… or rather, the company hosting duoteam.com goes green!  DreamHost announced on Earth Day that they are now carbon neutral - which is fantastic, considering they were using the energy equivalent of 545 average homes!  Read more about their efforts here, including using AMD’s more efficient processors and more.

So, looks like Feedshake underwent an upgrade and broke the combined Schroeder blog feed.  The Walker must have just dodged the bullet, we were using Feedshake to provide combined feeds to our homepage and others - and those pages break terribly if the feed stops working.  Luckily I rewrote the Walker scripts to bring them in-house a few weeks (a month?) ago and it’s working great, so I just adapted them to the Schroeder blog feed as well:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CombinedSchroederBlogs

Also wrote a plugin so Duoteam images should come through the RSS even if they’re uploaded weird.  Sorry for the hassle.  Now that it’s on Feedburner it should keep the same URL forever, even if I have to move things around again.  Enjoy!

Announcing duoteam.com as the new and improved online headquarters of DuoTeam.  Please, please, please update your links — a script on the old blog will continue to try to pull people over here, and if you subscribed directly to our old atom feed (not feedburner) please update your link to http://feeds.feedburner.com/DuoTeam.  That one will be permanent, as hopefully everyone on it is getting this post via RSS already.

Whew.  Keep an eye out for bugs and let me know in the comments here, k?

Now maybe we can get back to posting!

A blog was born.

I realized the majority of the Schroeder family was now blogging (if you count travelpod, which I do), and realized there was a neat trick we’re using at work that would mike life easier for us all. If you’re using an aggregator (FeedReader, RSS Owl, or web-based Bloglines, even Google), you can now subscribe to one single combined Schroeder feed! Everything’s in there, new posts will automatically appear, and it’s all in chronological order! Even the travelpod entries!

It’s available at: http://feedshake.com/mpfeeds/wzazhode5e.xml

Check it out. It’s really cool. It’s like a combined Schroeder life journal, only better.

I got the tape off the walls pretty cleanly Wednesday morning. I did end up using an exacto knife to help - I was having almost the opposite problem as Tuesday night, the tape was tearing because the paint was sticking so well to the wall and tape. But that ended up being easier to deal with and created very few spots needing touchup.

In response to the comments on the last post: Yeah, I think I knew I should be taking the tape off between coats but that really seemed like a huge pain because of all the edges involved… But now there’s a different pain, so maybe it would have been worth it.

I think if I had to do it over again I would leave the tape on like this time but paint the edges with an edging brush and try to keep the paint off the tape as much as I could. That’s really where the issue was, too much paint bridging between the wall and the tape…

As for images in the RSS, I’ll have to dig in a bit and see - it’s a bug in Blogger or Feedburner if they’re not showing up. Or your aggregator? Weird.

A few cosmetic changes to the blogs - my posts now appear in this nice brownish/red color, and Karen’s appear in a sort of blue. Should make it easy to tell at a glance that while Karen’s posts are long, they are few and far between. (Just kidding, Karen! Ha ha!)

I went back and added text to go with the photos of our move, just to give a little context. And now I’m writing about writing, boring, but I thought I’d throw a new post out to draw attention to the previous ones beingupdated. Done. Karen keeps promising to blog - "real soon". I dare you to hold your breath. (Actually, don’t. She’s out of town for a wedding tonight, driving back tomorrow, then leaving Sunday for a week long trip in the Boundary Waters, so… definitely don’t hold your breath.)

We’re in that sort of awkward phase between the rush and excitement of successful househunting and the actual move-in day. Our situation is even a bit worse than "normal" because we close at the end of the month and then rent back for 2 weeks - complicated, but necessary. (and we still have to try to convince our stupid current landlords to make an effort to rent it mid-month or we’re stuck paying for the remainder plus the mortgage.)

But I’ve already started making plans for the basement, and K too. I’m getting a chest freezer from her family which I intend to start filling with kegs of homebrew ASAP - but there’s money involved there to get the temperature regulator, kegs, taps, and CO2 setup. Might have to do it in phases. But, oh, so sweet to have delicious beer on tap. Good thing I’m finally working out again…

And speaking of working out, K’s big plans for the basement involve her free-standing punching bag - it’s a molded plastic thingy with a big base and a covered foam pad that goes on the top. You fill the bottom with water for weight, and you’re good to go, it will take all sorts of punches, kicks, and general workout abuse.

… but it’s all so far away… Still over a month.

Anyway, watch this place for further entries on the new adventure of home ownership! From unexpected bills to fun projects to those awesome "mysteries" that houses have - "what the heck is this switch wired to??", it’s all coming to you live from the Duo Team World Headquarters!