jeffpollard.net

Finally..relief!

Last night was the first night in (jeez, I can't even remember how) many nights that I didn't have some big "thing" to do. It's always something: putting something new (or fixing something) on CustomTacos.com, working on Show-N-Shine.com, doing a house call, bringing someone's "house call" home with me to work on, or something else. But last night? None of that. It felt weird. But I'm glad.

Olivia and I ended up sitting down and talking about the whole townhouse thing some more and we both ended up calling our parent's to get their opinion about the situation. They both had the same first question: "Wait, can an unmarried couple BUY a house together?" We both replied with the same answer: "Well, Paul at Ryan homes asked us if we were married and we told him 'No', and he didn't seem to care."

Olivia's parents were a little more skeptical of it than my Mom was. I don't think they think it's a bad idea, they're just not sure if it's the thing to do right now or not.

After our phone conversations, we traded details and discussed things a little more. Ok, a lot more. We pretty much decided that this is something that we want to do, but perhaps not RIGHT NOW. When I say RIGHT NOW, I mean not this week. If things go as we think they will, then perhaps we'll be ready to buy sometime in February.

The 150's? Not as nice as the 180's

I thought I'd follow up from my in-depth townhouse discussion from 2 days ago. If you haven't read that below, you'll probably want to.

After the guy at the nice 180's townhouses told us to look into the Townes at Hunton Park (the townhouse community that's just starting to sprout right off Staples Mill Rd. (Rt. 33) and 295, we decided to drive over there and check it out. We're driving out Staples Mill and we get to a sign advertising new townhomes from the 140s. There was a long, newly-paved road leading back into the forest. If you know me, then you know that this is a good sign. So, we start driving down this long road. It's a 4-lane divided road, but only 1 side (2 lanes) are open right now. This tells me that this road is going to be pretty busy one day, and the engineers know it. So, we're driving, we're driving...dirt piles on the right...dirt piles on the left...and, we're at the end of the road. Yep, the road just ended in a big heaping pile of...dirt. Ohhhhkay...where's the townhouses? It became apparent to us that the townhouse community hadn't even started to sprout! There wasn't even a demo unit to look at! Talk about getting in on the ground floor.

So, it turns out that if you want to find out what one of these places looks like, you have to travel back down Staples Mill to the Ryan Homes townhome community where we first inquired. So, we ended up going in a complete circle.

We ended up talking to the same lady that we talked to on Sunday, and she even recognized us. So, we told her that we liked the more expensive place up near Innsbrook, but that it seemed a little out of our price range. So, we started taling about the new townhouse community down the road. She pulled out floor plans, options, add-ons, price sheets, etc. She also volunteered to go ahead and write up a little mock estimate to see what a monthly payment would be for a custom-configured house. You see, they don't begin work on your house until they know exactly what you want it to look like. Each family is allowed a certaim amount of customization as far as carpet, bathrooms, cabinets, etc. So, we went down through the options. Ceiling fans in the master bedroom and great room? Yes. Vaulted ceilings with a skylight in the master bedroom? Yes. Garden tub in the master bathroom? Yes. Wood floors in the foyer and dining room areas? Yes? So, when we were all done, the final house price came in just under $160,000, complete with all the fixin's. Not bad, except for one thing: these townhouses do NOT have a driveway and they do NOT have a garage. Those two things were a definite advantage that the other, more expensive, neighborhood offered. Bummer. So, she added in all of the taxes, fees, and -get this- if you through their mortgage company, they pay the closing costs on the house. So, after it was all calculated, a typical monthly payment would come in just a hair under $1000. Not too bad, considering that we're paying almost that in rent right now! Amazing.

So, we left their office with a fistfull of literature and stuff to look at, and completely overwhelmed. Perhaps tonight we'll head back to the expensive place and get the nice guy over there to do up a little estimate, too, just to compare.

A Heat Wave

Well, here we are. The end of January. The high temperature is going to be 78 degrees today.

What...is up with that?

(can you tell that I ran out of time to talk about something interesting and so I opted to talk about the weather instead?)

A combination of depression and inspiration

This weekend was a blast. Actually, the word blast makes it sound incredibly exciting, which it wasn't really.

