Phil online

A while back I wrote here about trackback spam. Today I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, and in the process I reset a lot of my plugins and hacks. I brought the trackback and comment spam blockers forward with me, and I’m happy to report they still work. (yay!)

I still get several dozen trackback spams a week, and it’s a pain to go moderate them. But 1.5 makes it a tad easier. And anyway, at least they’re not making it into my blog.

Comment spam blocker: wp-hashcash
Trackback spam blocker: trackback-moderation
Pingback spam blocker: pingback-moderation

No, not the new one. The old one.

See… We lived there for ten years. It was a great house for us. It was the right size, in the right neighborhood. And it was very “lived in”, so I didn’t need to worry about (more…)

A friend of a friend also bought a house in pre-foreclosure. She got a great deal. But it came with an antique piano, badly out of tune, which she didn’t want. She offered it for sale. I offered to come see it, but it would have to wait until I bought my new house (in four months).

To make a long story short: she gave us the piano for free after weeks of trying to donate it to a charity who gave up trying to move it.

It will take some bucks to get it tuned and repaired a bit. But it’s a free piano and it looks great in my new living room.

Friday: We moved. I hired a local company, Atlanta Peach Movers, to come move us. I price shopped around a little bit, and their prices seemed on par with others I found. The main reason I picked them, though, is the boxes. They had boxes for cheap, and they offered free delivery. And while I had them on the phone, I went ahead and scheduled the move. One less thing to worry about.

The crew was great! They were fast, courteous and energetic. They hauled all my stuff down my big hill of a driveway (no way to get the truck up the hill!) non-stop for 5 hours. Then we drove to the new house (an hour away) where they did it all in reverse, without the hill. They even stopped at another house with us to pick up a donated piano. (Watching them disassemble, wrap and carry a baby grand piano down the steps and onto the truck was enthralling.)

Highly recommended. Total cost: $1800 for 10 hours, 5 men and two trucks.

Moving sucks. After every move, we always take the same oath: “Never again!” It lasted 10 years this last time. But this weekend, we moved.

We’re very happy with the new house. But we’re still not done with the old one. We have a few miscellaneous things to clean out, the house needs to be cleaned and prepped for sale, and there is a ton of things that need to be fixed.

This week will be spent working on the old house to make it the home we always wanted. More posts coming about this. :-\

It’s official now. I own the Castle House. It wasn’t easy getting here, though. My buyer’s agent (highly recommended) really had to work to get this one through closing. Thanks, Buddy!

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the hurdles we ran into unexpectedly: (more…)

I managed to squelch all the comment spam on my blogs, so now I’m being pummeled by trackback spam. I installed the trackback moderator plugin, though, and that should kill it for now. I’ll test it by trackbacking against Godvertising.com now…