Real Estate Rant

The following is an email correspondence between me and our real estate agent after having received a list of petty repairs to be made before closing, which we eventually conceded to do. I think it sums up our frustration with selling our house pretty well.

On a side note, we are getting very frustrated by all of this and we found the letter that was forwarded to be disrespectful and rude. I don't know why such a vague emotional appeal should ever have been brought into this negotiation. It certainly didn't make us want to help them out, if anything it made us want to walk-away from such disrespectful and greedy buyers. I always find numbers objective and appealing, here are some numbers so you know what our perspective is:

112000 - What we paid for the house
2000 - Cost of closing at purchase
3000 - Price of new furnace
400 - Cost of new dishwasher
1000 - Cost of new refrigerator and Oven
3500 - Cost of new Deck
3000 - Cost of new Kitchen
====
124900 Total

Their offer: 113500 after us conceding 1500 from our asking price.

What we get after agents fee and warranty: Approx. 108000.

Approx. Actual Loss by Mr. and Mrs. Gable: 16900.

But that has absolutely no bearing on how they make their decision, does it? We are not so stupid as to try and write up a nice letter that will make some vague emotional appeal about why they should just go ahead and concede. What I can do is complain to my agent, because you are the buffer between us and them so that emotions don't cloud the fact that we need to sell the house. So, we appreciate being able to vent a little bit right now.

We are ready to close on this house. Let's get it done.

Now Playing: Starship - We Built This City

Nonverbal Communication: Experiences in Parking Cars

According to the almighty Wikipedia;

A gesture is a non-vocal bodily movement intended to express meaning. They may be articulated with the hands, arms or body, and also include movements of the head, face and eyes, such as winking, nodding, or rolling ones' eyes.

A gesture is just one of the many forms of Nonverbal communication that we use everyday. What you may not know is just how important Nonverbal communication is in directing traffic in a parking lot of 200+ cars.

I recently had the pleasure of volunteering with the Mass Audubon Society during their local Woolapalooza extravaganza, and extravaganza it certainly turned out to be. We couldn't have asked for better weather, 60 and Sunny all day; I myself am returning to my Kentucky roots sporting a nice red-neck to show for my work today.

After a quick meeting with our Boston Cares team leaders I headed out to the parking lot to meet up with the rest of the team, which consisted of: One tall lanky Oakley sunglass sporting middle aged man named Tony who is the head parking guy, another shorter wiry balding man named Bob but referred to as "Bo" by other staff members, a lovely blonde female twenty something staffer who exudes happy-go-luckyness from every ounce of her being, and the other volunteer assigned to this team, a congenial middle aged Scottish man wearing a Patriots hat and some sporty sunglasses.

I'm given a vibrant orange vest to wear, like everybody else, "So I don't get run over" says Tony. The vest is the start of our Nonverbal communication, it clashes with the pale verdant shades of the new found Spring that has arrived this very day as if in anticipation of this very extravaganza. After a bit of a dry run in a smaller parking lot, we start seeing a major influx of cars around 10:30 AM.

Every parking car is just looking for some direction. Naturally, the Orange Vested are here to help in any way we can. Here is the first lesson I learn about Nonverbal communication while parking cars: Keep a smile, you are the first contact of this extravaganza for these people. It seriously all starts with you, if someone has a bad experience parking, they are going to be pissed off when they get to the gate and have to wait in line to get in, etc... I, the Orange Vested, am here to help you park in an efficient and economical way, the problem is, I can't share that feeling with you, the parking person, except through limited gestures involving hands, smiles, thumbs-ups, occasional leg-kicks and maybe a fist pump or two (okay, maybe I squeezed a wink in every now and then).

Let me break down the normal communication cycle while parking a car. First, there is the communication confirmation. This is normally a head-nod or direct eye-contact with the driver of the vehicle. What were doing here is setting up this nonverbal conversation between the Orange Vested and the parking party. What we want to convey here is that we see them, they are important, worthy of our attention and we are going to get them in a spot as quick as possible.

Next we want to start with a direction impression. The direction impression is usually a grandiose gesture with the hands that indicates a particular direction to be followed. The direction impression is vital because it lets the parking party know where to go next. The direction impression could point towards an available parking spot or just to the next Orange Vested individual who will continue the nonverbal directions to an available parking spot.

Finally, we have the landing directives. The landing directive is usually a horizontally outstretched right hand indicating where the front of the car should end up as well as a continuous circular "come-hither" motion with the left hand. These directives are usually given out by the Orange Vested individual in the parking spot to be parked in. The directives indicate how far to pull in, and if and where they may be dangers in the spot, e.g. rough or muddy terrain.

