Unit38

I'm falling down on the job here. I think that the real estate idea was a bad one for me. While I'm going to work on selling my condo, I don't think blogging about it is my best way forward. I do want to blog, but I think this idea has failed. It's no mystery why, I just am not passionate about real estate and stuff. So I'm going to go ahead and kill this guy pretty soon, but I will replace it with another, probably using the engine that the wikifad blog uses.

And destroyeth the momentum of the weekend.

Eth.

Nothing valuable done today. I think I might have to start instituting some productivity rules on myself, because I've got a few other projects that are really distracting me from this one. I can't commit to anything just yet though.

This is perhaps the weakest blog entry ever!

Well, I didn't get paint, luckily. I asked first, and we decided that flat out white might not be the way to go, which I would have just gone ahead and bought and then regretted. I did get wallpaper removing equipment, because the wallpaper in the downstairs 1/2-bath sucks, and we're going to get rid of it in favor of something that doesn't suck.

I also bought some electronics stuff from a radio shack that actually has electronics components (it seems like the mall ones don't anymore, but other ones still do). That project is going to rule, I've decided. I need to get some pictures and stuff up here. They're coming, I swear.

And videos, when I hook up my tv card toy.

And I even played some Final Fantasy X-2. I think I've done everything except the last battle and the sick ridiculous dungeon that I'm probably not going to bother with. I just don't have the kind of time I used to. I just want to finish this so I can get XII already!

Tonight for dinner we had Panera Bread Crispani, which is this new pizza thing they make. It was really very good.

Today Leslie had to do some work so I drove her there and went shopping in the area while she was working. I bought Beverly Hills 90210 Season 1 (for her) and a USB-based TV card thingy for me. I haven't had a chance to mess with it yet, but it could be pretty cool for a project idea I had.

I also went to radio shack to try to get breadboard and some LEDs for a small electronics project we want to try for christmastime. They didn't have any. Of anything. Didn't radio shack always used to have electronic components? Maybe I'm having false memories.

Anyways, tomorrow for paint, and I think I'll play some Final Fantasy X-2 right now. I can't believe the price of the PS3. I always just assumed I would get that so things like XBox 360 and Wii didn't even really stick in my head, but $600 makes me start to think more seriously about other platforms. I don't know if I can go without Final Fantasy though. Does that make me wierd?

Some blogs:

Leslie's Wikipedia Fact-A-Day blog (awesome idea, and I'm not biased at all)
Boing boing - my primary source of neat stuff
My money my freedom - also deals with real estate issues at a personal level
Boston Gal's Open Wallet - financial stuff, including some real estate

I think I might make more blogs. I want to continue this one, but I think there is more stuff I want to blog about! But maybe I should stick to one for the time being... we'll see how ambitious I feel later this weekend.

(i am apparently not as smooth with firefox as i thought, this is my third time writing this post as i keep closing the tab by accident)

Sometimes you just need a friday. Today, I need a friday. Luckily for me, today is, in fact, friday!

This weekend's plans include getting painting supplies and maybe painting a bit, getting some electronics supplies for the breadboard christmas tree project, and playing final fantasy x-2 a little so I can finally get final fantasy xii (I won't get the new one until I finish the old one). I was tempted not to write that down so if I don't do it I wouldn't feel bad, but that is one of my motivations for this blog, after all. By writing things down and writing and checking regularly it will keep me on task, as it were.

At work things proceed smoothly. The chain of data from the sea floor to the boat is completed, but I haven't been able to test the error tolerance yet. I'm having a problem simulating the noise effects on the modem, all I can get is perfect communication or perfect failure, which doesn't really test the scheme much. Hopefully I'll be able to get somewhere with that today.

Sometimes it's nice to be oblivious about things. Like internet memes. They're so much more delightful to come across once they've already been formed and passed around. I really hadn't heard of the "I am in ur base, killin ur doodz" meme before yesterday, when a boingboing post used it. This led to lots of fun and laughing.

Acoustic modem work is going smoothly! I might have some time to remove it from my mind for a little while in favor of other things, like working on selling the condo! Or any of the million other projects I want to work on! Maybe.

Such a silly-sounding word.

Now Leslie (my other half) wants her own blog too! I couldn't figure out how to make the Serendipity engine do two blogs, so for the moment I added a second engine (Nucleus) to the hosting account and I'll set her up to use that. It's good anyways, to get a comparison and see if there are great features that I never thought to miss using this one.

Her blog will be a pretty interesting one I think! She noticed that she looked up something on wikipedia almost every day, and so her blog will be the topics that she feels compelled to look up on wikipedia (and presumably the information that she finds).

