The Demilitarized Zone

There has been some underlying demand for pictures of the house, and I’m glad to show you them. I’m generally not a flickr-using kinda guy, but I just didn’t want to bother doing the crazy uploading needed for the blog. The pictures are slightly old - the house is actually a good bit more unpacked today.

Anyways, things have been going pretty smoothly. We had a slight problem with a young tree root attacking our main sewage line and clogging the drains, but a plumber cleared it quickly (albeit for an exorbitant amount of money). We’ll have to consider our long-term solution for that - the tree is located on what I believe is nominally county property (the median between the sidewalk and street), so there’s some confusion as to whether we’re allowed to cut down the tree, who’s responsible for the damage to our pipes, etc. Personally, I like the tree, but not so much that I want to spend $5000+ trying to save it and our pipes.

The recent storms did a number on some of our trees, which culminated in a gigantic branch hitting our fence. The fence withstood the impact surprisingly well, but there is now a huge (bigger than me) branch in our yard that needs to get removed somehow. I’m contemplating taking down a few of the low-hanging branches in the yard, and then calling a landscaping/gardening service to clean up the mess. It’s not that I’m lazy - I just don’t have the time or tools to do this stuff properly.

As I have lamented before, we still don’t have FiOS available to us. However, I think there’s reason to be hopeful we’ll get access to it before the end of the year. I’m not sure we’ll switch right away - Comcast gave me a very good deal on our current plan (digital cable plus internet for $65 a month) - but having the option for something really high-speed definitely makes me happy.

No one likes a whiner, though, so let me tell you some stuff that has gone right.

The house insulates very nicely. People were telling us how great brick was for that when we bought the place, but now that we have drapes up (and sunlight isn’t hammering our hardwood floors), we are pleasantly surprised at how little we really need to use the air conditioner. The basement is especially cool.

Speaking of the basement, the rec room is turning out to be a really perfect home theater room. The air conditioning fan in the utility room does get a little noisy, but shutting the utility room door muffles it to a large extent. Having a mini-kitchen nearby is excellent for storing drinks and popcorn. You’ll notice that there’s a new TV down there - I’ll discuss my home theater plans in another post, but rest assured, it is an absolutely mind-blowing TV and I got a good price on it.

We managed to get the shed open, and while there’s a lot of trash in there, there’s also a lot of very nice storage hooks, shelves, and so forth. The shed itself is in excellent condition, and could easily hold a grill and a lawnmower, along with other assorted lawn items.

Our pantry is working out pretty nicely - we need another storage cupboard or two, plus a couple hanging pot/pan racks, but I’m satisfied that the mental model we had for how it would work was realistic. It’d be interesting to see if we couldn’t do some sort of integration with the deck (have a dedicated space for grilling gear).

So, overall, we’re very happy. There’s still a lot to buy and do, but we’re getting there. It feels like home!

It’s because 2008-2009 is going to be amazing when it comes to RPGs. Why aren’t the Japanese buying this console? They’ve got a Tales game, a Star Ocean game, and a couple of really slick-looking new IPs (Last Remnant, Infinite Undiscovery). Not that Disgaea 3 and Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3 side are worth sneezing at…

Housing post coming up soon.

Well, good news: after a month of anxiety and crazy negotiation, Debbie and I are home-owners. Between that, graduate school, work, and just trying to eat and sleep, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to post.

We are currently offline at home right now, except when I use my work laptop’s EVDO modem (which I limit, since it’s primarily for work!). We should be back online next week.

Finally, this picture is an inspiring reminder of the sheer power, knowledge, and wisdom that G-d gave us. Our potential is really limitless thanks to Him.

I don’t know why, but it seems like the place that all of the console manufacturers screwed up this generation was with recharging their controllers.

The Wii remote, for instance, can’t even be recharged at all, unless you buy one of the third-party charging stations. I am decidedly unimpressed with the Nyko one, which my parents use - the contacts are too small, and I never seem to get the remote in just right. (The Wavebird has the exact same issue, too - what happened, Nintendo?) On the positive side, swapping batteries is pretty easy.

The wireless Xbox 360 gamepad, on the other hand, can be recharged, but requires an expensive cable to do so, since the recharge connector is proprietary. To make matters worse, the 360 doesn’t power the USB ports when the power is off, either. On the positive side, like the Wii remote, you can swap batteries really fast with their battery packs, or by just tossing in a new pair of AAs.

In terms of recharging, the PS3 gamepads (Dual Shock 3 and SIXAXIS) are fantastic - they have standardized mini-USB connectors. But, of course, if your controller runs out of juice for whatever reason, you’re completely screwed, because they both use non-removable Lith-Ion batteries. This isn’t an unreasonable scenario, because like the 360, it doesn’t power the USB ports when off, so your controller could very well stay on and lose all its charge.

Thus, I’d like to propose that all controller manufacturers do the following in the future:

1. Use AAs, AAAs, or some other standardized battery type.
2. Use mini-USB for the recharge connector.
3. Keep the USB ports powered when the console is off (or at least make this a configurable setting).

