September 26, 2008 11:07 AM 9/26/08

Or more precisely don’t ride through the fog at 5 in the morning. I had a serious case of “CSS” or Can’t See Sh!t. Nasty scary ride to work today...but fun.

[livejournal.com profile] acelightning pointed both me and [livejournal.com profile] siliconshaman to this Google challenge:

http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html

It’s basically ideas to help other people. They have $10M set aside to fund the winning idea into reality.

That rocks and I think I might have a few ideas as to what to submit. I’d love to see any one of my serious ideas help people even if I don’t end up getting paid in the process.

I need to find out if they will accept multiple ideas or if it’s one per customer so to speak. *checks the FAQ* Oh cool! You can submit more than one idea! Excellent! And I was right - it’s not a “we’ll give you $10M to make the idea reality.” That means this should only get serious people rather than money grubbers.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/faq.html

And I think I’ve got just the thing right off the top of my head...

In other news I still can’t get the damn Cobalt to play sound. It looks like I’ve got everything done right and the cobalt-port guys from the NetBSD mailing list haven’t gotten back to me so I might just have to file a kernel bug report. I hate doing that because if it’s not really a bug and just something I didn’t know how to fix I’ll likely get called a noob. Bah! :-(

So as of 2:30 p.m. today I’m on vacation for a whole week and I’ve got a great deal to get done. I’m so horribly anal about what I’ve got to do that I went and made a Gantt chart for all the tasks from Monday to Thursday of next week. As long as I keep at them and get them done everything should go as planned. When I’m done a lot more of our house and grounds should be better organized and won’t be so hard to maintain. That will leave me time to devote to other projects like re-covering/refurbishing my grandmother’s couch, making the second motorcycle ridable, the root-ball staff I have finally started for a friend of mine, and maybe actually reading again regularly. (I feel like I’ve been in a literary desert for quite some time because I used to read a book every couple of days. Yes I read that fast.)

And once all this is handled I’ll also finally have the organization to be able to make time for things like re-learning my programming, writing, video editing, electronics stuff, and many many other projects.

I’m hoping that once I get the third bedroom done I can put some good task lighting in there for our daughter to work at the one desk with us. Once I finish the current crop of house stuff I’ll actually have time to spend with my daughter and my wife as well.

That’s precious time I have felt unable to spend lately. I’ve been so hammered by things that I’ve been hiding out in the garage trying to relax. Once most of this major organization stuff is finished I won’t have such a big load and some of that pressure will be off. This is a good thing.

Anyway this week will hopefully get everything back on track but only if I keep at it the entire week. I think I’ve left enough flexibility in it to allow me slack and I purposely didn’t schedule anything on Friday just in case things run long or I’m a little slow at getting them done.

Which admittedly I sometimes am...
January 21, 2008 11:11 AM

So we’re still waiting on the quote for the sewer hookup of the one house but it’s taking time we don’t have really. So we’re going to continue looking at houses this weekend and see what else is available. After crunching numbers with our mortgage broker even with PMI involved our upper limit is about $175k. That including taxes, insurance, PMI, etc. gives us a monthly payment of about $1450.00 which is well within our ability to pay.

We don’t want to waste time either so if the sewer estimate comes in heavy then we’re going to drop our current contender like a hot rock. There’s plenty of other things out there...

Truth be told both my wife and I just want this to be over. We want to buy a house, move, and then settle in for the long haul. We certainly seem to have enough to look at but honestly buying a house in this market shouldn’t be so damn hard.

Of course that puts our current contender in a new light. It’s been on the market a while and probably because of the sewer connection issue. (Recap - it needs to be connected to the village sewers 90 days after you buy it. That could cost quite a bit.) That means that either they need to seriously drop the price, pay closing, AND credit the sewer connection costs if they want to sell it.

Our broker is probably right - it’s probably too much trouble and a waste of our time. But I’m going to keep it on the table just in case...

So we’re going to be looking at houses again this weekend and within our specifications I easily printed 5 or 6 out of the one real estate site. It irritates me a bit that I can’t get direct access to the MLS. Seems to me that _all_ the data on a house should be available to buyers at any time. Hmm...it’s probably a violation but I bet you could make a pretty penny by having a real estate license and setting up a server that queries the MLS data when a particular number is entered and gives all the data back to a buyer who pays a fee. (Too easy - there’s gotta be a suitly law against it.)

Our broker mentioned that there are a lot more foreclosures out there than before and quite a few of them in our area. She offered to put us in touch with an agent who specializes in them but I want to give our agent a chance before going with someone else. But she’s right in that there are a ton of bank owned properties out there now.

And we need to move faster since our lender has been bought. (You can guess which one if you read the news.)

And if we don’t find anything and our funding disappears? Well then for now we put everything in storage and rent a small apartment somewhere.

Whatever happens we _will_ survive. And who knows? Maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen.

I’m going to keep my optimist’s hat firmly on my head though. In this market we can’t help but buy a house and well within our timeframe too.

A friend of mine made a joke about making up a web page “Pick Mike’s House!” with flash animation and everything. I think he’s got the right idea and we need to laugh at the situation. If we get too stressed out then we’ll certainly screw it up. And we definitely don’t want that...
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Mike Hebel

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