I'll cut through the bull to the real excitement of the weekend: today. I woke up semi-early for a Sunday and went to a local computer show/sale. It turned out to be pretty much a waste of time. There weren't many vendors there, and hardly any Mac stuff. I didn't expect there to be any Mac stuff, but it was pretty sad regardless. Mike, Eric and I still had a fun time looking at junk and looking at all of the funny people.

We came back home, met up with Lauren and Olivia and proceeded with our plans to ride around Richmond in search of the perfect apartment (or otherwise) for Mike and Lauren. Secretly, I think all four of us wanted to look at nice, new houses, so we did some of that, too. We ended up looking at a number of townhouses out in the far west end, just north of Innsbrook, one of Richmond's technology parks.

Sidebar: When Olivia and were looking at apartments in Richmond, Brian kept mentioning how he thought it would be a good idea for us to look at buying a townhouse instead. At this point, I didn't really understand his reasoning. His reasoning was that when you rent an apartment, you're basically throwing your $800 out the window every month..never to be seen again. However, if you buy a townhouse (or even a house), you're paying $800/month (probably more, realistically), but you'll one day be able to turn around and sell that townhouse and use that money towards a bigger, better house (if you choose).

So to summarize, over the past few months, I've been starting to realize this..which makes me want to consider trying to move into something that I'm not just throwing my money away at.

So, we looked at a few townhouses..all for sale by Ryan Homes. The first community we looked at had townhouses very similar to Eric's house, priced around the 140's. Not bad, except that they don't have any open houses in that neighborhood anymore. So, they referred us to one of their sister properties just north of Innsbrook.

We walked into the second house and all four of our jaws hit the ground. I'm so mad at myself that I didn't take my camera. This place was absolutely BREATHTAKING. It had a beautiful vaulted ceiling in the living room with a second floor balcony that looked over into the living room. It was a three bedroom place with the master bedroom on the first floor. The mast bedroom's bathroom was gigantic with a garden tub and seperate shower and an awesome walk-in closet. Amazing. Oh, and did I forget to mention: it had a garage. This place was everything that any of us could possibly want in a house right now. It was simply amazing. It was also starting in the $180's. Now, for some of you that live in larger metropolitan areas than Richmond might think that's chump change for a nice place, but for me, that's still a lot of money.

The guy there was really nice and helped me understand a few questions I had about how things work when you buy a townhouse (or any house for that matter). The thing is: a mortgage on a townhouse in the 150's or so wouldn't be too far out of our price range (as far as monthly payments are concerned). However, it's the down payment that seemed to concern the four of us more than anything. If 3% is the normal down payment on a place like that, then that would be around $6,000. Where am I gonna come up with $6,000? Yeh, I know: savings.

Well anyway, so today's experience was both depressing and inspiring. We all walked out of that house with stars in our eyes and aspirations of one day owning a place like that. The guy suggested that we look at another Ryan Homes community that's getting ready to sprout up near Staples Mill Rd. and 295. They're not quite as expensive as the 180's, but a little nicer than the place we looked at that was already developed and filled.

If anyone wants to donate money to the Jeff-and-Olivia-want-to-stop-throwing-their-money-away fund, operators are standing by.

Wow. Now that's refreshment!

Let me just say that I absolutely love REALLY, REALLY cold milk. I opened up the refrigerator this morning to pull the milk out and guess what? It felt crackley. Yep, ice chunks in the jug. I was psyched. I've even gone as far sometimes as to drink my milk in a frosty mug. Is that so weird?

On another note, we discovered last night that a cat can indeed sustain 110volts (the equivalent of licking your finger and sticking it in a light socket) without keeling over. Gizmo decided that it would be cool to chew through Olivia's PowerBook A/C adapter..before it gets converted down to a lower voltage that the computer can use. So, he got the whole 110v. Don't think it was really what he was expecting. The sad part it: I don't think he learned his lesson.

"If I only had a brain....."

It was the Monday that wasn't really a Monday

Boring day at work today for the most part.

But let me explain what a boring day at work is: it doesn't necesarily mean that I didn't have anything to do, but rather it means that nothing exciting happened. I stayed busy pretty much the entire day..but at the end of the day, I had no stories to tell or anything to show for my work.

These are the worst kind of days.

