For me, this is yet another reason to love DreamHost. In the past I have had the misfortune to deal, on behalf of clients, with a really awful web hosting company located right here in Saskatoon. When I started dealing with DreamHost I thought that all my wishes had been granted. I will be the first to tell you that DreamHost is not perfect. Far from it, in fact. If you believe that your webhost is perfect, then I am afraid that you should seek some medical help, because you are suffering from delusions. No webhost is perfect. They are run by regular human beings like you and me. As a result, they make mistakes like we do. The amazing thing about DreamHost is that they actually admit when they screw up. In my experience, this is a first amongst webhosts. I simply cannot count the number of times that I have had someone at a webhosting company tell me that something wasn’t their fault when it most defintely was. A perfect example is the aforementioned local hosting company. One of my clients had a dedicated server with them and it mysteriously went down one day. It took us four hours and talking to the two owners of the company before they owned up to the fact that someone accidentally unplugged the server in the data center.

In addition to being completely up-front about their operation, warts and all, the customer service at DreamHost is second to none. Back around the dawn of the new year I was working to migrate one client’s web application to new hosting at DreamHost. Unfortunately, the site relies on a very old version of Postresql which does not play well with networked storage and the storage at DreamHost is all networked. Over the course of two weeks their customer service staff spent a tonne of time trying to help me get things up and running. They even called me once, despite their site information stating that they only call US customers. Even though we could not get the legacy app to run properly on their machines, I was unbelievably impressed with their service and would recommend them to anyone on the basis of that alone.

While I’m on the topic of DreamHost, I noticed that Philip has had some trouble with his blog host recently. From the sounds of things, this is not the first time. Well, Philip, I suggest that you give DreamHost a try. In addition to all of the great things I had to say about them above, they also offer WordPress blogs as a one-click install. That’s it, just click one button in the administration panel and you’re golden. If you do switch, you’d be getting your blog onto a decent Linux web server instead of one of those nasty Windows machines

Just another quick note. Our house has both the bottom and top floors framed now and they should be adding the roof this week. On Saturday Lindsay and I took a trip over to the new place and took some pictures in and around the house. I will be posting them to the albums in the next few days, so keep an eye peeled.

Lindsay and I went to another ultrasound appointment today. We were hoping to find out the sex of the baby but the little critter was being shy and kept its thighs pressed firmly together. We were lucky enough to see it yawning and drinking amniotic fluid. It is so strange to be looking at a whole little person growing inside of my wife. So amazing! I have added a Baby album to the photo gallery and the pictures from the ultrasound today are in there.

Framing is progressing nicely at the new house. It is looking like they might finish off the second floor by the end of the week. Not sure if they’ll have the roof on, but it is possible. I am really hoping that they get things done quickly and get the roof shingled. We are aiming for a possession date at the end of August and we were told it will be ready four months from when the shingles are done. Four months from the end of April is the end of August. We have our fingers crossed! More pics are in the gallery now too.

The lowest offer we received was $100 over our asking price (we listed it for $169,900 – we bought it for $114,000 two years ago) and the second lowest was $5,000 over asking. Of the eight offers only one requested a possession date earlier than the August 31st we had specified. The offer we accepted was for $197,000 – an amazing $27,100 over our asking price.

The best part of the whole thing is that we did things our way and came out ahead of the game. Our builder, Dundee, put us in touch with a local agent, Derrick Stretch, and he appraised our house and gave us a guarantee of $140k. Our favorite agent, John Zimmer, appraised us at $150k at the same time and was optimistic about getting us to $170k by the beginning of April. John was shocked at how well we did. I can’t wait to hear Derrick’s reaction to our $197,000 when he rolled his eyes at John’s prediction of $170k and told us flat out that the market wouldn’t improve that much from February to April. Sometimes being right just feels so good!

First of all, it was determined that there had not been sufficient testing and outputs verification to launch our DriveWorks implementation on March 26th. This was a bit of a downer for the team, as the programming was on track to be done on time. On the bright side the delay gives us a chance to implement some features that we didn’t have time to get done for the original launch date.

Outside of work, Lindsay and I listed the house for sale Wednesday morning and we accepted offers Thursday night at 8pm. To our surprise we had 8 offers waiting for us. We were expecting more than one but never in our wildest dreams did we expect 8. And all of them were over our asking price, many of them significantly over. The real estate market in Saskatoon has been insane! We had also expected there to be some trouble over the fact that we want a possession date of the end of August, but only one offer wanted to take possession before then. We accepted a very nice offer and with a little luck, conditions will be removed tomorrow.

Also, this week we have been making some decisions for the new house. Knowing how much we’ll be making on this place has made this much easier. We are looking into cabinet and counter upgrades as well as all new Stainless Steel appliances!

Finally, on the way home from work today I noticed that they have begun framing our new house! The floor joists are going in! It is very exciting. I’ll try and get some pictures this weekend and post them.

Next, we looked at paint options. We can choose any two colors in the M and W ranges from General Paints. Lindsay was quite concerned that this would be too limiting, but any of the colors we were even remotely interested in fell within that range. We grabbed a bunch of chips and looked at them over lunch.

We didn’t have much time to talk to the woman at Gregg’s plumbing and heating but we were able to get a look at what comes as standard with our house. We were pleasantly surprised with the bath and shower fixtures – so much so that we probably won’t be changing them. I wish I could say the same for the rest of the plumbing fixtures. Lindsay really wants an undermounted sink which costs $1000 minimum. The kitchen fittings I want are looking to be in the $5-600 range. And then there’s the bathrooms! We are going back to meet with her on Thursday night and we have some thinking to do before then.

We also looked at our flooring choices at Braid Flooring on Millar. We were very surprised at the quality of the choices we had for standard. At first we were concerned because the only carpet we could see that was in the standard group was too shag for our tastes. A little more looking revealed something that was exactly what we were looking for. We also found an awesome vinyl for the kitchen, bathrooms and foyer. Great stuff and not a dollar extra!

Moving on, we rented My Super Ex-Girlfriend last night. It was very funny, altogether enjoyable. With one exception. Their choices of music were terrible! There were two horrific cover tunes – one of Devil Inside by INXS that was really short and didn’t have any vocals – why bother with a shitty cover? Also, they played She Hates Me by Puddle of Mud. Great song. Unfortunately, they played the edited version of the song. I have enough trouble with the shitty radio stations in Saskatoon that *still* play the edited version of Brown Eyed Girl that has the line “Making love in the green grass” edited out without a goram movie playing edited songs. It isn’t like it was a Disney movie or anything, the word “fuck” did appear elsewhere. Lame, really lame. Other than that, though, it was a great movie. Go see it.