This is the first follow-up to a Traffic Asshole Of The Week that I’ve posted, which, I think, makes this a fairly momentous occasion. Like we need a moment of silence because someone out there was stupid enough to make it to TAotW twice.

So, those sort of following this thing realize that Jenn got front-ended at a stop light last week. After being given some faulty insurance information, it turns out that the lady at fault was driving on a suspended license. And why, you might ask, did she have her license suspended?

For driving without insurance, of course.

Needless to say, this is not terribly surprising to me, but it is a highly annoying thing nonetheless. My insurance rates are sky high and I only have one accident - a rear-ender going about 10 mph - on my record. Why? Because jackoffs like this feel the need to back up for no apparent reason in rush hour traffic and not carry insurance.

Jenn has followed up with the police and got the insurance information they have on file for the lady, which is also incorrect. We’ve gotten no call back from the lady, either, so it seems Jenn’s going to be paying the $200 deductible and filing the uninsured motorist claim.

The real kicker - as if you hadn’t already read it - is that this bitch had the outright balls to file an at-fault claim against Jenn. The sheer audacity of it all makes me want to take up arms and hunt her down.

Apparently there are also other claims against this lady - tickets and whatnot that she’s evading - and there’s some sort of a warrant out for her… but (and this is something I don’t get) the police, for some reason, can’t just go to her house and arrest her. Like, every time they show up, she’s not there, and that’s stopping them. Shit, I may just go rob a bank, and when the cops show up to arrest me, I just won’t answer the door. That seems to be a viable thing now.

If it was up to me, the fucking SWAT team would be at this lady’s house. They’d swing in through the windows on ropes and break down the doors with battering rams. You know what? They wouldn’t even have to arrest her. I’d accept the property damage on her part as due pennance for the whole ordeal. Maybe they could shoot her in the meaty part of her leg or something. That’d be fine, too.

What a load of ridiculous crap. Somehow I’d like to envision a world where people take *gasp* responsibility for their actions, but I believe my Utopian dreams are just not meant to be. I’ve been told I hold too high of expectations for people and I should lower them lest I be constantly disappointed. This right here is proof positive that’s the case.

I found that Pelican makes an A/V selector/switcher that works on component video and is reasonably affordable. I have an HD cable box, PS2, and DVD player, all three of which do component video, but my TV only has two component video inputs. This might be something to look into. Similar products seem to go for more… maybe a bargain?

Jenn and I spent five or six hours driving around to between 10 and 12 different houses on Saturday with our realtor and the best we got was a house that we wouldn’t have minded living in, but nothing that called to us.

We found one listing that we totally fell in love with, but when we got to the address it turned out someone had listed the wrong picture with the address. We were beyond disappointed, because that was the house. That really sucked. I mean, it was located right by the local landfill and I was still sold. Our realtor is going to contact the person who listed the article and see where that house actually is.

I had hoped this wouldn’t be a three-month process the way several people had told me it would be, but I guess that’s just how it is.

I did get the paperwork from my mortgage broker in the mail on Saturday, though, and now that it’s all signed and off to her, we can be a little more serious about having money and getting this house thing done. Not that I wasn’t serious before, mind you, but now I’ve actually signed stuff. That makes it all official-like.

I threw together a quick tip that I posted to MSD2D about how to integrate user presence information into web parts. I saw a couple of the stock Microsoft parts doing this and thought it would be good to use for some of our web parts since we also take advantage of the Live Communications Server internally. One good application of this: I wrote a web part that displays a list of the current WSS site administrators (so users know who to contact to get more than just reader permissions) and threw their presence info in there so if someone wanted to request permissions or ask a question, it was right there for them.

I’m thinking I should put together a series of articles talking about how to build that “list site admins” web part. It’s actually not as easy as you might think, since you have to run the part as an administrator rather than as the currently logged in user, and then it gets trickier still if you try to use the same web part on a WSS site that resides underneath a SharePoint Portal Server “My Site” (because of the way administrators are set up there).

I’ve finally received a new batch of 34 properties to look at from my realtor. Based on location and features, I’ve narrowed it down to 8, and that includes the two that Jenn and I already agreed we wanted to see. We may narrow it down further; I’ve let a couple slide through that are slightly farther south than what we want, but they’re in brand new neighborhoods, so we’ll see. I know I may be opening myself up for something bad neighborhood-wise, which is not going to fly.

We’ll look at those online tonight and then tomorrow when we see the realtor we’ll tell him which ones we’re interested in. I don’t want to spend all damn day driving around willy-nilly - I’m very much a get-in-get-out sort of person.

I’ll have to remember to measure the TV so we can see where it might go in some of these places.