Add and vote for your favorite Boston blogs.

December 29th, 2006

Just a quick post to let everyone know that Jesse Legg has created squidoo lens for Boston-area blogs. Go to it, add and vote for your favorite area blogs.

I'll keep this short

December 26th, 2006

Because in a few minutes I'll be leaving to go see Jessi's grandma.

I'm currently in Illinois (read: the middle of nowhere) staying with Jessi's family for Christmas. We've been here since Friday and will be here until Friday, which is why I haven't been writing anything. Also, the internet connection is incredibly slow out here (it has to be satellite way out here in the middle of nowhere, so it's also extremely high latency...) which hasn't really encouraged me to spend a whole lot of time online.

Anyway, not really a whole lot going on that's relevant to my blog, but i wanted to point out this.

Apparently a company called Phoenix Motorcars is building electric trucks/SUVs that will be released some time next year. According to the website it has a range of over 100 miles and can charge to 95% in less than 10 minutes. If this is true, it's huge news. One of the markets that I think electric cars really need to break into is the rural market. Ordinarily the limited range and long charge times really make electrics impractical for rural areas, but with a charge time measured in minutes, 100 miles should be plenty. A good, rugged electric pickup would, I think, really change the image that electric vehicles have in the eyes of Americans. It would stop being a toy of the rich, spoiled celebrities and urbanites, and start being something that you're average joe farmer could actually use.

Having spent a good amount of time out here in farm country, I think it's safe to say that this is where our oil dependency is hurting us the most. Out here, people have to drive everywhere, and they have to drive pretty long distances even to just go out to dinner at a restaurant. That adds up to a lot of gas and a lot of money (even way out in rural Illinois, gas is running around $2.25 per gallon for regular). If it were practical for people out here to drive electrics, it could really save a lot of money for everyone. Additionally, if farmers are using electric trucks, it reduces their costs which will drive down the prices on their crops and make it easier for American farmers to compete with imported food without market-imbalancing subsidies (something which I think would be very good).

Hopefully the Phoenix SUT (Sport Utility Truck) will turn out to be as good as it sounds. I would love to see EVs start to appear way out here in the middle of nowhere. As far as image goes, a 'cowboy-compatible' EV will go a long way towards making EVs seem like a more viable alternative for everyone, in addition to the advantages of bringing down the cost of domestically grown crops and therefore helping our economy and American farmers.

Living in Crack Head City isn't all bad

December 15th, 2006

Say what you will about Central Square, or 'Crack Head City' as one of the cleverer denizens of my future home, Porter Square, labeled it on a map of the T, but living hear does have it's benefits. Despite the occasionally shooting, there are definitely some good things about our current apartment. For example, both of the following photos were shot out the window of my office at sunset.






November Sunset:




December Sunset

Only because I can't stop laughing

December 15th, 2006

And everyone needs to see this.

From here and here

The MBTA: ineptitude and indolence incarnate

December 15th, 2006

Back in mid-September I wrote about how I was finally starting to understand why people don't really like the T. This was mostly in response to the implementation of the then-new CharlieTicket system which was obviously not very well thought out and could have been done much better and probably much cheaper (if only they had thought to hire me to do it...). Now they've started rolling out the CharlieCard system, and with it a whole new fare structure.

The CharlieCard, I think, is actually a good idea. It will make things much more convenient for both the passengers and the MBTA. And it really isn't a system that's particularly easy to screw up considering the infrastructure is all already in place. And yet the MBTA seems bound and determined to excel at screwing up. In January, when the CharlieCard goes 'mainstream' (right now it's only there for the elite few who braved the morning commute at a certain time on a certain day at whatever station the MBTA deemed worthy of having CharlieCards that morning, or, in Jessi's case, the elite few who were able to talk a security guard into giving them one anyway), we'll also be getting a new fare structure. The cost of a ride will, of course, be going up. But it will be going up by varying amounts depending on how you pay for it. People with CharlieCards will pay the least, and will get free bus rides. People with CharlieTickets will pay more. I suppose that makes sense, as CharlieCards will save the MBTA money in the long term, but it's still annoying and somewhat confusing. I'll even go along with the fare hikes as a good thing, because the MBTA is clearly in need of more money with their mounting debt and all.

But with all that mounting debt, what is that money going towards? Is it going towards the poorly maintained red line (the one Jessi and I ride) that, nearly killed a child and woman yesterday due to faulty doors? No, it's going to a new MBTA website. A new MBTA website that doesn't even properly implement the Google API. When you go there you get a warning about the Google API key not matching the site. Basically, they never got a new Google API key for the live site and were still using the one from the development site, which doesn't work (I learned this the hard way when developing the dy/dx tech website). Admittedly, the new website looks better, and it won't take long for them to fix the Google API problem, but it seems like an egregious waste of money to me, when they are so in debt that they can't even properly maintain their trains.

