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There are no Apple sores anywhere near me. I have been to one Apple store in my life. The one in the Mall of America. Well, Justine was at that one to get her iPhone. While she was there she saw hometown heros Motion City Soundtrack there. On her short little montage video I spotted Jesse Johnson and Matthew Taylor from Motion City Soundtrack. Pretty cool. I have seen them in concert 5 times, and wish I was in San Francisco this weekend. They are playing there this weekend. I don’t think I could ever see them enough. That’s how good they are.

We made the first of many purchases for our new house today. Since Friday we have been looking for an entertainment center for our new TV we are going to buy. Entertainment centers for big LCD or plasma TVs are pretty limited. We finally found one we liked. Now I have to start looking more closely at TVs. I know I want a 46 incher. In that size you have a choice between LCD or plasma. It really is a toss up on which one is better. It will come down to price and image quality for me, and image quality is a tough one because they are never set up right in the stores, and the lighting isn’t ideal either. There are a couple of TVs that I am looking at. I have a couple weeks before it’s time to drop over a grand on a TV. Ouch!

The inspection went well. It was nice to spend some more time in the house and get a closer look at everything. The day we bought the house we looked at so many houses that I got parts of the one we bought mixed up. We thought it only had a stand up shower in the downstairs bathroom, but it has a full tub and shower in that bathroom also. The washer and dryer are staying with the house, and we thought they were an old mismatched pair, but we were wrong. They look like a pretty new Whirlpool washer and dryer, so that is cool. The inspector was very good. He was very thorough. There was nothing major wrong. Just a few things that we can fix after we move in. The windows need to be re-caulked, the gfci outlet in the garage needs to be replaced, the bottom of the garage doors needs some touch up paint, and the deck stairs railing is a little wobbly and could use a few bolts in it. All simple things that we can do. We probably didn’t need to have the inspection, but it’s nice to know there is nothing major wrong with the house. Now the 25th just has to hurry up and get here already.

Another busy day today. In an hour we are heading to the house for the inspection. Everything should be fine. We would just feel safer with an inspection. Then at 3:00 I have a dentist appointment. I am keeping my fingers crossed for no cavities. Then at 4:30 we meet with our banker to get everything ready for closing day. Is that day ever going to get here?

With all the house stuff I have been super busy. I am way behind on my RSS feed reading and my podcast listening. I have no time to blog. So I will post a video for you folks.

I meant to post this video earlier this week. It is of the newest song from the soon to be released newest album from the BEST FUCKING BAND IN THE WORLD!

Motion City Soundtrack!

I have been quiet on my blog about it, but I have been tweeting it. We bought a house yesterday. Today they accepted our offer, so we are planning on moving on July 25th. Hopefully everything works out this time. Our new house is pretty similar to the one be bought last July and had to back out of because the people buying our current house backed out. It’s a three bedroom, two bath, 3 level. It has central air which our other house didn’t. I have been living in central air for the past five years. I am glad I don’t have to give that up. I will be glad when everything is all done though. It’s going to be a pretty hectic month.

One of my favorite punk bands of all time is Screeching Weasel. They have been broken up and haven’t released an album since 2000. Their front man Ben Weasel just released his second solo album though. He is releasing the album in digital form only. I think that is great. Especially for lower volume sellers like this. No CDs to make, no shipping the CDs, and no guessing at what stores the CDs will sell in and not. Now everybody who wants to can get it. You can get a lower quality DRM encumbered version on iTunes, but why? It is also available at the same price, better quality, and no DRM at Downloadpunk.com. That is where I bought it.

My “not to busy” July just got busier. Yesterday at work I got a call from our realtor, and our house sold. We are going house shopping this afternoon. They’re tons of houses for sale around here, and we pretty much know what we want. I won’t be surprised if we find and buy our new house today. The people that bought our house want to close on July 25th. We will talk to our realtor to see if that is possible. It will make July hectic, but I would rather hurry up and close as soon as possible. It would be torture living here for a couple months knowing we got a bigger better house.

What did we do before the internet? Today at work a conversation started and we were wondering who was the last Minnesota Twins pitcher to hit a homerun.

I did a little research and in five minutes I came to the conclusion that it was Jim Kaat. He hit two in 1972. In 1973 the designated hitter was adding to the American League so pitchers were no longer batting in the American league. Now with interleague play, AL pitchers do bat from time to time, but they usually aren’t very good.

A friend of mine just recently lost his hard drive. It was his laptop hard drive which luckily didn’t have much important data on it. I was shocked when he said he was thankful it wasn’t his desktop system because he would have lost a lot of data. I thought it was crazy that he didn’t have backups. I am anal about my backups. My backups even have backups. In fact next weekend I am due to create another backup.

My backup plan works like this.

I have a 500 GB NAS (network attached storage) that stores a copy of everything that is irreplaceable, or hard to get back. It includes a copy of all my pictures, and my complete music library. It would be a pain in the ass to have to re-rip all of my CDs. So that gives me two copies of everything at home. Then every six months I burn a DVD with all my pictures on it and bring it to work. I have a stack of DVDs in my locker at work. Each one contains my entire photo collection at that time. So if any of the DVDs go bad, I still have many copies off all my pictures. The only think I don’t store off site yet is my music library. It’s just to much of a pain in the ass to burn 45 GB to disks. I should get another external hard drive for my music library, but it’s only music. If our house burns down, the music can be replaced. The pictures can’t. That is why I am very diligent about backing up my pictures.

Do you have a backup plan? If not, go and make backups now.