Tomorrow Jenn and I will be going to check out three more houses and see if anything compares with “the one that got away.” They all seem reasonably promising, I’ll just have to remind myself not to go in with any preconceived notions.

In the meantime, my parents, who haven’t actively been looking for anything in particular, seem to have found their ideal townhouse out of nowhere and my father is now trying to figure out how to get them into it as soon as possible. I’m happy for them, but I continue to be aghast at the idea of moving out of a disconnected house into a situation where you’re going to have neighbors. Just this evening, Jenn and I were laughing in our room when the guy next door started pounding on the wall. Apparently we were being too loud or something (of course, his alarm will go off and wake us up on the weekend at 5:30a, so his opinion doesn’t hold a lot of water with me). I think they’ve forgotten what that’s like. Oh, well. I guess this is one of those situations where you let them make their own mistakes.

Either way, I’m happy for them, but at the same time, I’m pissed off that I’ve been totally searching for a while now and haven’t had any luck, while they just stumble across their dream home. Where’s my dream home?

I went to the dentist yesterday morning to have my teeth cleaned. Not the most exciting procedure in the world, but I gotta keep these pearly yellows clean.

So I got the cleaning done and made it all the way to the final exam where the dentist comes in and pokes around in your mouth for a couple of seconds when he declared that one of my fillings was “rough” on top and needed to be smoothed out (I hadn’t noticed, but maybe that’s just me) and another of my fillings was acting like a “wedge” and my tooth was cracking so the filling would have to be replaced.

Thus, I went in again this morning to have the royal treatment. I got the gas, I got the numbing gel, I got the shots, and I got a new filling. All the while I listened to a little Blue Man Group on the iPod.

What really killed me was the part when I left and found out how much I owed. I have a 10% responsibility on the bill; insurance covers 90%. I ended up paying $78. That means a filling costs $780. Isn’t that pretty exorbitant? I was only there for a frickin’ hour! Maybe I should be in the medical profession.

Thank goodness they take Visa.

My Viewing SharePoint Site Administrators web part/tutorial is MSD2D Tip Of The Week (at least, via the email newsletter they send out), but the email newsletter had my name and article title but the body to last week’s tip. If you want to see it, check it out on the site. It walks through the creation of a web part that you can put on a SharePoint site (WSS or SPS) and see the list of administrators for that site (a handy thing if you have a lot of sites and people want to know who to contact for help).

I will be following this up with an additional tutorial at some point because there are some security foibles you have to work around in SharePoint that the web part doesn’t address. For example, My Sites are each individual site collections, each with a different root-level administrator - by default, there are no common administrators on WSS sites you create under My Site, and the web part I wrote about uses the site administration group to get access to the list of users and determine Administrators for the site.

What I ended up having to do to get around it was create a “helper web service” that I could call from the part such that I could run the web service as the ASP.NET process user (thus having full access to all sites, including stuff under My Sites), which, in turn, uses the web services exposed by WSS to retrieve the data. It’s the “long way around,” but since you have to be an Administrator in order to get any user information, I don’t see any other way to do it. You have to emulate an Administrator, and that’s the only way to do it on a large scale, and for multiple servers/sites (which is what we have to do).

Saturday Jenn and I went out house hunting with the realtor again. This time, however, we met with success - we found a beautiful house that had everything we wanted. We walked through and loved everything about it. Very spacious, beautiful construction, excellent floor plan, lots of character. Perfect.

You know when people tell you that when you walk into a house you just sort of “know” whether that’s the house for you? We knew. It was awesome.

We went through a couple more houses just to make sure, but we couldn’t stop thinking about that one. We decided to make an offer.

The realtor went back to the office to draw up the paperwork and told us to go hang out at Starbucks or something for a half hour while things got prepared.

Twenty minutes or so later, I got a call from the realtor.

Someone made an offer the day before on our house and it was accepted. So, from the category “a day late and a dollar short,” we were a day late.

sigh…

I guess we’re going to take a day and go through some more this weekend, but I don’t think we have that many now that we want to see. I know much better what features I’m looking for in a house (at least, I know all the things about the house we lost that I would like to see in any future prospects) and none of the ones we have seen so far even come close.

So… the search continues. Much to my dismay.

In related news, our next door neighbors moved out of their apartment this weekend. It made me very jealous, though honestly I don’t know if they’re moving to a house or just another apartment. Either way, I couldn’t help but feel like it should be me doing the moving out.

What is it about developers that requires them to practice poor hygiene? I went to a Microsoft developer event and the sour body odor stink was nigh unto overwhelming. Besides that, I think it’s mandatory to have some sort of respiratory issue requiring you huff and puff like you’re working out the largest crap of your life.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this phenomenon, and I think it’s high time someone did something about it. Maybe that’s why they hand out t-shirts - as a subtle hint to folks that they need to change clothes sometimes. If that’s the case, I suggest the hint is too subtle. Perhaps it’s time for “Microsoft soap-on-a-rope” or “Deodorant 2003.”

(My suspicions were confirmed on this point when I more closely investigated the tag on the shirt I got from the event. See for yourself.)

Oh, and I don’t claim to be a fashion guru, but I’m pretty sure the Hawaiian shirt, khaki pants, and Birkenstocks-with-no-socks combo does not fall under “haute couture.” (There were two of those there.)

I went to Mr. Bill’s Trivia again last night with Andrew and Susan and crew. Always a good time. Andrew laid off the beer a bit this time so he didn’t go shouting the answers to the questions for the world to hear, but Susan spilled her drink in her lap after getting worked up about one of the questions so I almost had to cut her off.

It was confirmed once again last night that Jenn and I think pretty much the same thought process entirely. It began with a conversation Andrew and I had about reality TV:

Andrew: Do you watch reality TV? Travis: Yeah, Survivor and sometimes American Idol. You? A: Both of those. Oh, and Average Joe. T: Is that the one where the guys wear the masks? A: No, it’s the one where the lady has to choose between a group of average guys and a group of models. T: Who’d she choose last season? A: The model. T: Of course she did. Was there ever any doubt?

*** Time passes… conversations change, the trivia game continues, and somehow someone starts talking about reality TV again… ***

Jenn: So you like reality TV? A: I watch a couple of shows. Average Joe… J: Is that the one where the guys wear the masks?

I think you see where that’s going.

I ended up eating way too much - a huge nacho, an order of cheese sticks, an order of potato skins, and three iced teas - and this morning I can still taste the potato skins. I really need to just cut back when I’m there.

Anyway, that was a good time. It’s always fun to hang out with those guys. Plus, Andrew finally won something at the trivia game ($1 off his meal), so his bad luck streak is broken.

Super Diamond is coming Saturday, March 13, to the Crystal Ballroom and both Jenn and I are thinking this group needs to go experience the Surreal Neil. Andrew’s firmly against it, which will make it all that much more fun. Doesn’t look like we have a hockey game that night (is the season over already?) so it’d be cool.

In entirely other news, it turns out Hasbro is releasing (or re-releasing?) the “original trilogy” line of Star Wars action figures. I never got a Millennium Falcon and I’ve always wanted one. I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want it. Maybe I’ll have to get one now.