Ok, since it's been a while.. lets see...
Work is better - was told that almost no matter what they're gonna have stuff for me to do. In the meantime I'm back to my 1st project doing a web database and migrating it to the official servers. I really don't like the group I'm having to work with on it as they are about as helpful as a freezer to an eskimo.

Anyway, not much else to report, life goes on - ex-landlord issue is dying down, life goes on.

Ok, today was my first time at Jury duty... I'll go back some day. I didn't end up on a trial, but the rest of the process was somewhat amusing. Next time I may even take people's advice and take something to do the first day.

Incidently, if people are looking to contact me, it's aaron@powertrip.net.

Renters need to take extra precautions to cover their liabilities for when they leave the property. Even the nicest sounding landlords can still turn out to be interested only in their financial well being at the end of the term.

In the beginning make sure to document EVERYTHING that is wrong, substandard, cracked or in anything but in perfect condition. Take a video of the property. Have the landlord signoff on the list of problems that are acceptable to live with, but that you want to make sure won't come back to haunt you when you leave.

When preparing to leave, make sure you mail your 30 days of notice before that final 30 day mark and send it via certified mail. When you leave, do a final walkthrough and make the itemized list of problems at that time.

Remember during your stay to document anything you do to the property, keep receipts and any inspection reports.

I just had a landlord come back to me and claim that there was over $600 of damages to a place I had rented. The pool was the big item on the list. $400 to clean up the pool... even though the pool had been given to us in a less than perfect condition and where we had a verbal agreement that we could have left the pool covered the entire time and they wouldn't have minded. Now that we've moved out, they are claiming that not only do we not get our deposit back, but that we owe money. Of course, I have full documentation thanks to the wonderful pool and spa place we used which includes chemical tests done to the water over the time to show that it was not clean when we received it and receipts showing that we did everything within our power to clean things up.

Strangely enough these were the nicest landlords I think I had ever dealt with.. up until now.

Just to clarify the type of renters we were... we paid the rent a month in advance most of the time we were living there. We did not ask for modifications to be done when we moved in - allowing them to spend less and give it to us in more of an "as is" condition and got along with the neighbors etc.

After talking to more people online, I feel that the world needs yet another mailing list... or two.. so I'm going to start a few more up. The first is an OS (unix/windows level) help mailing list which is for helping with a smile. No put downs, no calling people names, the occasional RTFM comment permitted but would perfer not to have many of those... just a nice place to go for help and/or share cool tricks and/or ideas. More news once it comes online.

Ever notice how non-programmers come up with these huge projects that are well beyond their means and try to use them to learn to program? ...ok, that's me in a nutshell. I know what is "possible" but not "what is possible for ME".. so I end up comming up with projects like a decent network monitor or a better dynamic DNS system for DALnet or various other ideas, but they're all well above my programming abilities. If there's anyone out there that would like to take a stab at any of these projects, most are in a basic documented state where you can understand what I have in mind, it just needs to be made into a program.

Yes, a simple concept - work is good. Even though my last project at work got stopped at the budget review, my first project needs my attention again.. so I've got another month or so of database migration, code rewrites and other fun stuff. The office VPN also works better now, so I can accomplish this even faster than before - YAY