It seems that I’m either currently, or will soon be, in the market for a new phone. This is actually a fall-out effect from the marriage, as well as timing on getting my last phone, a T-Mobile Sidekick 3. As I’ve checked the notes I made when I last upgraded, I realized my 2 year contract extension is up in July. In fact, it’s up on July 4, Independence Day. There’s some sort of nice congruity to that.
Sorry, Ladies!
Sorry to disappoint all the other ladies out there (all zero of you), but a little over 2 weeks ago, I became a married man. My lovely wife has a write-up of the wedding over at her blog, so go check it out.
Finally back on the air
So when we were looking at houses, one of the primary things I was looking for was DSL access. With the house we finally ended up buying, I noticed that the owner had a DSL bridge up and running. Score! At closing, I asked him if he had DSL, and he said he did. Score! It’s smooth sailing from here on out, right? Wrong. Little did I know just how much of a broadband wasteland Frederick happens to be.
Holy shit, we are in debt!
So, we did it. We finally did it. This morning at 10am, we closed on our house. After scads and scads of signing and initialing paperwork, and handing over a huuuge check, we’re now both officially in debt. Eeeep!
So, we finished up around 11:30 this morning at the title company then went back to our agent’s office for a bit. After that, we stopped by the Despot of Homes for some minor supplies, and headed up to our house (after a quick lunch).
Hooray, Nationwide!
Most of the time, when I hear testimonials from customers about insurance companies, I tend to take them with a shaker of salt. Mostly because so many ads with testimonials for other products have itty-bitty disclaimers that often indicate “Results are not typical”, and what with companies always trying to put their best foot forward. Now, Nationwide doesn’t have a bunch of celebrities on their commercials, or cute little reptilian mascots or anything like that. What they do have is service.
Making some progress
Even though I haven’t been devoting as much time to it as I either could or should, I’ve made some decent progress on my aggregator. Maybe it isn’t as much as it could be, but it’s enough to make me happy, and since I’m not getting paid, that’s all that matters right now, right?
I never thought I’d be happy about debt
So, I just got off the phone with the mortgage consultant that works with our buyer’s agent. We had filled out some info for a good faith estimate/pre-approval a few days ago, since we’re looking to move on a home slightly faster than we’d originally thought we would. I have to say, I’m stoked.
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This is supposed to be simple, right?
So, I’ve been spending more time working on coming up with my own feed aggregator. I’ve learned some pretty interesting things so far, as well as just how FUBAR RSS and Atom happen to be. You’d think that this would all be somewhat simple, and in an ideal world, it probably would. This is the real world though, not an ideal one.
Putting my money where my mouth is
So, having complained about console feed readers, I’ve decided to put up or shut up. Or put my moneycode where my mouth is. A few months before I wrote the last article, I’d started playing a little bit with ruby-feedparser. Then I promptly forgot about it, as other more pressing matters came up.
Package Tracking Sucks
All the major package carriers, even the USPS, offers some form of package tracking. They all work slightly differently, and all have their plusses and minuses, but they all suck. Why? It doesn’t have to be that way, if only they’d make an effort to provide more visibility into routing information that most of them already have.