Help fixing a draft?

I recently purchased a home. While there are a lot of things wrong with the home and although it needs a lot of work, I think it is a nice home for my little family. It does need some TLC. One of my many current problem fixations is my drafty chimney:
I am not sure how to fix the draft. The stove was installed illegally by the previous owners, so we are not and will not be using it. There does seem to be a draft coming from either the chimney, the stove, or both. I need to fix this. Any ideas? The solution needs to be cheap (we just bought a house), easy (I need to be able to do it myself), and pretty (it is in my living room and people see it). A tall order, I know.

Here is a link to the Yahoo Answers question I posed about this. It already has one answer: plastic and duct tape. Would that really work? Any ideas of how to make that as pretty as possible?

Who is George?

It should not be news to anybody that I have become a big Jonathan Coulton fan. A while back I was listening to his song A Talk with George again and decided to finally figure out what the song was about. I liked the tune, and the lyrics seemed to describe somebody like Forrest Gump without the mental handicaps (popping in and out of historical events in a way that could have happened but seems rather implausible). It turns out that the song is about George Plimpton, and his life sounds even more amazing than the song makes it out.

Related to my work

I work for BAE Systems and am currently tasked on some projects for General Atomics. These projects involve the Predator. If I succeed, I will have created Skynet. Okay, not really. This comic from xkcd still made me laugh, though:

While I am there, the comic below (also from xkcd) relates to the conversation we had at lunch yesterday. One of my co-workers was defending TSA allowing her to bring her knitting needles on a plane. Those safety measures do not actually keep anybody safe, they just help the ignorant feel safe:

Google Wave: Day 2

I was surprised to have a few random people offer to accept a Wave invite over Twitter from me. Unfortunately for you random people, I have real friends and family who would get priority. That does not matter, since it appears that Google has closed the lid on inviting more people for now.

Here are some more useful links that I've come across for Google Wave:

• Starify, a simple little bot that has source code available
• Google Wave Extension List, a Google document collection of bots, gadgets, and extensions
• My Favorite Google Wave Bots by Gina Trapani
• Google App Engine is where most of the bots seem to be hosted

I went through and added a bunch of bots to my address book and then put them all in a group (found by searching for "appspot" in my contacts). I also created a personal wave with useful gadgets I might like to use later.

Google Wave first impressions

My sister-in-law sent me a Google Wave invite last week and it finally arrived this evening. So I have caught my first wave and played around with things a bit. I must admit the experience is a little underwhelming right now, but that is probably because I have not interacted with anybody on the service yet. Below I will jot down some notes.

Useful guides

Here are some websites I found that seemed particularly useful, or that look like they will be useful in the future, or that are written by people who generally write useful stuff:

• Google Wave Wikipedia article to answer that difficult question of "What is it?"
• Google Wave's support site for the official help line
• Google Wave 101 by Gina Trapani (TWIG panelist) for Lifehacker
• Google Wave first look by Gina Trapani for Lifehacker
• Wave Gadgets tutorial for extending Wave
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide by Ben Parr at Mashable
• Wavety.com the Complete, up-to-Date, list of Google Wave gadgets and robots
• TWIG 10 is an episode of This Week in Google focusing on Wave
• Wave Extensions featured by Google

Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I have not really done too much since I have not collaborated with anybody yet. As can be expected, there do not seem to be many of the obvious and necessary gadgets yet. For example, I would like to embed YouTube videos but have not figured that out yet. I also have not been able to integrate it with Google Groups. That is unfortunate, since I received my invite specifically so that I could use Wave with my in-laws who have an active mail list in Groups. I do like the Sudoku game.

Video

Here is a video about things to do in Google Wave: