YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

What’s new? Well, in the past few days:

• We put the top down on the volkswagen and enjoyed a little open air driving today. There’s nothing like the first warm days of spring. I would have liked to have taken the motorcycle for a ride this weekend but we had friends to visit, realtors to meet and houses to see.
• We thought one house we saw recently was perfect but the seller thought our offer was less than perfect. A lot less than perfect. We were surprised so we did some investigating the public records- the Internet is great sometimes- and found that he bought it this past December for a little more than a third of what he is asking now. He and his contractors did very nice work converting it back to a single family but not enough to justify his steadfast demand for the top dollar sale on the block. I’m sure he’ll keep us in mind if no one else comes along but I’m not holding my breath. The realtor was great, though. We keep looking… might have even seen it today.
• We visited friends and drove to New Hope, PA. I think half of New Jersey had the same idea- the streets and shops were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people. There are a hundred shops all trading on the local Delaware canal cachet but does anyone actually buy any of the overpriced goods? Sure the town is cute, but is it cute enough to warrant a scrum and above list price? I don’t think so. A bright spot is the authentic Mexican food served by the husband and wife owners of the Blue Tortilla. The food is great, even if the service isn’t, and it makes you wonder how you ate what passes elsewhere for "Mexican" food. Their fresh, well-seasoned preparations (I tried a safe bet, flautas) are not the usual heavy chili and cumin stomach-swellers. I wish them luck, their small sit-down restaurant makes up for a dozen greasy tacquerias doing take-out business.
• I helped some friends with their new wireless access point before dinner and I can’t believe what passes for an owner’s manual. Sure, the page and a half of illustrated instructions are in three languages but were are the product specifications or the installation and troubleshooting guides? Oh, right, they’re on the website but if you have one computer you can’t get to the website while you are working on the AP. You can also peruse the interactive configurator on the accompanying CDROM but all it does is reinstall the drivers and launch IE to execute the Windows XP network configurator. No wonder my friends had trouble with it- I had to make a couple of lucky guesses to get to the point where I could get it working. I suspect some of the terminology was translated to English by people who never saw the product. I’ve got a four-letter word or two for that computer company from Texas with the four-letter name.
• I uploaded a few more pictures. I still have more to sort through, but it’s a start.

 

I switched to CRM114 to block spam and after less than a day of training on errors, I’m a happy camper. One of the NEDod folks wrote the filter and several of the list members swear by it, so I thought that before I attempt retraining bogofilter again, I’d try it. It’s not trivial to understand but you can follow the cookbook instructions and get a working filter in short order.

Maria picked up at the public library a wonderful book for me: Schott’s Original Miscellany. It’s a slim, hardcover collection of interesting and eclectic trifles and it even has a website. Originally, I thought that it lacks an index; not true, I just mistook it for an uninteresting collection of statistics. It does lack a list of sources. It isn’t quite useless but it is a very entertaining diversion. That might be the point.

A guy I know through the I.T. field has begun selling hand made briar pipes (pipecrafter.com). He has freehands and churchwardens ready and will make custom orders. Good luck with the new business, Kurt!

I’m feeling dejected about house hunting. The matter is that we are going to close on the sale of this apartment and likely be forced to find a rental just to continue looking for a house. Mortgage rates are staying low, fueling an unbelievably heated market and ushering in more and more potential buyers. We’ve seen wrecks- honest to goodness wrecks with leaking roofs, shattered windows, rats in the basement and boilers broken open with ice- where the realtor says that the seller won’t accept a penny less than the inflated asking price. Open houses are packed- literally too many interested buyers for all of them to view the property at once. The realtors, grown swollen and fat on easy commissions, are not bothering to return calls on Saturday for advertisements in the Sunday NY Times. A friend of a friend had one realtor tell them that at this time she doesn’t even bother doing call backs for anything under a million dollars. We’ve seen one place that could be the right house and made an offer but the owner wants much more than it’s location (the subway runs in a valley behind it) warrants. House hunting feels more like pushing your way into a crowded bar with the idea of meeting someone new. You start out hopeful and elated- this could be the night!- and leave feeling worse off and maybe a little poorer.