Living Room

You are standing in the Living Room, the largest room at 10 Spring Street. The living room has three large windows that look out on Spring Street, and another window that looks out over our porch.

Right now, you are looking at our fireplace. When we first had our house inspected, we were told that the firebox on the fireplace looked good, but that the chimney was falling apart and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up. We were told that it was a 4-inch flue, which was too small to line.

Well, our home inspector was just plain wrong. The chimney is in great shape. What was blocking the chimney was a number of dead birds and about 20 years worth of soot and ash. We paid $74 to have the chimeny swept. The sweeper said that we didn't need to line it unless we decided to get a wood burning stove. (Why would we want to do that?) He also said that we might want to get a metal screen for the top, but it wasn't necessary.

On the bookshelf at the right of the photograph you can see some books on computer security. I just finished publication of my 10th book, Web Security, Privacy and Commerce, with Gene Spafford. 2001. (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.). I'm supposed to be working on my new book right now, a book about the Macintosh OSX operating system. But isntead, I'm writing these web pages.

The small door on the left leads to a coat closet. Perhaps one day I'll take a photograph of the inside.

• Go outside.
• Turn to your right, to look at Simson's office.
• Go into the hallway.