Housing Hell
I recently got a note on my door saying that my apartment complex is raising my rent by almost $150 per month when my lease is up in mid-June. This is the second time in as many years - it looks like apartment rents are finally catching up to the recent Seattle housing boom. When I moved in 2 years ago the rent was already high, but now it's verging on the ridiculous. So I think I need to move, but where to?
Thanks to the Invisible Hand, similar apartments are going to cost about the same, so my options for reducing my rent payment are somewhat limited:
- Move into a lower-quality apartment (smaller, no attached garage, more neighbors, bad neighborhood, etc.)
- Move farther away from work (worse traffic/commute)
- Find a roommate
Finding a roommate to split the rent with might be my best option, especially considering that one of my friends is looking for a new roommate in about the same timeframe.
My other main option is to buy a condo (a house is out of the picture unless I want to move 40 miles out of town). Of course the housing market in Seattle has gone ballistic over the last couple of years - some of my friends who purchased 2 or 3 years ago have seen their condos increase in value by almost 50% (!!). Now everything is priced ridiculously high.
Many other parts of the country are seeing housing prices actually fall now, but the Seattle market is bucking the trend and is still going up a bit, or at worst leveling off.
Example: Riverwalk at Redmond is a recent condo conversion (highly visible from 520) at W Lake Sammamish & Leary Way near Redmond Town Center. They've been selling almost as fast as they get on the market. Here's a representative unit:
15825 Leary Way NE #E1 - Redmond - $325,000 for a 758 square foot 1 bedroom/1 bathroom condo, which is a conversion from an apartment (not new construction), and doesn't have a garage. One thing it does have though is a really great location.
As a comparison, the nearby Cleveland condos are new and go for about $390,000 for a similar unit, or $500,000 for a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom condo.
Being from Colorado where housing prices are far, far lower, this just blows my mind that people are eagerly paying this much for tiny little condos. Where I'm from these prices would get you a huge McMansion. But, I guess this is the reality of living on the West coast - it's even worse in California. I'm glad I didn't end up living in Silicon Valley, which is the other main market for software engineers.
l guess the big question at this point is: what's the future hold for the Seattle housing market? Will the bubble pop like in a lot of the rest of the country? Or will it keep going up? Obviously nobody knows for certain, and anybody who knows more than we do is better off keeping it to themselves and making a killing on the side.
My feeling, given the recent Seattle immigration numbers and Microsoft expansion plans, is that recent trends will continue and that the market will continue to rise, though at a slower rate than it has been. At worst, things might level off for a while.
So I'm actually giving serious consideration to buying one of these overpriced things. Of course, $350,000 is a huge amount of money to bet and be wrong :).
Lots to think about..
Locked Out
I recently learned an interesting lesson about the proper protocol for securing locks and shutting garage doors. On arriving home I drove into my garage and walked back out to grab a UPS note on the front door. Not wanting to have to go inside only to come back out the front door, I just reached into the garage to hit the close switch and walked off to get my package.
When I got back with the package, I unlocked the front door with my key and discovered that the "U" latch was locked from the inside (see picture below). I couldn't open the garage door again since my remote was inside the car in the garage, so I spent a good ten minutes trying to reach in the 2-inch gap in the doorway and somehow undo the U latch. Not surprisingly, they are apparently designed to stop you from doing just that, so I was unable to get it open.
I noticed that the latch was held on by two screws, so I got my swiss army knife screwdriver through the door and started to unscrew one of them. It was actually working, although very slowly, and I had one screw about halfway out when some neighbors walked by. Not wanting to look like I was trying to break into an apartment, I took my hand out of the door and pretended to be looking at my UPS package. As I did that I accidentally dropped the screwdriver inside the door and it bounced inside and out of reach.
Now I was really stuck, so I went to get the apartment maintenance guy. A bizarre conversation followed:
Me: "Hi, I locked myself out of my apartment"
Him: "OK, what's the number? I'll get the spare key"
Me: "1072, but the spare key won't help, see I have my key here"
Him: "Then how are you locked out?"
Me: "The U lock is shut from the inside, so I can unlock the door but can't get it open"
Him: "How did you shut the U lock from the outside?"
Me: "Well I went out the garage"
Him: "So why don't you go back in the garage?"
Me: "It's shut, and the opener is in my car, which is inside the garage"
Him: "How did you shut the garage door?"
Me: "I hit the switch and ran out before it closed"
Him: "Mmm... this doesn't make any sense. Let's go look at it"
We walked over to the apartment and I showed him that I was indeed completely locked out, even though I had the key.
