Home

Found out our house appraised at just the right amount. Next stop: gathering some masonry estimates for repointing the brick foundation. Shouldn't be too bad. The seller will cover some of the repairs. This time next month, we'll be living in the new house. Sweet.

Work

Again, not much. As this Zope project is winding down, I'm getting back to more sysadminny projects. Setting up servers, helping clients with services. Normal bit pushing.

Personal

Finally got urbanape.com moved over to a new server. My employer has a big, fat, shared host server that we used to put customers on before they began getting dedicated servers, so we kinda open it up for staff use. I can install the latest version of Zope, which will be nice.

Talked to the lender last night. Since we're going conventional FHA ( not a 203k renovation loan ), we should actually end up with extra $$ after closing, which leads me to...

Saw the PowerBook G4 at CompUSA last night. Wow. Just wow.

Work

Implementing validation in Python for Zope is fun.

Buying a House

Don't ever let people tell you that buying a house is scary. Don't let them tell you that getting approved is hard. Especially if you have a steady job, and aren't a complete basket case with your credit. Getting pre-qualified was about as easy as breathing, and I was a basket case ( back in college - still hanging with me, though ).

Now, finding a house is an entirely different matter. Looking over different neighborhoods, realizing what you can get for your dollar, trying to decide whether to buy a ready-to-move-into house or a fixer-upper.

My gf and I live in Richmond, VA. We looked at some historic neighborhoods, we looked at up and coming re-development neighborhoods, we looked in the suburbs, we looked in the boonies. We finally settled on a nice quiet neighborhood close into town on the north side called Bellevue/Ginter Park. We made an offer on a house and the owner accepted.

Now we go through the process of getting the Inspectors and Appraisers in. See, the house was For Sale By Owner ( known to our Realtor® as a Fizbo ), and the owner didn't want to contribute to closing costs or agent commissions, so we had to inflate our offer to compensate for these factors. Now the house has to appraise at our inflated offer price or more, or we can't get the loan.

Actual Work Stuff

Not much going on here. Been Zoping still. Writing a data validation module in Python to handle lots of form stuff. It's fun.

So I lost my Apprentice Cert.

Heh. Figgers. Well, time for an update then. Perhaps that will bring me back in the good graces of the Powers That Be.

I've been Zoping like mad lately, trying to get a project out on time and in spec. Despite the fact that we were brought in as subcontractors, with no say in the initial project design. Design? What's that? Since our company is still in start-up mode, we can't turn away work. Because of that, we dabble in web development in addition to our core competency of managed hosting. I vacillate between wanting to follow in the footsteps of BOFH and ditching the sysadmin stuff to work on web devel projects full time.

Zope is such an amazing beast.

Man. I'm bad at this. I suppose I'd be better with a project? Ah, who knows.

Started my new job at Baymountain, Inc. Back to the comforting and reassuring hum of a server room. Not to mention the rigorously maintained temperature control. *Brrrr!* Need to get some good headphones. Anyone impressed with the inexpensive Koss R/80's? I don't have hundreds to spend on quality Sennheisers or the like.