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Friday, May 21, 2004 18:43:53      And with that, we are getting a house! With what you ask? I'll tell you. Brianne and I have been looking to get our very own home in Guelph. Everyone had been saying "get a mortgage pre-approval done so you know what you can afford". It made sense to me, so I filled out all of the forms on ING Direct's web site. They ask everything of you, make sure they're allowed to check your credit record, and ta-da, they give you a magic number the next day telling you how much house you can afford. It was almost too easy. In fact, it was too easy. It wasn't until we had shopped for a new house and put in an offer on said new house did we find out that our pre-approved mortage was a completely bogus piece of paper. We weren't "locked in" at the rate that that piece of paper said, our credit was never checked at all, so really the amount of home and the rate were nothing like what we could afford. This week has been a nightmare of scrambling to jump through a new hoop every day, a very stressfull process if I do say so myself. With the help of my parents and a mortgage broker we got word today that our mortgage has been accepted and we are getting this house! Very wonderful news indeed. We get the place on Friday July 30th. As you can imagine, this has been a very tiring week and this weekend is going to be a wonderfull weekend of relaxation... and packing. Monday, May 24, 2004 08:48:21 Aunt Jane writes: Congratulations!!!! Can we look forward to your house warming party sometime in August/September? Thursday, May 27, 2004 09:47:53 Ian writes: I can't guarantee a date yet, but we'll host something this year.

Wednesday, May 19, 2004 06:48:02      Tax hike!? G'dammit!      Okay, at first when I heard the news that this tax hike was coming I was really miffed. Voltron McGuinty (aka: Dalton) hasn't be an exemplary leader for the province. Then I looked into it and it's really not all that bad. Yes, it sucks for any additional money to come off your pay cheque, but to fix what the PCs have been breaking; our health care system, it takes money and it has to come from somewhere. So, here's the breakdown:   Proposed Premium Taxable Income 2004 Taxation Year 2005 and Subsequent Tax Years up to $20,000 No premium No premium $20,000 - $36,000 $150 $300 $36,000 - $48,000 $225 $450 $48,000 - $72,000 $300 $600 $72,000 - $200,000 $375 $750 more than $200,000 $450 $900      So that's how much it's going to cost, which is what I cared about at first, but then I read what they were going to be doing with that money and it kinda made some sense to me. Read the report.      I can however say, I don't like the fact that they're removing optical exams from OHIP coverage. Hopefully they'll be giving them IHOP coverage though.

Monday, May 17, 2004 10:10:20      Very bright in here today. They took away my blinds to clean them. Bastards. Got big news, don't wanna spoil it, so I'll let you know as soon as things are final...

Friday, May 14, 2004 11:17:08      So now I've got two access points in the office. Actually they're both Linksys BEFW11S4 version 4, so technically they aren't access points, they're routers. What I did is disable their internal DHCP servers, and plugged my network into them, so now they're behaving just like access points. I set the SSIDs and the WEP keys to the same thing so that I don't have to have anyone re-configure and they're on different channels so that they won't interfere with each other. I'm not sure if that's how it's supposed to be done, but it made sense to me when I read someone's technical support response. I'll have to wander around the office with Network Stumbler running to see what kind of responses it sees.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 12:57:21      I went out this morning to get my allergy test done. Apparently I'm allergic to pretty much everything. Cats, cockroaches, birch trees, dandelions, and ragweed are the biggest ones. The animal ones had gone down a bit before I was able to take the picture. If you click on the picture, the sections are labelled. They shaved my arm and then poked a bunch of holes in it. That's gonna be itchy once it starts to grow back. Anyway, they've prescribed immunotherapy. Basically it works like this; for sixteen weeks I get a shot every week, then for the next year one shot per month. Then we do it all again two more times. After three years they tell me that I could be completely immune to all of those things that I'm allergic to now. Except house work, apparently that unexplained allergy will never go away.      Since I had to take the time off, I scheduled Cricket's annual deally today too. So she got a couple shots, blood taken, etc... She weighs 60.7lbs for all of those who are interested.      Stu's computer is almost back to normal now too, saved all of his important stuff and am just waiting for partition stuff to complete and then I'm going to go to Tom's place to use his internet to do a quick windows update on his machine. Thursday, May 13, 2004 18:37:33 mom writes: Sorry, my genes got passed on! My allergies are about the same. We can talk about the allergy shots too, I've tried that too.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 18:49:58      Check out The Ultimate Office patent pending It's a little something that years of thought and thousands of dollars have gone into producing. A very detailed list of required items and how tos have been included. Also, you can sign up and post questions about setting up your very own ultimate office. Watch for snakes.

Monday, May 10, 2004 09:37:41      I got an email this morning from the lady who's running the raffle at work. Apparently all staff has been kindly asked to sell a book of 6 raffle tickets for the 25th anniversary edition Harley Davidson motorbike. If you would like a ticket, please drop me a line. They're $20 for one or $100 for a book of six and all proceeds go to support research and education scholorships in the horticultural industry.

Sunday, May 9, 2004 22:52:38      Happy Mother's Day! It's been a whole Mom's weekend this weekend. On Saturday we went over to my parents' place and Brianne cooked one of her patented feasts. 'twas deelish as always. Then today we went over to her parents' place and she cooked up another storm. I dined like a king all because I had a Mom. Pretty good deal if you ask me. Although, there's a lot of hard work to be done at the gym this week to work off the good eats.      The birds on the portch have eggs. I'll post pictures tomorrow, don't feel like getting the camera out right now.      On Saturday Stu's laptop just cacked. It's like the hard drive went missing. I still haven't figured out if it was a virus, but it just looks like a hardware failure, so I think it just might be that. Fortunately for him, it's not during school where he relies on his machine. Also, it looks like his data is (with many restarts with the drive in another machine) mostly salvageable. I haven't talked to him about it yet. I feel like a doctor, having to give bad news about a sickly patient.      This week is shaping up to be fairly busy. I've got tons to do at work, a lot of little side work that needs to be done and a workout schedule that demands respect. Not to mention some quality hometime.      All of my problems could be solved if we all just worked by a 36 hour clock. Think about it. It would work perfectly. You work for 10 hours a day instead of 8, you've got that much more time to get stuff done. You sleep for 10 hours instead of 8 as well. That way you'd feel much more rested. Then you still have 16 hours to do your own thing (about 2 for travelling). It would work perfectly. I think once I get more established I'm going to work on implementing that.

Friday, May 7, 2004 09:44:09      Tom asked this morning if he could put a server inside my network to run a backup name server and backup mail server. I've been thinking for a long time that I needed that same thing. That way if someone drives into my connection again, I'll be able to update my DNS so that I could at the very least show a backup page. MySQL announced that they will have MySQL Cluster coming out in Q3 this year, which is totally awesome. I won't have to build redundancy into my applications, I can let them have it done on a database level. That's going to be great for 100% uptime for my databases too. So anyway, I'm getting a server ready to go on to his network, and then we'll both benefit. The only down side that I can think of is that a lot of spammers and viruses target backup mail exchanges so we'll each be getting a lot of superfluous crap on our networks.

Friday, May 7, 2004 07:01:19      Let it be known that the funniest version of Die Hard 2: Die Harder is going to be on TBS at 8pm EDT tomorrow. The best line in that whole version was changed from "Yippee Kayyayya Mother Fucker" to "Yippee Kayyayya Mister Falcon". If you ask me it doesn't have the same ring to it. What's the new CRTC rule on saying shit these days? I've been watching the news more often lately and they keep saying shit instead of bleeping it.

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