We are making an offer on a home we looked at today. Spent a few hours kicking the tires. It’s in Windsor Forest, off of Durant Road.

Tomorrow we go to sign the paperwork. If the deal goes through, we could have sold our current house and closed on our new one within a span of seven weeks. Not too bad, considering.

I can’t wait until all of this is behind us because I feel like we’ve been short-changing Hallie. All these hours devoted to houses is time taken away from our daughter. I’m so glad that the end appears near for all this hassle.

I’m finally back in town after a week away. Had a fun time reacquainting myself with my wife and daughter. Check out Hallie‘s page for the play-by-play on that.

The flight home was interesting. There was a crowd of people at my gate trying to get to Manchester, NH. Their plane was delayed well past its original departure, so the gate area was overflowing with people. The Raleigh plane was only a little bit late in arriving. It was overbooked, however.

I waited too late to get an earlier flight. The 5 and 7 PM planes were all full. Which means some of the folks on my plane may also have been stuck with the late flight. The gate agent pleaded for volunteers to be bumped to the next morning’s flights, but few if any people accepted.

I seriously considered accepting that offer. I didn’t have much scheduled for Friday and would get home around 11 AM. Kelly was okay with my staying, since we both like free airfare. Only real problem was my need to pick up new contact lenses by noon Friday or else suffer through the weekend without them. I decided to keep my seat.

Once the plane was full (and I mean every last seat), the flight attendents pleaded once again for volunteers. A man was waiting who desperately needed to fly that night. Even when we learned he was on his way to a funeral, no one jumped. An attendent mumbled “wow, a bunch of toughies” as she went down the aisle.

As the plane’s door was closed, I couldn’t help but think of that poor guy who just lost his chance of attending that funeral. It could have been totally bogus, but it did get me thinking. What if the funeral was for someone really close to him? It’s bad enough losing someone you love, but to also miss your chance to pay your respects must feel as low as you can get.

The whole flight back, I kept thinking how I’d feel in his shoes. There were no heroes around when he needed one. I could have made his day but chose not to. And I regretted it. Because someday, that guy could be me.

While I’m waiting at my gate for my 10 PM flight, I’d thought I’d look up this interesting story. Federal air marshals, flying under cover on random flights, have been giving themselves away by the procedures they use to bypass airport security checkpoints. Seems that they waltz straight through the “exit only” section — past all the metal detectors and screening machines — sign a logbook and then pretend to be anonymous again. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out these guys are the supposedly undercover agents. What’s worse is that these asinine procedures remained in place after an agent pointed out the flaws.

I mean, just how stupid are these guys? Aren’t we lucky to have such a crack security team protecting our skies? Gheesh…

The cicadas are back. Those creepy, crunchy bugs who make an appearance every 17 years, are sprouting from the ground and littering the place with their shells. The last time they were here in Northern Virginia, I was too, finishing up high school and figuring out what to do next. They, like myself, are finding much more pavement around here than before.

Kinda neat that the bugs remind me of my time here.

Its off to Wilmington, DE and then Philly today on a long, long last day. Can’t wait to be home with my girls.

I wandered into an area CompUSA today with my coworker and discovered a very cool device. It’s the Hauppauge MediaMVP. The MediaMVP is a Linux multimedia platform which can play MPEG1/2 movies and MP3 music stored on a server elsewhere on a LAN. It is Linux-based, comes with a remote control, and costs a mere $100. If I didn’t have to figure out how to stuff it into my suitcase for the flight home, I would have bought one on the spot!

There are a few pages devoted to hacking the MediaMVP, possibly to get DivX or OGG support added. The MPEG decoder is a common IBM chip (also used in Tivos, I believe) which unfortunately doesn’t have open-source drivers. The chip might not be much help with OGG or DivX media, either, unfortunately. Still, a hackable media platform for $100 is hard to ignore!

X-Ten makes the free softphone I use for SIP connections to Asterisk. I read on theirSipThat.com blog that they recently went public. So, I’m thinking this isn’t a Google-sized IPO, since I didn’t hear about this until 12 days after it happened. I decide to poke around and find out why.

Here’s the interesting part: the company that bought X-Ten and made it “public” was previously focused on the adult-entertainment business (NSFW). Against all odds it wasn’t too successful, generating a mere 1,200 bucks in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2003. Makes you wonder how such a company buys such a promising software company, doesn’t it?

Both of these companies are incorporated in Nevada, a state with notoriously lax, swindle-friendly corporate laws. Makes me wonder what’s really going on with this merger, and what will become of this admittedly cool, free application.

I finished up my first day in Reston on my business trip. Had two visits today. The first went very well, while the other was a trial in patience. Seems the second customer didn’t have the password to his Cisco switch, meaning we couldn’t configure some key features of our product. Worse yet, the company managing his network didn’t have the password, either. I spent two hours guessing passwords before deciding we’d have to settle for resetting it. The next few visits will likely make me work much harder. But I think I’m ready for them now.

My good friends Gerry and Mandy, and their daughter Emma welcomed their newest family member, Caleb James Reid, on Saturday afternoon. Caleb entered the world a whopping 8 pounds, six ounces. A big boy!

Congratulations to the four of them. I can’t wait to meet the big guy!

We have a contract on our house! The papers were signed today. I think the buyer will be very happy with our home. Once we move out of it, that is. The buyer wants to swing by again this weekend to do some planning regarding how she’s going to furnish it. Then she’ll become our landlord for a few months or until we find our new home. I think we all come out winners.

I guess its not bad to have a contract on the house less than two weeks from putting it on the market. We were certainly surprised at how quickly things progressed. I’ll take pleasantly surprised over the alternative, any day!