Me: "Can you program another remote to open this garage door?"
Him: "Yes, we can do that. But we need the serial number of the opener, and it's inside the garage."
Me: "Don't you have them all written down somewhere?"
Him: "Hmm... no I don't think so"
Me: "What do you normally do in this situation?"
Him: "Nobody has ever done this before"
Me: "Uhh..."
Him: "How about I just kick your door in and then patch it up?"
Me: "OK, but won't that mess up the door frame?"
Him: "Nah, these U lock things aren't really secure anyway"
Me: "Ah well that's nice.."
The trusty U latch and the crack where the door frame was kicked in
Easter Monkey
At work I won a squeezie-monkey in a contest to write an array-shifting algorithm.
It's very cheapo, made in China, and the packaging has pictures of painted eggs and describes it as an "Easter Monkey" in broken English.
I can think of 3 possible explanations for this:
- In other parts of the world they celebrate Easter very differently than we do.
- There was a gross mistranslation of "bunny" somewhere.
- They only have a limited number of squeezie-doll molds, and rebrand them according to the time of year. So you might see the same product as a "Christmas Monkey" or a "4th of July Monkey" depending on when you bought it.
Spam comments
My WordPress spam filter has caught 384 spam comments as of today.
Am I weird because I saw that and immediately thought "Ooh, 384 is a nice round number: 256 + 128!"? (110000000 binary)
Golfing
I used the golf gift certificate this afternoon with Eric L and Andrew. The weather was pretty good, although it had rained in the morning so it was a bit damp. As for the actual golfing, well.. I got par on one hole at least 🙂
GRE
I went to UW last week for the info session about their master's program. It sounds good, so I'm at least going to apply. On Saturday I'm taking the GRE test. I haven't really been studying for it - I assume it's relatively easy like the SAT. If nothing else at least I bought a GRE book at Borders:
How to open a Windows Vista or Office 2007 box
I nearly cut my hand while opening my copy of Office, and my brother just sent me a string of angry emails after banging on his Vista box for 5 minutes trying to get it open. So to prevent further pain, I present this guide about how to open your Windows or Office box.
First, rip off all the little plastic seals from the sides (This step updated 4/2/07 with a picture sent in by Erin (thanks!)):
Next, you need to cut the circular sticker across the top using your trusty Swiss Army knife. Note: don't try ripping this sticker off, or else it will probably rip the 'certificate of authenticity' off the box as well. Pic:
You might have to cut the sticker on both the front and the back if it covers both sides.
At this point you might be tempted to push in the tab things on the side of the box and pull it open:
Don't do this, however, because these tab things are actually supposed to hold the box shut, so if you grab them you prevent the box opening at all. The trick is to leave the tabs alone and find the little recessed grip thing on the top of the box and pull on it:
The center of the box slides outward radially, so you actually have to pull up on it, which might not be what you expect. Once you do that the box pops open:
Alternatively, you could also read the little visual diagram of how to do this that's on the first little plastic thing you rip off, but that would be too easy :).
Rattlesnake Ridge
Went hiking at Rattlesnake Ridge today. It was pretty cloudy so we didn't get a very good view of either the lake or Mt. Si.
Golf time
I'm the proud new owner of the most suspicious-looking gift certificate ever:
Despite the fact that it's already expired and the amount has been crossed out multiple times, it's supposedly legit. We'll see if the golf course accepts it..
I won it in the weekly office happy hour competition. This week the challenge was to write an implementation of a function with the signature "void ArraySort(int[] array, int length)" that has O(1) memory usage. This was my entry:
void ArraySort(int _array[], int _length)
{
_asm
{
push _mysort
push 4
mov eax, [_length]
push eax
mov eax, [_array]
push eax
mov eax, [qsort]
call eax
add esp, 16
jmp _done
_mysort:
mov edx, [ebp-8]
mov ecx, [ebp-4]
mov eax, [ecx]
cmp eax, [edx]
jle _le
mov eax, 1
ret
_le:
cmp eax, [edx]
jge _ge
mov eax, -1
ret
_ge:
xor eax, eax
ret
_done:
}
}
I particularly like this implementation because the code for the qsort callback is embedded inside the ArraySort function. I was sad that not everybody else appreciated the sublime beauty of this as much as I did.
Corporate Matchmaking
Recently I've been thinking about an idea that was jokingly brought up at lunch at work a few months ago. At the time it sounded stupid, but now for some reason it sounds a tiny bit less so. Maybe I'm just crazy, so I decided to write up the idea to see if anybody can point out obvious gaping holes that I missed.
