Global Reset

When someone tells you that they are buying a house (shopping around, under contract, closing, whatever)… The proper response is not “Congratulations!” Instead, one should hang his head low and with a concerned face ask, “Sorry buddy, is there anything I can do to help?”

Home inspectors, mortgages, appraisals, surveys, closing costs, origination fees, APR, points, homeowner’s insurance, hazard insurance, 15 yr vs 30 yr, 10% down vs 20% down, HOA vs HOB, and actually worrying about what the Fed is going to do next…

This is no small undertaking. So, next time a friend of yours says he’s buying a house, don’t patronize him with that smile. Try to empathize.

Update 6/7/06:
I noticed a lot of hits for people looking for information on HOA vs HOB. I was surprised to see that I was at the top of the google search results for the query “HOA vs HOB”, so I thought I’d enlighten any searchers on what I learned about it. There wasn’t a lot of info that I could find on it as I searched and I eventually discovered it’s because it’s kind of a meaningless distinction. In general, HOB is supposed to mean more coverage than HOA. However, in practice it isn’t always true. By more coverage, I mean that an HOB would typically cover mold damage, while an HOA would not. In the state of Texas, we are recovering from a mold damage bonanza where a lot of people were making claims a few years ago after some babies got sick (at least one died) from inhaling mold spores. So, HOB policies here will now exclude mold damage by default with an option to buy it back at an increased price. The HOB is typically recommended as the best deal for your money (and the HOC is just way overboard), but for my money I decided to go with an HOA-Amended. It’s ‘amended’ basically with all the extras that make it an HOB. The basic lesson that I wanted to get across here is that the difference between an HOA and an HOB doesn’t matter at all. Instead of worrying about this label, ask the insurance company who is sending you the quote to give you a detailed list of all the coverages included. Compare the specific coverages between the insurers and make sure you’re not saving money at the cost of a necessary coverage item (like accidental water damage). You should try to get as many quotes as you can… If you only got one quote, I can practically guarantee that you are overpaying.

Ever since my last post, where I made mention of trackback spam, I have been targetted by “trackback spammers”. I was getting about 10-20 trackbacks a day since posting it. I just went through and disabled trackbacks on all my posts (UPDATE contents SET contents.allow_pings=’0’ WHERE type=’Article’).

It looks like, though I can’t be certain, they were using Ruby to post the trackbacks. I say that only because I saw some early ones that had descriptions like “Testing from Ruby”. I guess a rubyist might have wanted to make a point to me about how you can’t identify the source of trackback spam, so maybe my earlier complaint was misdirected. It’s probably lucky for me that Ruby doesn’t scale well, or else I could have had hundreds of thousands of trackback spam posts from that fella!

Trackbacks in general are probably just adding noise to the web. If good indexers like Google and Technorati can tell me when one blog links to another blog, why do I need to advertise who’s linking on the particular post page? I guess I’ll just leave it disabled until I can think of some use for it. Perhaps replace the trackback link with a direct link to the Technorati cosmos for a particular page (not that my cosmos on Technorati is any less barren than actual space).

Forget the doomsday prophets and their cries of panic as we approach some alleged day of reckoning with our “natural resources”… Their is a bona fide shortage that must have peaked ages ago: Good Movie Ideas.

Unfortunately, it may be far too late to do anything about it. The steady increase in movie ticket price did not result in an increase in movie quality, as we had hoped… We may have to experience a Movie Apocalypse before we can revive the medium with good art.

Don’t believe that it’s gotten that bad? You must not have heard of Snakes on a Plane. Synopsis: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who’s a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes. That’s right… It’s called Snakes on a Plane because, well, it’s about snakes… on a plane. As Erik puts it, next we’ll see movie titles like Someone gets stabbed and You just gave up $8.50 to see this?.

As an aside, if you don’t know what the title and the first sentence are referencing, I was alluding to the Peak Oil prophets. They claim that we’ve reached the end of our oil supply and the whole world is going to end because of it. The author of this Peak Oil website got more than just the idea for a ranting single-column layout from TimeCube guy. Besides our memories of the assorted Y2K-disaster theorists, if you need any reason not to waste your time on this disaster-du-jour you can browse the criticisms area of wikipedia.

But Good Movie Ideas… I would be interested in hearing a solution to this problem. Lately, Nicole and I have spent more time at the independent theater than the standard theater. But, we’ve been watching mostly documentaries, so I don’t think it stands in opposition to the problem necessarily.

So, what do you do when you need to access peripherals on Windows XP x64, but the vendors have yet to release a 64-bit compatible version of their driver?

Switch to Linux? Same problem, if vendor doesn’t open source their driver.

Complain? Tried that, vendor said they don’t support 64-bit and they considered the whole problem my own fault.

Improvise? The pic attached shows my Win32 (Windows XP) Peripheral Breakout Box. All you need is an old laptop and a copy of Windows XP (or other vendor supported OS). Throw in Remote Desktop or just an rsync folder and ssh server, and you’ve got everything you need.

The better solution, which I will hopefully be able to implement soon, is to throw Windows XP x64 in the “Great Idea, Bad Implementation, Abysmal Follow-through” bin.

You’d think that given the high cost of rent we pay for the posh downtown apartment we’re in, we wouldn’t have to deal with crap like this. It’s leaked since we moved in, but it really only drops any water if there is a horrendous storm outside… Which, thankfully, is rare in Dallas. We’ve made complaints to the management multiple times, but no action has been taken. I assume that either they don’t want to re-shingle the roof since they did it right as we moved in about 2 years ago or they are waiting for us to move out to dig out the root of the problem.

