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Another blizzard and another weekend spent at home. This time the snow started to fall about 10am on Friday but for approximately 6 hours it never accumulated on the ground. The ground was just to warm and melted what ever fell on it. Not until late in the afternoon, with the temperature rapidly dropping, did it start to stick. This is about the time the snow kicked into over drive.
the snow blanketed everything
Through the overnight hours it snowed and snowed, adding to what was already on the ground from Tuesday which was about 4-6″. All morning and well into the afternoon it snowed at my house. I spend most of the day working on the computer and getting some organizing done. In fact with the exception of shoveling my sidewalk/truck and watching Terminator: Salvation, I didn’t leave my man cave. I got my finances in order and worked on a travel map that I have been meaning to finish for years. I am missing a few pins, but it shows every city I have seen a concert in. Eventually I will get the total number of shows seen in a city corresponding to each pin. Most cities I been to only once. A few cities, like Washington DC and Baltimore, I have been to 8 and 7 different venues with several times that number of concerts in each of those cities.
I love to travel and see concerts
I also got a lot of coding done on taping.org. Mostly PHP to calculate totals and such. Like always, most of the changes I made are on the back end and don’t add much visually. Let me tell you, it was a lot of fun figuring how to get PHP to read a line in a db results query and keep a running total of the values. I can do this in Java pretty easily, but PHP is a whole new beast. Thankfully the basic concept of how to accomplish this is the same in both languages. The rest of my time was spent entering and updating information already in my db to take advantage of the calculations I coded earlier in the day. Now that 90% of the site has the basic functions I wanted to implement, I find myself spending more time enter and updating information in the database. I will continue to split my time with data entry and writing code to analyze all the data into useful information.
I might not have left my house all weekend, but it was great spending the time at home just getting stuff done. Saturday when the snow was still falling I would often stop my coding and just look out the window, it was very peaceful. I almost turned my desk around to face out the window and soak up nature.
why rent when you can own
So I bought a townhouse and moved in at the end of June. Sense I moved in I have not had internet at my house. I was suppose to get Comcast the day I moved in but that turned into a giant cluster fuck getting it installed so I canceled it. I eventually went with DSL from Verizon, but that took almost two weeks to get install for some strange reason. Well yesterday my service was turned on and I wired my house for the internet, I feel whole again.
My servers are back online and running again which means I can finally start posting again to my blog. I have three articles all of which are 80% complete, plus at least another three articles in the works. Stay tuned.
In addition to my regular posts about my adventures in this work I will probably start posting about being a home owner as well. For instance last weekend I spent Saturday cleaning the cutters and washing the siding on my house. On the inside I still have a lot of crap to unpack, things to buy, and minor repairs to make. My next door neighbor saw me while I was cleaning the siding and we chatted for a few minutes. She told me “Ah the joys of home ownership.” I know there will be a lot of work compared to living in my old apartment. But I am ready for it and excited to do it. I feel like I can now start making this place my “home,” something my apartment never felt like to me.
When I was at the closing you should have seen the couple sitting on the other side of the table. I don’t know their situations, but I do know they couldn’t afford their mortgage any longer. They both looked pretty upset, especially when a young single guys is buying the place they could no longer afford. I have been working hard for several years to save money for a house. With the economy in the toilet housing prices in my area have fallen sharply, in some areas up to 40%. Add to that the $8,000 tax credit from the government and it was the perfect time to buy. The previous owners payed just over $300k for the house, I got it for less than half that!
First post!
Makes me feel like I got first post on /. or something.
Well after much head beating I finally got WordPress installed on my poor little Mac. 5 minute install my butt… You know what it came down to Localhost vs localhost. God I had syntax errors.
Finally after getting all this installed and properly confirgued I want to re-design and start putting some stuff up. But its late and I need to get to bed. I have a meeting tomorrow morning. It will be boring as hell, but I will get a free breakfast out of it.
