Evan Agee: Live from Richmond Indiana

It’s exciting! Kristen and I have officially started house hunting. We don’t quite have all of our down payment saved up, but were close enough that we should start getting a sense of what type of houses we can afford on our budget. It’s mostly a chance for us to see what’s available and if our expectations are reasonable.

We’re going tonight to look at two houses that are both in our price range. I hope we don’t just love one of them since we can’t buy yet. I’d give anything to have the down payment all saved up already so we could just go out and pick what we want and buy it. It’s so difficult to save money, and no one we know is too eager to offer us the money. I guess I can’t blame them.

The two houses we’re looking at tonight are in Centerville, one is down the road from where I used to live and the other is out on Abington Pike, which would be nice. Our first choice is to live in the country, but I understand that it’s hard to find houses in the country. We’re sure whatever we get we’ll like though.

If I can build up the nerve I’ll take some photos of the houses that we look at so I can keep track of everything and show you some of the houses that we see.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on this site lately. I’m not sure what has gotten me so excited about it, considering that I don’t have a high volume of traffic, but I’ve been wanting to add more features to it to make it more interesting for the people that do visit it.

I recently redeveloped the Photo Gallery from the ground up making it a new, more user-friendly, database-backed, more-fully-featured system. The new gallery mostly caters to my desires as the maintainer. With a web-based administration interface, a complex browse/edit interface that allows me to move photos from one category to another and a new system for adding featured photos (see the top of the front page), this is by far the best addition to my site in a long time.

The features that I added that you’ll be interested in are the ability to search photos, and the new photo captions. So, you don’t have to wonder about why a picture was taken or who is in the picture. There were also some minor, but much-needed interface improvements. If you haven’t already, you should check out the gallery.

My newest addition is the Movie Reviews section. I went back and forth with this for a while. I wasn’t sure whether my traffice volume was sufficient enough for me to put all of the work into creating software for the idea that I had. But, I decided to do it anyway.

I created software which allows me to post reviews of movies as I see them. Fueled mostly by my Netflix account and the fact that I usually see at least one new movie a week, I thought it would be nice to have a way to communicate what I think about these movies with anyone that’s interested. My dad, like myself is really into movies, so I was thinking a lot of him when I created it.

Well, there you have it. I’m still actively working on both of those items, but they’re available for you to browse as they currently are. Let me know what you think!

As I mentioned in my last past, I got a new digital camera for Christmas. Since then I’ve been having lots of fun with it and even added a new, more user-friendly version of the photo gallery to this site. I’ve been taking pictures of everything that I can think of and pretty much carrying my camera around with me wherever I go. It’s awesome. I’ve also started creating short films with my camera, which brings me to “The Unwelcome Guest“.

The Unwelcome Guest is a very short film that I created last weekend with my brother-in-law. It was basically an experiment to see what type of video we could create using my camera and I was very pleased to say the least. To read more about that project, read The Unwelcome Guest in Items of Interest.

In other news I bought a home theatre system! I’ve got a receiver and two LARGE home speakers, but they’re huge and they don’t produce 5.1 audio, which is a must for home theatre. The home theatre I purchased was the Panasonic SC-HT670 and it’s features are awesome, among other things it’s a 5-disk DVD/CD/MP3 player. It should be here this week and I cant wait to set it up. I bought it using my leftover Christmas money.

I don’t believe there’s much else new on my end.