The Middle

So it's no big secret that I'm a big Battlestar Galactica fan. Heralded as the show that "Killed TV", the people behind it embrace a new model of pushing a TV show. There are blogs and vlogs by the creators. There are podcasts of DVD-style commentary for every episode that are released just before airtime. They'll send you an SMS to remind you the show's coming on. You can even watch old episodes from last season streamed right from the scfi.com website (buried in some flash, no link, sorry). All of these have kept me excited about the show, but the latest outreach pushed me over the top and compelled me to write something. From the show's main page:

VCR Alert: This episode will run two minutes overtime!

Not "We're screwing with you by shifting the showtime around a little", but rather, "Hey, please record the show however you like. Watch it over & over. But don't miss the end of this one, it's that good". Outstanding.

I'm going to have to buy some Season 1 DVD's next week.

Since my new house is NOT next to a bar, this will have to do.

Add another one to the list.

Item: Home Appraisal

Cost: $300

Why: You go to a banker and say, "I'd like to borrow, let's say $100K, for this house I just made an offer to buy". Now, unless you've got a horrible credit rating or some other bad deeds in your past, the banker will jump all over you and try to work out a deal to lend you the money. Very early in that process, probably after a quick credit check, is the ordering of an appraisal on the home in question. This basically is just so the banker knows that you're not trying to borrow the $100K to pay for a house that's worth $75K. In fact, they'll want to see an LTV (that's Loan To Value ratio) somewhere around 80%. So the banker calls up his buddy, who does a quick search of home prices in the neighborhood, maybe drives by and takes a picture, and then types up a report that says the house is worth some value that's equal to, or slightly higher, than the value you agreed to purchase it for. He then charges the banker $300 for this 'service', which of course is then charged directly to you.

Fun with inline auto-highlighting of text

class Foo
  def bar
    "abcde"
  end
end

Now that's good stuff.

Just a test. Gotta love shiny new typo features.

Well, if you're seeing this, I've finished up my move to the shiny new servers at Textdrive.

I'd been running a dedicated machine for the last two years or so, but as nice as it sounds to have your own machine sitting out there on the internet, I really wasn't using it for anything other than hosting. With that in mind, I figured it wasn't really worth it to continue paying the premium required to use a whole machine.

And since this was definitely not my weekend for good football karma, I wanted to come out of it with at least a little something accomplished.

If you're one of the umpteen people running off of the hiveserver MT install, that migration will be happening shortly, yell at J$ to get it done.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 for the Mac simply blows Safari out of the water, performance wise.

I've still got to play with it for awhile to test the stability (it is a Beta, after all), but with this performance there's no way I can go back to using Safari.

It's hard to say if it's caught up with the Windows port, but the improvements are amazing over the 1.0.x releases.

Seriously. Super-fast.

It's rare enough that I get to catch the Buckeyes down here in NC, much less a blowout.

Then when ABC decides the game isn't exciting enough and switches to Oklahoma-TCU in the middle of the thrid quarter, it really ruins my day.

Texas is going down.