The search for a house has come to an end. We bid, we won and we close in two weeks. It was rough going, but we made it. Things are going to be a little tight because we bought a smidge outside of our price range, but I think the prices of houses are going to rise much faster than my salary so buying early is probably the smart thing to do.
This move is also going to bring me closer to work. My commute will go from an hour and thirty minutes one way to fifteen minutes one way. I will gain about two hours of usable time each day.
The Movable Type fiasco is prompting me to switch blogging software. MT is nice, but I can't handle paying for something that I could write myself. One of the biggest pains is dealing with the comment spam, so I am tempted to turn comments off. I would like to move to WordPress, but they don't have good support for PostgreSQL which is the database that my ISP is using. I may have to break out the PHP again and contribute.
Well, we are in the final stages of getting a new house. This is BIG news since it will significantly cut the amount of time I will have to spend in the car between work and home. Normal commute for me is 1.25 hours, one way. That will change to .25 hours in July. We are also adding a couple of bedrooms, so now all of the kids will have their own bedroom.
This process was a real rollercoaster. The house we ended up buying was on our list from the very beginning. We could have saved ourselves much pain and heartache if we had just gone for it in the beginning. I am very excited and can't wait for that short commute. My life will be significantly different. YEAH!
I have been sooooo busy with work and finding a house that I haven't had much time to write here. I need to get off to work now, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I am still here *wave* In the next couple of days I want to talk about what I learned at this weekend's NFJS and my house hunting experiences... including the surprise squirrels.
Stay tuned...
I am sick and tired of the political arm chair quarter-backs in the media. They sit back and observe what is happening around them and quip about how the people that are actually doing something are doing it all wrong. I wish people that complained about what was going on would actually get in the game and try to make some changes instead of sitting on the side lines and jeering at the players.
Maureen Dowd is snippy and cute but lacks the courage to actually get into the ball game. Columnists are like professors, they are pretenders. If they actually had skills, they would be playing instead of sitting in the bleachers. She says that 9/11 was the biggest intelligence failure since the Trojan horse, OK... You get in there and start analyzing the data. Then she says that we used "underwhelming force to achieve overwhelming goals" and proceeds to trash Secretary Rumsfeld comparing him to Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup from "A Few Good Men". There is only one problem, Secretary Rumsfeld hasn't broken any laws.
I was having dinner with my boss this evening and since we have differing views on the administration, the war and politics in general, we got into it on all of the above. Thank God I live in America and can actually have a different opinion than my boss and not worry that I am going to lose my job. As a matter of fact, I feel that I gain some respect for standing up for what I believe in... anyway, back to the conversation... My boss was saying something along the lines of Ms. Dowd's comment about not having enough troops in Iraq. This confuses me because in one breath they are saying "we shouldn't be there" and then in the very next they are saying "we don't have enough troops over there". These people need to see a psychologist because they are showing symptoms of schizophrenia.
Secretary Rumsfeld, George Tenet and President Bush are not responsible for the events of September 11, 2001. Crazed religous zealots hijacked those planes. President Bush is not responsible for outsourcing technology jobs as one AFL-CIO report claims. Are they trying to say that President Bush called up the technology companies and told them they would be better off if they sent jobs overseas? How, pray tell, is the President resposible for the actions of corporations that the President does not sit on the boards of, employed by, consult with or interact with in any other way than by running the country they work in? Most of the policy that is "allowing" this to happen was set by President Clinton. Please don't take that to mean that it is President Clinton's fault either, because I am almost positive that HE didn't call up corporations and ask them to send jobs overseas either.
To wrap all of this up, I think Secretary Rumsfeld has the right attitude.
Asked how we can get back credibility, Rummy bridled. "America is not what's wrong with the world," he said, adding: "I read all this stuff — people hate us, people don't like us. The fact of the matter is, people line up to come into this country every year because it's better here than other places, and because they respect the fact that we respect human beings. And we'll get by this."
And we will. The French are still selling us wine. The Germans are still selling us cars. And the Spanish are still... well I don't know what they send to us, but I am sure it is something. The United States equates to 25% of the world's economy, we lead the way in technology and offer unique cultural benefits. So, all in all, I think the arm chair quarter-backs should either get in the game or stop nit-picking the administration and start providing real insight.
I just downloaded the newest Opera version 7.5 beta 1. Very nifty browser I must say. It has support for RSS feeds. How do you add an RSS feed? Why click on one of course! Very nifty. Currently there isn't any other way to add a feed, so that is a bit cumbersome, but that is what you get with a beta.
Thunderbird is cool, I can't get past the to: and cc: lists though. It is a deal breaker. After using Opera's email... nothing else works. I have asked for encryption hopefully one of these days, they will add it!
I was a lover of Outlook for a very long time. But creating the email rules and folders to sort just got old after a while. Also, it seemed to slow down after I installed a spam blocker. Then someone introduced me to Opera.
Opera was and is great as a mail client. The sorting by contacts is terrific! That is primarily what I want to sort by when I am not sorting by date. And the fact that all of the sorting is "virtual" and the message isn't being copied all over the place is just great. Adding new contacts is very easy in Opera as well. It was also easy to have multiple email identities and easily change which one was currently sending email. On the browser front, I have stopped using Opera as a browser and gone back to Mozilla (I don't know why, I just like Mozilla better) but I was still using Opera for email.
But my company is now starting to encrypt most of its email and this is a feature that Opera does not yet support. I was afraid that I would have to go back to Outlook.
Then, I opened Mozilla's mail. ICK! But... it does support encryption. On a whim I downloaded Thunderbird in hopes of 1) a better mail client than Mozilla's mail 2) encryption. SUCCESS! Not only does it support the two above, it may just beat out Opera's capabilities as well. I can type in the name of the person that I want to sort by in the "Subject or Sender contains:" search box above the listing of emails, and Thunderbird then displays only those emails. I don't mind a little typing, that gives you some flexibility. It is still virtual-ish.
So far, GMail has to be my favorite client. It doesn't have support for encryption and can't handle sending as multiple email identities, but the sorting and keyboard shortcuts are terrific.
I am going to give Thunderbird a try for now and see how it goes. I don't think I am going to need multiple identities since they are now split. All personal email goes to GMail and all business email will be in Thunderbird.