Illusory Follies

This week has been full of geekiness so far. I’m in D.C. on business travel doing all sorts of boring stuff for work. Thankfully, I’ve found a little time when I’m done with work and while I’m not on the phone with my wife to do a bunch of random time-consuming stuff. I reinstalled Linux on my laptop (and this time did some things right). I tried to install OS X on my laptop (there’s an Intel version that you can run on a standard PC) but I need a separate hard disk for it and I’m not that rich. I’ve also been playing around with some new software and taking a look at XGL (a coworker of mine gave me a LiveCD to check out). Very slick stuff.

All for now — it’s not that exciting but it’s something to pass the time before I head home to the family…

My family has been in the house hunting process for a bit now. It’s an annoying market in the South Sound area and we’re definitely not getting a “deal” on anything we’ve considered (but at least it’s better than the D.C. market). What’s been amazing is how much guidance we’ve received from God on this. I’m normally much more of the type of guy who considers a decision, weighs the pro’s and con’s, prays that the right decision is made, and plunges in. However, with houses it’s been a lot more nerve-wracking. It’s a huge amount of money, it’s very hard to determine what you’re getting and what it’s really worth, and it’s also very hard to tell if you like a place.

So far, we’ve successfully avoided getting two different houses. The first was very nice in many ways but they didn’t take our initial offer (which was barely shaving anything off of what they were asking — about 2% of the total cost). I liked the place but was concerned that the price was too high. We sort of “let the fleece out” and determined that if they took our first offer, we would go with it. They didn’t and we backed out. The second house was just this weekend. I didn’t like it quite as much but the price seemed good (certainly relative to others on the market). It was also an ideal place to start with a new family and it really was quite beautiful. Just prior to putting an offer down (our agent was literally driving over to our place) the listing agent called to notify us that the sellers had decided to not sell their home at this time (some sort of family crisis). That doesn’t happen very often…

I guess people could look at these events as just coincidences (even unfortunate coincidences since we didn’t get “what we wanted”!) but I very strongly disagree. It’s obvious to me that we’re being Guided and I’m confident that we’re going to get what God wants us to get.

I just got in on the Gmail for “Your Domain” Beta.

Neat stuff — it’s basically just the Gmail interface but they’re providing “domain level” administration. Basically, if you don’t mind keeping your email on Google’s “Anti-Federal Government” servers, you can have a really slick interface.

I’ve already found and reported some minor bugs, but it looks really promising! Here are some screenshots: