ace’s blog

So this is my first weekend in Orlando and what am I doing? Am I out drinking and partying and acting like a bachelor? Nope! I’m here at 9:30 pm on a Friday night writing a blog post on my new work laptop while I take a breather setting it all up and installing my much used software. Whew, long sentence…

I had intentions of coming home and seeing if Tania and her boyfriend wanted to go get wings at Ker’s Wing House, my treat but Tania went out and I sat around. I ate some chips because I was insanely hungry and was going to talk to Meri and Aaron and then head out for a few beers and some wings. Well the chips did a number on my stomach and now I feel like shit. You know that warm, clammy feeling you get in your stomach when somethings just not right? Well that’s me right now, feeling shitty.

I did mention that I got my new laptop from work. It’s bad ass. It is a Dell Inspiron with dual Centrino 2 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM and it has a widescreen screen to boot. My current resolution on this laptop is 1680 x 1050. Well I think that’s cool…

Anyway, work is going alright. I’m not sure if I made a mistake or not taking this job but I just have to keep telling myself that the move is better for the family and I will be learning a ton of new stuff here and things in the future will be better. Once I can get the database figured out, things will be much better.

Meri just called me for the third time telling me that Aaron isn’t going to bed for her tonight. She has done amazingly well getting him to bed since they’ve been up in MA. Normally, I put Aaron to bed and it has basically been the norm since Aaron decided he didn’t need boobs to go to sleep.

I’m going down to Tampa tomorrow to hang out with my friend Bernard and a bunch of his other friends. I have a sneaky suspicion that I will be the only white person there. This will be the first time I’ve seen Bernard’s condo since he bought it. It will be great to see him again, it’s been well over a year since we’ve hung out.

My first weeked at this job and I have to work over it! As if the 12 hour days weren’t enough, I have to do this too? I asked how much I would be asked to work on a weekend and they told me that it was a rare occassion. I suppose they will tell me that when I have to do it again!

Wow, reading over this post and it appears that I have had a lot to blog about since I’ve only put up one very small blurb since I moved down here a week ago! I guess I should keep doing the blogging thing…if I have time that is.

I’ve been so busy at work that I haven’t had a chance to even look at any PHP or AJAX code. Before this week, I hadn’t written a line of PHP or AJAX code in two weeks prior to me moving down here! I may lose my touch. Too bad huh? I’ll just have to fall back on my Lansa Web development skills. That’s ok, they pay better than PHP/AJAX coding.

Alright, CSI Miami is going to start in about 15 minutes and I have to watch it since I can’t record it since the house I’m staying at doesn’t have a DVR! This woman is living in the stone ages!

The marathon painting session is OVER.  Five rooms in five days!  One room a day makes it sound very misleading and almost simplistic.  We actually have been doing trim for the past two days so that means five rooms in three days!  It was insane.  I’m glad it is over!  Now I can just go back to being busy doing other things such as NOTHING!  What will I do with all of my free time at night while I’m not painting?!  Seriously though, painting sucks; although I am really good at it now.

Hurricane Ernesto is threatening to close down my new office tomorrow.  It’s a good thing I’m making more money and the job is in !Memphis (that’s programmer speak for not Memphis) because otherwise, I wouldn’t move into hurricane alley!

Monday, I worked on an issue that has been sitting in my queue at work for a little while now.  It actually felt good to get some coding done and not just researching other former employees code.  I spent the whole day doing that and I’m just about finished with it.

Last Friday, I did some work on the PeopleArray dev site.  I got the Lightbox Gone Wild JavaScript working for the Add Contact and Edit Contact portions of the site.

The problem I was having with that was that the “window” that opens up wasn’t large enough to cover my entire form.  The problem was that the default code specifies a specific height and width for the background window.  I must have overlooked that because I really thought I was going to have to hack up the code to get it to work like I wanted it to.

Lot’s of updating on minor things.  I’m glad you care enough to read this far.

