Spent a couple hours tonight moving stuff back into the kitchen. There’s a couple minor issues – the first was that the refrigerator kept beeping, and wasn’t actually cooling down. This was curious, but after a couple minutes of exploration and a little disassembly, I found the door sensor hadn’t been reconnected when the delivery people reassembled the doors. Oops. Easy fix, and we’re on our way.

The second problem is that the plumbing below the sink is leaking. Nothing that can’t be relatively easily fixed, but sort of a bummer nonetheless. A quick trip to Ace in the morning should take care of that no sweat. Everything else is FUCKING SPECTACULAR.

The tile looks awesome, the sink is HUGE, there’s tons of closet space, the lighting is bright and cheery, the new fridge is huge, and there’s space for everything we need (and probably then some). Oh – the other weird detail is that the stove isn’t level. It tilts slightly forward. I’m sure it’s not a big deal, and Monday those guys can level it out, but it is a touch odd.

We ended up sticking an old Altec Lansing set of speakers & a subwoofer into the cabinet above the microwave – so if you want to listen to music, you can hook up an iPod and have at it. Sometime over the weekend I think I’m going to drill a hole into the adjacent cabinet and run a wire with a connection, because the only real problem is that it’s all mounted kinda high. If the iPod, at least, could be mounted lower, it’d be much more accessible. It actually sounds decent even with the cabinet doors closed, which makes for a really eerie effect.

Yeah, I know – pictures – but I didn’t want to post the end result without a really good shot of the kitchen in bright light, and that means it won’t happen ’till tomorrow.

There’s still areas that need to be painted, so it’s not “finished” finished – we need to do a really good job masking up – there’s a lot of stuff to screw up if we do a bad job of that. Oh – one of the last details that needs to be hooked up are the living room lights and the pendant lights above the bar division between the living and dining rooms. Not that big a deal – probably ten minutes of work, but it hasn’t happened yet.

So, Jim & Co. are coming back out Monday for the last of the inspections and to finish up the last bits, then we’re off to the races! Good times.

Things are close to being done. One thing from today: the glass tile looks AWESOME.

I don’t actually think it’s proper to cast Hillary as a demon, but this is a pretty funny use of a quote from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series, and it does to some degree sum up how I feel about Obama, and why I like him more than any of the other people running this cycle.

So… that’s our new kitchen faucet. I think it’s the most badass faucet I’ve ever seen. Ridiculous? Oh, hell yes.

The kitchen’s coming along quite nicely. It’s actually so far along that it’s doubly frustrating that we can’t just move all the appliances in and start using it. But, there are things still to be done.

We’re picking up the tile for the backsplash tomorrow, then Monday, they’re supposedly gonna start tiling the backsplash, moving in the rest of the appliances, and finishing up the granite – the sink still needs a pretty serious cutout. Then, they sand the drywall (I have NO IDEA why this step comes so late in the process). Supposedly, they’re gonna be done by Wednesday, which is just astonishing to me.

The stuff that’s in is gorgeous. The cabinets look great. We’d picked out four samples of granite from Granite Expo, went to a couple other places, and saw that most places have exactly the same types of things. We fell in love with a honed black granite (matte finish), but the only way to get it was through a specialty store, and the cost difference was almost $3K, so we passed. Ended up going with a style of granite that we *didn’t* have a sample for – a little risky, ’cause we hadn’t seen it in the kitchen light – “Black Pearl,” I think it’s called – and it’s *awesome*.

We’re getting a mix of green clear glass subway tiles for the backsplash, which we’re picking up tomorrow morning. Ended up getting a pretty good deal for the tiles. Then we need hardware from IKEA for the cabinet handles, and we’re good to go. This feels insane – like there’s no way it could actually be happening. We’d been talking about redoing the kitchen for years, but I thought it would be still longer until we actually did it.

If things actually do finish up reasonably, and nothing untoward happens in the next few days, I hope I’ll be able to write a really glowing review of this guy – ’till then, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

So, all the appliances are here, sitting in our living room. The stove, microwave, dishwasher and refrigerator all arrived intact. I was really worried that in the process of delivery, things would get bashed up. Given how messed up a lot of the stuff at the Sears Outlet was, it seemed like a lot of damage was quite realistically possible, and since we got almost all floor models, if they got bashed in, it wasn’t as simple as, “Okay, fine – please bring another.”