Overall, I had a great time parking cars today. I know I have a new found respect for the people directing traffic at large events.

Now Playing: Dropkick Murphys - I'm Shipping up to Boston

Subway Rumble - Part 3

I see this all coming in slow motion from the time he hocks the loogey and all I can think about is a straight up Yellow-Belt level straight kick to the chest, but then I remember I didn’t really ever get the Yellow-Belt so I slowly back away towards the back of the train while Butterbean starts the bull rush. I luck out and he trips over himself on some stairs and is faced down right in front of me with the other two guys behind.

At this point we are going on like a good 10 minutes of ruckus with this Butterbean behemoth and something in me snapped. I’m tired of trying to just keep this guy from hurting me and I’m ready to knock this dude out. I throw a kick that lands my lower shin to his forehead and the top of my foot slaps the side of his head, I follow up with a right hook somewhere about the face area. By this time the other two guys have come up and are a little surprised, everyone kinda is like “okay, okay, just hold him down, easy there…”

Look, I probably shouldn’t have hit the guy, but the cops weren’t there and I had already subdued the guy like 3 times, it was time to step up the alert level a little. A little bit after that the cops showed up and took him off the train. He got arrested for PI probably, but they asked if we wanted to press charges and we said no. When we were getting questioned by the cops they asked for our ID’s and I still have my Kentucky Drivers License, when I handed him my license I said “It’s my second week in the big city”. He laughed and said, “Aw $&*!, you’re from Kentucky, I’m amazed you didn’t have him strung up and skinned in here”.

So anyway, that was pretty exciting.

Now Playing - Nappy Roots - Country Boyz

Subway Rumble - Part 1

Alright so, let me tell you about this fight I got in on the subway the 2nd week I was here. It’s nuts. Me and one of my roommates Nick went to a bar to watch the UFC fight. We went to this bar right next to Fenway, where the red sox play. The bar is right behind the “Green Monster”, the big wall in left field. Anyway, we watched the fight and I drank some beers but I was pretty straight (That’s another great thing about the subway, you can be totally blasted and still have a ride home, just make sure you take a piss before you leave… you may even wanna take two pisses).

Nick doesn’t drink, so he was sober the whole night and we headed back to the subway station about 12:30 at night. We watched some dude take a piss on the floor in the station, and get arrested… (Obviously he did not take two pisses before he left) Then the train came and we hopped on it to get home.

Let me kind of describe the trains, the Green Line (A,B,C,D are all Green Lines) is where I live, I live at the end of the C line (Called Cleveland Circle) but you can also take the B Line to Reservoir and there’s a little side dip that will get you home… or raped… it’s 50/50. The trains on the green line are more like trolley cars, but enclosed. The C line runs in the middle of this long road called Beacon that runs right into downtown. C Line trains have to stop at stop lights and shit, but they are riding on rails, the rails just run in the middle of the street, kind of like where the median would be. So, there is usually two cars to a train, and there is like a little middle part that is like an accordion so it can flex between the cars when the train goes through a curve.

When me and Nick got on the train the only spots left to sit were on the middle part and there was a kinda hot girl and this bald Butter Bean looking dude kinda dressed up. He had like a tweed sport coat and tie on with some dress pants and dress shoes. This guy was wasted, and he was trying to holler at this girl. Asking people for a pen on the train and being all obnoxious. So me and Nick were trying to kind of diffuse the situation, because we could tell this girl was uncomfortable and she was all by herself.

So anyway, we were just talking to this guy, asking where he came from, how much did he drink tonight and kinda laughing at him. The girl started to chirp in with little comments and he probably thought we were making fun of him. So this goes on for about 15 minutes and the ride home from the bar is about 25 minutes. All of a sudden this guy is just stone cold quiet for like 4 stops on the train, it was a good 5 minutes. I look over and this guy is like super-duper mean mugging Nick who is sitting across the aisle from me in a separate seat by the girl. Nick notices it too and so he starts smiling and is like “Hey man, you’re being awful quiet over there”, but this dude is still just super mean mugging him so eventually Nick is like “Alright man, you win the staring contest” and he looks back at me across the aisle. I smiled a little bit and started to change the subject, I asked if any of the other stops on that line were faster than just going all the way down to the end of the C-Line like I always did.