The basic idea is to write some simple "matchmaking" website software, specifically designed for internal deployment at large corporations, for use by employees who are looking to meet other single people in the area. The software itself would be simple to write since it's basically just a web front end for a database. The difficult part is to determine which features it should have (and whether it's even a good idea in the first place).
Before you laugh your way away from this page, allow me to list a few reasons why this might be a potentially interesting idea.
It might actually be feasible
Let's make up some assumptions out of thin air and assume that the target company has 50,000 employees, two-fifths of which are single, and 50% of those might actually sign up for the service if it's well-advertised and becomes popular. If it's just a simple casual profile-listing site, I think that last number might not be too unreasonable, given the success of similar sites like Facebook or MySpace on college campuses. So we're left with 10,000 potential users, or 5,000 potential matches for each person if for the sake of the argument we make some egregious assumptions about everybody's gender expression & orientation. Now let's cut out 90% of those matches to account for things like age differences, physical distance, personal preferences and any gross errors in the preceding assumptions. We're at 500 potential matches, which is roughly the number of matches returned from a match.com search for single females aged 20-26 in Seattle. So the basic idea isn't too far out there.
Most of the infrastructure is already in place
One of the main advantages of the fact that the software would be restricted to internal corporate employees is that we get tons of infrastructure for free. Namely, identity & authentication. Everybody already has a corporate username & password, so nobody has to sign up for an account. Depending on what kind of information we can pull out of the directory, the only thing a user might have to input would be their gender preferences & age. If the IT infrastructure is properly managed, the users just need to go to the page and the NLA will take care of authenticating them and signing them in automatically. We also get trust and verification for free: assuming security policies are enforced rigorously, you know that the person you're looking at is really who they say they are and that they work for the company. Since it's impossible to create new accounts (except by getting hired) you don't have to worry about scamming & fake profiles, among other things. It also becomes possible to ban misbehaving users much more effectively. The main downside to this is the loss of anonymity (see discussion below).
No financial pressure
The other main advantage I see is that unlike other matchmaking sites, money isn't involved and there's no pressure that it needs to make any money (from advertising or subscription fees). It's free for all users, which is a huge advantage since the one common thing among all people is that they don't want to pay for anything. It also allows for interesting possibilities on the management side since there's no pressure to maximize the number of active accounts at a given time. You want to remove your profile? Great: one click and it's gone. No "are you sure?" games. We could also do things which commercial dating sites would never have the guts to do, such as enforce gender load-balancing across the system by temporarily preventing members of the over-represented side from signing up until balance is restored. One of the biggest problems with regular internet matchmaking sites is that there are usually way more men than women, which isn't good for anybody. This sort of enforcement would be difficult to get right without killing the whole thing before it can grow due to over-restriction. Perhaps a 'voucher' system where you can get a free pass to sign up if you convince one of your female friends to sign up would work.
Good for the company (?)
This may be the weakest argument, so it comes last. It could be argued that if a company's single employees were provided with a matchmaking site that actually worked, they would all get matched up and would be happier. Their newfound happiness would lead to increased satisfaction and work productivity. The higher employee productivity would lead to rises in revenues and profits, which is what the owners (shareholders) want. Thus it would be good for the company, and it wouldn't be motivated to squash the service. Admittedly, the argument has a tenuous chain of inferences, and who knows if the time wasted by employees using the site would actually be greater than any savings due to increased happiness. I think this one could really only be determined through experimental testing.
Now let's take a look at some of the downsides:
Matches are restricted to the same company
This one's obvious due to the nature of of the thing, but it could be a big disadvantage that you couldn't get matched with people outside the company. Out of all the people in the world, what are the odds that the one person you will eventually marry works for the same company you do? Those odds might not be so good. Either way, it might still be a good way to meet new friends nearby, and you could grow your network out from there.
Loss of anonymity
Since the system works on the basis of corporate username, anonymity is lost from the beginning. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good thing since you gain trust and verification that people aren't pretending to be somebody else. But anonymity is important to many people, at least in the initial stages of dating, so this could be a deal-breaker. The system could be configured to present profiles anonymously, but then the users have to trust the administrator of the site, because he/she will have access to everything. Perhaps a hybrid model of selectable levels of anonymity would work.