Luckily, I was able to come home, continue work on the new owner profile system over on CustomTacos and give myself some much-needed instant gratification. Ahhh, there ya go.

Craziness!

A sure sign that my life is crazy is when I haven't posted anything on here in 3 or so days. It's been crazy. Here's a summary:

Friday was spent getting most of my design ideas for the new client extranet shot down at work. I went around and got some people's opinion about the designs I had already done and the general consensus was that my designs didn't accurately voice the style of the Agency. I can't really argue with them. The part that hurt the most was the comments made about our current Intranet (my baby). Aparrently, comments were made implying that it's ugly and too cluttered. So, I got crituiqed pretty hard..but I asked for it..and that's what I got. I now have a little different perspective on designing Agency stuff. It was a difficult "pill" to swallow, but I'm glad that it happened, now that I look back on it.

Friday night I installed an upgrade to the discussion forum software over on CustomTacos. It was a disaster at first, but then I somehow found a way to turn it all around. I ended up doing a fresh, clean install of the forum software, therefore completely erasing all of the neat little hacks and modified code that I had worked hours on to get tweaked perfectly. I got the forum running to the point that it worked, but nothing more. Went to bed at 4am.

Saturday, we slept in late (because I was up so late). Olivia left to go out on the town with her friends from college, which left me the entire night to repair the damage done to the CustomTacos forum software. I got the rest of it patched up and tweaked again in a pretty short time. I also started messing around with the next feature for CustomTacos...a photo gallery system that allows members to upload and maintain their own photo gallery of pictures of their truck. It's a feature that I've really wanted since it's inception, but couldn't find the correct software to do it. Well, it's installed, and now I just need to tweak it a little to get it ready for prime time. I think the CustomTacos guys (and gals) will love it.

Brian came down Sunday afternoon. We spent the evening over at Mike and Lauren's house playing Quake and watching the Golden Globe Awards.

Another interesting thing that happened today was I went and met (in person) a guy that I met on CustomTacos. His name is Myk and he lives in VA Beach. He was up here at VCU visiting his girlfriend and sent me a message and asked if I wanted to get together and meet. So we did. He was really cool. This is just the type of thing that I had dreamed about when I started envisioning CustomTacos. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: It's so neat to watch this dream of mine finally come true..and in a better way than I had even thought possible.

Tomorrow, I've got the day off, so I'll be at here playing Quake with Mike and Brian most of the day. Yay for Martin Luther King!

A House Call Home Run

Not much exciting today. The house call tonight was a totaly success. I upgraded two iMacs to 9.1, updated the firmware and upgraded Apple DVD PLayer on one, installed Kid Pix on the other. Setup USB printer sharing on both machines so that they could share the printer...and, oh yeh, installed a Linksys router and spoofed the MAC address. Joe also had me help him understand why he couldn't watch DVDs on his TV. It turns out that the RCA cables coming out of the DVD player went into the OUTPUTs on the TV. Not much gonna happen that way, ya think? I rewired his home entertainment system while waiting for the 69MB 9.1 upgrade to download. He's lucky he has a fast cable modem or I would've been there for HOURS. As it turns out, I was there for about 2 hours exactly..better than I had hoped for.

And now, I'm off to catch my 1am self-imposed bedtime. Bring it on, Friday!

All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go

Wow! Who's that? Oh wait. That's me. That's me all dressed up when I went to Portsmouth last week for Aunt Nina's funeral. That's the most dressed up I've gotten in a loooong looong looong time. Ever, perhaps. That's pretty sad isn't it? But, ya know, I learned something that day: getting all dressed up like that isn't as bad and uncomfortable as I remember it being. My big problem is that I always feel constrained and uncomfortable in dressy (or "snazzy" for you older folks) clothes. So, I tend to not want to wear them. But, this time was different. Perhaps it was different because I was much more concerned with paying my respects to my family then my clothes.

Today was a great catch-up day today at work. I closed calls that had been open for a long time and finished up some Intranet projects that have been hanging for months. Pretty cool. I feel a weight lifted from my shoulders.

It looks like I've got yet another house call Thursday night. Yep, another Linksys router install. I think this makes at least 5 or 6 routers I've setup or helped setup. I love those things.

