For all none of you that read Perry's blog, energeticprocession.com is dead (because the domain has presently walked off with a specific individual). For the time being, use energeticprocession.wordpress.com.

This is very cool.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Houses are a bunch of work and I'm going back to church.

So, the wife and I went to see Terminator: Salvation last night. All in all, I think it was alright. I enjoyed the first 1/2 to 3/4 and then the end kinda fell apart for me. Spoilers and ranting below.

Looking forward to seeing Star Trek and Drag Me To Hell.

( Read more... )

I'm pretty sure we've been inside of some of these houses and would have had quite a bit to contribute if we'd known about this blog earlier. Similar to cake wrecks, this shows really bad photos for listings.

http://www.lovelylisting.com

THE CURTAINS DO NOT CONVEY!!! (http://dejavudew.livejournal.com/64755.html)

Tofuffalo = Tofu-Buffalo. It's fun to say and could be something you found...on the range.

As of 3:22 PM Central time on April 17th, 2009, we became homeowners. We don't get to move in until the very end of May, so we're landlords as well.

I decided I wanted to read each document and understand it. One of my favorite bits of contract language was in the Deed of Trust and I'm now tempted to go try and learn a little about the history of that paragraph. The Deed of Trust ultimately states what can happen if the Lender doesn't get paid (i.e. hire big, scary Italians and what exactly they're allowed to break). This part is in bold in the contract, but I changed that to show exactly what I found so amusing.

If Lender invokes the power of sale, Lender or Trustee shall give notice of the time, place and terms of sale by posting and filing the notice at least 21 days prior to sale as provided by Applicable Law. Lender shall mail a copy of the notice to Borrower in the manner prescribed by Applicable Law. Sales shall be made at public vendue. The sale must begin at the time stated in the notice of sale or not later than three hours after that time and between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on the first Tuesday of that month.

Apparently, the day has something to do with whether or not the court will be able ot be around for the "vendue". Also, it turns out that "vendue" is a real word (yeah, nobody typoed that one) that means "auction".

The most amazing thing about those forms was what they didn't (or probably couldn't) say. "Applicable Law" trumps everything and I, amonst most everyone else, have no idea what bearing "Applicable Law" has on the contract. And since none of us are prescient, noone knows what "Applicable Law" will have on the contract later. So, I'm thinking, "Let's pass some laws that let me keep the house without having to pay the Lender. Oh hey! That's how that bailout thing works." ;)

Amazon does quite a few things stupidly, in reality, but I think this one is probably the most assholish. The wife and I are basically going to stop using Amazon until they stop.

http://jezebel.com/5209088/why-is-amazon-removing-the-sales-rankings-from-gay-lesbian-books

[Update:]

Amazon is apparently blaming a glitch of some kind. To be fair, Amazon hasn't really moderated reviews or comments and has been somewhat subject to trolls (http://dejavudew.livejournal.com/84731.html).

Some new links:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/04/amazon-responds-to-adult-queries-blames-a-glitch.html
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal/2009/04/this-is-not-a-glitch-amazonfail/

Google completely one-ups like my little prank below with this: http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html

I <3 Google on April Fool's day.

We lost the house! Stupid woman broke up with her fiancé and cancelled the contract! OMG!!

I'm buying a house April 17th!!! We also managed to lock in an interest rate around 4.875% (which I think is insane).

Soooooo, we got estimates in that were significantly lower than our initial thoughts. Soooooo, we're going to make a somewhat lower offer (based on the estimates) and amend the contract a bit. Hopefully, all goes well.

Well, look at that. IE 8 got released today... Now I have quite a bit of testing to catch up on. ;)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/

So, the inspection went worse than I'd expected, again. Judgements I made about things I suspected of being trivial and/or indicative of normal behavior got reversed. Other things I didn't know about were also problematic. So, it's a good thing I'm not your home inspector (or my home inspector, for that matter). Dan Tucker is a freaking dynamo when it comes to this sort of thing (just in case anyone's looking for a house in BCS).

In it's current state, the house is livable and would probably just need some regular minor repairs for awhile. Personally, I'd rather not wait for the house to sink into the ground while the roof flies off (although I think insurance would probably cover the roof). Instead, we're going to get some estimates on repairs the house would need and try to renegotiate the contract. We have until the 24th before we're out of our option period.

http://www.amazon.com/CONTROL-CHRISTIAN-MARRIAGES-PRIESTHOOD-CHILDREN/dp/1425992609/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

The description and comments on this are classic.

One of my favorites is:

"This is one of the better books I've read all in caps on the subject. I am thankful that Amazon has given voice that so many crazy people shouting at traffic don't have.

I was initially concerned due to the disclaimer "THIS BOOK MAY BE REVISED: BECAUSE OF COMPUTER DICTATORS" and worry for the safety of the author. Has the robot uprising/rapture begun? No need to worry, the message is to not use birth control and seek repentance, in that order? I will try it both ways and see if the sex is hotter, or the repentance. Based on the results I would like the challenge the author to a karate match and we will see who is filled with the Holy Spirit."

Like the commentor, I hope this eventually turns into some sort of psychiatric help for the woman though.

