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.

On my way to work today, I was passed by a FedEx truck that was moving like something on the Autobahn. The guy was weaving in and out of rush hour traffic like an expert race car driver and passed by like the rest of traffic was standing still.

I was utterly impressed. It makes me want to ship something FedEx. For what it’s worth, the guy was driving an Overnight Delivery truck. I kind of wonder if he personally drove the packages across the country for their next day deliveries. At a speed like that, I could believe it.

(All you people wondering how Santa can deliver billions of presents in one night - he gets that FedEx guy to drive.)

I’ve got a very slight cold and went to bed last night after a healthy dose of DayQuil (we didn’t have any NyQuil). I slept better last night than I’ve slept in, like, a month. Love it.

Of course, I’m dead tired this morning.

I went and traded in my previously viewed copy of Bad Boys II at the Hollywood Video store I bought it at a couple of days ago because DVD X Rescue couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m running a test on the new copy I got now - it’s already gotten farther than the last copy.

Can anyone tell me why ginger ale is always so expensive at the store? Every other 2-liter product on the market can be on sale for $1, but the ginger ale is always like $2.50. Why is that? Is the demand so high that it never needs to go on sale? Bah.