Archive for September, 2002


P&S Negotiation Preparation

Had a conference with my attorney on the P&S. Of course it is completely one sided benefiting the seller. I always wonder about this type of negotiations. Are there some standard dance that the attorneys on both sides go through?
Does anyone get away with the first draft? What is the percentage that someone ended up […]

Meeting the Developer and Future Neighbors

I went to the building site right on time. I am the first one there. The seller’s Agent recognized me and introduced me to the developer. We walked around the building and my unit, and he gave me a good sales pitch as to how things are going to be fine now…
The seller’s agent actually […]

New Refridgerator Arrives

I have a new fridge for the current house. The old one has been dying for 1 year. I was hoping that it will last until I move to the loft, since I definitely won’t need the same fridge for the loft. But it died, actually, on Friday the 13th last week.
I went to Sear […]

Almost giving up

I moved the initial P&S signing date from two weeks ago to this thursday hoping that we have more information on the building. The seller’s lawyer sent over a standard, i.e. one sided, P&S for review. My lawyer of course picked out a lot of issues. The seller lawyer also mentioned to my lawyer something […]

Passive bargaining on t-mobile / voicestream pricing plans

I had been using Voicestream GSM mobile phone service for a while because they are the only one that does GSM and I need GSM for roaming in Europe and Asia. I had a very old pricing plan, $60 for 600 national minutes. Voicestream is now t-mobile, owned by Deusche Telekom. They also have new […]

wireless on Linux!

Well, it’s 2:40am Sunday morning, and finally I got my SMC wireless card to work with RedHat 7.3 on a IBM T22 laptop. Amazing. There are still some annoyance, like during boot it waits for a long time trying to start eth0 (the onboard ethernet card) while I have the laptop unplugged from the wired […]

My Miata turned 40….K

Yes. My 1990 first year in production Miata turned 40,000 miles just now. Perfect timing too — rolling into the garage at exactly 40k miles. I guess I really have not been driving it too much each year.

Debian vs RedHat

I could never get X to work well on my Thinkpad T22 with RedHat 7.2. So I’ve decided to give Debian a try, the latest and greatest, 3.0r0. Jigdo’ed the CD images. Decided to install it on a very old test box first since I have never installed Debian before. Good news is that the […]

Architect or no Architect

I have to decide whether to enlist the help of a professional to design the interior of the loft. The obvious cons is cost. I also have to negotiate with the developer to see if I can do that, meaning stopping their standard build out, and hopefully get some cash credit back for not using […]

Making Tea

How do you make tea? How about using a microwave and a coffee maker….:

Filter water using Brita
Pour water into glass carafe from coffee maker
Boil water by putting carafe into microwave, on high for X minutes where
X = 2 + number of cups of water
Warm Beehouse tea pot with boiled water
Put in tea leaves, add water
Keep […]