Category Archives: Lifestyle

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 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.

Recrap

Back in town, here’s the recap:

Arrived to a torrential downpour, but overall weather was good – even got 50’s one day.

Christmas Eve festivites commenced at the lovely Middleville estate of Blacken magnate Moist Pigeon, where myself, Felix Tibs, and Le Creeper joined the entire Nau clan for a spirited round of holiday cheer and much cocktails. Moist himself was dressed at the height of homeless Vietnam-vet chic in duct-taped pantaloons, and coined the phrase ‘filthy blogger’, which is sure to endure for many years to come.

Festivities continued at the notorious Club G (Gunther’s Tap Room, Jack Kerouac‘s old hangout), where 5 generations of Northport High alums filled the scene. Class of 94′ attendance was nil except for Rich Li**old, who was, and presumably still is, a dick. Same haircut for ten freakin years. J Crew rollneck sweaters and completely improper running shoe / ballcap attire was out in typical display.

Christmas Day arrived with much Manicotti and typical crankiness. Yours truly dodged the madness with some high-intensity napping. Grandmas on the scene included maternal and paternal, health status: good.

Friday night myself and the wife hit up NYC. Thanks to Priceline we scored a 4-star room at the Intercontinental on 48th between Madison and Lex. Macy’s Herald square looked like a bomb had gone off, but the NYC public library always kicks ass. We plushed out with an utterly civilized meal at Chin Chin, including a greet by namesake Jimmy Chin. 75 bucks for 2 + drinks & tip – not shabby for midtown NYC. Attempts were made for a screening of LOTR – ROTK, but alas, sold out. Heineken and traipsing about NYC were a fine replacement.

Returning to the isle, more napping ensued. Inter-nerd and all-around mad scientist Xanix rolled into the Casa Lee for some pizzas and a rousing game of HeroQuest. Corral Lane gangsta Dan Cregan was all up in that piece. LOTR was screened soon after.

In typical LI fashion, ridiculous sleep schedules were the norm. Felix Tibs took top honors for being asleep nearly 20 hours a day. Apparently he was awake at some point as well. We even got to meet Le Creeperette who was sporting sassy Mucklucks.

After unknown amounts of food gorging, Sopranos re-runs, and occasional drunkenness, we returned to SD yesterday. As always the return is depressing to me, as SD seems like the most po-dunk place in the world after a few days in the land of high population densities.