The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

I got an email today, forwarded on from a hosting company that I do some work for. Apparently from a prospective hosting customer, it read:

I am trying to complete an application for Cyberspace Liability Insurance but am having trouble with some of the questions.

Would you be able to help me with them? I would really appreciate it.

It was at that point I considered swearing off of computers entirely and moving to a shack in Montana. Nobody should be allowed to type the words “Cyberspace Liability Insurance” and be allowed anywhere near anything more complicated than cat food.

“Cyberspace Liability Insurance.” Kill me now.

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I’ve been enjoying a fun new website recently – raleighing.com. It’s a quasi-blog focused on life and events in the North Carolina state capital. They talk about new businesses, housing, entertainment, and roads, among other things. One really cool thing they just finished was a 10-part series on the most confusing roads in Raleigh. It was enlightening to me to see some of the weird roads that I didn’t even know connected.

So if you live in the Raleigh area, be sure to add raleighing.com to your RSS reader.

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Living with her like I do, it’s sometimes easy to overlook just how talented my wife is. But today, as I was looking at the painting she did for me last year and reading over the great story she’s writing, while sitting in the house she’s made into a home and thinking about the lemon bars she cooked the other night, I had one of those “Well, duh!” moments. And that’s not even counting the theatre work she does!

Our neighbor says “I don’t think there’s anything that Holly can’t do.” I think she’s right.

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We’d noticed some weirdness in our kitchen for a while – something that looked like insect eggs on the wall a few weeks ago, an increase in sneezing for me, and the final piece, our security system freaking out the other day until I cut power to it.

As Holly investigated further, she found that the “eggs” were mold, and the wallpaper on one wall in the kitchen was peeling. Uh oh. We called a plumber and, sure enough, there was a leaky pipe behind that wall. The plumber first thought that our new cabinets had been screwed into a pipe by mistake, but when he went into the wall, he found that the cabinets were fine (of course, I doubt Everett could make a mistake like that if he tried), but it looked like there was a small nail-hole in the pipe nearby. The pipe that, I believe, takes all the plumbing water from upstairs down into the septic tank. Ewwwww.

We can’t remember ever having anything nailed onto that wall, so it’s possible the hole was there when we bought the house in 2001. The pipe’s fixed (a rubber gasket and clamp over the hole), but we have a gaping hole in the wall. We’ll probably have to replace that whole 4×8 piece of sheetrock at the end of the month when Everett comes down to help. That will mean removing the wallpaper, which will probably mean that we need to pull down all the wallpaper in the kitchen and paint. Looks like we just answered the question of “Which room in the house do we re-do next?”

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

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I got a chance to meet up with an old friend for the first time in years this past weekend. She’s a lot of fun, and we’ve been through a lot, both good and bad. The last patch of “bad” led to us not having much contact at all for 4-5 years.

But it was good to see that we’re at a place where we can reconnect and still be friends, and are fine with where we’ve each gone in life in the intervening years. It was fun just hanging out, catching up, talking smack about about people from back in the day, etc. So I think we’ll be able to have a friendship now that’s not marred by the drama and weirdness that popped up regularly back in the past.

So I guess it’s true that it’s good to have “Old friends you can talk to like you saw them yesterday, no matter how long it’s really been.”

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Check out this interview with Ludovick Michaud, a super-cool guy I met when I was down in Dallas recently. Ludo’s a heck of a guy, so it’s awesome to see him getting some industry press.

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After finding it increasingly difficult to pry my iBook G4 from Holly’s hands (Holly being the one who mocked me when I got the laptop, saying “I don’t think you’ll use that enough to make it worth getting”), I broke down over the weekend and picked up a refurbished 15” PowerBook G4. It arrived on Tuesday, and I’ve been using it since then. Nice box – the widescreen monitor is a cool touch, and the backlit keyboard is just fun.

I ordered another half-gig of memory for it separately. I checked the FedEx tracking for that package, and it apparently arrived in Raleigh this morning, and is sitting around with status “Package not due for delivery”. After searching online, apparently what this means is “You paid for slower shipping and, even though the package arrived quickly, we’re going to sit on it for a few days so that it can arrive as slowly as you paid to have it shipped.” FedEx, folks. Give them a hand. Quality.

In a related note, a guy here at work got an iPod Nano delivered to the office. Holy hell that thing is nice. The commercials really don’t do it justice how small and sleek it is. I’m in full-scale technolust, casting disdainful eyes on my old-and-busted 20GB 3rd Generation iPod. I know I don’t need the Nano, but I want it. Curse you, Apple!

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What more can be said about Ron Francis than has been said already? Quiet leadership was his trademark, and it was reinforced by the way he announced his retirement. No press conference, no flash, just a simple statement that his playing days were over.

Thanks for everything, Ronnie. I’m glad I got a chance to watch you play. Here’s hoping he takes a front-office job with Carolina, to continue to influence the franchise for years to come.

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The pieces are starting to fall into place for our Europe trip. Holly’s booked our Paris hotels, and I’ve purchased the train tickets that will take us between Paris and London. Only about seven more weeks until we’re crossing the Atlantic!

That is, of course, if we can get our passports. We sent them off in early August, with a roughly six-week turnaround time. However, last week, we got a postcard from the State Department saying “Due to Hurricane Katrina, there are delays in processing passports. Please call us if you’re within six weeks of your travel date.” Well, I was close, so I called. They checked and, sure enough, our passports had been sent to New Orleans for processing.

I tried to find out what that meant, but the guy wouldn’t tell me anything until I was within that magical six-week window to the travel date. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

Another thing that has fallen off our agenda is attending the London premiere of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It’ll be the Sunday we’re in London, but I don’t think we want to blow a whole day of our vacation standing in line for a 10-second glimpse of the actors. We may swing by the area that night to take in the atmosphere, but I doubt we’ll be “there” in any meaningful sense.

Now we just need to get London sleeping arrangements, and start planning out what we actually want to do there. If I can convince Holly, hockey will be part of it.

Update 9/16 – Holly reports that our passports arrived in the mail today! Whew!

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Congratulations to my cousin Preston and his wife Trish, who welcomed their second child into the world! Lucas Owen Warren hit the streets a couple weeks early, but is doing well at 7 lbs., 6 oz.

Welcome!

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