2 Bit Hacker

Sitting on the front steps of the house, enjoying the cool evening. I’ve just finished trimming the lawn and sweeping the driveway, and am waiting for Meg to get home from work. Growing up I always hated doing yardwork, and while I’m still not a fan, there is a certain feeling of satisfaction that goes along with mowing the lawn and keeping the place looking decent.

We just received our first check for the first time homebuyer’s tax credit (we each claimed half) last week, so we rushed out to buy some items we were waiting on; some new chairs, a couple tables, and some much-needed lawn equipment. Being the proud owner of a brand new Troy-Bilt, I of course had to use it last weekend. The grass was nearly knee-high when I started, but after 5 hours of walking every inch of the lawn it was cut down to size and looking much more lawn-like. Last night we went out and picked up a string trimmer to get all the little places I couldn’t mow, a Black & Decker corded electric. I was on the fence between gas and electric, but we don’t have a lot to trim and I didn’t want to muck about mixing gas. It did an adequate job, and I’m overall rather pleased with the lawn at this point.

We also had our first plumbing related fun with the house this past week. The drain from the shower stall in the master bath was leaking into our kitchen ceiling. This is covered under our builder’s warranty though, so we just had to call up and he sent out a plumber, who just tightened up something in the drain, and so far it seems to be better.

Other than that, we’ve just been running around like headless chickens. Somehow we’ve found ourselves with a fairly full social calendar between movie nights and game nights and various cookouts. To help contribute to the chaos, we’ve decided to throw a housewarming party near the end of summer, currently scheduled for late September. If you haven’t already been invited, drop me a line so we can correct that.

The bugs are starting to come out now, so I think it’s time for me to get off the stoop and head indoors.

Good morning, Internet! I’ve got the day off from work to prepare for our trip to San Diego, and while I’m waiting for laundry to cycle I thought I’d post a little update.

Life in the house is going well. We’re mostly unpacked now and have most of the rooms mostly in order. We turned on of the bedrooms into a craft room to hold Meg’s yarn and my computer stuff, at least until I can get the basement set up the way I want with a server closet and workbench. Then I’ll be moving most of my computer stuff down there, and probably just have a workstation up here. I think our next steps will be getting some more furniture so the place doesn’t feel so empty. It’s time to finally get some real bedroom furniture, as we currently just have a mattress on the floor and the room looks really bare.

Work is good, I’ve been doing some IPv6 deployment, and it’s nice to finally see that getting some traction in the real world. Also been playing around with netdot, mostly for it’s IPAM features. A little hairy to get installed on FreeBSD, but once you get it on there, it seems to work out pretty well.

Meg and I are going to be heading out to San Diego tonight for Comic-Con this weekend. It’s out big vacation for the year and we’re really excited about it. Bunch of big names will be there, including Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. Hoping to get some autographs and generally have a good time. Also, Geek Chic will be there, so we’re going to be checking out their Emissary table. We’re thinking about getting one for the dining room, but I want to see one in person before dropping that kind of money on furniture.

Time to go move laundry around. I’m sure we’ll be posting plenty of pictures from this weekend, and I’ll try to remember to post about it when we get back.

So, after talking about it for a few years now, I have a house. Well, technically Meg and I have a house. And it’s awesome.

We bought a new construction two story colonial in a small development. It’s just over 2,000 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, 2 car garage on about a 1/4 acre. Hardwood floors on most of the downstairs, carpet upstairs for the bedroom. Small deck off the back.

Moved in last month and have been slowly settling in. We still have a lot of boxes in the garage to go through, but we’re making progress on that, as well as buying all the little things we’re finding we need, like shades and curtains and a fridge and a lawnmower. There’s an unused space in the garage under the stairs that I’m hoping to rig up for my router and home storage server and such. Big Dave has offered to help me pull Ethernet wiring to the bedrooms and living room, so that’ll be cool.

I’ll have to get some good pictures to post, the only ones I have at the moment are from the construction. I’m hoping to get a bit better about writing on here as well. My personal goal is to do at least one thing worth writing about each weekend, even if it’s just some small improvement to the house.

So, hopefully more posts to come in the near future, along with a house warming party sometime in the next few months.

Been thinking a bit lately about buying a house. I know I’ve talked about it before, but I think I’m in a much better place financially than I was the past couple of time. The original plan was to try and find a place to move to when my lease was up on my current apartment, early next year, but I’ve been looking at this Federal Housing Tax Credit and thinking that I should jump on that if I can.

On the plus side, I might be able to get that 10%-up-to-$8k tax credit if I can get things all set before December 1st. On the down side, I’ll have less cash available for a down payment, and I’ll have to pay the lease break fee to get out of my current place.

Hmm…

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occasional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintenance roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rather liked in Merrimack. Unfortunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

Well, I decided that paying off my rent debt was more important than a new laptop, so I’ve done the financially responsible thing and put more tax return toward that. Now I just have to pay off a couple smaller debts and I’ll be debt free once again. Yay!

In other news, the apartment building we’re living in is up for sale. Looks like the asking price is about $350k, and I’m trying to think of a way to get together with our friends on the first floor to buy the building. One person suggested working out a system by which the building is split into individual condo units and purchased separately, but I have no idea whatsoever on how to go about doing such a thing.

Other than that, not a whole lot going on in life. We had a party for Delia’s birthday last night (I’m actually still awake from that, haven’t felt the inclination to sleep yet.) Much fun was had, lots of Karaoke Revolution, a surprising amount of alcohol and more than enough pizza. I’m sure Delia will post more about it at some point.

Not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my weekend. I’ve been tossing around the idea of going geocaching, since I haven’t done that in quite a while. I should do some work on the SimPro stuff as well. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to work on one of my own projects for a change.

Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to get a mortgage in order to buy a place, so it looks like we may be renting for another year or so. This would give me time to get some money in the bank again (assuming I can stick to my automatic savings transfers and not touch that account) as well as try to get some of the items on my credit report cleared up.

On the plus side, we found a pretty nice apartment on the west side of Manchester, two floors above where kyotemusings and redenife are living now. It’s a pretty big 3 bedroom place for about what I’m paying for my 1 bedroom currently. We’d be able to take on a roommate, too, which would help with trying to put some money away.