2006-Jun-10 08:09:32 +0000 @381

I just purchased my first home and have some thoughts on the process both for people who are thinking of buying and to remind me of some of the less obvious things I need to know next time around.

Financing:

• Before you shop for a house, get qualified for your loan. No one treats you seriously until they know for sure that you will have money to complete a transaction.


• Mortgage companies don’t call people back. There are many reasons that a mortgage company might not be interested in your loan. They might not be licensed in your state, might not do first time buyers, or whatever. Bottom line, however, is that if they don’t want your mortgage they won’t be polite enough to call and tell you so. Maybe people whine a lot or something, I don’t know, but if you don’t hear back within one business day you should call someone else. Mortgage companies make a lot of money off your loan. When they do want your business, expect them to call over and over again.


• Get some extra phone lines and email addresses to hand out to people. As a new home owner, you are marketing gold and will want to turn off phone lines and email addresses when they get bogged with crap. Likewise, get ready for a lot of credit offers. Vendors were calling me within 24 hours of closing to sell me alarms and all sorts of other stuff.


• Remember the old saying that “banks only give money to people who don’t need it.” Oh, and also, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Expect to kill some trees in the process.
  

Home Shopping:

• You’ll need an agent. Your mortgage approval will only be good for so many days and shopping for a home on your own will suck up an inordinate amount of time. Your agent will spend nearly as much time doing background work for you as they spend home shopping with you. You’ll have a ton of questions, and it’s nice to have someone who can answer about half of them. Also, most homes on the market have the little key boxes for people to check them out. Agents have access to those. Agents will also save you a lot of time by checking out listings in advance. A lot of listings are already sold, even though they are still listed. Sometimes sellers take homes off the market, but they stay on the MLS sites. Sometimes there are issues with homes that your agent can tell you about. For example, “I looked at that home two weeks ago with another client. It was a rental and the people renting it wrecked it. It needs $40,000 in renovation and has mold. Do you still want to see it?” Finally, the prices homes actually sell for are substantially lower than the amounts people ask for. Your agent can pull MLS records for the area and find out what homes really sell for and use that as a tool to lower the price. Saving 10% on a home is like getting a car for free.


• If you want DSL, find out where it is available in advance of your search. I wasted two weeks of my time and my agent’s time looking in an area that had no service. I would never have guessed that the nearest CO switch was so far away or that homes in such a nice area would not have DSL service. I know it is very hard to find out where the COs are located, etc., but the hours you spend digging this information up will save you a lot more time later.


• Rent an airplane and fly over your area, preferably during rush hour. Not only is it kind of fun, but you will learn a lot. Expect it to run $200-250. If you happen to be a pilot, hire someone else to be pilot-in-command for this flight. You want to get down to 1,000 feet AGL and gawk, so let someone else be in charge of paying attention.


• The best homes sell in just a few days. Homes that stay listed on MLS, therefore, are not necessarily as good. A good agent watches the new listings every day and will call you. Be prepared to look every day and to put in an offer quickly. Sometimes agents know about homes that are not even listed yet.

2006-Jun-01 09:34:33 +0000 @440

I just noticed, a bit to my surprise, that different versions of Google give different results. While it made sense to me that English versions and Japanese might have differences, I’m surprised that Google.com (US), google.co.uk, and google.com.au all return slightly different results from the same query.

It’s also interesting to see which sites show up in the top results in countries, while others do not.

It might be a neat experiment to use international Googles for my day to day searches.

2006-May-13 23:48:01 +0000 @033

I’ve had a passing interest in astronomy over the years, but have mostly been disappointed. There’s a lot of light pollution here in the city, and the meteor showers are either on cold nights or it is cloudy. I did enjoy a near lunar eclipse in high school and the comets in 1998 were awesome.

I’ve played with some of those rotating disc maps over the years and never really got them to match up with what I was seeing. I’ve also played with some really neat astronomy simulation programs over the years, but the timing was never right.

Last week, I found Stellarium a multi-platform easy-to-use program. Since it was availble in OS X, I loaded it on my laptop and waited for a clear night. I only got to play with it for 20 minutes or so, but the experience was excellent! It was so smooth to whip it around, adjust the magnitudes to match what I could see, and spot things in the sky that I had only read about in science fiction. I found the star Vega, planet Jupiter, several constellations, and the North Star (Polaris). Polaris was not exactly were I expected it to be based on what I learned as a boy scout, but it was close enough that I could have found my way if I had to rely on it.

I also like setting the clock forward and watching the stars spin. I now understand the “ecliptic,” which was always a mystery to me before.

So check it out sometime. It loaded and unloaded very cleanly from my system and I highly recommend it.