The company itself might be gender-imbalanced
Even with a gender-balancing algorithm in place, it's possible that we would hit the problem that the input data (that is, the company's employees) is imbalanced in the first place, and thus we could never make everybody happy. For example, consider your prototypical high-tech software company, whose gender balance is 75% male, 25% female (and that's including sales, marketing, HR, etc). In this scenario, even if every eligible woman signed up, two-thirds of the men would be prevented from signing up at all if a gender-balancing limit was in place. This, combined with the fact that in such a situation many of the females might not be single in the first place due to the existing overabundance of males, might kill the idea. I haven't been able to think of any solutions or workarounds for this problem yet. Bad ideas that come to mind might involve some sort of Hot-or-Not ranking system where the 'top' 33% of the males are bubbled up to the top and allowed to join, while the rest are not (obviously, that would not work).
The whole idea is lawsuit-bait
I can easily envision a scenario where the Legal or HR department finds out about the system, squashes it like a bug, and fires the employee who hosted the server in his office. It would probably be a good idea to make sure to get buyoff from the appropriate management, HR & IT people before attempting to do something like this.
---
So those are some of my thoughts. It'd be interesting to see what other people think. Is this just another case of me being a programmer, so my first solution to any problem is to write an algorithm or program to try to solve it? (probably... see: hammer & nail analogy)
Masters @ UW
I'm considering signing up for the Professional Masters Program at the University of Washington Computer Science department for Fall 2007 and I am curious if anybody else is also interested. If you are, let me know. I'm sure it would be more fun if there were people I know, and we would be able to utilize the carpool lane on the way over (very crucial). Obviously this only applies if you live in Seattle and work for a big tech company like Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, RealNetworks, etc..
Website: http://pmp.cs.washington.edu/
Cost: Free (assuming you don't fail, most employers pay the full tuition).
Time commitment: 1-2 evening classes per week, 2-2.5 years.
Where: UW (duh), some classes at Microsoft campus.
What you get: M.S. degree from UW (equivalent to full-time student degree)
Requirements: 2+ years of industry experience, plus normal grad school stuff (GRE, etc)
Why: Meet college chicks, *cough*, I mean, acquire new skills you can apply in your career.
There's an info session on March 12th that I'm planning to go to. If you think you might be curious, come along :).
Happy Valentine's Day, Angel of Death style
This one gets me even weirder looks from co-workers than the Christmas Angel of Death. So it's obviously a tradition that needs to continue ;). Next up, St. Patrick's Day Angel of Death!
From a psychological perspective, it's interesting to see that people are clearly disturbed by the juxtaposition of Halloween and Valentine's Day office decorations, but it doesn't stop them from taking some candy hearts out of the bowl 🙂
This week in Google
I'm always amused by the things people type into Google and find this site with. Here are some from this week:
- seattle yuppie - Apparently I am the #1 search result for "seattle yuppie" (why.. why?).
- are windshield dings covered by insurance - Woo, #1 again. <Your windshield repair ad here, only $500!>
- bomb threats advice - My advice: don't search Google for random blogs if you get a bomb threat!
- fend off mummies - I usually go with a shotgun.
- how to be a tree faller in washington - This one should put to rest the accusations that my name is not a "real" profession. 😛
- disable safety belts golf - Uhh why are people searching for this??
- bugs in cereal - For some reason this one gets a lot of hits, which is scary.
- is religions end near - Not any time soon, but I see that the end of punctuation apparently is.
New Wii
Mini-Mii is in color and happy again:
Amusingly, when I first took the picture "I" blinked:
Broken Wii
Doh. While fooling around with my homemade Wii component cables I accidentally broke off the Pb and Pr pins of my Wii's YPbPr connector:
Trying to fix it just made it worse. I only have the Y signal left, so mini-Mii is angry now that he only shows up in black & white:
Signs you might be a Seattle yuppie
- #17: Your car has both high-performance racing tires and a ski rack, and you don't see anything wrong with that.
Emergency Resource Guide
I just got this Emergency Resource Guide in the mail from the "Washington Military Department Emergency Management Division":
It contains lots of useful info, such as what to do when you cough, in case you dropped out of school before kindergarten:
It has 41 pages of advice about how to deal with everyday dangers such as:
- Terrorism (advice: "Be aware of your surroundings")
- Accidental Poisoning
- Pandemic Flu
- Radiation Exposure
- Bomb Threats (questions to ask: "Where is the bomb?" "Where are you?")
- Chemical Agents
- Anthrax
- Botulism
- Pneumonic Plague
- Smallpox
- Tularemia
- Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers
- Methamphetamine Labs (wtf?)
