I’ve been wanting to move to a .NET based blog package for a while now. I’m currently on pMachine, an old, PHP-based freeware product that isn’t architected super well and is hard to customize or extend. I’m a .NET guy now and it’d be nice to be able to do some cool .NET things on my site, so I’d like a .NET blog.

I started looking at dasBlog, but I don’t think that’s the way for me. It’s got some nice features, but the code on the back end was inherited, patched, fixed, updated, added to, and jimmied together to make it what it is today. It’s not terribly well documented, and looking at how it works from a code perspective is less than clear. Even just trying to install it locally to see if I liked it wasn’t too straightforward and ended with me talking to a couple of other dasBlog users who had this odd proprietary knowledge that they got from still other dasBlog users. I can’t be dealing with that.

Stu and I thought we might just start writing our own blog engine. We went so far as to get a domain name and a project space on SourceForge, but the time required to get the thing going is a little more than we’ve had to allocate to it.

Now I’m really thinking about Subtext, though. With the 1.9 release, they’ve updated to .NET 2.0, they’re getting their unit test coverage up, and from what I can tell, the templates use user controls (like master pages) so I wouldn’t have to deal with the odd template/macro language that most blog engines make use of. I’m all about that.

Granted, I haven’t actually downloaded it and looked at it yet to see if it’s any better than dasBlog behind the scenes. But I like what I’ve seen so far.

Wedding invitations were sent out Monday and people are already starting to get them. Thus far it seems that as soon as they’re received, we get a phone call from the recipient to tell us whether they liked the invitation and start talking about whether they’re going to be there.

I’m glad to get phone calls and hear what people think, but let me make one thing very, very, super, extra clear:

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

Let me say that again for the folks in the cheap seats:

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

I don’t care if you are family. My mom had best return that damn card. I don’t care if you’re in the wedding party. Stu, you’d best return that card. I don’t care if you mention it to me on the phone. I don’t care if you email me. I don’t care if you instant message me. I don’t care if you send me an SMS text on my cell phone.

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

I cannot stress this enough, and it may sound like a crazy rant or a ridiculous diatribe, but let me assure you how very serious I am about this. If you don’t send in the card, I can’t get an accurate head count for all the various crap we need head counts for. If we don’t have an accurate head count, we don’t have enough chairs, we don’t have enough food, etc. The only way we can make sure everyone is counted is to have a single point of entry for registration for this thing, and that single point of entry is the RSVP card that comes with your invitation.

So here are the rules. They are very simple:

If you don’t send in the RSVP card, don’t show up to the wedding.

If you send in the RSVP card and say you’re not going to be there, don’t show up to the wedding.

If you send in the RSVP card and say you’re going to be there and then you don’t show up, I will hunt you down.

This isn’t a difficult concept. Either you’ll be there or you won’t. If you say you’re going to be there, be a person of your word and be there. If you don’t say you’re going to be there (or if you say you’re not going to be there), don’t show up and wonder why you used to be my best friend but now I won’t speak to you again for the rest of your life. Seriously, we just need folks to return the cards and follow through on it. I don’t want to be a Bridezilla (Groomzilla?), and on the rest of the stuff with this wedding I’m cool as a cucumber.

But don’t you dare fuck with me on this RSVP thing. This is the one thing I’m going to be a stickler on.

(Oh, and to the folks who weren’t invited, I’m sorry. There are a lot of people we wanted to invite, and when we had the 100% complete list, it turned out the wedding might have required the Rose Garden to be the venue since I don’t think the Empress Palace can hold like 50,000 people. Instead, we had to make some decisions, and it ended up being a far, far smaller affair with many fewer friends and coworkers than we originally planned for. It’s not that we don’t like you or didn’t find you worthy, we just had to make some hard choices. Sorry.)

I finished Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the “Normal” difficulty a couple of days ago, so I’m thinking I might try it out on the “Hard” difficulty just to see. I haven’t yet jumped online with it, either, and I’m tempted to, but somehow the idea of getting into a game with a bunch of 12-year-olds yelling arbitrary profanity at me doesn’t sound too enticing. That said, maybe I’ll give it a run anyway.

Jenn’s bridal shower was on Saturday and while that was going on I headed over to Stu’s new place to put in a few units* on Oblivion. Jenn ended up getting several very nice things from folks and it sounds like she had a great time, which is good, since you don’t get a bridal shower every week.

I, of course, felt pretty good about the units put in and look forward to the next set of units.

* A “unit” is roughly defined as a “large block of time dedicated to a single task.” The original definition derives from when Stu and I were playing Soul Calibur III and had to fight the last character so many times before we finally beat him that it became a running joke.

I put a little time in hacking the ol’ pMachine and I have full-text RSS enabled now instead of the partial-text feed I was running. I’ve been wanting to do that for a while, I just hadn’t had the real inclination to get it done.

I still really want to change blog software, but I haven’t yet found what I would call a “great” blog package. I started down the road to dasBlog, but from a developer extension standpoint… eh. I might consider moving to Subtext, but I haven’t really looked at it yet from a source level.

Of course, technically both of those totally beat out what I’m on right now, but if I’m going to put in the effort to move, it’s gotta be worth my while.

I’m pretty much done with this whole painting situation. And I don’t mean “done” as in “the job is complete and correct to my satisfaction,” I mean “done” as in “I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with the ridiculous nature of how this has gone.”

I had a meeting on Monday with the crew chief and the paint crew. I pointed out the three remaining problem areas. The support that runs above my railing on the porch outside was spotty and not uniformly covered. The trim around my front door was never prepped correctly so you could see the layers of old paint under the new paint. The soffits were painted too thick and looked “drippy.”

The crew chief acknowledged these items in turn. The support did, in fact, get re-painted, and it looks fine now. Awesome. The soffits, as it turns out, weren’t actually their fault - they showed me that if you sand down the drips, the old paint shows up underneath, so I accepted that - next time I’ll know. But my door trim…

First they argued that the job wasn’t quoted for “that sort of sanding and prep work.” Odd, since that was the whole reason I called them out there and I specifically pointed that out when I got the estimate done. Regardless, they sanded the thing down and it looks almost reasonable, but then they slapped the paint on so fast you can see ridiculous brush strokes all through it.

They didn’t tell me when they were leaving, either, they just sort of left. I haven’t heard from them since. They did leave a can of the paint behind, so the new plan is to just fix the damn trim around the door myself and call it a day. I’m tired of fighting them to get the job done right.

For all you Oregon homeowners out there - avoid WILLCO Painting and Construction. It occurs to me that what they probably do best is more industrial work - stuff like apartment complexes and so forth - where the person having the work done isn’t going to scrutinize the job.

That said, I still think I just got a bum crew. The crew chief I dealt with was cool all the way to the end, but I really got the impression the crew wanted to do as little as possible and get the hell out of there.

Ah, my first poor experience with contractors. I’m sure there are many more to come.