2006-Apr-26 09:32:16 +0000 @439

I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to make an invisible tatoo that shows up under a blacklight. this site shows that it is possible. Some of the effects are pretty neat.

I’ve never thought of anything that I would want to keep around forever, plus there is a social stigma of having a tatoo in later life. Many surveys indicate that the majority of people regret getting one. Still, the idea that there’s something there and only I know about it has a sort of spy-thriller appeal.

I’m still not sure I would do one of these. The article says that the skin irritation can be visible up to a year. While the ink is “safe,” I have seen some of my ultraviolet inks turn yellow with time. With fair skin like mine, that would make it visible in daylight.

I think I’ll stick to paint and glowstick juice, but I thought this was neat enough to comment on.

2006-Mar-26 14:25:02 +0000 @642

I’ve been getting a ton of credit card offers lately. It’s now to the point that I don’t even bother to send all the crap back in the business reply envelope – there’s just too many! My shredder is giving up the ghost and I’m now burning them because it is faster.

I’ve received offers at my current address that are co-addressed to businesses I worked at more than 10 years ago. I’ve moved more than five times.

The most interesting ones are these offers from Chase. First, if you recall the Chase-Manhattan Incident, where Chase imagined a credit card and then sued me when I refused to pay it, it’s amazing that they would offer me credit at all. But more interesting than this is that each of the offers is slightly different. They offer a slightly different rate, grace period, etc. It’s like they are experimenting with their marketing mix to see what will make customers take their offer. Even the phone numbers to call are different.

2006-Mar-01 22:53:42 +0000 @995

Yeah, it’s finally here! I finally figured out enough WordPress/XHTML/CSS stuff to finish my new blog design.
I’ve been trying to change my alias for a while now.

The old one was okay, but it was what people called me briefly in 3rd grade when the movie WarGames came out. Few people remember it and there’s several other people using it. It’s kind of neat that it is a real-sounding name, but I think it is better to use one that signals to people “this is an alias that I’m giving you” rather than to purport to be someone else.

Dreaming up a trademark is tough work. It’s very hard to think of globally available names. CypherGhost, after more than 100 other ideas, fit the bill. The domain name was available. Google produced no hits. All trademarks were available.

CypherGhost came about partly because of my cypherpunk interests (cryptography, anonymity, etc.) and because I tend to be invisible in social situations. I’m not particularly introverted or anything, but I frequently make suggestions or comments that just go in one ear and out the other. A short time later, someone else will think of the same idea and, all of a sudden, the idea is brilliant. I just consider myself ahead of my time, but it’s an eerie and recurring phenomenon.

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2006-Feb-17 15:32:46 +0000 @689

I played with the reservation system on the Georgia Aquarium’s web site today and saw some useful patterns.

My initial purpose was to determine when the least busy times were for people to visit so that they could avoid the large crowds I have heard about.

As expected, weekends are very busy. In fact, the Aquarium has no tickets available for the next two weekends and is half sold for the weekend after that. During the week, the busy times follow the “class field trip” schedule. Early in the morning, the 9 and 10 slots, have lots of tickets. Tickets sell out first during the middle of the day, but more slots open up as school gets out. Students have to be returned to school in order to return home on schedule, it appears. Rush hour is a good time to go. Pretty much anytime during the week after 3pm is decent since all the kids are back at school.

I’m not certain if the inordinate number of first slot tickets is due in part to the Aquarium not having visitors already inside. During the day, they must expect that a certain percentage of visitors will remain past the hour block they entered.

The total number of tickets available per day approaches 3510, so I’m assuming that is the maximum number of visitors the Aquarium can support per day. Assuming they can sell each spot each day for the full adult ticket price, the total gate fees for the year would be only $29 million. Given the massive cost of construction and operation, it seems hardly feasible that they would be able to continue operations. I assume that they also receive grants, research money, etc.

Another way of looking at it is that it will take 3.5 years at maximum capacity for all of the population of Atlanta to see the aquarium. That, of course, assumes no out-of-town visitors.

So, take a break from work sometime and checkout the aquarium. On my trip during the week, I found it very uncrowded and could get as close as I wanted to anything without any problems.

2006-Jan-29 22:54:14 +0000 @995

I went to the Georgia Aquarium for the first time. I mostly decided to take a break from work to decompress (sorry, bad SCUBA diver joke). I planned to just spend an hour or so to figure out where it was, get my photo taken, and scope it out so I would know how it works the next time I visit.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the aquarium. It’s a very nice addition to our city and I’m glad I forked out for an annual pass.

