Rob's Ego Trip!

We've exchanged up the chain so we have a house to move to !

Moving date is 9th July.

Sunday, this week has been a hive of inactivity! Next week will probably be manic as it's just before moving, but today, we did nothing.

We are going out for a drink this evening and wmute has been coerced volunteered to babysit so that Georgina can come out with us too :)

update:
We had a great time and set the world to rights! Thanks wmute!

and Jon is being really cute. For some reason, he is always miserable after his lunchtime nap. Today was no different and he picked up and became happy when we went out into the garden with him and played.

He even climbs up the little slide we have and slides down himself!

think that when it comes down to a choice between the BBC and Alistair Campbell, the BBC is the one to go with ?


Oh, and exchange up the chain didn't happen today. They couldn't find on of the owners at the top of the chain. Maybe Monday...

I found this interesting on adot's notblog*.

Apparently we can use advanced CSS for browsers that support CSS3 and other cool CSS stuff and hide it from IE6 which is rapidly becoming long in the tooth and a pain to code for.

See mezzoblue's article for a good article on these ideas.

We are halfway there now!

We have exchanged down the chain, but not up. Exchange up will take place tomorrow.

*phew*

Still waiting for exchange! Seems that our solicitors are playing silly buggers over a minor legal point...

Update
Legal point cleared up and we are still waiting...

I've discovered a trackback plugin for Nucleus! So I've installed it cos I can :)

have started, but I'm very unhappy with our purchaser's behaviour...

Update
Moving forward at a snail's pace :( Have got the price issue resolved. Only a couple of documents to sort out now...

This means that exchange will be tomorrow at the earliest.

is good news? Personally, I'd just like to have some news!

Surveyor has been and gone. We have discovered that the bottom of the chain is ready to exchange. Next thing is to see if our buyer is happy with the survey...

Very tired today. Jon woke up around 1:30 this morning and came in to us wanting a cuddle. We also had a man round to quote for a new roof for our prospective buyer today and so we had to be up bright and early too.

We are still don't know if our sale will be going through or not yet. It's not in our hands anymore. It's looking like we can exchange on next Tuesday or Wednesday and then complete on the 9th July. However people up the chain have said that they will pull out if they can't complete by the 30th July. Our buyer seems adamant that she can't complete before the 9th and so we have to hope that either we can persuade her to complete earlier or persuade the ones somewhere up the the chain to hold on.

At the moment it's looking like the chain above us will collapse, all because of 9 days :(

"'Tax rich more' says minister"

You can tell that this government is getting comfortable in power as we start to see more and more traditional Labour policies come along. What I can't believe is that I voted for this lot :(

BBC News reports that a British couple have just had a son that was selected so that he stands a chance of being able to save his older brother's life.

I'm currently in two minds over this. I know that during IVF embryos are discarded and so implcitly a choice is made, so I don't really see a problem with choosing the embryo that will save a life. The argument against it seems to be that it "devalues" the child who's been "selected". I don't agree personally as I think that most parents would only go through this sort of thing if they wanted another child anyway. The fact that they can save the life of their current child is a bonus that means that they will go through the pain of IVF for that chance, not that they are only having the baby for the first child.

What I find worrying is the obvious developments. In this case, the embryos were studied and the one with a tissue match was chosen. The next step will be to modify the embyro so that it's tissue does match and then we'll be getting to the point where we are choosing the embryo that's got the genes that match the parents' vision of thier child. This is where it gets problematic in my view. I wouldn't want a child to be modified just so that it has blue eyes, but paradoxically, I wouldn't have a problem modifying a child so that it won't get a brain disorder.

I don't have an answer, but I do know that pretending that it will go away is going to cause us more problems later.

Was awake for most of the night, and fell asleep sometime after 5am this morning. As a result I slept straight through the alarm and have just got to work.

Not a good start to the day.

It looks like our sale has completely fallen through now :(

Update:
It's all on a tightrope at the moment. It seems that threatening to re-market our house has forced movement towards getting this sorted. We won't know if it's all going to work though until next week...

Have spent all morning investigating options that'll mean that the entire chain doesn't collapse. I think that I should be paid for all this work!

We ate out today to celebrate Father's Day. Went to a very nice restaurant where they welcomed children with open arms. It's much less stressful to go to a restaurant where there's more than one high chair, kids cutlery and food that isn't just fishfingers and chips.

Although we booked for midday, we had such a good time (and Jon didn't get bored!) that we didn't get back here until 2pm. Jon's nap was a little late as a result but he slept very well until about 4ish! Of course, he probably won't sleep tonight now :)

I'm not quite so stressed today over the house move. Georgina and I had a nice long talk last night which was good and made everything much more bearable.

We can't do anything about the move for a week or so, so I'm sure that my stress level will rise again then :)

Our exchange has been delayed again :(

It appears that our purchaser's solicitor has been less than completely honest with us about the state of the chain below.

Gutted... again !

BBC News:

It took the jury of 10 men and one woman just an hour and a half to return the not guilty verdicts, after a trial which lasted nearly six and a half weeks.

