BillSaysThis

Well, when all the work is done, and the finish line seems fairly close as we’re mainly into closing up walls and ceilings, the new homestead will be really nice. The new flooring is complete, the roofer did his work days ago, the plumbing and electrical is nearly finished and the handy man is moving at good pace.

The movers did their work today and I can comfortably recommend Partner Moving as this is the second time we’ve used them. Less than $600, including everything except tip, to move a two bedroom apartment and they were done in five hours.

New appliances arrive tomorrow and I believe we’ll be able to have the building inspector Monday, meaning when he signs off we can close up everything else and put a fresh coat of paint all around. After the inspection we can really unpack and settle in, though we should be sleeping here from tonight.

For the weekend we snagged two tickets to the Earthquakes v. Galaxy match courtesy of VentureBeat and Microsoft. Quakes are playing well lately and I’m not sure that LA will have my former favorite American player Landon Donovan available, so this could be a stronger game than expected for a first v. last confrontation.

Anyway, all this was way more expensive than expected but I’m getting happier about it by the day.

The closing was six days late and let’s just say there’s very little plumbing present now that was there two weeks ago, but we’re really excited and packing fast because Thursday is moving day.

The contractors have been pretty good so far. Not cheap but the work looks good. All of them worked over the weekend too, to help us meet the schedule. I’ll know for sure in a month but I’d probably giver referrals for each one (plumbing, electrical, roofing, flooring and general purpose work).

One positive thing about being around to answer questions and such is I’ve had plenty of time to spend on Insoshi. Working with Ruby on Rails again, especially in a meaningful way like this, is a lot of fun.

More soon, I’m sure.

I also saw the US national team’s three recent matches away to England and Spain and home (sort of) to Argentina. The boys got better over the week, allowing one less goal each time, though the offense never clicked enough to, as ESPN’s Tommy Smith repeats endlessly, bulge the old onion bag.

We clearly missed Landon Donovan’s creativity on attack the first two outings, obvious to a blind man once he showed up against the South Americans, though against Spain Freddie Adu showed why Benfica paid good money for him last summer. Which made me wonder, seriously, why he wasn’t starting on Sunday as I’d have loved to see him combine with Donovan.

The biggest disappointment was Eddie Johnson. The striker started all three outings and produced about zilch. Bob Bradley should have left him on the bench the last game, started Adu in midfield and put Clint Dempsey up top. Dempsey was rarely able to get involved on the day stuck out on the right and with too much defensive responsibility.

Second biggest disappointment was Jozy Altidore’s absence from injury. With his big money transfer to Villareal announced last Wednesday plus a sizzling performance during the Olympic qualifiers–where Adu also shined–he’s clearly preferable to Johnson in a 4-4-2 formation.

Next up for the Americans are the first 2010 qualifiers, home and away with Barbados this weekend and next. Not likely to be the same kind of competition as the friendlies but you have to play and win these games. My over/under for Barbados’ goal tally from both is one, but given Tim Howard’s outstanding performance against Lionel Messi and Julio Cruz that may be generous.

12 of the 16 teams have played their first games over the last three days and so far for me the Netherlands are the cream after thrashing an Italy side 3-0 that was never in the game and seems over the hill just two years after winning the World cup with nearly the same players. I may be biased, a bit, since I picked the Orange Crush to win the tournament when many observers didn’t even have them getting out of Group C.

The Dutch had energy and pace, plus a slight edge in poor officiating, while Andrea Pirlo never got his attack in gear and Luca Toni blew the team’s best chance while it was still 2-0. The third goal was deadly, a header from left back Gio von Bronckhorst–who at 5’6″ is nearly a foot shorter than either Italian central defender.

Liverpool FC’s Dirk Kuyt provided the supply for that one as well as the second, which was pure beauty between Kuyt deft header and Wesley Sjneider’s lovely turning high kick inside the near post. The first goal will surely be controversial as Ruud van Nistlerooy was played onside by an Azzuri defender laying off the pitch from the previous play.

Italy caught a extra large break, though, because France could only match a 0-0 draw against Romania in the group’s other game today. This means that Italy can still advance with results against those two, though doing that will require some spark and aggresiveness entirely abset today.

I also caught the Germany-Poland and Portugal-Turkey matches. Germany dominated but this was pretty much as expected and the two goals, both from Poland-born Lukas Podoloski, were just reward for their effort. Portugal gave a more exciting performance but again, against a squad marked for an early exit who still were able to keep the hottest player on the planet right now under wraps the whole way.

