…what day is this?

I don’t why I’m so streaky with this blog. It should be very easy for me to make an entry once a day or so, but I just don’t find the time.

Here we go again, though. I found a site that you can track your net worth online by making entries for your assets and your liabilities called NetworthIQ. I know products like Microsoft Money probably do the same thing, but this one is free online.

I bought a couple of web programming books the other day. One is on ASP.NET 2.0 using C# and the other is about PHP5. I already know a little bit about C#, but PHP is quite new to me.

After a few hours of installing and configuring PHP5, I am ready to begin learning. Not sure if this is going to be a language I will be using a lot, but I figure that anything that you can learn is worthwhile.

Every year, it goes so fast. The Thanksgiving weekend is a nice break to be able to get together with family and friends to start the holiday season, but like every other long weekend, it seems to fly by.

It seems like I was just out at Pickle Park enjoying some Captain Cokes, even though it was Wednesday night. As I write this, it is 10:30 Sunday night. Time indeed flies when you’re having fun. Oh, well, just have two long weekends in December to look forward to now.

I understand the concept of daylight savings and I love it…in the spring when we gain an hour of daylight. In the fall, when we lose daylight, I always wonder why we should lose that daylight.

Why don’t we just keep daylight savings the whole year? In my opinion it is similar to when people get a huge refund in April instead of having that money throughout the year.

Why do cable companies try to screw people over?  I just signed up with Comcast last week and got digital cable with HD service and high speed internet.   When I set it up online, the quote said that it was going to be 40 bux a month for the cable with HD and 43 per month for internet.

I just got my first bill in the mail and they were trying to charge me over 100 bux for both.  WTF!?  I decided to call them and find out what the deal wass.  After they checked out my account…making me wait some obligatory amount of time, the rep comes back and says that I can upgrade my cable to the next package and keep my “performance” (6Mbps) internet for 77 dollars per month, not counting fees and taxes.  That is even cheaper than the original package that I should’ve been charged.  If I wouldn’t have called, would they have given me that deal?  I don’t think so…

I spent the better part of the day today trying to fix my brother’s car.  He has a 2002 Chrysler Sebring that has some sort of problem with the battery getting drained.  I figured it might be an alternator problem since the battery doesn’t stay charged, so I helped swap it out for a different one.

First of all, to disconnect the battery, you have to take off the front left wheel and remove a splash guard to get to it.  What a joke.  Then, to take the alternator out, you have to disconnect an A/C hose from the compressor because it runs down right in front of the alternator.  I had a helluva time figuring out how to keep the refrigerant from leaking out.  So I went ghetto style and used a vice grips to clamp the hose from the reservoir to the compressor.

I finally got the old one out and the new one in, so we took it for a spin and the car just died about a 1/4 mile down the road.  I have come to the conclusion that it is not the alternator after all.  There must be a short somewhere in his electrical system that keeps draining his battery.  Oh, well.  If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

My friend Steve is in town from Portland this week, so he, Justin and I all decided to go out to downtown Minneapolis. We had a great time. We bar-hopped til about 1230 or so. We went to Brother’s, Drink, Fatso’s, and Gluek’s, where Steve decided to sing a little karaoke. “What I Got” by Sublime was the song of choice. It was awesome. Here he is:

After that we decided to go get some pizza at Pizza Luce.  That is by far the best pizza I have ever had.  As my friend Lance says, “It’s an institution.”  When we got back to my place, we decided to play Halo 3 online and we all proceeded to get stomped by all the 12 yr olds that spend all their free time on there and now know every board “better than they know their own neighborhood.” - Steve

All in all, it was a great night.

Well, I have finally taken the plunge that is home ownership. I closed on Friday, Oct 19 and began moving my stuff in. What a pain!! I hate moving. I should’ve paid someone else to move my stuff for me.

I like my new place a lot. They finally delivered my new furniture today. I got a new living room set, dining room table and chairs, and a new bedroom set. I feel like I am an adult now, instead of just a post-college drifter.

Spending the last three-plus years in the Army really showed me how much I appreciate being stable. It’s a nice feeling knowing that I won’t have to move out of here in a year or less…

Just started learning web development with ASP.NET and C#.  I haven’t done any programming for a while, so I’m a little rusty.  It will come back to me. 

 This is so much better than the days of HTML, so much more powerful.  I still have a lot to learn.  I won’t have much time this weekend, either.  I move into my new townhome on Friday, so most of my time will be taken up takin’ care of that crap.

So, here I am trying to create another blog.  I tried to make one a couple years ago, but I never kept it updated.  Maybe this time, I will keep it going.

 I am finally getting my own place this week.  I bought a townhome in Plymouth, MN.  It’s pretty sweet, too.  I will upload some photos of it…after I actually move in and take some.