Add to my resume? Under what heading?

I feel especially accomplished today, but it's not because I revamped my investment plan or washed all of the laundry and dishes. It's because, after several years of intermittently playing Minesweeper, I finally won at the advanced level! Woo-hoo! The feat only took me 45 minutes and 23 seconds. I only wished that I had achieved this months ago so that I could've made mention of it on my law school applications. :J

All the Ron

I received a note from my friend, Ron, in Nashville announcing that he'll be DJing tomorrow (Sat, 9 Jun) night at the Swan Ball, a big funds-raiser for Cheekwood Botanical Garden and a huge event on Nashville's social calendar. Ron is very excited about this, with just cause. Not only is he bringing dance music to one of the hoitiest of Nashville's hoity-toity events, he's also going to be experimenting with his new VJ set-up, which includes some experimental equipment that will let him more easily beat-mix videos in the way that DJs mix songs. (Not just DJing -- VJing!) It should be quite fab. Did I mention that Jay Leno and Earth, Wind, and Fire will be appearing at the Ball, too?

Check out Ron's, Cheekwood's, and Swan Ball's Web sites, linked above, and read the story about Ron in All the Rage, the weekly happenings rag published by The Tennessean (their equivalent of Winston-Salem's Relish).

So, Ron, will I soon have to adjust my bookmarks to point to vjron.com instead of djron.com? :J

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Update: Since the 2007 Swan Ball has come and gone, Ron has posted some photos of the VJ booth at the event. Enjoy!

Stickin' it to the Crooks

The following letter is in response to a complaint that I filed after receiving an unsolicited, pre-recorded commercial telephone call. My phone numbers are on the national Do-Not-Call lists. Additionally, North Carolina law prohibits pre-recorded solicitations, use of automatic dialers, calls outside of certain hours, and blocking of the company's information from Caller ID.

The call in question was offering information about lowering my credit card interest rate and said at the end that I should press one number to be removed from the calling list or another number to speak to a customer service representative. When I pressed the one number to be removed, a message said that I had made an invalid selection. When I pressed the other number, I heard a few clicks before an agent answered and asked for me to confirm that I wished to lower my credit card interest rate. I replied that I was, instead, interested in knowing her name, her representative number, and the name of her company. This caught her off guard and led her to eventually hang up on me.

In filing the complaint, I provided the date and time of the call, a synopsis of the call, and the phone number that appeared on Caller ID. The complaint form is available online at the DOJ's Web site, nocallsnc.com, though you have to print it and complete it manually before mailing it. The Attorney General's office took care of the rest! Get 'em, Roy!

State of North Carolina
Department of Justice
9001 Mail Service Center
Raleigh NC 27699-9001

Roy Cooper, Attorney General

May 29, 2007

RE: File No. 0705197, Ervin

Dear Mr. Ervin:

This letter is in reference to the complaint you filed with the Attorney General's Office, Consumer Protection Division, alleging violation of North Carolina's Do Not Call law. Your written complaint helped the Attorney General determine to seek a settlement with Card Member Services, the company from which you received an unwelcome telephone solicitation. A more thorough, and possible long term, investigation is under way into this matter. Among the terms we will be asking for will include:

• Fully comply with North Carolina "Do Not Call" laws and related federal statutes;
• Ensure proper training of all the company's telemarketing representatives calling North Carolina residents;
• Maintain written records of Do Not Call complaints from North Carolina residents for a period of five years; and
• Pay civil penalties and related investigation costs.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Without concerned residents like you, it would not be possible to enforce North Carolina's Do Not Call law. In the future, should you encounter any business practices that you believe violate the law, telemarketing or otherwise, please contact us at 1-877-566-7226.

With kind regards, I am

Very truly yours,
David Fox
Telephone Privacy Protection Specialist
919-716-6000
[e-mail address omitted here]
noscamnc.gov

Kernersvegas

By now, I should've closed on and moved into my condo in Greensboro. Negotiations with the seller were quite brief and the inspection turned up little of concern. I knew when I made the offer that I was buying the most expensive unit in the community of about 200 condos, but I figured that it was worth it since there's steady demand for housing in that area and my unit would have a brand new kitchen, furnace, water heater, and even a gas stove for back-up heat. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be.

Bad news came back with the appraisal, which valued the unit at about 5% less than what I'd agreed to pay. The seller, who was not using an agent, had made noises that he wasn't willing to lower the price since he'd accounted for his renovations and a buyer's agent's commission in the price. At the same time, the mortgage company wouldn't lend me all of the money that I'd need to buy the place. I had a few options before me if I really wanted the place. I could pay for another appraisal, but that seemed pointless. The appraisal looked reasonable enough to me and my realtor's research revealed it to be so; it even appeared that the appraiser had tried to help me out a bit by using comparables at the higher end of the scale and looking at a very similar community about a mile away (Whilden Place) where units sell at consistently higher prices. Other options involved even more money coming out of my pocket and none of them were at all appealing; some even seemed ethically questionable, though legal. I decided to let the condo go on the grounds that it didn't appraise and I couldn't get satisfactory financing. It took about a week of my realtor's arm-twisting and my own hand-wringing to convince the sellers to sign termination papers on the sales contract, but they finally did and I look forward to picking up a check for my earnest money before the weekend.

During this drama, Leslie, my friend with whom I was staying in Kernersville, made me a very good offer to rent space in her house. A bit of budget forecasting showed that this would be a very good move, even after accounting for the additional fuel and car maintenance costs, and would provide each of us with a built-in pet-sitter.

I've spent the past week settling into my new digs, the large bonus room above Leslie's garage. She installed ceiling fans and a closet system and I've been dragging things out from storage to make the place homey. I brought Cilly to his new home and he is acclimating well and becoming acquainted with his new canine cousin, Leslie's dog, Emma.

With the housing question answered, I turned my attention to other law school housekeeping matters -- applying for student loans and purchasing a laptop. The loan applications are in and I hope to hear something soon. I'd assumed that I'd buy a Dell laptop, but I don't care for the looks of their current line. I'd seen some nice Hewlett-Packard laptops at Costco, so I compared prices around town. Costco's prices were about the best around (bested by Sam's by a few pennies, but beating hp.com by a few hundred dollars). I was still nervous about shelling out so much money for a computer with an operating system that I'd never used (Windows Vista) from a manufacturer with whose products I had little experience, but Costco has a good return policy for computers, offers technical support, and extends the manufacturer's warranty on computers that it sells, so I finally settled on configuring a system myself on costco.com and expect it to arrive soon.

Meanwhile, Chris has been having his own housing drama, but I can hear the fat lady warming up so a climax seems to be drawing near; he'll move into his new condo this weekend.

Though I've heard the -vegas suffix applied with varying degrees of admiration and derision to many -villes (particularly Nashville, to become Nashvegas), Kernersvegas is a particularly apt moniker for Kernersville for me, since Leslie moved here about a year ago from Las Vegas AND the fact that I'm about to roll the dice in the crap-shoot of life in a quite fabulous way. :J