Czech Republic escaped with a 1-0 win over the Swiss thanks to a very questionable penalty call in the fourth minute. Hype team Croatia did nothing to get anyone excited, just scraping past hosts Austria by the same 1-0 score line, though unless the Poles can make something happen will likely get through to the quarters.

Most interesting for me so far:

• All six games have been clean sheets, one 3-0, two 2-0’s, two 1-0’s and the scoreless France-Romania disaster. Italian keeper Buffon allowed only two goals through the seven matches while winning World Cup 2006, one an own goal, compared to shipping three today.
• France and Italy’s performances. The French squad is also on the, er, more experienced end of the age range and sorely miss Thierry Henry. Surely Roberto Donadoni and Raymond Domench will be under huge pressure the next two match days.

Tomorrow is the last day of first games: Spain v. Russia, the one I’ll try to watch since Spain should start at least two of my Reds and Russia are intriguing with good results but no big name players, as well as Sweden taking on 2004 champs Greece. The expectations are for Spain and Russia to advance though tournaments like this almost always have some surprises when the group stage is finished. Such as Greece getting out of the group last time, much less their capturing the whole thing.

The Dutch were able to get Robin van Persie on for the last 20 minutes and if he comes to full match fitness while his mates can get a win or two draws these guys will be surely be a force to reckon with in the knockout stages.

Swingtown	June 5	CBS
Law & Order: Criminal Intent	June 8	USA
Secret Diary of a Call Girl	June 16	Showtime
Burn Notice	July 10	USA
Stargate Atlantis	July 11	SciFi
The Cleaner	July 15	A&E
Monk	July 18	USA
Eureka	July 29	SciFi
Primeval	Aug 9	BBC America
The Shield	Sep 2	FX

What seems like a long time ago but is really less than two and a half years I went down to Pasadena for one of the first Ruby on Rails classes from Mike Clark and Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Studios. While there I met Michael Hartl, at the time working as a consultant at CalTech and IdeaLab but interested in doing his own thing soon.

We kept in touch and I was very happy last Summer when the book he co-authored, RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, came out.

Michael and his good friend Long Nguyen continued working the book’s ideas on social networking and in December were selected to participate in the Winter 2008 Y Combinator program for startups.

Insoshi is the product they’re creating. The vision is to create a complete open source social networking platform, a Facebook in a box to put it crudely. The programming language is Ruby on Rails running against MySQL or SQLite by default; Rails has taken a bit of a battering in the last few months but for certain types of web apps (including this one!) I think it’s still a great choice.

At this stage, less than two months after the initial developer release, Insoshi is very basic: profiles, friends, private messaging, forums, blogs, activity and mini feeds. Even so the structure is solid, with a strong application design, and Long and Michael are clear about the feature roadmap while remaining very open to community feedback.

I’ve set up a development instance and hope to contribute some user experience improvements based on what I’ve learned from Glen Lipka, Marketo’s guru. The co-creators, by their own admission, are much better at coding than UX/UI so this seems like a good area for me to add value.

A friend of mine is now at an Israeli startup called Toluna, a web service where anyone can create polls and opinion topics at no cost. What you create can be embedded in a blog, as I’ve done in this post, or hosted on Toluna.com. Either way the results are tracked for you.

Members can earn redeemable rewards points from a list of well-known partners and participate in prize drawings. So far the members and partners are mainly in the UK but I’m told expansion to the US is imminent.

Here’s my first Toluna poll:

Anyone who knows me knows how I’m voting.

I really have never understood the arguments against same gender marriages so today’s ruling from the California State Supreme Court seems both logical and right.

All arguments against this change come down to religious, emotional or straw man fallacies:

1. The Bible says its wrong. Not being Christian or particularly religious in any mainstream sense I’m probably not qualified to say if it does or doesn’t, though the evidence of which I’m aware seems weak. Either way, the First Amendment precludes this argument from having any legal standing.
2. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals are sick and need help, not support. You are entitled to your opinions but until you can produce substantive evidence, that’s all this is.
3. Tradition says marriage is one man and one woman. Yeah well, until 140 years ago tradition said one could own slaves in this country, until 90 years ago only men were qualified to vote and until 40 years ago interracial marriage was illegal.

