Stop whatever you are doing and watch Men In Coats. Now.
(10 MB Windows Media)

Marshall & Ilsley’s Metavante to buy GHR | Reuters.com

NEW YORK, June 27 (Reuters) – Marshall & Ilsley Corp.’s financial technology unit, Metavante Corp., on Monday said it agreed to buy GHR Systems Inc. for $65 million to add residential mortgage origination and consumer finance services.

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Established in 1985, Wayne, Pennsylvania-based GHR provides underwriting, processing and closing technologies for companies in the residential mortgage and consumer finance industries. Fifteen of the top 50 U.S. mortgage lenders are GHR clients.

GHR is the parent company of my current employer, Loansoft. So now (or as soon as the deal closes) we will be Loansoft, owned by GHR, owned by Metavante, owned by M&I;. I hope they’ll be merciful.

GRYNX is featuring a step-by-step article on building a WallTop . What is a WallTop? It’s a junk laptop converted to an intelligent picture frame. Intriguing, no?

So, I had this laptop booting on a CD with XPE (Windows XP Preboot Environment) made with BartPE to provide me with the log files from my servers. That was basically it. But it soon took up too much space on my desk and ended up in a corner where it was never used or looked at. But hey – why not take this old laptop, break it down to it’s pieces, mount it into a frame and hang it in the living room showing a slideshow?? It’s definitely silent as it doesn’t have an hard drive. Well, first I was sceptical myself. Power cable and network cable would be difficult to hide, and drilling an hole into my neighbours living room wouldn’t solve anything. Hmm, but let’s go wireless and replace the original power cable with an thin cable in the same colour as the wall!!

So I did.

There’s a stack of ancient (but working, as far as I know) laptops in the server room at my office. I’ve been told I can have them if I want.

I am getting a lot of mail for Professor Andrew Rich of the Department of Political Science at CUNY.

Wrong Andrew Rich. I am Andrew Rich, the software developer in Northern California, not Andrew Rich the CUNY professor or Andrew Rich the Oregon vintner.

Our local Expo Design Center will be closing soon:

Home Depot will shut down two of its high-end design stores, in Concord and East Palo Alto, and replace them with two more Home Depots.

Expo Design Center, which caters to a wealthier customer base than Home Depot, sells high-end fixtures to people mainly looking to remodel their kitchens and bathrooms.

The problem with Expo, IMO, is that it’s a very elaborate showroom filled with very expensive fixtures, but no real-world solutions. We go to look at how we would want to do a kitchen or bathroom or floor, and then consider how we can do it for one-tenth the price–seriously, Expo prices are beyond “pricey” and into “excessive”.

The EPA location shares a giant building with the neighboring Home Depot, so the company plans to make an even larger HD store out of the combined space. Should be interesting.