Well this weekend was busy.  Meri and I painted five rooms…FIVE!  There isn’t much to say about that other than we were busy as hell doing that.

Sunday afternoon, I was going to do some yard work and usually I listen to my mp3 player (Dell DJ 30, no longer in production) while I’m working.  Well I turned on my mp3 player and was greeted by an unfamiliar message: Problem with firmware.  Super!  So I figured I’d just download some new firmware from Dells support site and install it and be on my way.  Nope, it was not going to be that easy since my PC wouldn’t recognize the mp3 player was connected since the firmware was corrupt.  Normally, I would screw with it more on my own but I was tired from all that painting and just called Dell.  Long story short, even though I was 4 days past my warranty, they are going to replace the mp3 player for free.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easy that was to get “resolved” since I’ve read a lot about the horrible customer service from Dell.

Ok, painting sucks big time!  We have painted the master bedroom, master bathroom, dining room, bottom of the living room and then the bottom of the kitchen!  I never would have thought we would work this hard to LOSE so much money!  But that’s besides the point right?

Ok, time to run. I have more painting to do!  YIPPEE!

Shameless link to my house’s website: http://www.bartletthomeforsale.com.  Visit the site, visit the house.  Make an offer to buy it (at full asking price! – this is important).  Make me happy.

I posted earlier today about creating a website to assist in my realtor’s selling of my house.  Well now I’m assisting in another way.  Meri and I are painting fools!  We have painted our second room in about 3 days and will tackle another room tomorrow, bringing the total to 3 rooms in 4 days!  Oh no, that’s not all kids!  We are going to paint the bottom of the living room and the bottom of the kitchen.  We are paying someone, a moon-lighting cop, to paint the top part of the living room.  Yes, the same living room that has 20′ ceilings.  This guy is only charging us $250 to do that and another $75 to paint the upstairs hallway.

How are we going to afford such luxuries you ask?  Well, we are going to paint our neighbors house: 4 rooms @ $300 per room!  Yessir, $1200 USD plus supplies.  I have a feeling that I’m going to ask the guy for more money because their bedroom is the same cobalt blue that ours was and they want it painted an insanely light color.  Can you say “Daaaamn that’s a lot of coats of paint!”  Well you’re right, it will be a lot of coats of paint; I’m guesstimating at least 4.

We have never paid someone to paint anything for us.  We are the do it yourself and go have a nice dinner with the money you saved kind of family.  We feel like there is nothing that screams homeowner than some poor sucker (me) carrying 7 gallons of paint, of multiple colors, around Home Depot because “we only came for two gallons” and nobody felt the need to get a cart.

I made a website for help in selling my house.  The URL is http://www.bartletthomeforsale.com.  My intentions for this site are to assist my realtor in selling my house.  From experience, I am frequently frustrated by only being able to see 5 or 6 pictures of a house on realtor.com.  On the site I [quickly] put together, I have approximately 40 pictures of the house, hosted on Flickr, and a room-by-room description of the entire house.

Since we have decided to repaint most of the painting that we’ve accomplished in the past 8 months, I can take change the pictures showcased on the site as each room is updated with the new colors.

The realtor thought the site looked great and agreed to link to it from her website and the realtor.com listing of our home.  I think being listed on realtor.com will bring in a lot of traffic, relative to what the site would get by itself.

I was pleasantly surprised that the domain was available, especially the .com tld.  I just hope that this will aid us in selling our home.  I really can’t imagine being without Meri and Aaron for 3 months.

Can you imagine losing that much money? What a shitty feeling!

That is what Meri and I are faced with when we sell the house so that we can move to Orlando. We are hoping to sell the house for $10k more than we bought it for in hopes of not actually losing that much. Losing $20k is the worst case scenario as we can see it: if we sell the house for what we paid for it.

As we were repainting the trim in three of the rooms that we’ve painted since moving into the house, we were left wondering what’s the point of doing all this “extra” work since we are going to realize a loss even if we get full asking price on the house.

