The Howerter Blog

We just finished our Labor day party in our new house. It was really a good time. Thanks, to everyone who came and brought food. It couldn’t have been a better day. The pool water could have been a little warmer though.  It was nice to have a house that is big enough to have a party in.

Well, we have been working every night for almost two weeks now and we are almost all unpacked. I do not like moving. The next time I move I want it to be either into a nursing home or the morgue. Last night we were able to finish unpacking the garage and get our cars into it.

Well, as some of you may have noticed, the blog had been down for a couple of days. We moved last weekend and I have just now gotten all the servers back up. I had to retrofit a room in our garage to be my server room. Anyway, I will be taking some pictures of the house soon and post those.

We put an offer on a house and the sellers accepted. We are closing on August 18th. That leaves us homeless for 2 days. We are still waiting on an appraisal to make sure we are not overpaying. Once that is done, I will probably start getting excited. I am trying not to now, just in case we don’t end up getting the house. It has an inground pool and a huge backyard. I will post some pics once we get in there.

Well, the sellers of the house we like refused our offers. I guess it is back on the hunt.

Last night we got the final copies of our contract to sell and put a bid on another house. The sellers have until 5:00 pm tonight to counter or accept. We really like this house, so I hope they like our offer.

Yesterday, we officially accepted a bid from a buyer on our house. The closing date is set for August 15. It is a kind of wierd feeling selling your first house. I was excited and then a little sad. We are ready to move, but it is starting a new chapter in our lives. Tonight we are putting a bid on a house. If we get the bid, I will post pictures.

I purchased one Media Center Extender for our bedroom that we use quite a bit. I am wanting to put one in the living room so that I don’t have to connect the Media Center directly to the TV. While researching this I realized that I couldn’t add my music or pictures to the extender upstairs because they are on my file server. The extender creates a user account on the Media Center and logs in to have access to all the content. Since my music and pictures weren’t on the Media Center, I had a problem. Luckly, someone else has a not-so-simple network configuration like mine. It turns out that if you create a login script for the extender user mapping the drives you need with other credentials, the extender will allow you to add those folders to the library. It works very nicely. I believe I will be purchasing at least one other Media Center Extender. Here is the link to the original article.

It really brightens my day when I read about Apple’s iTunes servers crashing and people having to wait hours to get their beloved iPhones. It also appears that you can’t download iTunes right now since the download link on Apple’s website isn’t working. It is funny to me that people are standing in line for hours waiting for a 3G phone since they have been widely available from other manufactures for at least a year. I wonder how this activation problem fits into Apple’s mantra of “It just works”?

Today was the first day I rode my bike to work. It was really fun. Ryan and I rode from his house and it took us about 30 minutes. We got lost in 2 neighborhoods. We should be able to do it quicker next time.