The MBTA needs to improve their service and systems, that will improve their image, that will encourage more people to ride the T more often, that will increase their income, that will work to alleviate their financial situation, that will allow them to continue to improve their service and systems, ad infinitum. Basically, their current path would run any ordinary company into the ground, but thanks to the miracle of government subsidies they don't really need to worry about it. Ah, but for the luxury of a government contract, we could all be wallowing in the depths of our own ineptitude and indolence.

More bad BOFA news

December 14th, 2006

Fortunately it's not personally relevant this time, but Bank of America is pulling their support for the celebrity series. Boston.com is running a more detailed story.

I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I am still planning on dumping Bank of America and moving to a different bank. As before, my top two choices are Leader Bank and Wainwright Bank. I haven't fully decided which I'm going to go with yet, but it will almost definitely be with one of those two. Wainwright has the whole social responsibility thing going for them (hey, maybe they'll take up sponsorship of the Celebrity Series), but after one of my previous posts about my banking quandary someone from Leader Bank actually personally got in touch with me and offered to answer any questions I have, which was really nice. Leader Bank also has displayed a commitment to embracing new technologies to improve the banking experience (although, to be honest, their web site doesn't really reflect that) which I think is a very good thing. At any rate, I'm going to wait until after all this home buying and mortgage stuff is over before I start moving messing too severely with my account balances.

I think I broke it, and negotiations

December 14th, 2006

Prizewagon is down. Their servers appeared to have crashed. Oddly enough, this happened at the exact moment that I won a hand in the tournament I was playing in. I can only conclude that this is the result of some vast conspiracy aimed at preventing my success at online poker. Yeah, that must be it.

Anyway, on to real estate negotiations.

We actually ended up going into negotiations on two different places (not at once). The first one, was a fantastic 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath townhouse in Porter Sq. By some strange fluke it just barely happened to be in the high range of our price range and was an absolutely beautiful gut rehab. We still decided to make a very low offer because of the state of the market, and because we really didn't want to go that high if we didn't have to. After several rounds of negotiation the seller had made an offer that was very close to what we wanted, but just slightly higher. We decided to push just a little bit harder and countered with our actual target price. To be honest, I think the seller would have taken it, but their agent didn't want to. Instead, the agent delayed and brought in one of their own clients who must have made a much higher offer because we weren't even given the chance to match it. I can only assume that the actual buyer must have offered close to the original asking price whereas we had gotten the seller down by about $50,000. Suckers.

After losing the townhouse we started looking again. The next thing we found was again at the very high end of our price range. But, rather than a townhouse or a condo, it was a single family house. And not one out in the middle of nowhere, but literally just a block away from the Porter Sq. T stop in a very nice residential neighborhood (actually only about two blocks from the townhouse). It was listed as 1,500 sq. ft., 3 bedroom, 1 bath. The catch? It had been built as a farmhouse around 1900, and it looked like the only upgrades since then had been installing indoor plumbing. Despite that, it was a beautiful house with huge investment potential. Investing maybe $20,000 into it could have finished the attic, bringing it up to around 2,000 sq. ft. and up to 5 bedrooms, converted two of the bedrooms into a master suite, and upgraded the kitchen to something modern. The problem was that we wouldn't really be able to afford to put in that investment for a while. So we'd be forced to live with it as is for probably around 2 years, and on top of that had to make bigger mortgage payments than we really wanted to (which wouldn't really have been to bad because it had a four-car tandem driveway that could easily have been converted to 3 parallel spots and rented out). It also had an old oil heating system, so we would have had to pay for that all winter on top of everything else. It would have been a great investment, but eventually we decided that it was just a little more than we were willing/able to take on just yet, so we let it go.

The next one we found was the one we've now basically bought. Unlike the other two, it's at the low to middle of our prize range. Previously we had been looking at 1,200 to 1,300 sq. ft. condos, but this one, at only 980 sq. ft., actually feels bigger than those thanks to a very good layout. Everything in it is modern and it needs no work. It's the third floor of a three-floor building that had just recently been converted from rental units and the other two had sold within the past 6 months. It's actually just up the street from the townhouse we first made an offer on as well, so a very good location. The only problem, which originally had actually been a deal breaker for us, was that the kitchen hadn't been updated since the 60s. But it was still in working order, and after our experience with the house we had realized that we weren't actually afraid of doing a little work on the place. So we decided to make an offer on the place. Negotiations (obviously) went very well, and we were able to get the seller to agree to almost exactly the price we had as our target. Having seen what we've seen and realized what is and isn't possible for us, I think this place is actually just about perfect for us. It's in exactly the neighborhood we want, it's just about the right size, and it'll last us for at least 5 years, which is pretty much the amount of time that we're likely to want to stay there. Having found this place, I'm actually kind of glad that we didn't get the townhouse and that we decided the house would be too much.

