The Mandelbear's Musings

It's been a long month this past week. Our mortgage broker failed to get us a loan -- we didn't get this finally confirmed until Thursday, but it had been crumbling for a week. Our realtor, who obviously has a considerable interest in our closing the deal, found another mortgage broker. She claims, on the company website, to have a 100% success rate. Still waiting.

(Meanwhile, interest rates have gone down a little. Every silver lining has a cloud around it?) And my tenants at the house formerly known as the Starport asked whether I might be interested in selling the place. To which the answer was hell yes! (I'm looking at adding over a half megabuck to my debt. Yes, I can use it.)

This Saturday we went to the Seattle Home Show with Naomi and her new GF Susan. Lots of fun, and a trifle expensive. But we found what looks like the right gardener, and spoke with what looks like the right contractor. And found what looks like the perfect power lift recliner. Now all we need is the house to put them in...

Sunday I actually got in some good walking -- home from N's after taking the Honda back.

There are links in the notes, as usual. I'm going to post this and try to get to bed; I've been sleeping badly recently.

A day full of annoyances. Trying to get an authorization code to transfer thestarport.org out of Network Solutions Problems, and discovering that the email they were sending wasn't getting through. Turns out our sysadmin had installed a new spam-filtering appliance on Monday, which of course had a new address. The DNS hadn't propagated to Netsol yet. And the problem I was having yesterday was that the mail server for what used to be the lab's domain when I set up my contact info, rsv.ricoh.com, was down. Naturally it took until 11am or so for our admin to arrive and fix it. But by that time I'd already changed my contact email address to point to my home address here at thestarport.org.

Went out at noon to Fry's (taking the fact that my ankle is bothering me as a sufficient excuse to skip my usual walk) to buy an MP3 player. The ad assured me that the Samsung I bought would play ogg files, and indeed they have a reputation for doing so. Just to be sure, I checked several other vendors (having noticed that many of the boxes had phone numbers on them) and determined that, no, none of them played oggs.

What I didn't discover until I got the damned thing back to work was that it's totally locked down, and will only play files if you transfer them with Windows Media Player. So much for Samsung -- my respect for them just went down several notches.

Actually got a little work done in the latter part of the afternoon (mostly nailing down and documenting the encrypted blob format that finagler's software is writing) before trying to get an appointment with my doctor. The next available one was August 1^st until I mentioned the ankle, at which point I got one for this Friday. OK, I understand about triage. By this time it was 5:05 and the opthalmology department was closed, in spite of the entry in the phone directory that said the appointment desk was open until 5:30.

Back to Fry's to exchange the MP3 player. One thing about Fry's -- they'll take their stuff back for just about any reason. That's why I keep going there.

Aside to whoever took the glass bottles out for recycling: would it have killed you to unstack the bins and put the bottles in the one labeled "glass" instead of just setting them down in the driveway?