And as much as I’d rather continue renting in downtown than move out to a house in the suburbs, crap like this really makes home ownership a no-brainer. I mean, sure, if you own a house problems like these are your own to deal with… But in my current situation, nobody is dealing with it.

So, a few days ago I complained about sites who hosted RSS feeds without the full content in the RSS feed. Apparently, even sites which post only text can exceed their allotment of bandwidth. This is news to me… But I suppose I underestimated either the size of the readership or the common courtesy of the readers. Of course, by that I mean that you would be doing your favorite blogs a nice favor if you could avoid fetching their RSS feed once per minute… Especially blogs which are only updated once or twice daily.

I use BlogLines for all of my news reading, which seems to be on an update schedule somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. The good thing about BlogLines though is that it fetches your feed only once for all the users of BlogLines who read your feed.

I’d like to make a suggestion though for site owners whose RSS feed does consume a lot of their bandwidth… Host your feed with FeedBurner. They provide a pretty good set of “circulation” statistics, to help you track the size of your readership. But, perhaps most useful of all, they actually cache your feed and serve it up for you. They refresh their cached version once every 30 minutes. And it’s free. They have a “pro” version which offers more statistics and other advertising-related features, but the basic statistics and feed hosting is a free service. If you’d like to try it, but also be able to switch back transparent to your readership, they have a good suggestion on how to do that in one of their FAQs.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with FeedBurner, nor do I receive any sort of referral bonus if you try their service. I’m just a happy user.

On principle, I have to start being more strict about unsubscribing from feeds with a truncated RSS feed. The whole point of this syndication stuff, is that I gather all of my news into a centralized location and I format it how I want it formatted. When certain bloggers only offer a truncated feed, I have to exit my feed depot to visit their website. In certain cases, I assume the site is trying to conserve bandwidth. That must be the case for sites like Cox and Forkum. I guess the bandwidth adds up quickly when the content you are distributing is primarily a large image, rather than text.

But what excuse does Diana Mertz Hsieh and Patrick Oscar Boykin have for their truncated feeds? Most of their posts are relatively short… They aren’t making advertising money off the site… It’s possible they don’t realize that a truncated RSS feed annoys some of us. I have no estimate of the size of their readership, so I guess it’s also possible that I’m the only one. Diana is an interesting character in Objectivism in that she originally sided with David Kelly (in the infamous split with ARI and Peikoff), but after serious reflection has reconsidered her position and has written a lot of good articles about what’s wrong with The Objectivist Center (in practice and in principal). I believe that her well-written articles do net her a large audience. Patrick is a friend from Georgia Tech. We were meant to be roommates, but he kicked me out of my own dorm room to squeeze a friend of his in. Consequently, we became very good friends. A couple of his publications on social networks have been recently slashdot‘ed, so it stands to reason that his audience has to be more than a handful of readers.

I wonder if there is a service out there that parses popular blog layouts (wordpress, blogger, etc) and ”screen-scrapes” the full blog post into a full RSS feed? Do truncated RSS feeds bother you also? If you aren’t using RSS yet, check out BlogLines for a good example of “RSS made easy.” You can start with my blogroll as a quick intro.

Update: No thanks to my petty complaints, Diana’s RSS feed is no longer truncated. I no longer find her blog, in any way, inadequate. :) Though I did learn that bandwidth is a concern. Those of you using an RSS client would probably be doing all of your favorite blogs a solid if you toned down the polling rate. A couple of times a day should be more than adequate for anything but a “breaking news” blog.

There is a scene in Episode III where Obi-wan exclaims, “Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes”.

Guess what, asshat? That’s an absolute.

Modern film is riddled with bad philosophy. It just kills me when they state it so explicitly. It’s a slap in the face that I’m even sitting through this crap.

My overall impression of the film is that it had great effects, excellent fight scenes, and a good soundtrack. Much like the original Mortal Kombat movie… Also, like the original Mortal Kombat movie and Episodes I & II, the dialog was awful.

Last weekend I discovered a new medical condition that I need to warn everyone about. I haven’t quite come up with the perfect term for it yet, but let me describe how I caught the condition.

After hearing that my buddy had somehow achieved triple my high score in Lumines, I sat down for some aggressive playing to catch up. Erik had gotten 250k to beat my 80k, so I didn’t stop playing until I had wrestled 440k points from the game. This took me about 2-2.5 hours to accomplish. Now, that’s 2-2.5 hours of sitting in an armchair, arms locked in the same position, staring at the PSP screen. The only joints that moved were my thumbs. When I tried to get up to celebrate, I realized I had this massive pinch in my upper back and neck. I mean a serious ache, a deblitating amount of pain. And over the next few days, it actually got much worse. I couldn’t comfortably turn my head or stretch my arms out in front of me for most of this week.

Now, a contributing factor may have come from a painful neck twitch that I got while playing hackey sack on the previous day… But there is no doubt that the PSP/Lumines was the primary contributor to my pain.

Should we call it “Lumines Neck” or “PSP Neck”. Someone suggested “Luminitis”, but I think I’ll save that name to describe the condition I have whereby everything I see looks like a Lumines block that I can destroy… Or is that “Luminipsychosis”?

I’d like to know if anyone else is experiencing similar pains. Maybe we can get a class-action lawsuit going? :) I posted about it on IGN and found some comrades in pain.

prattkiddd writes:

Holy Crap!! My girlfriend was playing psp for like 30 minutes and she had an arm and neck cramp after. It was killing her. Wierd!!!! I thought she was joking around.

The only cure I know of so far is to stop playing PSP while the pain persists. I hope they make a pill for it so that I don’t ever have to stop again.