The next step: inspection. The inspection was actually, to me, one of the most interesting parts of the process. I'll write about it in my next post.

House shopping

December 13th, 2006

As promised, the first stage of buying a new home.

Obviously, there are three very important things to know when going into the first stage of buying a home: where you want to live, what kind of place you want to live in, and how much you want to spend on it. In Jessi and my case, we wanted to live in Cambridge and within walking distance of the red line so that Jessi could still easily take the T to the office. We also knew that we wanted a condo with at least two bedrooms and at least one bathroom (duh...), but we didn't really know much beyond that. We started our actual shopping online. It didn't take too long to discover that by far the best web site for searching and getting the basics on properties for sale in the Boston area is Hammond's. It has all the listing you'll want to see and, in my opinion, the best interface by far of any of the options. It let us specify exactly what our search criteria were, including neighborhood. It really helped us get a better idea of what was out there and what was in our price range (and we were lucky enough to discover that, in the current market, there were plenty of places that met our criteria and were in our price range).

The next step was finding an agent. it's not strictly necessary to have your own agent when buying a home, but it makes the process vastly easier, and the seller pays their fee so why not. Since we didn't really know what we were doing and we wanted to be sure we got someone we could work with we initially talked to a couple different agents. We ended up, as I mentioned before, going with Anne Munson from RE/MAX Destiny in Cambridge, mainly because we just felt like she was a good fit for our personalities. Once we had signed the paperwork with Anne and told her what we were looking for she signed us up with MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and we started getting daily email updates on whatever new properties showed up that met our criteria. She also was able to give us copies of the Rosenoff Report, which is basically a giant printed out spreadsheet with info on all the properties for sale in Cambridge and Somerville. That was more Jessi's domain, so I'll let her write about that if she wants. Anyway, this is the point when it starts actually looking like house shopping. Based on the properties that came to us through MLS we would tell Anne which ones we were interested in and she would arrange for us to go see them. We also went to some open houses.

Around this time we also went to get our mortgage pre-approval. Chris Smith, of Capstone Mortgage, was recommended to us by a friend who works in real estate in the area. After telling her our financial situation she was able to pre-approve us for a mortgage that was in exactly the range we were looking for. Again, just to be sure, we also went to someone else to see what they would say. In this case we went to Cambridge Savings Bank. They weren't quite as good. For some reason they said that, unless we got someone to co-sign our mortgage they would only approve us for around $15,000, significantly less even than the down-payment we already had. So we went with Chris.

Eventually we found a place we wanted to put an offer in on and went into negotiations. But that will be the next post.

In other news, Pigpen is now famous: Cat Art Gallery. Jessi says I'm going to turn into a crazy cat lady...

Fastest hands in the West and an all-star home buying team

December 11th, 2006

Now that we're pretty much done with the house buying process, I figure it's a good time to start writing about it. It's long, it's complicated, but it's interesting. One of the things that I found really interesting about it was how many people are involved. It's not just the buyer, the seller and their respective agents. Jessi and I have had to deal with: our agent (Anne Munson of RE/MAX Destiny in Cambridge. She's fantastic and we highly recommend her to anyone else buying a home in the area), our mortgage broker (Chris Smith of Capstone Mortgage. Again, we couldn't recommend her any more highly.), our attorney (Katherine Kurtz of Belesi & Conroy. Haven't really worked with her as much, but she seems to be pretty good.), the seller (probably shouldn't give out her name...), the seller's agent, the seller's attorney, a home inspector (Mark George of Home Inspection Assoc., Inc. Yet another amazingly competent person we were lucky to have on our team), and I'm probably forgetting one or two. In addition to those people, Chris also has to deal with an attorney (also Katherine in this case, which simplifies things and saves us money) as well as the various bank people. I don't think I can possibly stress enough how helpful it was to have a good team of people to work with. Anne made the process of finding or place as painless as possible, and Chris exceeded all expectations in doing the same with the mortgage process. Mark is a fantastic inspector, I think I learned more about houses from him during the inspection than I'd ever hoped to know in the first place. I'm sure most agents, brokers, and inspectors are good people and good at what they do, but the people we've been working with have just been great. Even if you don't go with the same people we did, you should really make sure that you like and are comfortable with the people you're working with. You'll be spending a lot of time with them and giving them all sorts of personal details, so pick someone you trust.

I really think that's the most important thing to know about buying a house. There's certainly a lot else to the process, but the people you work with, if they're good, will help you through all of that. I'll get into the actual process in the next couple posts.

And now for something completely different. The cameraman sucks, but you want to watch this all the way through anyway.