So all of a sudden while we are talking this big Butter Bean dude gets up and is like “fuck you fuckin boston college kids,” and starts walking toward Nick and leans back and throws the slowest haymaker I have ever seen in my life. It was like slow motion it went so slow. Nick just kind of moved out of the way and the guy hit the window and fell on top of him so I got up and somehow put this guy in some kinda 1/8th Nelson and grabbed onto the pole.

I was holding on for dear life...

Now Playing - Kanye West - Stronger

Dare Obasanjo Makes Me Want To Work At Microsoft

I've been reading a lot of Dare Obasanjo's Blog (aka Carnage4Life) over at 25hoursaday.com. I came across the blog through some posts on the CodingHorror blog a while back and have been a subscriber since setting up my Google Reader about a month ago. I've read about the drama before and the previous hiatus on postings, I'm glad he is still around for me to find.

There are a couple of things I have to say about the blog. The first is that I like the content because it provides a good mix of technical information and programming/software commentary. Sometimes the technical details (especially when talking about different protocol RFC's) get a bit above my head, but that is probably a good thing because I end up learning more because of the helpful links that he supplies.

I like that someone like Dare is still getting excited about new language features even though he obviously has a lot of things on his plate. My earlier posts on functional programming (including my "Sexy" Aggregate function in Leveraging the DNN Event Logging API) came out about the time that his posts did, but I was just recently looking through the archives and came across them.

The other thing about the blog that I like, which may or may not be a good thing for Dare, is that it makes me want to work for Microsoft. If a person like Dare is having a good time there, at least most of the time, then it probably is an okay place. For Microsoft recruiters, it's kind of like what Shaq called Homeboy Marketing:

'Homeboy Marketing’

Marketers refer to it as guerrilla marketing, but O’Neal calls it “homeboy marketing… . Most people spend $2 million, $3 million for a commercial. With homeboy marketing, it’s all for free. When these TV stations want to interview me, I wear a FreeInternet hat. When consumers see me on TV, they also see all this stuff.”

Dare gets to do "Slam Dunk" technical posts about topics that interest him, and along the way readers (probably pretty technical readers) find out that Dare works for Microsoft. In this instance, it's me, a 26 year-old programmer on the come up. Maybe somewhere else it's the genius that gives Microsoft a winning search solution that takes out the feet of one of their competitors.

Anyway, this blog was originally started as a way to indirectly market the super-cool company I work at and I'm not currently looking for a job. But if I were...

P.S. I gotta make me some kind of blogspot widget that does that "Now Playing" thing at the bottom of Dare's Blog Posts. Maybe something that can pull information from Amazon and link there (I'm not a big fan of Apple right now, don't get me wrong I'm not one of those guys with a stick yelling "Get Off My Lawn" because all the cool kids are using Macs, I'll have to elaborate in another post). For now, I'm totally ripping it off, sorry:

Now Playing: Augustana - Boston

Deck Construction - Final Result

Here is the final result of the deck project. Not so bad for a couple of programmers.

Deck Construction - Part 3 - Posts and Rails

We don't really have any pictures from the day we raised the posts and put the joists up. It was raining all day and it's just a blur now. Here is the current state of the deck.






So far, so good. Next steps, get the railings done and start the stair stringers.

Deck Construction - Part 2 - Solid Foundations

So the next phase of the deck is to put some solid foundations in place. After getting out some string and squaring everything up to the house, Brian and I rented a two-man Auger to drill 32" holes for our post bases. I don't really have any pictures of the holes, but here is the finished product with the concrete poured.

After getting the post holes dug and filling them with concrete, we attached to houseboard by using a hammer drill to drill 10" holes into the house. According to the inspectors, I couldn't just put lag screws into the board behind the brick, I had to go into the ends of the joists (dead-nuts so to speak). It was a pain in the butt, but we finally got all our holes lined up with the end of the joists and attached the board to the house with 10" Lag Screws.

Next step, putting up the massive 6x6 posts after we notch them for the beams.

Deck Construction - Part 1 - Destruction

So, in order to make a new deck, you have to get rid of the old one. Here is the old one.



Me (the flabby pale guy) and my brother (the skinny pale guy) decided to cut the joists that connect to the house board and pull the deck away from the house.


So far so good. Then we had to cut the pieces up into smaller more manageable pieces and haul them all to the dump to get rid of them. The Champagne Tacomastang made a pretty good wood wagon.

Deck Plans using Google Sketchup

I am undertaking a somewhat big home improvement project, for me anyway. I've convinced myself I can build a deck.

Here is a couple of screenshots of the plans I did using Sketchup.