And I'm liking these house calls. Actually, I'm not really liking the actual calls themselves, but rather the money they generate. You see, it's about time to trade-in my 1999 Powerbook G3. It's 2 years old and only has a 4gig drive. I think Olivia would like to give OS X a shot, and the 333mhz processor would probably be a little strained. So, I'm thinking of purchasing wither one of the new 14.1" iBooks or possibly a refurbed 400mhz first-gen Titanium. The iBook is going for around $1800 while I can get the Titanium for around $1400. I think we're still somewhat undecided on which to go with.

Ok, it;s off to bed I go! I'm making a conscious effort to try to get to bed before 1am for the rest of the week. I can already feel the difference..a little.

Just...a...few...more...hours..

..caught again in the lack of time paradigm. Wake up tired. End up sleeping a little late because I'm so tired. Get to work late. Work late because guys want to play Quake. Get home. Work on stuff that needs to be done. Try to spend SOME time relaxing (yeh, right!). End up going to bed extremely late because there's too much to do and time gets away from me. Wake up tired and do it all over again.

Any suggestions anyone?

Digging up the Past

Tonight is one of those nights that I wish I could just plug my brain into my computer (via FireWire, of course) and just download all of my thoughts onto this page. I've got may more to tell than y fingers can possibly take, I think.

Friday night, Lauren and Mike invited us over for dinner. They prepared a delicious spaghetti and salad combo while we provided dessert from Food Lion. Later, we went to Wal-Mart and bought a couple of board games to keep us busy. It was a really good change of pace..away from the usual watching movies, playing Quake, and mud wrestling each other. It was a really relaxing night and I hope we plan on doing it again soon. Perhaps we'll host next time. Jeesh, you think Food Lion could provide boxed dinners? :)

Saturday, we went up to Jeremy's wedding. It was at a little church about 10 minutes from Mom & Dad's house. It was a military-themed wedding with Marines in uniform abound. Even Jeremy was dressed in his Marines uniform. We made our way in and sat beside my high school tech education teacher, Mr. Ridgeway. What a perfect person to sit beside at Jeremy's wedding. Mr. Ridgeway was quite possibly the best teachers I had in high school, maybe only second to the late Joe Hiney. We both sat there gazing around the room at all of the people that we knew, or didn't know but thought that we should. He pointed out some people to me that I didn't recognize as being that person. I began realizing why I hadn't hesitated in accepting the invitation to Jeremy's wedding.

The Marines escorted Jeremy's mom and Lindsay's (the bride) mom to their seats. It was so good to se these people that I really hadn't seen in 4 or more years. Jeremy's sister, now all grown up, married, and with a little baby boy. The best man in the ceremony was Ike Cupp, a great friend of mine (and Jeremy's) during high school. He was easy to recognize by his ears.

The rest of the ceremony was great. As I expected, Jeremy got a little choked up while reciting his vows. He's always had that emotional side, although he never likes to show it to anyone. As I watched him up there all dressed up professing his neverending love for this girl, memories of all the times we spent together began flooding my brain. It even made me a little emotional. I don't think I would get that emotional about any of my other friends. I feel a special closeness with Jeremy that I don't feel with any of my other friends. Gosh, if you could've tapped into brain, you might have thought I was sitting at his funeral, not his wedding.

After the wedding, we wired the horn of their car to their brake lights on the "getaway car". They weren't leaving for their honeymoon quite yet, though. The reception was nice, followed by an after-reception party at Daniel's house. It ended up being outside where they had built a giant bon-fire. Everyone from the ceremony came, and more. This gave me even more time to catch up with old friends and find out what everyone was doing, who was married, etc.

One thing jumped out at me throughout the day Saturday: physically, all of us had changed..some more than others. But the most important thing, the bond between all of us friends had not changed a bit. At the party, it was almost like we had all been magically transported back in time to 1996, the last time we were all together like this. In our case: People change, great friendships don't.

It occured to me as we were driving back to Richmond today how many people I've gotten re-aquainted with in the last week. I saw family that I haven't seen in 10 years at Aunt Nina's funeral. I saw friends that I hadn't spoken with in 4 or 5 years this weekend. And as corny as it sounds, it made me realize how important it is to keep in touch with those whom you care for.