Our strategy worked! We paid a little more for the house than asking (~$5k), but it still seemed like a fair price for the home. The contract is really just awaiting a signature and we'll start inspections next week.

The house itself is a 4 bed/2 bath on an acre in College Station. It's relatively close to work and the neighborhood is fairly woodsy without really causing you to be lightyears away from civilization (or city sewage). This would also make us the poor folk in the neighborhood as some of the houses there have sold for $400k (and we are nowhere near that number). I think it's a nice house to live in and a nice investment property as well -- I mean, it sold in 2 days on the market, so we're excited with this one.

Photos are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32057828@N07/sets/72157615124287560/

There were some unusual things about this particular contract. The main one is that she doesn't want to move out until June because she's getting married. So we had a couple of options here. One would have been to close in June, but the issue there is that she could change her mind before closing (and carry a hefty penalty for doing so) or intrest rates could go back up (they're at a nice low number right now). You can lock in an interest rate for an extended period of time, but it costs extra money (I think either .5 or 1 point). Another option, which we went with, would be to take ownership of the home and then rent the house back out to her. We didn't negotiate an "at-cost" rent, but it's pretty close. The difference in price wouldn't be enough for us to have to worry about 2 housing payments and should let us keep a low interest rate. I got an estimate this morning that used 5.125%. Compare that to the 6.25% I was looking at a year ago and the monthly payments are significantly different.

So, we went to take a look at a house today that would "sell quickly". It went on the market today and we went to take a look around 5pm and really liked. Guess what? Someone was going to put a full-price offer on it today. Natural next step? Make a bigger offer.

We'll see what happens...

This is the comic for you...

http://xkcd.com/552/

So, my hotmail address got hacked. Weeee. Some of you might have gotten email about it. I'm changing passwords "enterprise-wide" now. The sad thing is that I knew about the problem and never really resolved it. I'm also cleaning up my contact lists.

Personally, I blame MySpace.

Some fun facts about this:

• Websites are still stupid about passwords. Even bank websites. It's pretty crappy when gmail and hotmail let me set stronger passwords than, say, most of the banking institutions I deal with. A 10 character password is not nearly as secure as the 20 character passwords I have in mind. The ability to use the full ASCII charset means it's harder for brute force and approximation methods to work well. I'd rather not get my bank and credit accounts hacked alongside my email, thankyouverymuch.


• Websites are incredibly inconsistent about the passwords they allow. Some allow symbols. Some don't. Some add a small level of dictionary protection (only two words, in the example I found. You're retarded for thinking that only blocking "password" and your bank's name is going to secure your website.).


• Websites are completely incompetant about their restrictions on passwords. Take this little gem "It can't contain two separated numbers (i.e., Abc12ef34 would be invalid)". GRAAAAHHH!!!

So, in .NET 2.0, you still can't serialize a TimeSpan (which is stupid because you can certainly parse them from a string and format one into a string). There are a series of workaround for this, my favorite being to use ToString and TimeSpan.Parse() on a string property that you don't intend on using. So, I thought I'd get clever and try something like the following.

private TimeSpan? _testTimeout;

[XmlElement("testTimeout"), 
Obsolete("Do not reference this property. Use TestTimeout instead.", true)]
public string TestTimeoutSerializer
{
   get { return (_testTimeout.HasValue) ? _testTimeout.ToString() : null; }
   set { _testTimeout = (value != null) ? TimeSpan.Parse(value) : (TimeSpan?)null; }
}
		
[XmlIgnore()]
public TimeSpan TestTimeout
{
   get { return _testTimeout ?? TimeSpan.Zero; }
   set { _testTimeout = value; }
}

The beauty here would be that anyone that decided to actually refer to TestTimeoutSerializer would get a nasty compiler message and have to change their code (which is great because you don't want people touching the property). AND, it would still serialize to a string.

Well guess what? XmlSerializer is smarter than you (well, me, anyway). It doesn't want to serialize an obsolete property. Why would it? IT'S O-B-S-O-L-E-T-E, STUPID! ::sigh:: Being insulted by an API isn't my idea of a good time.

Sure, I could fire up PostSharp and add the serializable stuff after the fact. I could possibly even solve this with extension methods -- I have no idea, I've never used them. But, really, I just want the serialization bug fixed. It just seems...so...basic and such a useful feature. Why hide behind serializing ints which you're supposed to magically know are "in seconds" even though the configuration element simply says "Timeout". Sure, there's documentation and experienced developers know the units of most things off-hand, but, surely, Microsoft can do better than that.

Also, check out the setter for TestTimeoutSerializer, notably, "(TimeSpan?)null". So far as I can tell, it's completely necessary. Why? TimeSpan.Parse returns a TimeSpan and it isn't compatible with a null. But, somehow, TimeSpan? is compatible with a TimeSpan. Neither should matter because the types should be implicitly converting towards the TimeSpan? and not the first argument in the list. I suppose I could have also casted the TimeSpan.Parse into a TimeSpan?, but I think that's equally ridiculous. And when was the last time you explicitly cast a null to something anyway. This particular nothing would have been a TimeSpan if it weren't, well, nothing.

So, here's hoping that they spend the small amount of time it would take to fix this crap before the next version.