Inside, the aquarium was done very well. One or two tanks had some water quality issues, probably local airborne molds and algae that they will remove with due time. SCUBA divers were still working in most of the tanks. I really enjoyed the coral tank and could sit there for an hour. They have a very large deep-sea tank with a 100-foot long tunnel underneath it. The docent said that we were 20 feet under water and that the tunnel was about 28 inches thick to withstand the pressure. They had a moving sidewalk that actually turned out very well. You can hop on and it creeps along at about 2 inches per second, but once people are on, they stand still. Everyone gets a good spot where they can see, kids stop pushing around, etc. You can also sit or walk on the carpet if you like.

The species selected represent “the usual” common marine fish, although I did see a few neat ones that I wasn’t aware of. The coral tank contains mostly varieties that are available commercially to home the home aquarist like myself. Still, an annual pass is a lot less expensive than maintaining a marine tank of any size at home. The displays are designed so that you can get up very close to the fish. It’s very well designed in that respect. It’s easy for people with short attention span kids to wander through, but also good for those of us who can sit there for hours admiring them. There aren’t many signs telling you what is on display in each tank or what is special about them. They even had some of the same fish I have. I talked briefly about them with a couple of other visitors but tried very hard not to bore them longer than 60 seconds.

The aquarium is touted as the largest in the world. I don’t know what metric they are using, but it’s not a record that they will hold for long. It isn’t spectacularly larger than the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, possibly smaller. On a square footage standpoint, 25% is classroom and research. There’s also a 5000-6000 square foot indoor playground and two ballrooms for special events. It’s also comprised entirely underwater exhibits. It does not have a rain forest area like many other aquariums do. It is larger than the famous aquarium in Monterrey, California.

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2005-Dec-25 23:27:38 +0000 @019

Well, Christmas is about over. I’m with my parents now and so far everything is going pretty well. Mom insisted on building a campfire outside last night and singing Christmas songs, but the weather was warmer than most years so it wasn’t too bad.

I got all of my gifts done in time, although many were finished at the last minute and I paid quite a bit in Fedex fees to get things done on time this year. Most of my Christmas cards will be late. The envelopes kept jamming in the printer. I’m not sure what is up with that. On the flight out of town, I realized that I could probably print them upside down and it would work better.

All of my gifts were well received, as far as I know… except perhaps that my brothers didn’t get the significance of Mentos and Diet Coke. Gifts received this year include:

• Many books from my Amazon wish list including Fruits, Zombie Survival Guide, Batman Handbook, and Natural Paint Book.
  


• Bonus books of How To Be a Villain, and The Bush Survival Bible
• A new set of Matrix DVDs (mine were stolen.)
• An LED glowstick
• Neat pour spouts for my wide mouth Nalgene bottles
• A MAD magazine
• Some magnets, wooden puzzles, camouflage duck tape, glasses for the kitchen, and some yummy chocolate chip cookies. I also got a shipment of Harry and David. The pears looked sad, but the chocolate looks yummy.

2005-Dec-09 22:18:36 +0000 @971

Well I got called for Jury Duty. Sure, I could get out of it if I wanted. Many people have told me they just didn’t show up and nothing bad ever happened, but I have several friends with criminal convictions because their “jury of peers” was 12 people who were too dumb to get out of jury duty.

Unlike most things run by Fulton County, it actually went pretty smoothly. Due to the nature of the legal system, there’s a lot of “hurry up and wait” and a lot of sitting around. If you get called, bring something to do for the entire day to entertain yourself. I didn’t see many problems that I could offer easy solutions for. It would be nice if the shuttle to parking ran more than every 30 minutes, and I would like to have had more information prior to my day of service like “what to wear,” “what the plan was for lunch,” etc. Lunch is an hour, by the way. There is a cafeteria or you can go to Underground Atlanta’s food court.

They have a barcoded check-in system, so I spent only a minute or two in line. There are signs everywhere telling you where to go. The directions to the parking lot were pretty good. One of the streets is incorrect, but if you can’t see the big sign for parking, you’re not smart enough to drive or be on a jury. They have a video that they show when everyone gets there that explains most everything. They read a list of FAQs after the video that addresses the questions people usually still have. Only one person asked a question at the end, and they were late arriving. No one noticed that I left my social security number blank on the form. I had planned to ask them three questions all in a row (“Is providing it mandatory, what is it used for, and how are you protecting it against identity theft?”) No one really cared.

At about 12:30, they told me that they had enough jurors and that I could leave. They handed me an expense check on the way out the door ($25).

Only 1 in 4 people who get a summons will actually serve on a jury. Many civil cases get settled out of court before a decision is reached, so there’s a good chance that you will only serve one day and that you will waste your time. I brought my laptop, caught up on some reading, wrote a proposal (which was already approved by the client), watched a movie, and read several chapters from Harry Potter. I did meet a lot of people, which was interesting. The jury pool comes from the voter registration, so the average IQ was much higher than waiting in line at the DMV, and everyone was local, unlike the airport.