Living in Memphis sucks. Since I have started to hate it when someone says “something sucks” without providing more of an argument as to why, I’ll list just a few of my reasons for saying that. From the high crime rate, unusable public schools, rude people most everywhere you go, blazingly HOT summers, dead foliage in the winters, high property and sales taxes (9.25%!), corrupt politicians and cops (that “everyone” knows about and yet nothing is done about it – just one example, of many, Memphians generally refer to the mayor, WIllie Herenton, as King Willie).

The real estate everywhere sucks, but is very apparent to us right now. This life lesson has taught us a few things. Don’t buy a house unless you know the area. Don’t buy a house unless you are going to live there for a while. Don’t rent a shitty apartment when moving to a new city.

If you are relocating to Memphis, I very strongly urge you to rent an apartment or house or condo. Don’t buy anything until you know the area! Read the paper and watch the news! Talk to as many people as possible about the surrounding areas. My advice would be to look in Germantown. If you have kids, either save up your money and live there or save your money and send your kids to private school! The public school system here really is that bad!

After reading over this post, I can tell that I have a lot of bitterness in losing that much money. But like I told my wife last night, to get us out of Memphis, I think it’s a small price to pay.

No matter how much I think I hate moving, it is apparently not true! Why do I say that? I’ve moved twice in the past 13 months. Once across several states and then one more time across my current home (Memphis). Now I may be moving once more…this time back to Florida.

In preparation for maybe moving, Meri, Aaron and I have quite the busy family. First thing we did was go and see the Peabody ducks, perhaps one last time. Aaron really likes ducks, especially baby ducks. Although there are not any baby ducks at the Peabody Hotel, Aaron kept saying “baby ducks” and clapped and then almost touched one of them once or twice! He was happy so that meant that momma and dadda were happy. After going to see the ducks, we went to Poncho’s downtown. That place is great! They have awesome food and some really good salsa and cheese dip. Since Aaron can’t have the cheese dip, he at salsa, lots and lots of salsa. The salsa is pretty hot, so Meri tells me, so after eating a lot more than he probably should have, Aaron’s mouth, lips and tongue all started to burn. Water did seemingly nothing. Aaron decided the best thing for a hot tongue and some hot lips was to have momma wipe them many, many times with a paper napkin. “Hot momma, hot! Wipe, wipe!” He’s so adorable. Kids are so wonderful.

Today, we decided that the rose “garden” looked horrible once again as it was run over with weeds…once again. Last summer, we spent a lot of time out there, with our neighbor, getting up all of the old mulch, ripping up the weeds, putting down weed fabric and then putting down fresh mulch. It looked super duper! Fast forward to this summer and we just ripped out all of the rose bushes, took up all of the weed fabric and then tilled the whole area once again. Now we are going to put down sod in place of the rose bushes and weed garden. We now have about 200 bricks that someone, somewhere thought looked nice, just sitting in our garage, waiting for someone to come pick them up. That was an all day event.

In fun news, I tied my very own tie for the first time in my life! I was in a near panic because I needed someone to tie my tie and nobody was around to do it; selfish bastards, where are you when I need you?! So I did what any decent programmer software engineer does, I figured out how to do it on my own. Now I will remember how to do it on my next interview.

In other planning-to-get-the-hell-out-of-Memphis news, we have list about two miles long of things that we need to do before we sell the house. This brings up a great point: if you move to a new city, don’t buy a house for at least a year. And don’t rent a shitty cheap inexpensive apartment, and I quote, “until you find a house in a month or two”. Those are two things to avoid at all costs

It seems that Memphis has yet another natural disaster to look out for: tornadoes!  This place has more possible natural disasters than Florida!  There have been 2 tornadoes touch down today and there was a big one last week that killed 8 people and destroyed a bunch of homes north of Memphis (in Dyersburg I think).