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Plunging into home ownership

We’ve decided that since we have to either buy or move again, we might as well look into buying a house. $182 000 can get a reasonably decent house around here and if we have to spend that much we might as well make it a house instead of a condo. Plus with a dog on the way a house will probably give us more space to deal with it.

A trip to the bookstore got us armed with a couple of house buying books which we’ve been reading to learn about the process. Quite frankly, it all seems quite overwhelming especially with the time frame we’re looking at (moving by July/August), but I’m sure that’s a sentiment many new home buyers experience.

We’ve already started with combing through various local real-estate sites and checking out MLS listings for areas we want to live in to get an idea of what’s out there and what kind of prices we’ll encounter.

I guess the next thing will be to find a good real estate agent. We’ll have to tap some of our friends that bought homes recently to get recommendations. And then navigating the home mortgage maze…

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Stuffed like a Butterball

Back home the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year. In the US, Boxing Day seems to be the biggest day of the year for returning things.
The wife and I spent our Boxing Day preparing and roasting 24 little chickens (those alleged Cornish game hens) for a party of 20 or so people that never materialized. So instead it was just a party of 13 or so people. And now there are a lot of extra little chickens filling the fridge.
They were tasty though, and I certainly won’t mind taking a few of them back home with me.
The problem with my holidays is that they usually aren’t. Unless we go away somewhere, we always seem to end up working, mostly catering for parties the wife’s folks are having. I guess it’s partly our fault…we seem to have developed a reputation for cooking really well. I suppose there are worse reputations to have.
Christmas day was a pleasant event. The wife’s family opens their gifts at the stroke of midnight (or as close to it as she can get). So we were up until about 2 AM Christmas Day exchanging and opening gifts. Santa was surprisingly good to me this year. I must have been a very good boy.
Then it was off to bed, and then breakfast at her brother’s place. Followed by more gift opening, and then the roasting of the turkey. Christmas feasting was at 5, and then everybody lapsed into a food induced coma for a few hours before heading off to the airport at 9PM to pick up the wife’s cousin. Then it was back to the compound and her aunt and uncle’s place for more gift exchanging and gift opening.
All of that made Christmas a long, tiring but satisfying day. Lots of good food, lots of presents, and best of all lots of family to hang around with.

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Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas Eve, and there are a surprisingly large number of presents under the tree with my name on them. Santa must think I’ve been a good boy this year.
Preparations for tomorrow’s feasting started today with the Tart Cranberry Dipping Sauce and the mac & cheese. We ended up with a monster 24lb turkey this year because the wife didn’t want to waste her time on a measly 13 pounder, which was the next smallest size they had at the store. We should have plenty of leftovers to take home with us.
Just about to get the turkey prepped for a nice long soak in the brine. The bird will soak for a good 12-15 hours or so before it goes into the oven for roasting. Then I get one of my favourite jobs, carving it up.
From the wife and I, we wish all of you a happy and safe holiday season and much prosperity and happiness for 2005!

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A trip down CPU memory lane

Tom’s Hardware has a 2 part series looking at Intel and AMD CPUs going all the way back to the 8086, the mother of all x86 processors.
From the introduction to the first article:

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts, because here we go. After 12 weeks of grueling and meticulous testing in our Munich THG lab, our biggest CPU test of all time is complete. Marathon, all-night monitoring sessions, system hiccups and crashes and the logistics involved in coordinating such a feat often short-circuited our caffeine-addled nerves. But then again, this project was about more than just tallying up CPU benchmarks

Benchmarks results aside (those are in Part 2), I thought it was an interesting brief look at the history of the x86 class of CPUs. A bunch of cool diagrams and big big CPU comparison charts to dazzle the eyes with.

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Festive glowing cheer

I thought the USB Christmas tree on my desk was looking a little lonely, so I thought the USB Snowman would be good company for it.

It’s cute looking, about the same size as the Christmas tree. Black painted eyes and mouth. The noze is a funny orangy thing that curves up. The toque and scarf are pink though, which was a little bit unexpected. Good thing I’m confident enough in my manliness that it’s not really a big deal for me. Arrrr.

It cycles through the same colours as the Christmas tree does and looks pretty neat in the dark. There are stars decorating it’s belly, although they’re not all that obvious. Maybe I”ll touch them up with a little bit of paint.

I still think at $13 it’s a little overpriced though. 3.5 stars out of 5 stars for this one.