Month: May 2003

I’ve noticed two memes going around. The LJ Barcode (which just looks dumb) and the LJMatch graph (their website has gone *boom* today, they got too popular, it seems).

I refuse to put either one in here.

That is all.

So, the house buying process is proceeding with only a few minor bumps. The bank sent their appraiser on Friday, and there was a termite inspection today. The only thing left that I have to help coordinate is the HOA inspection, which I just found out today actually has to be set up by the home owner, or at least he has to empower me to handle it.

I’m driving down to LA on Saturday, and it appears as though I’ll have a passenger, at least for the drive down… Lynda… but she’ll be doing homework. The last few times I’ve driven down, I’ve used my laptop as a very large iPod, basically, with powered computer speakers plugged into a power inverter… the whole apparatus resting in my passenger seat. With the passenger seat going to be occupied by a human this time… I wonder what I’ll do…

Oh, I know! She’ll bring her TiBook, right? I’ll set mine up in the back seat, start up iTunes 4, and host a local Airport network. Then, she can use her laptop on her lap, plug that into the speakers, and use Rendezvous sharing in iTunes to listen to my MP3s! It’s brilliant! It’s geeky! It’s perfect! It’s… overkill.

Oh well. Maybe I could just buy an iPod before Saturday.

Nah…

I just spent eight hours at Baycon, figuring out that scifi fans aren’t that much different from gaming or anime fans. I went in specific to play Netrunner, and I didn’t really leave the gaming room, but it was enjoyable nevertheless. I did make a pass through the dealer’s room, but I really wouldn’t buy anything in there that I couldn’t buy in a bookstore. Supposedly Fanime had a fan table, but they must have packed up by the time I got there. (I just got an evening pass, didn’t get there until just before 7) Ran into a few people I didn’t know except by reputation, and saw a handful of people I did know. Also saw some people walking around with LiveJournal nametags on, but couldn’t find the guy handing them out.

Now, I’m just waiting for the Excedrin PM to kick in… I think I can start to feel it now…

This morning on the way to work, I was just about to pull into the parking lot, when I saw something in the road that looked like a piece of paper blowing in the wind.

It wasn’t. It was a possum.

And it wasn’t dead yet.

Now, I thought that possums were nocturnal creatures, and it had been daylight for a significant amount of time… just how long was that critter lying in the road twisting away while cars drove around and over (straddling, of course) it?

*shudder*

As promised, here is the picture of all my extra common Magic cards. Yes, that’s a lot of extra cards, and you can see the tops of a few of the folders that I’ve been putting them in to. Since I took that picture, I have put all those cards back into the card boxes they came from. Step two is now complete (step one was sorting all those cards into piles by set). Step three, the final step, is collating all the missing cards into one master list, so I know what I need to trade for to finish out my sets.

I’ve been having such a ball on this project at work… I’m learning PHP as I go, and I’m using MySQL. I’ve been abstracting the hell out of everything and it feels so clean. I love OOP. Now, let’s see if the beauty survives the actual development process.

This whole house-buying thing is a bit complicated because of the oddness of our particular transaction. One, there are no realtors involved, and two, the buyer (me) is occupying the property, not the seller, which is usually the case. This means that I’m having to schedule some of the inspections which are normally handled by the seller (although he is still paying for them, of course).

I forgot to watch the stupid lunar eclipse tonight!

Dangit!

We opened escrow yesterday. This whole “I’m going to be a homeowner” thing hasn’t quite sunk in yet. YHOO had a nice run on Monday, so I shot off some stock options… not work nearly as much as they could have been in the past, but enough to make my down payment a bit larger and reduce my monthly bill. Of course, now I have to figure out how to shuffle money around my different accounts. I’ve got 44 days to figure it out until escrow closes, though.

I finally cancelled my PSO for Game Cube hunter’s license. I hadn’t played in almost two months, so that was twenty wasted dollars. At least I ended up using my efax.com fax number just recently for house stuff, otherwise that $10/month would seem wasted as well.

I’m almost done with cataloging my Magic: the Gathering collection. I’ve got one and a half sets to go, then I get to compile all the stuff I’m missing and all the extras after setting aside the folders with the cards I’ll actually use. When I’m done, I’ll take a picture of the pile of extra common cards. It’s already quite impressive… and you have to consider that I’ve already done a great purge of giving away extra commons about four years ago… so this isn’t as many as it could be.

Time to go to bed, tomorrow morning I go back to Washington Mutual (which from this point on will be referred to as The Bank) to give them updated paperwork.

I just called the landlord. We agreed on a price and we’re meeting Monday night.

With paperwork.

To buy the house.

I’m still not believing this…

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been looking for a new roommate ever since bigdumbthing got laid off and decided to finish his education. Well, last night desslok agreed to move in starting in July. So Leon and I have to shoulder the rent by ourselves, but there’s a definite light at the end of the tunnel. And we don’t have to room with a total stranger!

I just have to comment on the Dante’s Inferno test. I’ve been doing this LiveJournal thing for a while now, and I have never seen a meme propagate that quickly. And the rumors that it installs spyware is not true… at least it wasn’t for me, and I was using the unwise browser/os combination of IE on Windows.

So, I supposedly got the loan last week, but the admin said she mailed the letter on Friday, and I haven’t gotten it yet. Grumble grumble grumble.

hamstergal refuses to ever show up on my list of users with similar interests, but bigdumbthing seems to have edited his interests quite a bit since I last looked. I think he was copying off of my test or something, because he all of a sudden shot to number one by a significant margin.

Lastly, this new iTunes is sort of cool, I’ve already noticed two other shared libraries on the network… whee.