It’s pretty clear to me now that G-d is doing his best to deny me my FiOS - when I got back to the apartment on Friday, there was were little papers slipped under all the doors telling us that Verizon was putting in fiber optic drops in all the apartments. And, naturally, the place we’re moving to doesn’t have FiOS access, despite it being a whole three blocks from homes that do. ARGH!

Some folks have been asking me about this house we’re buying, and I promised a blog entry about it, so here goes.

The first question to answer is, why a house now?

• Inflation is rising, and a house (well, land) is a good hedge against that.
• Prices have finally come down to reasonable, sane levels. The price of renting where we are would exceed buying a house within three years.
• We are getting absolutely hammered in terms of taxes, and a mortgage would help with that more than renting.
• Realistically, we’ll probably have kids in the next few years, so we may as well get ahead of that before it happens.

We’ve been looking for a house since about mid-March. Our search area was fairly small: Woodside or Aspen Hill (Rockville). We didn’t want to live in Baltimore, Kemp Mill, or White Oak. Woodside had nothing within our price range, so it was off to Aspen Hill. For those who don’t know, Debbie grew up in Aspen Hill, and we went to Beth Joshua (Beit Joshua? Beis Joshua?) probably like 50+ Shabbosim in college. We are very, very familiar with the community there (and them with us, I suspect).

So, we looked at houses in that neighborhood. We saw about six or seven of them before we found the place we’re buying, which I gather is right about average. In general, the short sales we saw were wastes of time. They were very overpriced and in bad condition from being rented out. The failure of the banks and sellers to actually price these houses to market is definitely affecting the housing market in a negative way, and is just prolonging the problems the economy is having. It was also instructive on the damage that a few years of no maintenance can do, a mistake which we’re going to be avoiding now more than ever.

You can thus imagine our surprise when we upped our search range a bit and found this house. It wasn’t a short sale (I think it was a foreclosure at some point?), and when we saw it, we really liked it, but didn’t “love it” per se. We don’t fall in love with houses - none of them are perfect, and more to the point, falling in love with something makes you make bad decisions (um, except for getting married to the person you love!) with regards to it. Using some negotiation, we got the house down to a price that we could (easily) afford, got the seller to pay for minor repairs (no major ones needed!), easily qualified for our mortgage (the house appraised very well), and thank G-d, it looks like we’ll be settling on May 12th.

Now, to describe the place. It has a nice-sized L-shaped living-room/dining-room (with fireplace) that you can easily fit a dozen or more Shabbos guests into, while still leaving room for a couch, hutch, easy chair, and small table. The kitchen is right off the dining room, but small - thankfully, there’s an addition to the house (also off the dining room) that can easily be used as a pantry / preparation area. All the major appliances in the kitchen are new, sans the dishwasher (doh!). The oven doesn’t have self-clean, but it’s essentially unusable for Passover anyways - it has a flat electric stovetop, which is pretty much the worst case scenario for kashering.

The main floor also has three bedrooms - two medium-sized, one small. The medium-sized ones can fit two twin beds, albeit with not that much remaining room. They’re also all a touch short on closet space - say what you will about our current living situation, but closet space is not something we’re lacking in the apartment. The bathroom (which is quite nice) is right near the bedrooms. That entire side of the house is neatly segregated from the living-room/dining-room/kitchen/pantry side by a small hallway, which was a good architectural decision.

That leads us down the basement. There’s a small kitchenette area down there (right by the stairs) that was probably intended to be a renters’ kitchen, but when I see it (and its self-cleaning oven!), I see the world’s best little Passover kitchen. Just seal up the regular kitchen and pantry, do some minor cleaning downstairs, and you’re set. Hard to beat that!

The house’s information says there are six bedrooms. This is a gross distortion of reality. In the basement, there are two smallish rooms off the family/rec room that do have closets, but also only have small windows (you’re not going to rescue anyone through them in a fire). Off the utility/laundry room (which is off a hallway from the family room) is another room that, de facto, doesn’t even have a window (it comes out under the deck). We’re planning on using the two rooms off the family room as a library and an office, but both doubling as guest rooms. The room off the utility room will be for storage and networking.

As I just alluded, there is a family/rec room in the basement, and it is pretty big. We’ll probably put a decent home theater setup and a couple of couches there, along with a table for board games (and shelves for board games!). It ought to be a good place for parties or Shabbos afternoons. The utility/laundry room is reasonably sized, and even has a nice little table for folding clothes on.

We are exceptionally lucky in that the house is in generally fantastic shape (especially for something built in 1956!) and the seller has agreed to fix almost everything that’s wrong that we found. The only thing we need to do before we move in is to change the locks, it seems. Of course, the list of stuff we want to buy and do that’s not needed is staggering. If I had to guess, we’ll lead off with a new stainless-steel-tub dishwasher and then wire up the entire house with CAT6 cables/jacks. The latter is a luxury, but everyone knows what geeks we are, and I know it’ll come in handy. If we wait, I know we won’t do it, so I’m prioritizing it appropriately.

