Stress Much?

So, we made an offer on a house.

Small place on a small lot (750 / 2500sf), but close to a nice little park, in an area slated for major improvements (New elementary school going in by 2006, demolishing several large apartment tracts). Hardwood floors, 1-car garage, very private backyard, super cute and clean throughout.

Had to bump up our price range signifigantly and do some ‘creative’ financing to make it work. The places in a reasonable price range were either trashed, thrashed, or dashed to the ground. This place is move-in ready.

All I can say is that this is definitely the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Sometimes, you gotta just hold your nose and jump in.

This whole thing really forced me to question what I’m working for and why. To take your hard-earned cash and plunk it down on a property – all for the prospect of doubling your rent payment – is a sobering thought.

Looking at your finances on an annualized basis, including all your debt and tax liability, you begin to see why people buy homes. Suffice it to say that as long as you are willing to stay in the same place for 5-7 years, you should – even with the most conservative appreciation rates – come out ahead in the end. Keep em’ crossed, kiddies.

The NPR Rant

This one is a long time coming.

I’m a news whore. I need news, constantly. CNN, New York Times, NPR, BBC. Local, National, Global, I’m all over it.

In the morning, I have 25-35 minutes to get my NPR fix. NPR is mostly good radio – lotsa news, somewhat liberal, but not too much so (unlike the Beeb).

Over the past few months I have begun to break into cursing fits at NPR., usually with a resultant change in the dial to Howard Stern. Why, you ask? How about a bulleted list?!

* Traffic Report Sucks
NPR’s traffic report is apparently farmed out. There is no rhyme or reason to their reports. They do the traffic whenever they damn well feel like it, typically 15 minutes past the time when I’ve become hopelessly entrenched in traffic. The worst part is, they tend to do southbound freeways in one report, then northbound in another, so you are screwed either way.

* Poetry, Arab Women Singers, Retrospectives on Aretha Franklin
Apparently some people actually enjoy hearing a shreiking broad sing in Arabic at 6:45 AM. I’m not one of them. Does anyone actually care about poetry to the point in which they want to hear it on the radio? If so, please come forward so I can kill you.

* Intellectual Analyses of Art by Pompous College Professors.
I grew up in the Northeast, so I know all about these guys and their big words. Hearing Gloria Penner kiss ass on a guy who’s never set foot outside a college classroom should be grounds for immediate litigation.

* Gabriel Wisdom and the San Diego Business Report
Not only does Gabe repeat the same damn news SEVERAL DAYS IN A ROW, he also gets endless plugs for his own company while simultaneously having the on-air persona of a Pompous College Professor. NEWS FLASH – HE’S READING IT STRAIGHT OUTTA THE WALL STREET JOURNAL!

* Dirk Sutro and the Lounge
Now, I know someone who works on this show, and several of my friends have appeared on it, but dammit, Dirk needs a punch in the teeth.

I Hate Carrie Bradshaw

My wife and I don’t have HBO, so we watch the shows on DVD. This lets you get the compressed version of 5 seasons in just a few days.

We ran through the Sopranos in a few weeks, then moved on to Sex and the City. Right now we’re midway through season 4 and things are going south.

S&TC was great early on – chicks getting laid and running around in their underwears, talking about dick. Halfway through season 3, things got serious, people got married, pregnant, whatever.

Slowly, as things progressed, I found myself repeatedly screaming at the TV, saying: “I hate this bitch!”.

The problem is Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw. I hate her.

I’m not going to explain why, as it would make me seem more pathetic than I am, but suffice it to say that watching a 35-year old woman act like a 15-year old makes me wanna puke.

Yep, Again

John, I’m Only Dancing – David Bowie
I’m Only Sleeping – Beatles
Leg of Lamb – QOTSA
Quick and to the Pointless – QOTSA
Da Doo Ron Ron – The Crystals
Puddin’ N’ Tain – Alley Cats
Mary Ann with the Shaky Hand – The Who (Odds & Sods version)

THE SECRET OF VB COM

What I am about to say could have long-lasting, deep repercussions throughout the developer community. I am about to devulge a secret held dear by nearly every VB programmer in the world:

VB COM IS BUTT-EASY!

The task at hand: given 2 identical directories on 2 machines, verify their integrity.

Firstly, I tracked down a program which would handle hashing on the files. I used Fsum. Just add Fsum.exe to the path, and run it as scheduled task. It will dump nice little files with the MD5 hash values of each file.

I had written a script in ASP to read both text files and compare the hashes, but I figured this would be a perfect time to learn some VB COM, since the output of the script was an email, and would never be interactively called. Took less than 2 hours.

Basically, if you can write VBScript classes, and are familiar with VB’s particular brand of lunacy, moving to VB COM is a baby step.

RIP

Big Brother skate mag is no more… Long live Dave Carnie!

The mag was great for a while, but LFP didn’t seem to be able to prevent the brain drain to MTV (if you can consider Steve-O and Pontius ‘Brain’)

COM-plaining

I’ve spent the whole weekend debugging a C++ COM object that:
– correctly returns “ABC123-34BGH” in WSH
– but returns “TTTTT-TTTTT” in an ASP page.

I asked around and some people thought it was a line in the source which de-allocated the return value almost immediately after creating it. I played with that piece but got nothing from it.

I crash-coursed some VC++ / COM but had a hunch that it was not the source but an install issue.

I learned:
* Some basic C++ stuff – pointers, memory de-allocation.
* What IDL is (COM thing)
* How to compile C++ to DLL’s in VC++
* How to use Component Services to register a COM+ component

The culprit was that it needed to be installed through Component Services as opposed to just using the command-line regsvr32. Still don’t know why.