Update on New House #3
We’re finally in the new house. Woohoo!! Work on all the rooms is basically complete with one exception, the upstairs half bathroom, which can wait a couple of weeks. We’re slowly settling in with a little more than half the boxes already unpacked. And we’re planning a shopping trip for later this week to purchase new furniture for the baby’s room.
I’m so glad to be done with the majority of the renovation work. Overall I’m happy with the end results, but there are areas on some walls I would like to redo someday. But I can’t complain. After all, this was my first time doing home renovating work like this. I definitely learned a lot and will do much better work faster in the future.
I would like to send out a special thank you to my mom and brother for helping prepare the house. Without their help on the final days leading up to the move, we might have had to postpone the move in date a second time. Thanks for the help mom and Andy.
Update on New House #2
Work on the house is nearing completion. 4 rooms are now ready to go and I hope to have 2 more rooms completed by Saturday night. This leaves 1 room left to complete before we move in, which is now scheduled for Thursday, January 24. If I stay on track, I’ll have the final room completed on Monday. New carpet on the stairs will be installed on Tuesday. And we clean, clean, clean on Wednesday to get up all the dust and dirt from the floors.
To The Customers of White Peak Software
I would like to express my sincere apologies to the customers of White Peak Software, especially those who are waiting for features to be added to Killink CSV. My life has been turned upside down, in a good way, over the last 3 months. My wife and I are expecting a new baby at the end of March and we recently bought a house, our first house, which unfortunately needed work before we could move in.
The good news is we will be in the new house by next Thursday and life will return to normal, or as normal as one can expect with a new baby coming soon. The other good news is that I’m planning to release the next version of Killink CSV soon. This next version release should have many of the recently requested features including sorting and Unicode support. An update to SMTP Diagnostics is coming soon too.
So again I apologize to the customers of White Peak Software and I appreciate your patience over the last few months.
The Cavalry is Here
My very good buddy Darren has come up from TampaSt. Pete to help with work on the new house for 3 days. I can’t begin to say how grateful I am having Darren here to help. Work on the house is progressing nicely now and we’re hoping to have most of the rooms completed by the end of the weekend.
Thanks for the help Darren. I owe you big time!
They iScrewed Me Again
This spoof from MadTv is too funny especially if you are one of those individuals who keeps buying a new iPod each year. Me? I’m happy with my oversized, first-generation iPod Classic which is incompatible with almost things iPod these days.
My Recommended Mac OS X Applications
I have been a Mac OS X users for 6 months now and I love it. It is doubtful I will ever return to a Windows only machine so I thought it fitting to list the OS X software I use regularly.<ul>
<li>Mail.app, which comes with OS X, is a powerful email program that allows me to manage the many, many mail messages I receive daily.</li>
<li>iCal is another handy program that comes with OS X. iCal allows me to manage multiple calendars.</li>
<li>Spanning Sync synchronizes my iCal calendars with Google Calendars.</li>
<li>Address Book, also free with OS X, is a nice address book manager.</li>
<li>Fusion by VMware is the one piece of software that convinced me to try OS X. While I love OS X I still must use Windows on a daily basis. Fusions allows me to run Windows hosted as a virtual machine within OS X.</li>
<li>Firefox is my preferred web browser. Safari is nice and I use it from time to time. But Firefox is the browser I use most often.</li>
<li>Adium is a friendly chat program supporting AOL, Yahoo, Messenger, Google Talk, and who knows what else. I like iChat, which comes with OS X, but I don’t use it often due to its lacking support for IM services such as Messenger.</li>
<li>iPhoto is my favorite application in the iLife suite. I enjoy taking pictures and I currently use iPhoto to manage all my digital pictures, a collection that is quickly approaching 7,000 pictures.</li>
<li>iLife ‘08 is another reason I decided to switch to the Mac. Making movies, burning DVDs, and managing my digital photos was never this easy in the Windows world.</li>
<li>CoRD is a remote desktop client. I use it often to RDP into other Windows machines on my network.</li>
<li>VLC is a freeware media player.</li>
<li>Unison is a nice newsgroup reader. I prefer the user interface from Agent but it is not available for OS X.</li>
<li>Vienna is an open source RSS feed reader.</li>
<li>SuperDuper is my preferred backup software. Easy to use, and powerful enough to make the types of backups I want.</li>
</ul>
Update on New House
I can honestly say I have bitten off more than I can chew when it comes to prepping the new house for our move in. I have developed a new hatred for wallpaper. Pulling down wallpaper and prepping the walls for priming is a very time consuming process. But with luck I should be ready to start priming walls by Thursday.
Too Much Travel
2007 is winding down and I return home later today from my final trip of the year. I started a travel log this year to see how much I actually travel. 46 trips in total for 2007. Too much in my opinion. I hope to see a lot less travel in 2008.
The travel log idea is cool, and I plan to do another for 2008 even though I’m hoping for fewer trips. I wish I had travel logs for past years. I think the biggest difference I would see for past years compared to 2007 is the diversity of trips. Vermont and New York City were my most common trips in 2007. In past years, I traveled more with Melanie on flights she worked and got to spend more time in places such as France. I made only 1 work trip with her in 2007, to Belgium, and I missed out on trips to France and Ireland this year which really disappoints me.
Even though I hope to travel less in 2008, I’m hoping to join Melanie on more work trips (as soon as she returns to work). And the best part of work trips in 2008 with Melanie will be bringing Baby T with us.
Why No Baby Announcement Post?
Some might be wondering why I didn’t post a blog entry announcement that I’m a father-to-be. After all such big news rightfully deserves a posting. Truth be told, I didn’t want to share the news publicly until after the closing on the new house for fear that the mortgage company might find out and decide not to provide us the loan for the house. I’m sure I was being a bit paranoid but given the current state of the leading market I did not want to chance it.
I did, however, post a slight hint on July 23. The posting title is “Excited About Expected New Arrive” and while the posting talks about arrival of my new MacBook Pro, I was actually more excited about finding out I’m going to be a dad. July 23 is the day I found out.