The Blog of Truant

Yeah, it’s been quite a while since I last wrote something on the site and I feel bad about it.  Not only has it been forgotten but I’m also paying for a site that I wasn’t using.  When I logged in I had about 30 comments waiting in moderation and all of them were spammers.  But, Jen and I have been busy the last few months.  We did finally buy a house, well, more accurately a condo.  We had some pretty specific requirements when looking for a place to buy:

• 3 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms
• <30 minutes from work
• Move-in condition or little work
• In our price range

With all that we are hearing about the housing crash and it being such a buyers market you would think that it would be easy to find something.  But, it still wasn’t.  This area of the US is less affected by the sub prime crap that happened becuase most of the houses around here are 500k or more and typically over 1M.  So, the people who can afford those prices are the ones least bothered by sub prime loans.  Or, at least their houses are.  I haven’t seen much of a dip in price in a lot of the houses around here.  We did get about 30k off the price of our condo, and that was after the sellers had dropped 20k already.  They had moved to FL and were pretty desperate to sell since they now had two mortgages.  So, we did get a decent price on the place, and we had enough left over to actually put furniture in it, but let me tell you, buying a house is something I don’t want to do again for a long time.  Dealing with all those people and spending all that money really wore Jen and I out.  We were at each others throats for a little while the stress was so high.  And after moving in I started to feel a little buyers remorse, which didn’t help matters.  After moving in, we noticed a lot of road noise coming from the street outside and that it was pretty humid in the house.  And, we also thought we might have a leak in the upstairs bathroom since the paint on the ceiling in the kitchen was peeling.  So, we called a plumber and he cut a whole in the ceiling and then proceeded to tell us that we didn’t have a leak.  I believed him because after he left, I put my hand up there and didn’t feel any moisture either.  What it turned out to be is that the people who did the drywall for the renovations on the house were frikking idiots.  They cut too many corners.  The drywall didn’t meet another piece of drywall at a joist, they connected in midair, so after a while the drywall tape just bubbled out and cause the paint on the ceiling to look like it was wet.  Ugh…  well, I ended up patching the drywall up myself, but it isn’t repainted yet.  Someday we will get to it, but the spackle is white and you can’t see it unless you really look for it since it’s on the ceiling so we’ve left it.  We then speant I don’t know how many weekends cleaning up the basement and then patching it with concrete, caulk and drylok paint.(Another sign of the contractor’s laziness and how old the house is, we found a ton of debris under the floor in the basement such as coffee cups and paper towel rolls)  But, after all of that we are now comfy in our house.  I feel like I live here now and that this is home.  I know where my dunkin donuts is, I know where the grocery store is and we saw a movie in the small (2 screens) theater in town yesterday.  (Tropic Thunder, it was pretty good…)

Other than the house and house related items we haven’t done too much.  We went to DC to Jen friends birthday party.  It was held at a wine festival.  The weather was great and the hotel we were in was super fancy.  It had a golf course and something like 5 pools.  It was the off season so we got a deal on the room.  Then, last week I was in LA for Siggraph.  It was great to see a couple of my friends again, but sadly it was a working trip.  So, I had to spend much of my time either working the booth or looking at resumes and such.  The worst part was the flight home, I was scheduled to land at JFK at 8:30 but I didn’t get in until 2am.  We had to circle over NJ for about 2 hours because of a thunderstorm.  Oh well, I can’t blame the airlines though, what can they do about the weather?  I would have liked to have seen Josh and Wil and Davy some more while out there but everyone’s schedule was all out of whack.  Oh, we did get to go to Toronto for a hockey tournament I played in.  We won our division of the HNA here in NY but got stomped in Canada.  We didn’t have all our players though as not everyone could make the games, so we were at a disadvantage.  It was nice to see Canada again and I think it might have been Jen’s first time.  If not, it had been a while for her too.  I think we have pictures of most of these things I’ve mentioned so I’ll try to post them soon if Jen hasn’t put them on her site yet.  Well, I’d love to write more but it’s about 2:30 am and I am tired.  So, I think I’ll watch some Olympics and then hit the sack.  Hope to update again soon!

Ok, so this is the 3rd weekend in a row and 4 out of 5 that my DSL has slowed down to a nearly unusable state.  I’ve called the so-called “Tech Support” but they are clueless drones who read out a script and if they can find one reason not to help you, they will.  I normally don’t care if call centers are located in different countries, but if the problem I’m trying to explain to them involves knowing locations within the U.S., I might get better results.  Basically, I’m trying to tell Verizon that they have a big problem in they NY area but the guy I was talking to didn’t even know where that was…He even tried to forward me to customer service on a Saturday, even after just quoting me their hours of 8-5 Monday through Friday.  I can’t wait to move, I might even just cancel Verizon and pay whatever Optimum Online fee is involved in moving just so I can stick it to Verizon. I mean, they’ve gotten attention on Blues News and plenty of posts on DSL Reports.

For Valentines day, the wife and I stepped into the 21st century and got each other blackberries.  She got the pearl and I got the world phone.  I know, you’re probably thinking, “Why not the iPhone?”.  Well, we already had sprint, and sprint has a pretty decent data network which is faster than the iPhone’s.  Plus, there are lots of apps available for blackberries since it’s been out for a while.  And, I also wanted it because everyone I know seems to have an iPhone and I wanted something a little different than what they all had.  So far, I’m thoroughly enjoying my blackberry even though I’ve probably only received two calls on it.  I put instant messanger on there and have had like 3 people I haven’t heard from in a long time IM me during the day and use it to chat with the wife at work (like reminder her that it’s lunch time )  I customized everyone’s entry and put a picutre with them and also put custom ringtones on it, which is super easy, all you have to do is connect it to your computer with a usb cable and send an mp3 to it.  The only complaints I have about it is that it doesn’t have a camera or fancy looking interface like the pearl and it’s web browser isn’t as good as the iPhones.  Otherwise it blows my old phone out of the water.  The old one was nice and small but wasn’t very usable and had a battery life of like 7 hours.  So, if any of you want to call or IM or email me, I’m looking for any excuse to use my new toy!