Minor victory thread

The house saga continues.

Probate is scheduled for early July, and the estate attorney says that no one is contesting anything, so it should all go smoothly. Meaning I can give my 60 days notice for August 1, as per the original plan, and have 3 weeks to shuffle my stuff from the apt to the house :D

Still minor victory until the signatures are on the dotted line.
 
I know you obviously don't mean this, but for some reason the image that immediately jumped into my head was you and your daughter wearing the same ring simultaneously, basically linking yourselves at the nose.
And my first image was of a single large ring with a much smaller ring held captive on it, like, "Oh, that's a style now? Nose ring charms?"

--Patrick
 
Made it to work by bike in record time today: 12 minutes, 50 seconds. My best time yet.

I had the good fortune of hitting every green light along the way.

4.68 KM
Average of 22.1 kmph (fastest at around 42 kmph)

Fitbit screenshots behind the spoiler for size.

Screenshot_20220527-140245_Fitbit.jpgScreenshot_20220527-140251_Fitbit.jpgScreenshot_20220527-140303_Fitbit.jpg
 
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Wow. I've almost been here a year. I just got a renewal letter for my car registration.

The victory? The benefit to living in the boonies: No emissions test. Inspection will be under $10 and quick to get done.

The downside to living in Texas? $80 renewal instead of $30 registration renewal. That said, Virginia collected about $800/year in "property tax" on my car (plus a yearly $25 'parking tax' to park the damn thing on my own property--wtf?), so it's still cheaper in the long run.
 
I just paid the registration for our two cars. $170 for one (2015) and $190 for the other one (2017).

--Patrick
Weird..mine's $75.50 for 2019. Maybe Smith County's cheaper.

Still, even yours is cheaper than Virginia car taxes. I was paying nearly a couple of grand for 2 cars (plus $50 in bullshit 'parking tax' fees) up there. They cut you a break for 'high mileage' vehicles, but with COVID, neither of our cars were 'high mileage' eligible. I still have like only 17K miles on my car, and I've had it since 2019.
 
It gets boring and repetitive to say how I'm too Belgian to understand Americans complaining about their taxes and then see numbers half or les of what I'm paying. So I won't.

:awesome:
 
It gets boring and repetitive to say how I'm too Belgian to understand Americans complaining about their taxes and then see numbers half or les of what I'm paying. So I won't.

:awesome:
Yeah, but you know the drill. What do you actually get for your taxes? And what do we get for ours? And so the discussion goes…
 
Third time we're giving out internal awards for Exceptional Service and Cross-Team Support, for Caring and for Going Above and Beyond to Ensure the Purple Promise.
Third time I get an award :cool:

Only a very minor win, though, since these awards come with literally nothing but a PDF plaque to print. My career progression, that's..."still in the works, please provide proof of your work". But still, nice to be recognized :)
 
Then the REAL work begins.
"How to stir the perfect martini"?
"How to get a decent tan while reading without having the sun in your eyes?'
"How to make the summer last forever"?
"How to take in the tailoring of my dress uniform while still being able to display all my medals"?

It's summer,those types of questions should be all you're working towards :-P
 
Nope, I work all summer, I'm this school's IT person.

It's a couple of cabling runs, relocating a few APs for better wireless coverage, and a big project to install new projectors and screens in the cafeteria & auditorium with new control systems included.

I'll also be receiving and setting up new computers for incoming students as well as providing repairs for any that have trouble over the summer.

Oh and I'll also be fully out as of July 1st. So no more tiptoeing around when it comes to my gender expression at work.

So, quite a lot to get done and only 2 months to do it all in.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Nope, I work all summer, I'm this school's IT person.

It's a couple of cabling runs, relocating a few APs for better wireless coverage, and a big project to install new projectors and screens in the cafeteria & auditorium with new control systems included.

I'll also be receiving and setting up new computers for incoming students as well as providing repairs for any that have trouble over the summer.

Oh and I'll also be fully out as of July 1st. So no more tiptoeing around when it comes to my gender expression at work.

So, quite a lot to get done and only 2 months to do it all in.
I hear you. The majority of my clients are also in the education sector. Summer break, Winter Break, and Spring Break, everything goes red alert hurry hurry quick get it done panic mode around here because no school can bear to be without a single classroom for even a single day during the regular term OR ELSE THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE.

Just out of curiosity, what are you using for the control systems in your cafeterias/auditoriums?
 
Just out of curiosity, what are you using for the control systems in your cafeterias/auditoriums?
I actually don't know right now. We have an A/V guy who deals with all of that and gets vendors to do all the dirty work for us. We had a group we worked with previously, but they were crap, so last I heard we dropped them in favor of a new company and they have been much better. They had to fix the stupid setup at the high school I used to work with and it took them over a month to get everything sorted out.

This will be a new install, so not at all sure what they will be putting in.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
We had a group we worked with previously, but they were crap, so last I heard we dropped them in favor of a new company and they have been much better. They had to fix the stupid setup at the high school I used to work with and it took them over a month to get everything sorted out.
You have no idea how much I hear this exact scenario, where the company I work for is the "new company." There are an ASTONISHING number of A/V integrators out there that have absolutely no idea what they are doing. In fact, that exact story is an ongoing struggle right now at the Sam Houston State University college of Osteopathic Medicine. A competitor did the whole college/building in 2020 and the customer hates it so much they brought in us to unfuck it. Which is still in progress.

Anyway, I was just curious. I mostly do Crestron/QSC stuff, with a little Extron/Biamp on the side.
 
Crestron is what we have had previously, do not know what will be going in. That was the system they had to untangle at the HS. They'd run a command on it and get nothing back. Tracing wires down, rerunning things, and finally just reprogramming the whole stack because they couldn't figure out what went wrong in the old code (the touchscreen we used had become unresponsive).
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Crestron is what we have had previously, do not know what will be going in. That was the system they had to untangle at the HS. They'd run a command on it and get nothing back. Tracing wires down, rerunning things, and finally just reprogramming the whole stack because they couldn't figure out what went wrong in the old code (the touchscreen we used had become unresponsive).
Yeah, sounds about right. Crestron's by far the most powerful and pervasive AV solution... but there are so many AV companies out there that don't know how to use their stuff properly.

I just hope you're not getting DMPS3-4Ks, those things are a garbage fire.
 
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