A little bit of everything

I spent my first night in the new house last night. I got over there about 4pm with a load of stuff, just before it started to rain out. I ended up vacuuming the entire upstairs, mopping the kitchen floor twice, dusting all the kitchen cabinets, then cleaning the inside of them as well. I got my stove moved into place (it fits!! I was a little worried for a while -- there's only about 1/16th of an inch to spare) and even washed a few windows. Phew!

After all the cleaning was done, I started getting the kitchen set up, and it's most of the way ready. Tonight I hope to get the bathroom marginally outfitted.

Pixel is adjusting to the move quite nicely. She was a little scared at first and refused to come out of the basement for most of the night. But I woke up this morning with her curled up next to me on the bed, so she seems normal.

I woke up early this morning to the sound of the road graders backing up. Beep, Beep fricking beep. All. Morning. Long. :-P So I've been up since about 6am, which tends to make for a goofy Aaron. I'm not a morning person at all.

My internet connection still isn't hooked up out at the house -- well, it's there, but it's non-functional. So I'm back at mom and dad's place for the day so I can get work done. Hopefully they'll get it all resolved soon so I can move the office over into the new house.

Lis is up here tomorrow! I'm really excited to see her, it's been over four months, which is wayyyyy too long. But at the same time, I'm stressed because the house isn't perfect yet and I want it to be for when she gets here. So I'm resigning myself (and warning her) that the house is still a work-in-progress and will be for a while. :-P She's up here for an entire week, so I won't be working all of next week. I may or may not be posting anything to the blog over the course of the week either. It depends on how many entries I can get typed up today and whether I get access to an internet connection. ;-)

We've got a handful of fun things planned, including (but not limited to): checking out the U of M campuses (she wants to get her PhD, as do I), going to the casino, going hiking/biking around the area, going shopping (I am in desperate need of a wardrobe update -- Matt no longer brings me freebies from vendors!) and just generally being together. It's going to be a great week. I'm also really excited to show her my new house -- it's like my baby, and boy am I a proud papa!

I've started an interesting new project that's work-related in my ample spare time. I'm starting to work on an accessibility object for the RB framework so that your custom controls (and ours) can respond properly to things like screen readers. It's been an interesting project so far. I'm glad I worked on the ComboBox issue earlier since that got me back in the swing of implementing COM interfaces, which is what this project requires. But I still need to do a fair amount of education on the topic since I'm not too hip on all the COM interactions between things. So I suspect the side-project for the next while will be learning how to properly implement the IAccessible COM interface and respond to queries for accessibility information from the operating system. If I'm still feeling smart once I've taught myself how to do this, I may post an entry or two that's C++ related on how to implement this sort of thing youself. Of course, since most of you who are interested in programming are RB users, you won't have to worry too much about the horrible C++ details since I hope to get my work exposed at some point in the future. But for starters, I'm hoping to use it internally for getting things like the ListBox to be properly accessible. If that's a success, then I'll work on the API for exposing it to everyone. Pretty neat stuff! Better accessibility is always a great thing.

I've recently learned that not only is my readership expanding (I'm on pace to get about 11,000 visits this month! Whoa!), they're also the best readers in the world. :-) Thanks for the encouraging words while I vented and spewed profanities about. I really appreciated the support, it's always nice to know that the work I do outside of work is welcomed. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- I really do love helping people out. Seeing people succeed, and seeing what sort of awesome applications they create is really a blast for me.

I was browing my web stats this morning for the blog, and I noticed something funny. In the "Search Terms" section, I noticed that more people find my site while looking for non-RB things than anything else:

The other interesting thing is that I've used up almost 2 GB of bandwidth so far this month. Whoa! That's approaching a record month for me in that category too. Maybe I should post another 30 MB movie file of the house. ;-)

Well, time for me to wrap things up. I still have to run out to Sauk Rapids today to go pay Universal for putting in my driveway and get them to sign a lien waiver. So far I've been doing fine with the waivers -- it's just my damned framer (New Age Builders) who has been a pain in the ass. Unfortunately, he's been nothing but a pain in the ass since I hired him. The work his crews do is less than stellar, they tend to have attitude issues, and it's absolutely impossible to get ahold of him (nor does he ever call you back). I may end up having to drive all the way up to Freeport to get my waiver from him, in which case he won't be able to sit down for a week after I finish dressing him down about his business practices. Grr!

In any case, I should leave on a happy note instead of a cranky one. Bunny rabbits.