Did I miss any of the major arguments supporting this outdated position?

The Court acted to overturn a ballot initiative passed in 2000 making the one man/one woman standard state law.

By the way, six of the seven Justices are Republicans and Gov. Schwarzenegger has already said he would not support reversing this ruling by amendment

Even so, I have very little doubt that before close of business today there will be nutjobs groups filing papers with the State for an amendment to the Constitution overturning the ruling.

One can only hope that a majority of voters in this state will recognize that their calendars say 2008, not 1508.

We’re in New Jersey for the weekend, celebrating Mother’s Day, our nephew Jake’s 3rd birthday and our 5th wedding anniversary with my parents and my sister and her family.

After a few days to recover from last week’s stress we’re back seeing available properties which may meet our needs and budgets. Our Realtor did send over an interesting house, this time one which needs no serious work, and we’ll see how that goes.

What I’ve been thinking about this week, in the aftermath of ContractorGate, is how differently people view expensive and inexpensive purchases. Houses and cars compared to, say, food or toiletries. People have completely different, conflicting mental models about the two types of buying.

One reason some people still get the dead tree version of the local newspaper is the coupons and circulars stuffed in the Sunday edition. TS1 does it for us and if she didn’t I would. Saving 50 cents here and two dollars there seems meaningful to us, and we look at other small items, like movie tickets and restaurant meals, the same way. Not that we eat at KFC rather than Fresh Gardens…

Then you look at big ticket deals: houses, cars, fancy vacations. Forget 50 cents or two dollars, for these deals the marginal discussion is over hundreds or thousands of dollars. Even computers almost reach this level.

Let’s say you see a home listed for $865,000 and it meets your lot size requirement, quality is good, location suits, plus you expect to spend $60-80k getting the house from 1480 to about 2000 square feet. The back and forth:

• You offer $805,000.
• You originally thought $800k as a starting point but maybe the seller would be insulted
• Seller isn’t insulted but comes back at $849,000. (Ooh, that’s too much!)
• You counter with your final, best offer at $818k
• Seller says nothing less than $840k and you say, okay, not from us and done.

Notice in all this back and forth the numbers move at increments of thousands. Lots of thousands.

How many coupons do you have to use and bottles of vitamins and minerals do you have to buy on sale to make up for that?

A tip o’ the fedora to Rob… though as seven of these are sequels, updates or remakes I wonder about American cinema.

Iron Man	May 2
Speed Racer	May 9
Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	May 22
Kung Fu Panda	June 6
You don’t mess with the Zohan	June 6
Mongol	June 6 (limited release)
The Love Guru	June 13
Get Smart	June 20
Wall-E	June 27
Wanted	June 27
Hancock	July 2
The Dark Knight	July 18
The X-Files: I Want To Believe	July 25
The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor	August 1
Pineapple Express	August 8
The International	August 15
Babylon A.D.	August 29

So straight after I published last Saturday’s epistle our Realtor called to see if we were interested in any of a few listings he sent over. There were two of interest, three bedroom/two baths though both on the small side for our taste, but we met him in the afternoon to see them.

(Ed. Note: I misunderstood the situation regarding that bid last week. The listing agent did respond, with a verbal no, and told our’s the seller’s bottom line was about $840k.)

The first was a short block in from Central Expressway with a large sound barrier at the rear helping keep the noise level down. About 1350 sq. ft., IIRC, in decent condition with a corner lot large enough to support perhaps a 500 sq. ft. expansion. We’d seen another home from this development the Saturday before which had been expanded a few years earlier, providing a good model of the possibilities. However at an asking price of $878,000 plus probably $80-100k for the work, compared to a list of $935,000 for the one already increased to 1990 sq. ft., made us keep looking.

The second was over near Middlefield Road on a quite little street around the corner from my first apartment in Mountain View 11 years ago. (11 years, that’s hard to believe.) This house was smaller, officially 1150 sq. ft., and 57 years old, but the corner lot is 6300 sq. ft. with lovely wall of bushes just inside of the sidewalk on boths side and a next door neighbor which recently added a second floor. The house has a nice big kitchen, high ceilinged, that it shares with the living room.

This house also had a ‘bonus’ room. That is, many years ago someone essentially enclosed the patio to create a 19′ x 9 1/2′ room whose outer wall was all windows. The room was done, as best we could tell, without permits! Everything comes down to money, I suppose, but that seems like a foolish decision to me considering the possible complications in case of fire and so on. Anyway, getting the room up to code will cost ~$10,000.