Shepherds and Brokers

December 7th, 2006

I'm writing this from The Druid in Inman Square where I'm stuffed to the gills with what was, by far, the best Shepherd's Pie I've ever had in my life. Rather than the standard ground beef with some peas and carrots topped with mediocre mashed potatoes it was a fantastic lamb stew with vegetables topped with fantastic mashed potatoes. And they didn't skimp on the meat either, there was plenty of nice big chunks of lamb to last the whole way through the meal. Plus they're one of the few places around enlightened enough to offer free WiFi. So you get a fantastic Irish Pub with fantastic Irish food, good prices, great atmosphere, and internet access so you can spend the whole day here and still claim to be working. I think I have a new favorite casual eatery.

In other news, we met with our mortgage broker this morning to apply for our mortgage. When we were first starting the process we were told that applying for a mortgage was like getting a root canal. I've never had a root canal, but, if that's what it's like, sign me up! I think the mortgage has seriously been one of the easiest parts of this whole process, which is saying a lot considering every other person we've worked with on this has been really good and really helpful. I think we must have had one of the best possible house shopping experiences, and I almost can't wait to do it again (Cape house, anyone? Maybe in a few years...).

So we're now pretty much finished with buying our condo. Everything that we need to do has been done, and now it's just up to our lawyer, agent, and broker to take care of the rest. We're definitely on track to be moving in by our closing date of Jan. 12.

Some real news

December 6th, 2006

I haven't been writing much lately, just too much going on. I'm very close to getting my first client who will hire me on retainer rather than just for projects, I'm trying to keep on top of various opportunities to pursue for the new web venture as soon as all the paperwork for that is all ship shape and Bristol fashion (as an old boss of mine would say), trying mightily to find the time to get the work needed on cellphonetechnews.com done so that it can really launch, and, of course, buying a house.

If you had told me when I started this blog, way back on June 21, that today I would be buying a house, I would have thought you were crazy. None the less, this evening Jessi and I will be signing the Purchase and Sale agreement for our new condo in Somerville (and you'll notice that I now have a Somerville category to complement my Cambridge one), and handing over a cheque for more money than I've ever actually seen at one time before. Of course things won't really be finalized until Closing, which will be happening mid-January to avoid complications with the holidays, but the really important step of signing the paperwork and handing over a lot of money happens today (and we're meeting with our mortgage broker tomorrow morning to deal with that aspect).

So once again, this blog will be chronicling a move. This time I'll be moving less than 2 miles as opposed to the more than 3,000 before, but I think it's just as big a move in other ways. We're moving from renting to owning, a big enough step in its own right, but more importantly we're moving from a temporary residence in the area to a commitment to stay here. We had always planned to stay here for probably at least 5 years, but now that we'll own our condo it's a little more official, and much harder for us to just up and leave if we feel like it. So for the next 5 to 7 years, we'll be living in Somerville. Other than college, this is probably the first time I've ever really decided that I'd be staying in one place for any extended period of time. The only question that remains is: How will Pigpen handle all this?

The process of buying a house is a very strange and convoluted one. I guess I had always imagined it as being like buying anything else: you find what you want, negotiate a price, and buy it. Instead it's a long, involved process that involves hiring several different people to manage it for you, takes about a month, and involves several discreet steps any one of which could fail and bring the whole deal crashing down. I suppose, despite its apparent complexity, that it's really probably one of the most well-honed business practices there is. People have been purchasing land for thousands and thousands of years, so all these steps are probably there for a reason and serve a very good purpose. I definitely intend to write more about the process, and our experience with it, in more detail, but I'm waiting until it's all over so I can collect my thoughts on it.

And so, I'll leave you with this:

An example of just how important editing is to film and our impressions of it.

Absolutely amazing picture

December 2nd, 2006

I found this picture via Digg. It's now my new desktop picture (replacing the very first image taken on the surface of Mars by Viking I). I find the picture incredibly cool, and can't help but try and analyze what it represents.

From the way the horizon curves upward, and the generally tubular view, the city is clearly built on the inside surface of a toroid structure. The only reason that could possibly make sense is if it were built in space, either as some sort of free-floating space station, or some sort of habitation ring attached to a ship of some kind, and spun to create artificial gravity. It could, I suppose, also be some sort of variation on a Dyson shell, as in Larry Niven's Ringworld.

The tube-looking thing running along the ceiling, then, would most likely be some sort of high speed transportation system that takes advantage of the lower gravity that exists closer to the axis of rotation. Although that then begs the question of why they bothered to have boats in the river. Perhaps it's not meant for every day transportation, but is instead intended as a sort of 'airport shuttle' to take people to other parts of the ship or to an unspun spacecraft docking area.

Very cool. There's so much detail in this picture I'm sure I'll come up with more, but for right now, it's way too early on a Saturday morning to be putting this much thought into a picture...