- Earthquakes
- Tsunamis
- Volcanoes
- Government fear-mongering
Oh wait, that last one wasn't on the list 😛
MSDN Magazine article
Today I got my dead-tree copy of my first 'real' published magazine article. It's in MSDN Magazine and is about the new UI in Microsoft Office. It made the lead article for the February 2007 issue, and they even used a diagram I drew on the cover. Sweet! 🙂
The article title ("RibbonX API: Extend the 2007 Office System With Your Own Ribbon Tabs and Controls") was obviously written by editors, but that's OK 😛
Update:It's up on the MSDN website now:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/02/RibbonX/default.aspx
Deformed fork
At lunch today I got a plastic fork that obviously wished it was metal instead. (ha ha, horns, get it? never mind..)
Super Mario Bros
I'm ashamed to admit this in public, but I don't recall having ever beat the original Super Mario Bros back on the NES when I was a kid (without using some sort of cheats), despite having played it for hundreds of hours on end. World 8 was just too difficult.
Today I downloaded the Wii "Virtual Console" version, played it through and beat it on the first try, and only died once (on the last boss).
I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. I have not played the game in more than 15 years, so seemingly the ability to beat the game is unrelated to having played it recently (though I did eerily remember the locations of every single powerup and warp point as if it was just yesterday).
I suspect that I must have much better hand-eye coordination and timing now than I did when I was 5 years old, because it seemed much easier to control Mario this time around, especially through all of the tricky jumps which were so difficult back in the day. The strange thing is that I don't remember having felt like I had "bad" coordination back then, but I must have. I guess 15 years of playing video games is useful for something 🙂
Homemade Wii component cables
I still haven't been able to get real Wii component cables in order to display in progressive scan (Nintendo seems to be thumbing their nose at their most loyal fans with the Wii), so I found a guide online for making your own homebrew cables. It works, but the main problem is that you have to destroy your composite A/V cable to do it.
Wiring like this is the moral equivalent of goto statements and spaghetti code. My E.E. professors would be ashamed..
Paperclips to the rescue! Obviously not a long-term solution, but it works.
Yay for finally being able to select 480p! I just noticed in this picture that my camera has no IR filter, so you can see all the LEDs in the Wii 'sensor bar.' I am surprised that it has 4 on each side..
Power!
I came home from work today and my power came on. Wooo!! I thought it might get fixed tonight, because earlier in the day I noticed that they had some of the streetlights on my street working again and were making their way up towards me.
So I was out of power for a total of 5 days and 5 nights, which was longer than I have ever seen for a power outage. I have a flight to Denver tomorrow morning, so it's nice that it's on so that I can do a laundry and get all ready to go without freezing to death in the dark (again).
When I turned on my computer, the first email I got was "You have a new bill from Puget Sound Energy!" Weird coincidence? Hrmm... 😐
Angel of Death gets some holiday spirit
At work I have a leftover Halloween decoration in my office:
I haven't thrown it away because I love how corny it is. "Pre-assembled, ready to scare!" and "Straight from the grave.." It's a no-name Made-in-China decoration that is obviously not made by a big company (i.e. "ScareCorp Inc. Angel of Death GXR 2006 Edition"). There's no company name or contact info at all, so they don't have to include any 'instructions' which are really just lists of warnings to avoid lawsuits ("Do not eat Angel of Death", "Do not set Angel of Death on fire").
Reactions from co-workers range from people who find the humor in it ("That's funny", "Hillarious"), to people who don't get it at all ("You're deranged", "That's sick").
This week, in the spirit of the times, I dressed it up with a hollyhat and some jingle bells:
Windy
On Thursday night Seattle had the worst windstorm in recorded history, and millions of people are out of power for "days" (including me).
Supposedly about half of the customers have had their power reconnected as of Saturday afternoon, but my neighborhood is still out. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not fixed until Monday or later.
Yesterday I hung out with friends who were also stranded without power, but today my hot water was all gone so I had to come in to work to take a shower and get internet access.
Trees and fences are down all over the place. A car across from me in the parking lot got smashed.
Finally, an answer to the question, "Redmond rush-hour traffic: could it possibly be any worse?" Answer: "Yes, the power to all the streetlights could always go out."
Cooking dinner by the light of a car battery at Dave's house.
Ah, the joys of filesystem corruption
Weird places to split an encyclopedia
I'm sure they do it just by page count, but some of these make me wonder if the editors weren't having a little fun:
Say it real fast, it sounds like 'ménage-à-trois'
Well, they do have the highest per-capita murder rate..
"Ooh, what lovely little Edisons you have around the tree"
We could use a little more of this..
Cylinders, perhaps?
I don't think they had those...
The avowed enemies of the Zoroastrian Alliance, I'm sure
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