The price was right, TS1 and I thought: $723,000 but we offered $710k and the seller settled for $712k. We were under contract!

And under the gun too, with only seven days to clear the contingencies. The seller had done termite and property inspections recently, turning up no red flags, and the mortgage broker we’d used previously said even in this market we could get approval.

The tricky bit for us was getting a realistic handle on the price of adding 610 sq. ft., refreshing the kitchen and master bath, and bringing that extra room up to code. The first two contractors who came out to look at the property felt they could do the job and certainly the zoning would support even more enclosed space if we liked, but neither wanted to give us an estimate.

In my fantasies we got the work done and dusted for $90-100k. $800,000, more or less, and we’d have 1900+ square feet of up to date living space. The third contractor went by Thursday morning with our Realtor and they called after to give us a verbal estimate of $110-120,000. A little tight for us but doable, and with the clock ticking we decided to give the go ahead for the bank to start the appraisal and approval process.

This is when reality began to intrude on us. First the mortgage broker told us that her bank currently classifies Mountain View as a distressed market(!), so instead of putting 15% down and keeping more cash on hand for the construction we had to go with our original intent of 20%. Even tighter but getting nervy.

Then Friday morning the contractor faxed the written estimate. Ka-boom! as they like to say on KFOG. Instead of somewhere in the $110-120k range as he’d told us, this one was $137,400. His explanation was bringing the extra room up to code was $10k and removing the ugly, massive red brick fireplace and chimney from the wall between the kitchen and living room $6200, neither included in the verbal.

But this estimate explicitly didn’t include plans and permits: another $10k. No plumbing to where, down the line, we could add a third full bath in the new master bedroom: another $5k. No refresh of the kitchen or existing baths: $25-30k or more.

So not $137,000 but really $180,000. Whoa! That’s a whole ‘nother story. And everyone I spoke with about this emphatically told us that whatever the contractor tells you, add 30-50% because invariably there are overruns and unexpecteds.

Enough. We sadly had no choice but to cancel the contract and pull out of the deal. Too much stress for me, I can tell you that, and so we’re taking a break from the hunting for a couple of weeks.

Of course if some really attractive house comes on the market…

But hey, all the cool kids are doing it.

Here’s mine, from my work MacBook*:

MacEto:~ blazar$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5dt%s n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
23 ls
18 curl
14 cd
11 ssh
10 ps
6 svn
5 open
3 rm
3 ping
3 kill

* Yes, be jealous, I have a MacBook at work. Cool bosses.

TS1, the Big guy and I turned out to see Peter F. Hamilton, one of my favorite SF authors, at Books Inc. in downtown Mountain View this afternoon. Peter read a few pages from The Dreaming Void, took many questions and then signed copies of his books.

Hamilton was very good natured, I’m sure he’s heard all of the questions we asked dozens of times over, but for sure wasn’t at all surprised when the first (by me) was has he finished The Temporal Void, book two of this trilogy, yet. Unlike earlier appearances promoting TDV, today he could give this answer: “I emailed it to my publisher Tuesday, just before getting on the plane here.” Sweet!

TS1 snapped a couple of pics with her iPhone when I got to the head of the signing line:

I had the British Commonwealth edition of this novel and mentioned being excited to find it while we were Down Under, months before the US publication. Peter asked where in NZ we visited and, after I answered Auckland and Queenstown, told me that he really liked Queenstown and Randstown in this novel is based on that lovely little vacation spot.

Three years have passed since TS1 and I sold the townhouse over on Gladys Ave, apparently not a terrible choice as Zillow’s estimate of the current value is $25,000 less than what we got. The last few weeks we’ve been going out with a real estate agent to see what’s available.

Our requirements are straightforward:

1. Location: Mountain View, preferably within 1.5 miles of the Castro St./California Ave. intersection so TS1 can walk to work. I’ve lived in MV for eleven(!) years and she for nearly six and we’re happy and comfortable with it.
2. Size: 3 or 4 bedrooms, 2 or 3 baths and a minimum of 1700 square feet one or two levels. Bedrooms must not be cramped and the master must comfortably fit a king size bed.
3. Lot size: This is not a big deal for us, we’ve seen a few nice homes with not too much yard space, though more is of course better.

