We are homeowners once again! (Third time's the charm, eh?) Our offer on the new house was accepted... and it damn well should be, since we basically gave them asking price and only asked for better carpet in return. But we just weren't in the mood to play realtor games. Plus, we really liked the house, and we could afford it. (Two things we've never been able to say before...) Should be completed within 90 days; I'll try to borrow my sister's digital camera (or, heck, BUY ONE TO CELEBRATE!) and get some pics.
I'm extraordinarily tired now. We made an offer, received a counteroffer, and accepted within the course of about 15 minutes this morning after I agonized for two days about what to do. Then it took me about FOUR HOURS to get a stupid FAX out... efax.com sucks bigtime... Windows 2000 sucks bigtime... my ***FAX***/modem (I use the term loosely) sucks bigtime... yet another example of how technology, in general, sucks. Except for the fact that it makes me money, of course.
Off to Grandma's for the traditional gorging tomorrow, off to bed for now.
Oingo Boingo remains one of the coolest bands ever. Their horn-infused ska sound found a new life 15-20 years later with bands like No Doubt (who I will be seeing in four days). Boingo was ska before ska was cool!!!
We're putting an offer in on the new construction in Bear Valley Springs tomorrow. I probably ought to look at our offer sans the majority of a 1999 Fetzer Cabernet Sauvignon to make sure we aren't doing anything stupid...
Speaking of which, the Wine Spectator that came in the mail a week ago or so said that 1999 was a hallmark year for Cabernet Sauvignons. Said you basically couldn't go wrong. I've had two 1999's so far (Fetzer and Beringer, IIRC) and both have been quite good. The bonus with the Fetzer is that I got the bottle for like $7+CRV. (Best 30 minutes I've ever spent... ;-)
Finally, to come back full circle, here's what I'm listening to:
Only a Lad, Oingo Boingo
Contact, The Benjamin Gate (great Christian "alternative" group)
"Nothingman", Pearl Jam (hi bcp!)
We decided that the house we were considering just wouldn't work for us. The loft was a little too exposed to the rest of the house to use as a bedroom and the backyard (where most of the 1.1 acres ended up) was well over 45 degrees of incline (which we would have to clear periodically). We tried another house that we had seen previously, but seeing it again just brought out more defects (roof, carpet, tiling, etc.).
At this point, we're looking into a brand-new construction in that same community. It has the walls up, but without any drywall or anything so you can see right through them. Assuming we'd get to pick out tile, carpet, paint, and whatnot, this might be a good alternative to building the whole house. It also has a set price, which means that we wouldn't need to worry (as much) about a runaway construction project.
Now, the hard part: waiting. I'm working today and tomorrow... why can't mortgage brokers do the same? Bastards...
Here's one way this blog sort of thing sucks, and why computers suck in general: I had a big post going and mozilla decides to up and crash. Unlike, e.g., vim, there is no "periodic save" type thing that allows me to recover my post. It's gone. Forever.
But I'm not deterred (too much)... let's try it again.
I think I have a mild case of technoenvy. We just got a IP-phone PBX at work, but (naturally) it caters a lot to Windows users. The desktop software only runs in Windows. The web interface runs okay in Mozilla, but is ugly and unwieldy. So we Linux users (naturally) get screwed out of some cool features.
I'm about to swing the coolness factor pendulum wildly in my direction. I am going to get VoIP working on my Sharp Zaurus. Here are just two of the myriad reasons why this would be neato:
Say I'm at a conference with wireless access (e.g., OSCON). I can plop in my wireless LAN CompactFlash card, hop on the wireless network, log into our PBX, and start making (basically) free phone calls.
This is the really sexy one. I can plop my BlueTooth CompactFlash card into my Z, connect to my Sony-Ericsson T68i wirelessly, use my cell phone to dial into AT&T Wireless' GPRS network, and connect the Z to our PBX from there. (Okay, this would really only work in theory; in practice, I suspect the throughput would be too low for even the lowest VoIP codec. Besides which, AT&T GPRS is not cheap, which makes using a cell phone to send data to make a voice call seem a little ridiculous. (Verizon Wireless has unlimited data plans, but they don't have a good Bluetooth-enabled phone. My coolness factor would go right down the tubes when I whipped out a serial cable to connect my Z to my cell phone. Ugh.))
So that's why I'm cooler than you.
Since this blog will be like everyone else's blog in the universe (heck, I'm not even going to change the Movable Type templates, just so I can be like every other MT blog), I feel obliged to talk about music and other popular culture. So here's some of what I'm listening to today:
Gran Turismo, The Cardigans
De Stijl, The White Stripes
The Crow (soundtrack)
Some general observations:
Gorillaz rock. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt they'll rock long enough to release a second album.
I want to like lots of the Dave Matthews Band's music because I think I'm pretty musically savvy and other smart people like them. But all of their music just sounds the same, and one can only take so many 30-minute jam sessions (disguised as "songs").
Most good music is not new music. Most things worth listening to are 5+ years old, and almost all of the really excellent music is even older. Or am I just getting old and crotchety?
That is all.
God bless my wife: she made me coffee this morning. Unfortunately, she SOMEHOW found some wacky, maple-flavored, frou frou crap. Dammit, I thought I had thrown all of that away. Luckily, I'm not as snobby about my coffee as I am my beer, and I'm finding a way to choke this stuff down.
In other news, people who do live demos should really make sure what they're doing actually WORKS. Continuing the training from yesterday, our leader/teacher person has almost completely hosed the example he was trying to use to teach us. We're now at the point where he's looking through debugging logs and mumbling helpful things like "Hrm, that's interesting" and "That's not what it's supposed to be doing" and "[dead silence]".
(Sorry, just saw the "Homer, the food critic" Simpsons the other night...)
I should be working right now. Urge to wax poetic... irresistable...
I think we're going to probably end up putting an offer in on this house we're looking at. It's up in Bear Valley Springs, CA, a small community just outside of Tehachapi, which is just outside Bakersfield, which is just outside... you get the point, it's pretty isolated. Which is just fine by me; I can get high-speed Internet there, Tehachapi has two (count 'em, TWO!) coffee shops... what else matters?
Two bedrooms with a big loft (for the master "bedroom"), 1300 square feet, a detached office, and 1.1 acres of land looking down on the small community lake. It may not be quite as cool (or as expensive, for that matter) as building our own house (which we considered, until we sobered up) but it's a really nice place. The only online pictures of the house kind of suck, and I'm not cool enough to own a digital camera so you'll just have to use your imagination.
One other point of (good) news: I got a 12-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for $10 at the Sav-On here. It's pretty good stuff; I'm not ashamed to be snobby about my beer.
Okay, I've got to go and actually earn the house. Off to work...
So there's this phone/online training going on right now. It's for a Java-based XML/XPATH presentation engine [enter buzzword here] thingy. It's really pretty cool, and XPATH, Java, and all that is a wonderful thing... but I'm of the opinion that one can only know so many things and technologies. And this isn't very high on my list...
On the other hand, I get paid to sit here at home, drink good coffee, listen to music, and chat while keeping an eye on the training window. So it's not all that bad.
I'm convinced hell is far worse than this. Specifically, hell is where everyone gets a Mustang, but gets stuck behind a semi going through a mountain pass at 15mph. And the CD player is broken. And there aren't any radio stations except those that play country music.