Right. And selling the condo takes a back seat again. But I'm not worried about it, this is fun!

I'm new to blogging, and so I'm sure no one is reading this (yet!). I guess I am a little intimidated when I see big impressive looking blogs with mounds of content like sellsius or zillow blog. I'm not going to ever be able to write that much or post that much!!

But then, isn't that the point? The whole idea of collaborative internet technology is that everyone can contribute as much as they want to, and through searching and tagging and self-organizing behavior all this content is all accessible. So the fact that my little blog here isn't as snazzy looking and doesn't have lots of long articles every day doesn't mean that it doesn't play its part in the great mound of structured and searchable information that people call Web 2.0.

And yes, those two links at the top are totally to test how Technorati works.

I played with my personal web page a bit today, and worked a lot (at work, of course) on acoustic modem communication. I almost embarassed myself when I thought it wasn't working and had an email completely written to describe why my software was fine but the device was screwed up. Then, with my mouse hovering over the send button, I thought I'd take one last look, and luckily saw my error (I was sending the modem a 520 byte string instead of the 512 it wanted). I kind of thought I would see an error or something in that case but it just took the data and then the receiving modem never acknowledged it.

I guess that's a long way of saying not much house stuff. I had a cute idea to use our house "pets" (not real pets) to take fun interesting pictures of our house, when the time comes.

Pursuant to blog publicity and generally waking myself up to the 21st century, I'm trying to claim this blog on Technorati. Since I'm not quite the Master of Serendipity (the blog software) yet, I'm using the simple claim method first and just posting a Technorati Profile link.

Yay for the future!

...sometimes prevents me from doing the things that I want. I'm sure I'm unique in that respect.

Point being, while I did pay some bills, which is indirectly house-related, I didn't do anything useful with respect to blogging, painting, or selling. But I got a lot of good stuff done anyways today. Mostly I worked with an acoustic modem from Wood's Hole, trying to get a driver for a high data rate working. For the first day working with the actual device, I made a lot of progress, I think.

I suppose that's a little off topic, but it's what has occupied my mind all day and I haven't really transitioned out of it yet. I think one project on the horizon is the development of a web page for my old company, where my girlfriend still works, so that might take some more time away from selling stuff, too.

I'm going to try really really hard to keep doing the blogging thing all the time. I think it will keep me focused on selling the place. I think I'm going to need to stay focused because it will likely be a long road.

What can I say? I like football. As such, not a whole lot was accomplished today.

On the prompting of Jessie from For Sale By Owner Center, I visited Zillow and RealEstate ABC, two sites that let you check an approximate valuation of your property.

Zillow's estimate was, I thought, very high, and I didn't really get any information about comparable properties in the area or anything. I may have just been using it wrong though. RealEstate ABC, on the other hand, gave me a great list of the purchases in my complex recently and the prices and everything (I could even go back to find my own purchase), which was phenomenally helpful to my peace of mind.

As for promotion of this blog, well, I got someone to look at it, anyways. And I put a link to it on my myspace page.

I can't believe that as I wrote a blog entry about not being able to find good For Sale By Owner resources on the internet it never occurred to me to search for blogs on the topic! A google search for "for sale by owner blog" turns up this as the top link, which I've already enjoyed reading.

And this one and this one (oops, I didn't look at the year, that's over a year old!).

So it looks like I'll have plenty of reading to do! (and maybe a couple places to plug my silly little blog here)

It's actually Robert. So I am, and I say this proudly, Joe-Bob.

Okay, so today was a non-starter for house stuff, which isn't really all that surprising, I guess. We went to Boston for a information session with California College of the Arts, which was pretty good. Then we went to see the Borat movie, which was hysterical.

So nothing done today. I am thinking of trying to publicize this blog on For Sale By Owner websites. And the few (very few) other places where I actually have any kind of web presence. I mean, this does actually have the potential, in my opinion, to be a useful thing, right?

Tomorrow, if time and mood permit, I was thinking about going to Home Depot or wherever and getting some paint supplies, so on some random day if the urge strikes we would be able to just paint a bit here and there. Then later on when we had to pick a week and just do it there might be a little less to do. Especially if we made the little bits the hard bits like the corners and edges and such.

I should also start to put pictures up here, I mean who likes to just sit and read text?

Pictures, paint, and publicity. Three P's in a plan.

My intention was to do a little searching for web resources on selling your home yourself. However, I ran into the problem that the basic searches I did on "for sale by owner" gave me a list of sites for posting listing of homes that are for sale by owner, when what I was really looking for was information. The correct search eludes me for the moment, and tonight is occupied by my first Celtics game of the year (v. Detroit).

I heart the Celtics.