Sitting at a cafe, Carmel turns to me and asks:
Daddy, is that carrot cake (pointing to my plate)
me: yes, just like the piece I shared with you.
Carmel (~3 secs later): is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes

~10 secs later, Carmel: Daddy, what is this (pointing to the same cake)?

repetition is the mother of all learning I guess.

In case you are hosting wordpress yourself and have trouble using the “auto upgrade” feature, here is good tip:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/not-performing-automatic-upgrade-to-30

And that left me wondering why and where that came from? I guess i will never know…

Friday morning:
Carmel: where are you going dad?
Me: Work
Carmel: (starting to fake cry), no I don’t want you to go.
Me: sweetheart, if I don’t go to work, we won’t have money so we can’t go to store and buy cereal for your breakfast.
Carmel: Oh ok, I like cereal. Bye daddy.

Monday morning (after going to grocery store on Saturday with her)
Carmel: where are you going dad?
Me: Don’t you know?
Carmel: Are you going to work? Remember, we went to store so we have cereal in the pantry now, so you can stay home.
Me: but we are running out of bread soon. So I have to go to work so we have money for bread.
Carmel: I am ok with cereal.
Me: Naysan likes bread though.
Carmel: oh ok…bye daddy.

The sweetness of these days are passing too quickly already.

I don’t consider myself your average phone user. I consider my phone an important productivity tool (and a device that most wives wish were used less at home; more on that in another post, i.e. what men do on their phones as I am sure a lot of wives out there would like to see an academic study on this topic).

I have written on this topic, used Nokias and iPhones and yet even after today’s announcement of iPhone 4 I am torn how long this phone will satisfy my needs before making me frustrated. Some of my current frustrations with the iphone (and AT&T):

• Locked - even if my contract is up and i *own* my phone, no, I can’t use it with another carrier. On principle this is a biggie, but I will let it be a simple bullet point.
• Running multiple applications at the same time – It doesn’t do it and what it does is so limited it is useless.
• Tethering - i.e. using it as a device that gives your laptop connection to download things when needed. Not a big one but competition offers this.
• No flash – I get it, its a principle for Apple not to risk their brand and battery time AND they are in a position that they can force adaption of new technology (HTML5). In the meantime, majority of websites use flash and I want to be able to use them fully.
• Closed application store – Meaning I am not allowed to customize everything. E.g. I don’t want to unlock my phone, go into calendar app just to see where my next meeting is. I want this to be shown on the lock screen and so on.
• Ability to find your phone when lost – you can get this service from Apple for $99/yr, but it’s not worth that much to me, especially when I can get it for free. This one is very handy given that my daughter has misplaced my phone a couple of times and having it start to beep even when in vibration mode through the service above has been very useful.

Sure, Apple can’t risk their brand by opening the gates for some (I say some as a couple of these restrictions are imposed by the carrier, AT&T)  of the above and make their device into a unstable crashing phone (after all, they don’t have the time to do all of this work and ship a new phone every year). But this could be mitigated very easily but having a expert mode where you are on your own and can do some of the above without being ostracized if you did which is the case today. So the only alternative is to turn into a rebel Jailbreak and/or unlock your iPhone with some risks but that’s what I finally did and felt like a outcast (who has the option of coming back if I wipe and reset the phone to Apple clean version).

And now that I have, I can’t imagine going back to the vanilla version of the iPhone OS that comes from Apple. So even if I get the next iPhone, I will get it after I know I can at minimum jailbreak it or just switch to other phones that that have slightly better OS than the iPhone, i.e. Google’s Android.

It’s been a while since the last post on this topic, reason being not enough hrs in a day but here are random updates:

• Networking – This was one of the few decisions that I was solely in charge of and debated much with myself, asked around, and read even more but finally what I went with was a very simple solution. For the den, the family room (area where the entertainment devices will be),  a corner in the garage (for the family backup/server) and a couple of strategic points in the house I had CAT6 wires drawn. The rest of the house will be wireless and given that I have those strategic points where I can have the wireless routers placed to ensure maximum coverage I think this will be enough as there is really no place where wired network is a must have and the areas that do need it will have it. And I chose CAT 6 because it is more reliable for transmission of data than the traditional CAT 5E. For Cable, we have two sets of coax running to most areas. This way we can have internet through cable company and say TV through satellite.
• Light switches – Trivial matter yes, but a couple useful points: for bathroom fans we got timer switches instead of regular ones, that way the fan does not have be on for hrs. Also we have dimmers for most rooms which is far more useful than what you would think.
• Decisions – People ask, would you build a house again? Truthfully it has been very exhausting to make decisions on everything and anything that goes into building a house. And apparently spouses tend to get into tense situations as tastes differ, but aside from the energy and time spend on researching and deciding on things, it has been very smooth and a great learning experience. And as a side note, I notice details about other people’s house that I had never noticed in going to these houses for years, be it the color or material of window blinds to cabinet knobs etc.