Fortunately, everything came through a-ok. The range IS a big upgrade over the old stove. The old stove was wonderful – reliable, powerful – I had no complaints about it except the space on the stovetop. But the new one is CRAZY. It even has a built-in probe for cooking meat! You just plug the probe in on the inside of the stove, and it reads through the main stove interface.

The refrigerator does have “self-closing doors” to some respect – not in the same way the expensive LG model did, but if you close the door almost all the way, you have to overcome a spring latch that then closes the door the rest of the way. So it’s not just the standard seal that keeps the thing shut, which is nice. The dishwasher, which was a floor model, looks substantially better here than it did in the store. In the store, it had some “wobble” in the stainless steel front, but in our house lights, that irregularity is imperceptible.

I’m really excited. Tomorrow, we’re going out to pick out tile and settle on a granite color, and grab some small light canisters to install above the sink.

woo!

Went to the GDC again today and attended a couple talks – mostly writing-related, but one of the ones I went to was the Game Designer’s Rant session, which was pretty cool. This picture was during Jonathan Mak’s “rant,” in which he (and an assistant) released a bunch of balloons with messages written on them with some excellent music.

That’s me with the red hair in the lower right.

Most of the talks today were pretty informative and interesting. Met some really interesting people, and caught up with some friends I haven’t seen in a while. Good times.

So, I’m going to the Game Developers Conference this year for two days. Today was the first. I went to a talk by Ken Levine, creative director of Bioshock, called “Empowering Players to Care About Your Stupid Story.” It was a great talk – insightful, engaging, and often funny. More, he vindicated a lot of my positions on story in the game I’m currently working on. I wish the project lead had been there, but it’s nice to know that I can now back up a lot of my arguments with the opinions of one of gaming’s most respected writers.

I also went to the Microsoft Keynote, which was interesting for only two reasons:

1. The XNA Creators Club can now publish to Live Arcade. This is astonishing news, honestly, and makes a sort of hobby game development project much more likely to actually get into the hands of players. I’m really quite excited about this.
2. Gears of War 2 was officially announced.

Point 2 is really a foregone conclusion, but the first game was fun, so hooray for more of (roughly) the same. After that, I went to a talk by Rob Pardo, who is one of the most influential and important people in the industry – basically the guy who’s running the show from a design side for World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2. The talk was about Blizzard’s approach to designing multiplayer games, and while interesting, it was a little on the dry side.

After that, I went to lunch, where I met a couple MIT alum developers, including Steve Meretzky, who wrote the classic text adventure Planetfall, one of the first games that people regularly say moved them to tears. After lunch, I went to what I thought would be an interesting talk – Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer on Half Life 2, Steve Meretzky, and Ken Rolston, the lead writer on Oblivion, as well as some guy from Midway. The talk was “Stories Best Played,” and given that panel’s credentials, should have been a mindblowing roundtable about creating stories that are ideally suited to the medium. Instead, it was a roundtable talking about games with great stories – Loom, Planescape Torment, Thief, The Fool’s Errand, Ico, Bioshock, Phoenix Wright, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.

This talk ended up basically being the people talking about why they picked a particular game, and then the other people saying that they liked it or didn’t. It was surprising, crushingly uninteresting. Given that I’d just been talking to Steve Meretzky, and found him quite engaging and funny, the talk was a complete letdown – particularly with Laidlaw and Rolston present as well (though Ken Rolston is pretty damned funny).

After that, I had a splitting headache, turned in my pass at my company’s booth so someone could use it tomorrow to attend talks, and then boogied on out of there.

When I came home, the kitchen had been drywalled, which totally blows my mind. Pics will be posted soonish – aside from the teardown, this is the first time it’s actually looked… different.

Microwave: GE Cafe microwave – $349

This matches the range that we got – it’s about $100 more than we were looking to spend, but has some nice features, and looks great. We got it at the Sears Outlet, for about 50% of retail.

