patrickrhett

Yesterday marked my 70th day without smoking, and I finally feel strong enough to go out and have a drink with all you people I’ve been not going out and having a drink with. That is, if all my time wasn’t currently being sucked up by our new house. We’re set to close on the 12th or 13th, and the next 2-4 weeks after that will be pretty full, what with the flooring installation and the moving and all. (Do you have experience installing engineered hardwood flooring? Do you have your own tools? Do you mind being paid with beer and effusive praise? Call me.) And of course there will be the endless pictures to document the whole process, some of which will undoubtedly find there way here. I’ll keep you posted, I have to go pack some stuff now.

19. Inside Man

Good performances, entertaining, we love Jodie Foster bitching it up in a power suit, but where’s the Spike Lee? Does this movie mean anything or make you think? Not really. But it’s entertaining.

I always thought this one was pretty simple. Monday is the first day of the week, Sunday is the last. Monday you go to work, Sunday is the day of rest, the last day of the week-“end”, the Sabbath, at least in my predominately Christian surroundings. Of course there are variations around the world, differn’t strokes and all that, but here at home, right in the middle of the USA, I’m on solid ground… then The Lovely Wife tells me otherwise.

“Just look at a calendar”, she says. Sure enough, it runs Sunday through Saturday. She even tells me a kid at school got a quiz question wrong because he said Thursday was the 4th day of the week, not the 5th. This all seems pretty inconsequential, except that it runs counter to everything I thought I knew about something as simple as the days of the week. So of course I turn to Google.

WebExhibits has Calendars Through the Ages. Excellent, this will clear it all up.

What Is the First Day of the Week?

The Bible clearly makes the Sabbath the last day of the week, but does not share how that corresponds to our 7 day week. Yet through extra-biblical sources it is possible to determine that the Sabbath at the time of Christ corresponds to our current ‘Saturday.’ Therefore it is common Jewish and Christian practice to regard Sunday as the first day of the week (as is also evident from the Portuguese names for the week days). However, the fact that, for example, Russian uses the name “second” for Tuesday, indicates that some nations regard Monday as the first day.

In international standard ISO-8601 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has decreed that Monday shall be the first day of the week.

So I’ve got the Commie Bureaucrats and everyone else is against me. How does this happen? Are you all S-S people, or are there other M-S adherents out there? Leave a comment and tell me which you think is right.

The owner of the house on M accepted our offer. Don’t tell anyone, because I don’t wanna jinx it. The past few days have seen a house inspection (good) and major appliance shopping (weird). We’re pulling together the last few necessary documents (I’ll believe that when I see it) and are scheduled to close on April 13th. Finally I’ll have room for the Kettler KADETT Outrigger Style Rowing Machine. As soon as you buy it for me. I can’t afford it, I’m buying a house.

So if you’ve been paying attention you know we didn’t get our first choice house – twice. We’ll call that house Tisdale. We loved Tisdale, but it’s gone, we’re over it. Even if it came back on the market I would no longer be interested.

Since then we placed an offer on another house in the same neighborhood, we’ll call this one Gault. We offered the asking price, to which Gault’s owner countered with 2K under asking and us paying all closing costs. Gault seemed to be an over-priced fixer-upper to begin with, so we were underwhelmed.

The same day we got that news (yesterday) I saw M. We’ll keep the street name quiet for now, as my realtor has made me paranoid about divulging anything on a house in play. We’re submitting an offer this morning, as M is bigger, better and cheaper than Gault. It’s also on a beautiful tree-lined street with friendly neighbors, cute puppies, and singing birds… and it’s about 3 seconds from the Lovely Wife’s work. I’m pretty sure the sun always shines there, but not too brightly, and that it never gets too hot or too cold. We’ll never get it.

This is very long, and probably boring to anyone but me, but I’m pissed, so here goes…

My domain was registered with Yahoo. I wanted to transfer my domain to a different registrar. Because it is a .org domain, I have to get an auth code from my current registrar. I asked them for one. They said they couldn’t give me one since I was really registered through MelbourneIT, and I would have to cancel my service with Yahoo so they could transfer me to MelbourneIT, then I could transfer away from MelbourneIT to who I wanted. Still with me? Ok. So I did all that.

On January 24th, I cancelled my Yahoo service and sent the following email to them:

My account has now been cancelled. Please let me know when my domain has been released to MelbourneIT.

No response.

February 1st:

Can you please let me know if my domain has been released to MelbourneIT and, if not, how long this will take?

Nothing.

March 4th:

This is my third email requesting that you please confirm whether or not my domain has been released to MelbourneIT. Please respond.

Still nothing.

On March 21st I sent my forth email, but this time I copied semel@yahoo.com (Terry Semel is Yahoo’s CEO) to see if that would make any difference:

This is my fourth email requesting that you please confirm whether or not my domain has been released to MelbourneIT. Please respond.

Lo and behold, I got a response the next day:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Web Hosting.

Your domain name has been released from our reseller list. You should
receive an email shortly from Melbourne IT, the domain registrar, with
your domain’s new Registry Key.

You must now manage and renew your domain name registration directly
with the domain registrar.

Please do not hesitate to reply if you need further assistance.

Regards,

Andre

Yahoo! Customer Care

Finally, I got them to transfer me. Oh Happy Day. But wait… on the same day, from MelbourneIT, I get this:

Dear atomon.org Licence Holder,

This notice is to inform you that that the License for your Domain Name atomon.org expired on 08-Mar-2006 and has now been >>DEACTIVATED< < _______________________________________________________________________ WARNING****THIS DOMAIN NAME HAS BEEN DEACTIVATED AND WILL BE DELETED ________________________________________________________________________ Please note that this Domain Name has been deactivated. This means that the web site and any e-mail services attached to this Domain Name no longer function. >>> Payment is required IMMEDIATELY to reactivate this Domain Name.

WHAT THE FUCK!?

So Yahoo waited 3 months to transfer me to MelbouneIT, 3 months during which I couldn’t check my status because Yahoo made me cancel my service with them, and by the time they finally got around to it my domain name had expired. Now MelbourneIT is sending me a threatening sounding email trying to get me to renew with THEM, the people I’ve been trying to get away from for the past QUARTER-YEAR.

I just sent an email to MelbourneIT asking for the auth code I should have had 3 months ago, I’ll give them 3 days, them I’m copying their CEO.

So the house that we wanted, and then lost, went back on the market again at the end of last week. We don’t know why, as there were supposed to be several backup bidders, but it did. I haven’t been saying anything about it here because I didn’t want it to dominate my posts, but then I didn’t really post anything else because it was dominating me. So we bid again. And we lost again. I told our realtor that I’d just wait for it to go on the market again so we could bid on it a third time. I’ll just stalk this house for the rest of my life, waiting for it to become available so I can bid on it over, and over, and over. Or not, whatever. Houses are stupid.

18. Corpse Bride

Not bad, but as far as goth stop action full length theatrical releases go, you and I both know it’s been done better.

17. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

I was a little wary of this after the relative disappointment of Wedding Crashers, but it was much funnier. More people got hit with stuff, and there were ball jokes. Lesson: don’t overthink the comedy.

16. Maria Full of Grace

I’m not sure what I think of this movie, I just saw it and I don’t think it lends itself to an immediate review like the last movie (or the next one). First impressions: acting was very good. Story was interesting. I don’t know if I understand why she ran, it felt like it was needed so we could meet some other people and make the movie longer. We’ll see how it sits in a day or two.