And even though I know they don't visit this site: Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Cupp. Take care of him, Lindsay. He's one of the absolute best friends I've ever had.

Grinning From Ear to Ear

Boys and girls: This about says it all. That thread makes me the happiest man in the world. I couldn't ask for more.

We're off to the Valley today for Jeremy's wedding. Photos and stuff soon, so check back...unless you're an addicted Tacoholic.

Is Tomorrow Monday or Friday?

The service for Aunt Nina was really nice today. The best part of it all was that I had a chance to see family members that I hadn't seen in 5-10 (or more) years. I'm not quite sure what else to say about this event, so I guess I'll lay it to rest.

Changing gears a bit: the final episode of Survivor: Africa was tonight. Ethan won, which was pretty cool.

CustomTacos is rolling really well. Traffic on the site has been steadily on the rise and there are now more than 100 registered users in the discussion forum. It's becoming a thriving community. One cool thing is that a bunch of users from California and Arizona are planning to meet in the next couple weeks. It's a good feeling that the site helped those guys meet each other and form new friendships. It's so gratifying to see the main goal of the site being reached.

It's back to work tomorrow. Since I skipped out today, I'm not sure if tomorrow feels like a Monday or a Friday. Either way, it's back to work on designing Martin's extranet.

Oh, by the way: part of the bad news from Wednesday is that Martin did another (very small) round of layoffs. From what I understand, it was only 7 people. Our department head said that it's all part of a restructuring effort. In fact, apparently they laid off 7, but just posted 9 open jobs.

The day lots of things went wrong

Well, lots of stuff went wrong today. I'm not going to get into any of it tonight, cause I'm really tired and need to get up early tomorrow morning.

I'm taking the day off from work to head to Tidewater to Aunt Nina's funeral. I'll post more details about today's disasters tomorrow. Take care.

MacMania!

Things are work are finally starting to get back to "normal". It was busy again.

The monthly XMUG meeting was tonight. This month, members nominated people for officer positions for next year. The discussion migrated to XMUG's (lack of) web presence, which led to my good friend John Linthicum nominating me to take the website reigns and do somethign cool with it. They're even talking about forming a comittee that I suppose I would be in charge of directing/organizing. Pretty neat stuff. As busy as I am with thirty million other web projects, I'm still really excited about the prospect of this project. I can't even put into words how many cool ideas I have for this organization's site. Think discussion forum. Think Avant Go channel. Think Cafe Press merchandise. It makes me wonder why someone else hasn't thought of doing this type of thing before now. I mean, we've already got a unified community of enthusiasts and no (online) place for them to commune! Officer voting will take place next month.

Ok, get this: Mac Mania. Sound interesting? Probably not. What if I told you that it was part of GeekCruises.com? Yeh, that's better. Check this out (and tell me if this sounds like my kind of thing): You board a cruise ship in Vancouver, B.C. But not just ANY cruise ship. A cruise ship filled with thousands of other Mac enthusiasts and famous Mac people (including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple!) You're on this boat for 7 wonderful days where you meet and bond with other Mac enthusiasts, attend Mac seminars and workshops, and of course, enjoy the ammenities. And hey, it's only $1050 PER PERSON. Oh wait. That's only the cruise itself. Add another $1000 for the worskops and seminars. And, oh yeh, you have to GET to Vancouver. That'll be another $800 round-trip, probably. That would be awesome, though.

I didn't get home tonight until 10, so I haven't really had a chance to do anything..and it's already time for bed!

Blubs for my blog

Tonight's entry will come in chunks, mostly because I don't feel like making complete sentances.

The Leaky Press

It's MacWorld time again. Yep, MacWorld San Francisco begins tomorrow with Mr. Jobs giving his usual Steve-note. Pre-keynote hype has been off the charts this time. Much of it has even been generated by Apple themselves, with phrases like: "Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away." on Apple's front page of their web site. So, everyone has been speculating on what Steve & Co. have up their sleeves this time.