You’d be surprised how much new construction is laid out on three levels, resulting in terrible, and frequently cramped, floor plans. Also quite a few one or two level, 3 bed/2 bath homes under 1400 square feet, also far too cramped. Pretty never makes up for this.

We looked at several homes in the Whisman Station development. I was impressed with the general quality and we considered bidding on two. Now just over 10 years old the homes seem to be holding up well and the HOA fee is just $105 a month, compared to about $350 we paid three years ago on the townhouse (and I was president there so I know the budget was lean).

Two houses did meet our criteria: 653 McCarty and 711 Sierra Vista. Both are smaller than we’d like but have very large (for Mountain View) lots, meaning we could expand them. McCarty was our first choice and, having been vacant and on the market for over 200 days with no offers, we thought a very low offer would entice the absentee owners. Sierra Vista needs much less work and has a larger lot, but has only been on the market five weeks with the owners still living in (so motivated but not as much).

TS1 and I met with our agent, Devin Ruiz, Monday night to go over the latest information he had from the listing agents and help us crystallize our thinking. We decided to sleep on it, make some calls Tuesday to get expert advice and meet Wednesday morning to fill out the purchase offer paperwork.

Tuesday lunchtime Devin calls with the news that, after 200 days with zero bids, someone else came in with an offer on the McCarty property that the trustee felt was good enough. He didn’t reveal the price nor try and get us into a bidding war.

No worries, really, as we were happy to go after the Sierra Vista property. The location wasn’t quite as good but the house was in better condition, including a recently redone kitchen, and sits on a bigger lot. TS1 especially liked the spacious fenced in side yard as great to have for the two dogs we plan to get after settling in to the new home.

So we wrote up an offer. Money was a bit on the low end but we felt the right amount given the state of the market, terms were otherwise standard and even a bit generous on the contingencies. The owners countered with a higher dollar amount than I expected, inadequate termite and property condition contingency (considering they hadn’t done either inspection, which is unusual here) and a request to rent back for 30 days after closing.

Devin advised us to respond with our final, best offer. On Thursday afternoon we did, agreeing to the rent back, raising our dollar offer $13,000 (still quite bit less than their counter) and restating the standard termite and property condition contingencies. The offer expired last night (or yesterday noon, I’m not quite sure).

I was surprised–shocked, I tell you!–that we got no response at all to our counter-counter. Rejection is one thing but not to get any answer strikes me as strange.

We’ll just have to keep hunting.

The 2008 release from my favorite mystery novelist Harlan Coben is due in the next couple of weeks and he’s pushed a nice little teaser video to YouTube:

Betting this title is some kind of children’s story? Nah. The 2001 novel by Australian author Nick Earls would go whoosh right over the heads of any five or six year old by focusing on the complex social and emotional interactions of the main characters. Though they’d definitely get at least some of the humor, such as the point of view character’s primary work responsibility being to dress up in a huge chicken suit and dance at the street to attract business to Ron Todd’s World of Chickens.

Phil is a med student in Brisbane wearing the chicken suit part time to bring in some spending cash. His best mate Frank works the stove when not plotting his next female conquest, which he does regularly and far more successfully than Phil. Our boy is burdened by a conscious, Frank not so much. The lovely Sophie Todd, Ron’s daughter, rounds out the WoC night crew and inhabits Phil’s fantasies.

World of Chickens turns on what happens when Ron makes Phil his new confidant, Frank becomes Mrs. Todd’s plaything and Phil, er, entertains Sophie with tales of his imaginary girlfriend Phoebe. He justifies this as necessary to hold his feelings at bay while she dates the (never seen) Clinton but complicates things by giving his fictional female the same name as his mom (who teaches one of Sophie’s university classes) and not reporting any breakup before Sophie spots him on a real (sort of) date.

Frank causes poor Philby no end of complications as well. Not having a conscious seems to be working well for Frank but the gears in Phil’s inner courtroom get good and grounded the more he tries to be a good pal and keep confidences. Ron Todd and the real Phoebe put in a few loose bolts as well; the latter’s reaction to an innocent–at least on Phil’s part–photo is just awesome.

I got this book during our trip to Australia after having read one or two of Earls’ earlier novels during my 2000 vacation there. For an American, I think you have to make a few allowances for the kind of things writers take for granted, like local knowledge and language, but overall would give this a thumbs up.

recommended