Cathy Ferguson

I had this idea of this huge post I’d write about how I went about getting a house and the paperwork and all that stuff.

Well, it turns out I really don’t want to write that. Instead, I’m going to write about one of the people that I can really recommend; Cathy Ferguson our “mortgage advisor.” I think mortgage advisor is a fancy word for mortgage broker. Not sure, though.

We wanted to know about our mortgage options before we started looking at houses. We knew what we wanted in most ways, just not in money terms. Read More »

Bang! Bang!

So, me and my wife got home from Ikea with a new Billy bookshelf for the dinning room (aka, book room #2 — book room #1 is the living room). We lucked out and found a spot nearly in front of our house, right on the outside of the curve that our house in on.

We unloaded the shelf (it weighs a bloody ton) and had just finished getting it together when I heard a bang noise. I thought perhaps the storm door was open and the wind pushed the door open or shut.

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No Laptop

My laptop has died a horrible death and I’m not happy about it. I bought it about 3 years ago from Linux Certified, way back when Linux laptops was a novel concept.

Currently, it just flat out won’t power up. There is power from the power cord (checked it with a multi-meter), but the light won’t light, the power won’t pow and the battery won’t batter.

This will slow down my blogging, emailing, and working on It’s All Text! Read More »

First House!

So, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Part of the reason is that Robin and I have been working on buying a new house.

This is very stressful and scary. We’re almost done. We close on November 16th. I plan on blogging about the people and companies that provide excellent service during the process. However, I’m waiting till I’m all done.

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Weil McLain

So, I’m trying to find out how old a boiler is. It’s in a house that I made an offer on and I want to know how old it is and any other information that would be helpful.

When I viewed the house, I took a photo of the model information so I could look it up later. I thought this especially clever since the owners didn’t know how old it was; only that it pre-dated their purchasing of the house in 2003.

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GTD and Mutt

I found this article about Getting things done with mutt. It talks about using the the techniques from David Allen’s productivity book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“. I’ve been reading GTD for a week now (taking my time, you know) and think it’s pretty interesting.

Since is my favorite email client, I spent a little playing with it and making changes. I’m using a diferent editlabel script and my way doesn’t require patching and recompiling mutt.

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Amazon Christ!

Amazon redesigned their web-site, shrinking my name even more than previously…

Amazon Snapshot

Ciao!

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It’s All Text! v0.8.0

I have just released version 0.8.0 of “It’s All Text!“, the extension that answers the age old question, “What happens when you give a yo-yo to a flock of flamingoes?”1

New Features

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HX-20

I was walking through Squirrel Hill today with Robin and my Dad. There was a house with some junk on their porch and a sign saying, “For sale. $1 each.” I looked through the stuff and found an !

Oh. My. Gawd!

When I was in High School a guy named Randy had a portable computer (made in 1983). It was the coolest thing. I got him to loan it to me so I could write a small text adventure (only like 6 rooms, but a huge deal at the time).

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Mashups and JavaScript Security

I found this excellent video of Douglas Crockford (discoverer of ) talking about the security problems inherent in and of JavaScript as a whole.

He proposes a solution involving what he calls vats; a self contained JavaScript interpreter with limited communication to the page. The JavaScript in the page would be the only trusted code running and the code in the various vats would not be trusted.

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Wordpress User-Agent

Well, I just got a nasty shock!

I got in at the tail end of a thread about the new update notification feature in WordPress 2.3.

One of the comments I read kept ricocheting around in my head. Matt Mullenweg said something about the dashboard RSS feeds transmitting my blog URL. I thought, initially, that he meant the IP address was revealed. But the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed.

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Site Redesign

I have redesigned my whole site. While a lot changes are visual, there are even more changes in the way the unseen back-end parts have changed.

Previously, I had a modified copy of the default WP 2.x theme (which is based on Kubric theme). It was reasonable markup, but I spent a lot of time modifying the classes and adding containers to hang my CSS off of. In addition, tracking the changes to the default theme was a pain.

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