Snafu.org.uk

We’ve recently started the process of selling our house. Even though we’re not likely to move till the end of the year we figure that we’re going to be so busy once the baby arrives we may as well get started beforehand when we have a little more time.

We started by getting an agent round at the weekend to look the house over and do a valuation. He seemed pretty switched on and keen about selling the house so we decided to use his agency (which will remain nameless at the moment ) We agreed that the house would start being marketed in a couple of weeks as we need to do some bits to it, tidy it and sort the garden out.

Claire was therefore a little surprised to get a barrage of phone calls this morning from the estate agents. Firstly one wanted to visit the house to have a look round and gave a whole 10 minutes notice. She spent the time looking down her nose at the place (well, we did warn them…) before pretending (badly) that she liked it. I’m sure after a 10 minute visit she’ll be able to sell the house better…

Later on she then got a call off another agent who had a builder who was desperate to see the house. We agreed that he could show he round, even though we’re still a little annoyed that they’ve started flogging the place already. The estate agent turned up first, and my God, was he ever the stereotype. Sunglasses (even though it was going dark) and annoying personality. Again he obviously hated the house (I expect he’s more a designer flat type of guy) but did his best to pretend to be positive. The actual viewing went fine (though the builder had a rather nice MG so he’s obviously not planning to live round here ) and he didn’t seem to think much of the agent either. I suspect we won’t get any offer as the agents are selling the place as 3 bedroom (when it’s blatantly 2, unless you fancy sleeping in the cellar) for some reason and so it makes the house appear bigger than it is and is probably attracting the wrong type of interest.

Oh well, hopefully they will shape up a little more as they go on.

Today is our first wedding anniversary It’s scary how quickly the year has gone and difficult to believe that a year ago we were in Vegas. I’ve dug out our wedding video and put it somewhere we can find it so we can cringe at it in later years

We’re off out this evening to Cafe de China with our families to celebrate this and our birthdays (slightly belatedly ) which should be good fun and a good excuse to have some excellent food

I installed Vista on my work PC recently and was annoyed to find that my PDA didn’t want to sync. It seems that activesync has been killed off in Vista and replaced with Windows Mobile Device Center. This would be fine, but the version that ships with Vista seems to do bugger all and would only let me sync media files. Which is useless as I hate Windows Media Player.

Anyway, after more googling today it seems you need an update from Microsoft (which they’ve only just released) to actually get it working. I installed that today and I’m syncing properly again!

We were less than impressed today when we left the house to do some shopping and found that some idiot had crashed in the back of our car. The boot is totally stoved in and the bumper hanging off so we didn’t fancy risking driving it. Whoever did it didn’t bother leaving a note or anything, even though judging by the damage to our car theirs must be in a real state. Makes you wonder whether it was one of the 12,000 uninsured drivers that leave the scene of accident without leaving details.

Tesco insurance, who we only just switched to, seemed very efficient in sorting out a courtesy car and repair of our car, though we have to wait till Monday for anything to happen. All in all it’ll only cost us £50, which is our excess, but it’s still a pain in the arse we could do without. We suspect it was one of the pillocks that do 60 down our road (which is a 30), couldn’t stop and slid into our car.

It’s only when you don’t have a car that you begin to sympathise with the people complaining about town centre shops shutting. Luckily we have a somerfield within 10 minutes walk, but if that wasn’t there all the big supermarkets and shops are a couple of miles away outside of town.

Hopefully we’ll get a sensible courtesy car on Monday and not some stupid tiny thing where I can push all the pedals with one foot Have to wait and see I guess.

I’ve recently been playing with Sympa at work as it’s been decided the project needs to move on even though James is sunning himself in New Zealand

Sympa is a  mailing list system, in the same vein as Majordomo (which we currently use) and Mailman. A big advantage of Sympa over the others is the close integration with LDAP. Along with being able to auth against it (which is great as it means the users don’t need another username and password) it can create mailing lists based on LDAP searches. This means we could easily create a mailing list for just us Carters It also allows you to manually add people to these dynamic lists as well which is useful.

Creating the lists in this way means you get the benefits of all the access controls that Sympa provides, which is much more flexible than what is available with a generic LDAP dynamic list. They are also dead easy to setup as we had a test list working in a couple of minutes.

All in all it looks like Sympa will be a huge improvement over our current system, I can see the users particulary liking the web interface, no more clunky email commands (unless you really want to use them )