Vent, No Duct?

So one of the vents in my room always pours out cold air. I finally got tired of it and took off the vent. Amazingly, it's just a cavity reaching into the bowels of my floor - there's no duct work, or even any evidence that there ever was any duct work. I assume there's a disconnected duct somewhere since when the furnace is on, it pushes enough air into the floor to push cold air out the vent.

But what I can't figure out is how do I end up with a vent but no duct?

My place isn't exactly new - has nobody else noticed this problem for years on end?

Or perhaps a random construction accident took out the duct work, but they just left a random vent?

Or maybe they just accidentally knocked a hole in the wall at some point and decided to cover it up with a vent? (But then how come it actually leaks cold air...?)

Values

I'm still blogging - or at least, I think I am. As a friend of mine commented recently, though, my track record doesn't back that up.

Lately I've been mired in wedding planning. Okay, it's not really that bad, and it makes me appreciate my fiancee's economical sense of decor and style. But one aspect of the planning that's been really hard for me is the question of how to design a ceremony that reflects our values.

It's great that someone is willing to sell flipclips as wedding favors at $8.99 each. (Actually as cheap as $5.99 for orders of 200+.) But cost aside, what does a flipclip add to the event? Is it decoration? Is it symbolic? Is it commemorative?

But it's been hard for me to step back from the "Wow, it's really cool that for only $0.4391736/person, we can rent a reflective doodad that also doubles as a whats-it-called." sentiment to a more comprehensive picture that encompasses questions like "What would I like our ceremony to communicate?" or "What themes would I like represented at our marriage?" or "Do I really care if we have a concrete cast of our footprints?"

Maybe that's why I've felt so frustrated by the commercialness of weddings: Everyone is very happy to sell something for the wedding, but it's hard to put a context to the detail. [Incidentally, often they don't sell it very well - I've been aghast at how many businesses need to spend $500 to buy a decent website. I understand that pricing information changes, but couldn't you at least ballpark your typical services and costs? I know that an all-text site is so 1998, but couldn't you include a few photographs of the wedding urn you want me to rent from you?]

It's like trying to write an essay. Every essay needs an organizational structure - a thesis, introduction, paragraphs with topic sentences and a conclusion. Yes, details and supporting arguments are important, but an essay isn't comprised by throwing details together. The wedding shopping process feels a lot like trying to wade through the details without a supporting structure.

And yes, developing a structure is hard without knowing the cost of various details. In advanced engineering theory, this problem is known as "Catch-22".

So far the best solution I've found so far is an iterative one:

1. Fiancee and I outline budget.
2. Fiancee and I brainstorm wedding ideas and sketch out a corresponding day. (This step keeps highlighting details like 'hrm, it might be X hours between breakfast and the reception, we'd better budget brunch for the wedding party.')
3. Fiancee and I research approximate pricing (and use the research to brainstorm more ideas).
4. Review the research. Discard unreasonable ideas ("What? The reindeer drawn sled requires snow and we're not getting married in the midwinter...")
   
5. Select affordable ideas that we like. Repeat 1-5 for remaining plans.

Improvements? What have other people done that helped them balance the budget, theme, and detail aspects of the wedding planning process?

Environmentally Friendly Diamonds

So for the few readers of my blog who for some reason or another don't get my e-mails, I'm engaged. I'm not putting the story up for public domain (yet, at least), but it's well worth asking my fiancee for a retelling if you get a chance.

Planning the proposal was fascinating test, but one of the most interesting puzzles was finding a stone for the ring. My fiancee had said she wanted a stone that she could be sure wasn't mined by enslaved children in the middle of Africa, being used to support wars, or similar environmentally harmful causes. For her, that boiled down to "no new diamond". (I know that other socially concerned friends had been comfortable with, say, Polar Bear Diamonds from Canada, but she wasn't.)

Anyway, I knew all of that when I started visiting jewelry stores and trying to get a sense for the ring market. And it was fascinating how the stores steer the shopper toward diamond rings (and very expensive rings at that). The experience is simply not designed for the socially conscious. Ask about "where are the diamonds from" or express concern about diamonds in general and one gets reassurances about certificates, but no one readily offers alternatives. There's no "Well, we offer X, Y, and Z reassurances, but if you don't trust those, we also have some diamond alternatives available. For example, are you familiar with ...?"

I learned (or reminded myself, perhaps) that I really don't like actively fighting societal norms. I'm really comfortable doing my own thing. But when I have to actively and repeatedly dialog with strangers about doing something different, especially something where they are the experts and I have minimal knowledge, I get really tired and frustrated. It's so tempting to just go along with the norm.

Likewise, I suspect it's hard for businesses to change since 99.9% of their customers expect the experience that I had - and would be deeply put off by suggestions that they consider the social impacts of their shopping.