Tonight, Time Canada leaked the full details of what will be announced tomorrow: a new LCD-based iMac. As you can see by the photo, it's a hemisphere with the 15" LCD display on a short chrome pole. It looks pretty neat from the looks of the photo. I'll be very curious to see what it looks like in real life. It also looks like Apple will announce a new (simplified) photo-editing program, called iPhoto. It will be like a very scaled-down version of Photoshop and is designed for cropping and resizing images. It is rumored that Adobe is NOT very happy that Apple has developed this software. But you know what? Photoshop X for OS X is STILL not out, and probably WON'T be out until March! I say it's their own fault if they lose market share over iPhoto. I'm anxious to see how it works. If you're bored tomorrow afternoon, check out Apple's site and see what's new.

On a totally different note: I was just sitting here musing at all of our A/V remote controls. We've got no less than 5 remotes sitting here. Some of them control the lights. Some of them control the TV, the cable box, the home theater receiver, the DVD/CD changer. I know that plenty of companies make "Universal" remotes that are supposed to do EVERYTHING, but I hate to tell them: it's just not possible. For one, my cable box has some pretty specific buttons that allow me to view special menus, etc. Somehow I don't see a universal remote having a "guide" button.. But..you know what..I'd really like to get hands on one of those Phillips "Pronto" devices. It's a neat little Palm-Pilot-looking remote with a backlit LCD screen. It allows you to custom-design your own remote "screens" to get exactly what you want. So, my question for you is: How many remotes does it take to control YOUR house and all of it's electronics? Check out the new poll on the right and enter your answer in there.

Have a great Monday! (blech!)

SnOw

We've got snow! The funny thing is: it isn't THAT exciting. I guess it's probably due to the fact that we just lived in snow for a week up in Vermont. Olivia and I were both off from work today, which gave us some good extra time to relax. Eric came over and we watched Pearl Harbor.

Olivia's car was towed away yesterday evening and she got a rental car through Enterprise. I think NOT having the car sitting down there has been a relief to us both. It at least somewhat shields the pain from us for now.

Here are some photos I took this morning. The first is the view from our deck after the storm dumped about 4"-5" of fresh snow on us last night. The second is my poor little truck, all covered in snow. And the last is Olivia's rental car while her car is getting fixed. It's a base-model Saturn sedan with less than 5,000 miles. It's a pretty cool little car.

More Carnage

More Carnage

Well, here I am. Back at work. Sitting in my cubicle. I can think of exactly 359 other places I'd rather (or need to) be.

So, have you enjoyed the carnage? We haven't. In fact, my stomach starts churning every time I look out the apartment window down at the parking lot.

I guess by now you all have a pretty good idea of what happened. However, for the sake of not being my usual ambiguious self, I'll fill you in.

Apparently, at around 2:00am on Saturday (Dec. 29) a car came absolutely FLYING through the parking lot of our apartment complex in Richmond. It looks like they got out of control coming around the corner, locked up the brakes and slid for about 15 feet where it made contact with Olivia's teal Cavalier. Her car was backed into the second parking spot from the corner and it came to rest at a 30 degree angle to the curb with one wheel up on the curb. Oh, and the front end was totally annhilated.

The out-of-control car knocked Olivia's car out of the way and continued sliding until it hit our neighbor's Chrysler sedan, sliding it sideways about 5 feet, from the looks of the marks that were left behind.

When the initial impact happened, a witness said that the suspect's air bag deployed, and the car shut off. The suspect then sat there for a couple of seconds, restarted the vehicle and then sped away. But, they left behind some good evidence that the Police and an investigator have already sorted through: some maroon Nissan parts. The investigators are treating this like a felony and think it's a Nissan sedan..maybe an Altima or Sentra. Nobody has been caught yet, that we know of. I can't imagine that the suspect's car was very driveable after an impact like that.

As most of you know, Olivia and I weren't even in the state when this happened. We were in Vermont spending the holidays with my parents and my sister. We didn't even find out about this until late Sunday night through Olivia's parents. My truck, luckily, was safe in Mom and Dad's garage in Bridgewater. If it would have been in its normal corner spot, it would have gotten totally creamed, too. I'm thankful for that.

So, that's the story. Olivia's staying home today from work to sort things out with the Police, the investigators, and the insurance company.

Thanks to Mike, Lauren, Lauren's friend Chris, Chris Holloman, Brian, and Paul for throwing an awesome New Year's party and helping Olivia and I forget about reality for a night. You guys rock. There's nothing like having good friends.

Cavalier Devastation

Happy Holidays.