ace’s blog

Long time no post!

Well things have been busy here at work!  The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning.  Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!

The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF.  There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first).  Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family.  I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.

Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about.  We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home.  We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).

Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!

About a month ago, I wrote a post about getting an offer on our house. That offer was crap and the people knew it. We countered their offer and they have yet to get back to us. I’m thinking they just couldn’t afford the house and were hoping that we’d give them a good deal on it.

Well yesterday, my wife got an email from our realtor (who is not a good realtor, stay away!) saying that she may have an offer for us. This morning, we woke up and my wife checked her email for any word. Well we got an offer on the house…a much better offer! We are in the haggling stages right now but I’m thinking that these people are going to be the buyers! Oh, the best part of the offer, should we eventually accept a modified form of it is that they want to close on Feb. 28th! Of this year! I’m looking forward to the counter to our counter.

UPDATE: We accepted an offer on the house.  We have some painting that these lazy people either can’t or don’t want to do but this may just be the end of the Memphis chapter in out lives!

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.

Lately I feel like I do less work between the weekends than I do on the weekends.  Last weekend, I (we) put up two ceiling fans, changed the oil and rotated tires on both vehicles, watered the entire yard and pulled up all of the bark mulch in the back yard play area.  This weekend, I helped my neighbor, who is moving very soon, lay/spread a yard of dirt and lay a pallet of sod.  We started at 7:30 am and finished at 11:15.  They are great neighbors who have helped us on more than one occassion and even let us borrow all of their stuff!  Most notably, their Little Giant ladder that enabled us to paint the living room.  Those Little Giant ladders rock by the way!  They are totally worth the $400!  Someday, someday soon, we shall have one…right after I get my nail gun and air compressor.

As if painting as much as we have been lately wasn’t enough…we are painting another room!  We are painting Aaron’s bathroom and a peach color (pictures to follow soon) then we are going to create our own linen closet by semi-destroying the guest-room closet upstairs.  We are going to take down all of the wire shelves (yay!) and put up a wall of wood shelves and put two of the wire shelves back on one of the walls in the closet.  I’ll take some pictures later, befores and afters.