I'm glad that Trupti Patel has been found not guilty. It was
obious as soon as the case began that she was innocent. Yet more public money wasted though. I think that someone needs to sit down and come up with a better way to investigate infant deaths. Clearly assuming that a parent has murdered the child because there's no simple explanation is just wrong.

You have to admire Manchester United. Getting rid of Beckham for ?30 million just has to be a good deal. He's 28 now, so he's got maybe 3 or 4 good seasons left so MU have already had his best... It looks even better from MU's point of view if they do get the 23 year old Ronaldinho for ?9 million from Paris!

Today, so far, has been quite productive! I've actually got productive work done and haven't had to deal with any major crisis all day! Who knows? I might even meet this week's deadline!

Clearly my whinging worked :)

from one crisis to the next! It'd be nice if I was given enough notice that I could actually plan stuff...

when you don't get up and dressed until lunchtime :)

Reinstalled my main PC lastnight/today, so hopefully it'll run nice and fast now :)

Complaining works!

Having complained bitterly to Equity about the length of time required to give my solicitor some documents, I got a response this morning. The lady in the customer service department who had to deal with my complaint has managed to change a 10 day turnaround into a 2 day turnaround and has promised that we'll definitely have the documents by end of play on Monday!

What a result!

We found out today that we can't exchange tomorrow due to a cock-up somewhere that means that we won't get some essential documents for our sale until next week at the earliest.

I am livid and depressed at the same time. After many phone calls today, I have discovered that the Management company (called Equity plc) have lousy customer service and have such an inefficient legal team that a job my solicitor reckons his company could do in less than 24 hours will take then 8 days :(

What I can't work out is why we didn't know this earlier. Our solicitor has been saying to use that we are ready to exchange for a while now and then this comes up... So either he was telling me something wrong or I was missunderstanding what was said. Have to find out tomorrow and I'm really worried that it's me that missunderstood ;(

I do know that our solicitor has been trying to get the documents from equity since mid May. He seemed to believe (whenever we spoke about it) that the documents from equity would be "any day now" whilst Equity seem to have sat on their hands. They certainly haven't answered emails and when you try to phone them, you aren't allowed to talk to the legal department so can't find out the truth anyway. Talking to the "customer service" agents doesn't help. I phoned three times today and got three different answers to the same question.

So I'm pissed off with Equity plc, my solicitor, me and the whole process.

Actually, that's wrong, my overriding feeling is that I'm gutted :(

Ed regularly takes photos of Steph and posts them in the "On my desktop:" section of his blog. Where are the archives so that we can see lots of pictures of Steph?

Maybe Ed just wants to keep them to himself... can't say I blame him!

Update I've been told to look on Salopian Tube and with a bit of clicking I worked out that I should go here!

The more I hear about how inaccurate the Government's case for war with Iraq was, the less trust I have in Tony Blair and his Government. No matter how much the government is now saying that it wasn't about a current threat of the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, it was! They are trying to move the goal posts and tell us that we invaded Iraq because Saddam would have become a bigger threat in the future and that his regime was bad. Those reasons may be good reasons and it may be good that Saddam is gone, but it wasn't what we were sold prior to the war.

Intrestingly the call for an independant inquiry into the evidence presented to the House of Commons was defeated with a government majority of 98. The government pulled out all the stops to avoid defeat and 25% of the Labour backbenchers voted with the opposition! (the government's majority is 170). So we now have two parlimentary committees looking into it. These are the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Intelligence Committee.

The Intelligence Committee is appointed by Tony Blair and meets in private. When it publishes its report, Tony Blair will have complete editorial control and has the right to remove any parts of the report that he wants to before the report is published. Therefore the investigation by this committee is a waste of time and effort as I certainly (and anyone else who can think) won't believe its findings anyway. So that just leaves us with the Foreign Affairs committee that has to go cap in hand to the House of Commons everytime it wants to see something that the government doesn't want it to. Remembering that the government has a 170 majority, we come to the conclusion that the Foreign Affairs committee is going to be hamstrung and no matter how committed they are to the truth, they will only be able to see what the government wants them to see.

Of course, I use the word "government" when I really mean "Tony Blair". It's quite clear that Claire Short is right when she says that he is autocratic and believes himself to be more like a president than a prime minister...

Sorry Tony, but I don't believe a word you say anymore.

It's been a long day today as I've spent most of it setting up an email system for a client along with fixing domain name setting errors... On the bright side, wmute got to work today and has alreay starting producing usefull stuff :) I have a hope that with me shielding him from the day-to-day emergencies, he'll be able to get some serious work done so that we aren't so behind schedule soon!

wmute has accepted the job from Mustardhouse which is cool :)

I now have someone to boss around !

Does anyone else have problems dealing with the "control panels" provided by Domain Name registration companies?

Anyone know a really good company to register and administer domain names with?

My mind's dribbled out of my ear whilst writing this tech spec.

Fortunately I'm past the halfway mark now :)

The thing I really like about Sundays at the moment is how lazy we are during them :)