Dishwasher: Jenn-Air JDB1100AWS – $594

We spent a good deal of time trying to find a dishwasher that was better than our old one. The cheapest stainless steel dishwashers were roughly $330. Most of the really cheap ones were essentially our old dishwasher with a new front. That was a really… unsatisfying option.

Unfortunately, keeping our old appliances wasn’t an option (if I haven’t already written about that, it’s enough fodder for another post), so we had to find something new. This was a floor model from Fry’s, which we actually managed to negotiate the price down from the stated floor model price. This was, far and away, the cheapest stainless from/hidden control model we’d seen – the next closest was more than a hundred dollars more expensive. With a stainless “tub” on the interior, $150 more.

Refrigerator: Samsung RF265AASH – $1350

This was also bought at Fry’s – a return due to the customer not anticipating the proper size. Cosmetically, it’s more or less perfect, and has never been used. We got it for $150 cheaper than its normal price, which was nice. We’d looked for a good while for a French door fridge, and the next closest option was a Kenmore from the Sears Outlet for $1499, and we couldn’t find one that didn’t have something that didn’t have more than a minor blemish.

The Samsung is everything we wanted and nothing we didn’t (no self-closing doors, unfortunately, but the only model we saw with them was almost a thousand dollars more).

Range: GE Cafe slide-in – $1299

This was the best find of the last two weekends, by far. This is just about 50% less than the standard retail price, and though we got it from the Sears Outlet, it looks *perfect*. One of the biggest disappointments of the kitchen remodel has been the miscommunication that led to our stove and dishwasher being disposed of, instead of being kept.

Finding a range that has been a good combination of affordable, but *better* than the one that we used to have. This was difficult because our old stove was really great. It had a really good oven, a really nice high-powered burner, and proved to be really reliable and useful.

The only thing that was problematic with the old range we had (a GE, as well) was that the back console actually stuck out enough that it was difficult to put two tallish pans/pots front-to-back. As a result, when we started looking for a slide-in range (no back console), it was somewhat difficult to find something that really met the quality of our old range, was aesthetically pleasing, and a similiar, if not better value than our old one.

This thing, though… man. Feature-wise, it’s set to blow the doors off our old stove. It has four burners, one central griddle burner (and griddle), and two ovens. Our old stove had a power burner with (we think) 14,500 BTU. The new one has one 18,000 BTU burner, one 17,000 BTU, one 6.5K, and one 5K. The central is 9.5K, I believe. The oven is also a convection oven, which our old one was not.

We saw this at the Sears Outlet a couple weeks ago when we were looking for (what I remember as) $1,499. We thought, “Hey, this is a great stove,” but didn’t get it at that point. The next week, they were both sold, and we couldn’t find anything else that really hit the right notes. We went yesterday, and there was nothing. We went to the Sears Outlet in Milpitas, Fry’s, Best Buy, Sears, Airport Appliances… nothing. Nothing in the same value/feature range at all. We went back to the Sears Outlet in San Leandro, almost just because there wasn’t anything else to do. As we were there, they rolled out two pristine versions of this stove. Literally, I was standing in front of a blank space, and the woman at the store just rolled the range into the slot right in front of me. If there had been a spotlight and chorus accompanying her, it wouldn’t have made it any more dramatic in my mind.

Crazy.

So, that’s it – we’ve knocked down all the major appliances for our kitchen. My feet are tired, my legs hurt, I’m sick to death of looking at kitchen appliances, but we really got some good stuff for excellent prices.

So, after weeks of enthusiastic playtime, our Rock Band drums finally met their demise last night. The yellow pad had split in two sometime during the evening. The pad still works, technically, but it’s clearly going to degrade from here – the rubber pad’s already showing where the edge was rubbing up against it last night.

I called the Rock Band support line (since the automated stuff all assumes faulty pads from the start), and talked to a guy there. I explained entirely honestly that the pads failed through normal (but heavy) use, and that I was just wondering if it’d be possible to order a spare part.

He told me the pads were still covered by warranty, and it wasn’t a problem to replace them. Using the same “Express” method that they shipped our replacement guitars with, the new pads should be here in a couple days, and then we have a month to ship out the old set. While obviously, I’d have preferred indestructible pads, or guitars that worked correctly from day one, the Rock Band customer service has been really, truly excellent, going well above my expectations of what they needed to do.