TomBecker.net

The day it all came down

Wow. Yesterday was a busy busy day in my little world.

Let us start with the good news. I found out that my sister is both engaged and having a baby. Now this one came out of left field. I knew she was dating someone, but I didn't think for that long, apparently it was much more serious than I realized. I'm both in a state of shock and awe. Most of my family figured I'd be the first kid to take the plunge as it were, but looks like I proved all of them wrong. Looks like I'll take of on the role of Uncle Tommy here in December.

Now for the not so good news. I put in an offer on a house yesterday, which at first sounds like a good thing. I put in the offer at 4k less than the asking price as well as asking them to pay closing and a 3% down payment. They came back last night with an offer of 4k over the asking price and only 5k in closing and down payment. Their counteroffer has now put it over what I can borrow. So it is a little disheartening, them coming back so quickly and saying no.

This idea of waiting a year has been lurking in the back of my head for quite some time now but I think it will be the best thing for me to do. Save as much as I can for the next year and then start looking again. I am thinking that maybe I jumped into this too quickly. I'm still mulling it over, but I think that I may cancel the house hunt for now...

Labels: house search

posted by Tom Becker at 4/30/2008 | 0 Comments

Sad State of Softball

It is the fourth week of our softball season, and we haven't played but one game. I wish I could tell you that we have won those games due to forfeit, but no. We have been rained out for the 3rd time this week, and there has been some growing discontent due to it.

I am having a few mixed feelings about the rain though. It sucks for softball, but it is pretty good for my garden. April showers bring May flowers (and vegetables) as they say.

Labels: Softball

posted by Tom Becker at 4/27/2008 | 0 Comments

The Juggernauts

So after our first game getting rained out, we finally played our season opener against the Juggernauts, and they did live up to their namesake as they were unstoppable.....kinda.

Let me explain. Our defense was killer this game, they were raining balls into the outfield but we didn't let anything get passed us with quite a few great catches. The infield was equally as good, even though we let a few balls get passed us (I played 1B) the outfield scooped them up and held them to singles or doubles at the worst.

Our problem came with pitching. We are breaking in a new pitcher (our old one got snaked by someone from our team last year...but that's another story), so he had to get zeroed in. They were up to bat first and we walked almost all of the 9 runs they scored that inning. But we came back and almost tied it up the subsequent innings of that game.

The next game, we always play double headers, started off pretty much the same and had the same end result. Good defense, but our pitching still needs some work.

We, and by we I mean our scorekeeper and my girlfriend, are keeping stats this season too. Currently my bating average is .750, which is pretty damn good if I do say so myself. But that is only with 4 at bats, but it sounds good. I currently lead the team in triples too. Whoohoo!

It was a good game over all though, but we just need to shake the dust off and get ready for our game next weekend, against Ro's Hard Hitters. A team that we have played against for the past few seasons. They are a pretty good team. I think that the past few times we have been up against them we have split the series. So I think we have a pretty good chance of winning if we can just get our pitcher zeroed in.

Labels: Softball

posted by Tom Becker at 4/14/2008 | 0 Comments

Health Monitoring in .NET 2.0

The app I have been working on has started to experience some weird issues on our new production server. The users are getting prompted for log in credentials while they are working. Normally that only happens when they are idle for 20 minutes. But the users have assured me this will happen within 5 minutes of them logging in. I checked all of the normal stuff, like making sure the default time out wasn't anything ridiculously small, or the worker process wasn't set to recycle every 3 minutes or something. Those were all normal.

So I started looking around the internet and I wasn't the only one having this strange problem with IIS6 on a windows 2003 server. It seems that for some reason my app was randomly restarting. But in order to confirm this I had to add some health monitoring for my app. Which is actually some pretty cool stuff.

The code itself is pretty simple (see below) and what it will do is let you know when any application event is happening (stopping, starting, halted that kinda thing). And it will add all of this neatly into the windows event viewer. All you need to do is add the code below to the <healthmonitoring><rules> section of the global web.config file.



The above code is only using default .Net stuff. I was hoping for a few more events that I could add that would give me a better picture of what was happening, but it seems that there are only a few in-built ones that you can use. The rest you have to build yourself. I haven't looked into doing, but you can find how to here.

So I just need to let that run for a few days and see if my session time outs line up with my app restarts.

Labels: .NET

posted by Tom Becker at 4/14/2008 | 0 Comments

House search disappointment

In my last post I had mentioned that I found a home that I really liked. Huge backyard, garage and the like. Much to my dismay and slight disappointment, I will not be buying that house. Not because someone snaked me or that there was something wrong with this house. Nope, it was because of the location.

I tried to delude myself a little bit by saying that the neighborhood isn't bad, it is just the area's around it that are kinda bad. That's just how a lot of Richmond is. You have some of the nicest areas downtown butted up next to some pretty shady areas of town. But upon some further investigation, and looking up the crime reports in the area....wow. There were something along the lines of of 1100 crimes in the neighborhood in the past calendar year, including one at the property that I was looking at.

So needless to say I am moving on to other houses. My dreams of that home were quickly dashed against the harsh rocks of reality even before they really began. But I think it was a good move in the long run. I have now expanded my search to places on the other side of the river too. Give me a few more options on house and stuff.

So, THE SEARCH CONTINUES!

Labels: house search

posted by Tom Becker at 4/11/2008 | 0 Comments

Homes

Yesterday I went around to look at houses with my realtor. It was an interesting experience. I saw a total of 6 houses and I think that out of those 6 I can really only see myself living in two of them.

The first one we saw was the largest square footage wise, but it was right on Forrest Hill, and getting out of that driveway was a chore. So that kinda jaded that whole house for me. It was decent inside though.

The second house was on a much quieter street on a corner lot. Apparently a little old lady used to live the and the house just got to big for her. So as my girlfriend aptly put it. "It smelled like old lady in there." But it wasn't a bad house, could really use some landscaping work, and a little bit of work on the inside, but overall not to bad.

The third was my favorite, and I'm tempted to go ahead and put in contract on this one. It was a smaller house, 3 bed 1 bath but it was cozy. But the big seller for me was the yard and the garage. A huge lot with a garden and plenty of room for a dog. And the garage was great too. Two car and very deep. Could easily fit the bike as well as my boxing stuff in there with plenty of room to spare. Loved it.

The fourth was pretty good too, very nice inside, but no yard. It would take me 10 minutes to mow both the front and the back. But very well maintained inside.

The fifth and sixth were in the same neighborhood, and both were very similar construction. But I wasn't really a fan of either one for a variety of aesthetic reasons, so I won't even bother with describing the others. I'd be even more surprised if anyone is actually reading this far in.

Well I suppose that is it right now. Maybe I will talk to my realtor today and ask if we can sit and start talking about a contract for that house. I'm not gonna post pics yet, gonna wait till the house is under contract just to make sure someone doesn't steal it away.

Labels: house search

posted by Tom Becker at 4/04/2008 | 0 Comments