Quoted from the Star-K’s article:

“Another method to kasher the grates is to cover the grates completely with a flat double layer of thick aluminum foil and turn the burner on the highest setting for ten minutes.”

Believe me that this is a fairly nerve-wracking thing (and smelly) to do, but if you don’t feel like cleaning out your oven, it’s a pretty decent option.

We’re moving into a house with grill-style electric burners and a self-clean oven, not to mention a separate kitchenette entirely, so I’m looking forward to a much easier time of it next year. What’s this about moving, you say? Tune in next week!

UPDATE: tape smells pretty bad when it burns, and doing things the Star-K way will light up any nearby tape pretty quick. Be careful where you put it down.

I’ve been following the Japanese launch of WiiWare semi-closely, and I found some really good impressions on Wired’s Game | Life blog.

The two games I’m most interested in are Dr. Mario and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. I’m a little iffy on FFCC:MLAAK’s (could they have made that title longer?) microtransaction DLC and lack of progressive scan (WTF, Squeenix?), but I’m a sucker for a good Final Fantasy game, so they’ll probably milk me for all I’m worth. Dr. Mario seems less objectionable, even if all I see doing with it is losing to my parents (who have Dr. Mario skills that astound the common man).

On the plus side, I’ve been enjoying Super Smash Bros Brawl tremendously, and have been training Debbie strenuously so she can represent the Silver Spring Zakars properly. Her debut in the family online battle was surprisingly good, and she came in 2nd a fair few times (using Zelda/Sheikh - with morphs!). We’ll be doing more drills as time goes on, so she can master the useful arts of air-fighting and shield dodges. I myself have been trying to master parries (down-B), which can be surprisingly handy against a charging foe.

Consumer Affairs has a complaint section for complaining about mortgage companies. It is, by far, the most interesting reading I’ve done this week.

You only need to read it for a few minutes to find the numerous tales of consumers admitting that they didn’t read the paperwork that went with their loan. I mean, how dumb are you to not read the paperwork that goes with a car loan, never mind that these are loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Don’t take someone’s word that they’re doing the best thing with your money - people are essentially self-interested when it comes to money, and they will screw you if it’s profitable and they can get away with it.

Don’t get me wrong - reading some of those stories, it’s manifestly clear that the lenders were screwing around big-time and did some some astonishingly unethical things (whether they were illegal is debatable). The stories about the banks “losing” mortgage payments, if true, are indicating an issue that seriously needs some regulation. They were clearly lending money to people who didn’t understand the terms of the deal. And it’s terrible how they’re totally uninterested in fixing their own mistakes (albeit, in some cases, it wasn’t their mistake).

But, still, just reading these stories, you get the sense that most of these folks bit off way more than they could chew, and inexcusably so, no matter what the lender sold to them. The numbers I see online imply that you shouldn’t be paying out more than 28% of your take-home income on mortgage payments (including taxes). Thus, if you’ve got a monthly payment of $2000, you should be making more like $7500-$8000 per month in take-home salary. The impression I got is that most of these people were spending 60%+ of their income on the mortgage. They wanted the house so bad that they were willing to go along with anything to get it, damn the details. Anyone with even a little sense should understand that $50k a year cannot afford a $500k house!

Moral of the post: I’m going to ignoring people who tell us to stretch as far as possible, because it’s pretty clear that this can be a really bad strategy. Buying something we can comfortably afford? I think that’ll work better.

When I was hunting (futilely) for a cheap copy of Disgaea for the PS2 the other day, I was wishing that I could just play the (updated and better) PSP port on the console. And that got me thinking: why can’t I?

Is there anything really stopping Sony from releasing a PSP emulator for the PS3 besides the usual engineering time and costs? Just plug in your PSP via USB, and let the emulator use it as a UMD drive. For bonus points, they could let me cache a game to hard drive (maybe with monthly “show me your disc!” checks to make sure I still have the original disc). This would work even better for PSP-2000s (aka, PSP Slim), since you can also charge with the USB cable.

The trick here would be for Sony to actually let PSP developers leverage the PS3’s greater abilities. Let the developers include a true 480p resolution mode (800×480) and maybe even higher-resolution textures if the game detects that it’s running under the PS3 emulator (and thus has some extra rendering power to play with). Put those Dolby ProLogic IIx soundtracks on the PSP games, and output them if you’re running emulated. Allow us to use that memory card in our PSP to store our saved games, so we can transparently use the emulator AND the actual PSP. The idea is to make the PS3 enhance and complement the PSP experience, not replace it.

I’d also like Sony to deliver on the promise of PSP integration into PS3 games - like using the PSP as a rear-view mirror in a driving game, acting as a secret playbook in a football game, or using it to display a map in an RPG. I’m a huge fan of the Gameboy Advance and Gamecube integration idea, even if it didn’t really get fully exploited[1], and I think Sony really could do an even better job.

[1] It turns out that the Gameboy Advance Player for the Gamecube can act as GBA using the Gamecube to GBA link cable - which is awesome, since I can use it as second GBA for Crystal Chronicles multiplayer if I just hook up a small LCD to it. Just thought I’d share that.