a song is to burn it to an audio CD then import the song back into iTunes. But, 3,700 songs, average 4 minutes each is 14,800 minutes. That's 185 80 min CDRs to burn and rip. With a burner/reader that averages 10x, that's more than 24 hours of burner time. Drag.

But, Apple has this thing called "Match" which is a way to get your music library into Apple's 'cloud' so you can play it on any iOS device. It scans your library, figures out which songs you actually have and makes a downloadable version available for you, on any device you authorize. $24.99/year. So, sign up for Match, let it scan your library, identify the DRM'd songs and delete them from your library (not the actual files, just the entries in the library). Then, tell Match to download new copies of the songs you deleted and ... voila ! DRM-free songs ! Takes forever with a library of that size, and since it's iTunes there were many freezes, false-starts and failures before it actually worked. Sometimes iTunes is smart enough to do work in the background, and it can show you 'progress' messages. Sometimes it puts all the work on the same thread that's doing the UI, so it just freezes, and you can't tell if it's working or if it's dead unless you let it sit for an hour or so. But in the end, after a couple of days of fighting with it, it worked.

It worked for most of them. In some cases, the record company never released non-DRM versions so Apple can't provide them. In other cases, Match couldn't identify the song so it couldn't provide a non-DRM version. In other cases, Saturn's moons weren't aligned properly so random songs from an album couldn't be identified even though all the other songs on the album could. But, in the end, I was left with 460 songs that Match couldn't handle; and that's only ~23 CDs. So, I did the burn and rip thing for those, then deleted all the protected songs for real. And now, all my music is DRM free.

iPhone

The excavator has attracted a giant mulcher to help it digest the trees.

We met one of our future neighbors when we were at the lot. He said, as have all the others we've met out there, that he was sad to see us cut down the trees on the lot. The next person who says that is going to have to answer a simple question: If you liked the trees so much, why didn't you just buy the lot yourself?! Everybody there apparently owns multiple lots just for that reason. Why you gotta make us feel bad?

The beast has begun his feast. Trees have been turned into the pretty wood chips that cover the lot. It's raining again, so he might hibernate before continuing.

We received an email from the Homeowner's Association president, last night. He wanted to meet to go over our builder's plans, so that the "architectural committee" could approve them. Because we can't build a house our neighbors don't approve of.

In the clearing next to our house I made a rare sighting of a female excavator and her companion bulldozer as they lay in repose after a long day of knocking down trees and churning the earth. The remains of their feast lay strewn about.

I dared not get closer, lest I startle them.

This is the time of year when excavators start getting ready for the big summer digging season. They're fattening up and getting in shape and hunting for prospective mates. I feel lucky to have spotted two of them in such a short time.

Here we see a solitary male excavator resting in the forest. Soon, if weather allows, he'll begin his harvest of the surrounding trees and boulders. If the birds who live in that house on the left are lucky, he will spare their tree.

When he has consumed his fill he will roll off to find new things to dig or knock over.

So let's leave him to his slumber. He has many hours of hard work ahead of him, and he needs to be strong to get it done. We'll check in after he's gone to see if the debris can tell us anything more of his nature, or his purpose.

The empty lot next to our current house was cleared around the same time ours was. For whatever reason, the builder never got around to building on it. Until this week. This week, he's going to start building a house there. And that's good, because the lot was getting a little scraggly and I've been tempted to go over there and clean things up. But, now it starts. Five months of hammering and sawing and Mexican music and muddy streets.

The timing here means that the new house next to us will be finishing up roughly the same time our new house is finishing up. Which means our current house, and the new house next to it will be for sale at the same time. Which sucks.

On the other hand, they still haven't been able to clear the lot for our new house. The rain just keeps coming. So maybe there won't be much overlap after all.

Mrs. wrote a note to all the people on our new street apologizing in advance for the noise and the mud that the building of our new house will create. Because she's thoughtful.

Anyone here have any recent experience with designing a whole-home audio system?

Our current house has ethernet throughout, and all of our iTunes libraries¹ live on a NAS. My desktop PC handles playing iTunes in the 'office' room. In the living room, we have a Windows laptop which has its audio out connected to our AV receiver; this laptop's primary lot in life is to run iTunes.

The receiver has two audio zones: living room and back porch. The receiver also handles video switching: cable, DVD and the laptop's video out.

This setup works OK, but it does nothing in any other room.

Since we're starting new construction we have the opportunity to set up any kind of audio system that we want (and can afford). We'll be doing ethernet everywhere regardless.

I've been looking at Sonos, but it's not clear what I'd need for components. And it kindof sounds like I could maybe ditch my A/V receiver - run the BluRay player and cable directly into our TV (let it handle switching video sources) and then maybe grab the audio out from the TV and into some kind of Sonos setup?

Or, Apple's Airplay?

Anyone know anything about any of this? I know I can pay someone a lot to design and install a kick-ass system, but I really don't want to.

1: Let's just assume that switching to a non-iTunes-based system is out of the question. We have close to 20,000 songs and most were either ripped into iTunes or purchased from the iTunes store. We're locked in.

We went out there yesterday, to take some pix of the clearing, but they haven't started clearing. Because of the constant f'ing rain. Something about heavy equipment in mud on a slope. Wahh.

Oh well.