Like any other project, it did feel like the last 20% of the work took 80% of the time and it did. But we are very happy with the results. Next post:  cost breakdown.

I needed to turn an image into an .ico (icon) format and did not have access to any image editing software.

for online editing of images : pixlr.com is pretty handy.
for image file format conversion I came across this site which seems to work:
converthub.com

Not sure about the source (often misattributed to Nelson Mandela):

“Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Since the last post a lot has happened. On one hand getting the foundation related items out of the way took a while, from rain detention tank, to rebars, to many inspections, then came the concrete pouring followed by layering the drainage pipes and whole lot of other visually boring items. But once all these were done, the more visual part and apparently the most exciting part of the building started, the framing.

Framing went at an unbelievable pace, 3 weeks in total. From one day to the next you have nothing but a foundation to the next day where outer walls and floors are in place. and within a week you actually see the shape of the rooms which is an amazing experience after months and months of planning and adjusting and moving this wall over there and that room over here, seeing it take form day over day is pretty exciting. You go from thinking, this is smaller than I thought untill the walls come up and then you realize its actually bigger than you thought and I am told once everything is finished before furniture is moved in, the feeling of everything is smaller than we thought will be back but then go away once moved in. We did make some very minor changes from the original plan on the fly as we saw the shape of the rooms and windows.

So here is a chronological order of things once foundation has been laid (including drainage pipes):

• Framing
• Roofing & Windows/External doors
• plumbing and electrical
• HVAC/Exterior stone & paint/Gutters
• Insulation
• Drywall
• Trim work
• Tiles and cabinet
• Interior doors
• Hardwood floors
• Interior paint
• Plumbing and lighting fixtures

Fixtures are the last on the list, before framing started we started deciding on cabinetry, plumbing fixtures, counter tops and appliances and are now done, we think. Deciding can take a while though; you see something you like, but you may not feel that way tomorrow or in a week, so you have to make sure what you choose as part of your finalists are real keepers.

Some thoughts on different areas:

• Appliances – pretty straight forward, the only thing that took time was fridge in deciding between french doors, side-by-side or single door and french door won finally as everything is in convenient height (since freezer is at the bottom)and it can fit big platters. The drawback could be that you forget which side an item is on opening both doors, but that’s minor.
• Kitchen Countertop – Still TBD as we are still deciding between lime stone(not durable), granite (comes in matt, aka honed and glossy), soap stone (40% more than granite and same durability) and concrete(not as durable). We want a unique look rather than typical glossy granite but given all the factors including price we will see what we end up with.
• Heating/Cooling – Important realization here was to go with multizone control (ie since you only have one unit for AC or heating, the ability to control without manual work how certain parts of the house will get more heat/cool than others). Saves energy and better for the environment. We dropped the option of going with radiant heating which we initially really wanted for environmental reasons, but that would have meant buying, installing, and operating two completely different systems.
• Other – I also briefly looked into things like motorized painting to cover the TV as well as home automation control, and cool as the result may be, given the costs and what you get out of it, we dropped it simply wasn’t worth it. The one luxury that I am very much looking forward to is the rain head shower.
• Networking – will do a separate post on this as I geeked out a little, at least on paper.

Building a House – preperations for teardown (Part I)

One of the things I really dislike is the idea of buying a new car. Scratch that, I just really dislike dealing with car salesmen because with the exception of one or two, you are surely going to get suckered, you just don’t know how much and most likely you will never find out. It’s different from buying anything else in my opinion (even a house) as it can be researched a lot easier and you can arm yourself with all the needed information before going into a store.

With cars there are just too many unknowns that you simply cannot find out (for mortal people at least) before starting the process, hence that uneasy feeling of “wonder where I rank in the list of people this guy suckered” feeling just won’t go away. The car industry would sure benefit from more transparency as I don’t mind dealerships making a living/profit as long as I am paying very similar to what the other 20 people who bought the same car and that just is not the case.

Anyways, we needed a car for the next many years that we can use as the kids grow up, so we decided to go with a mini-van (which is another post by itself) and Honda Odyssey seemed the natural choice. Next came the buying part. We decided to not trade-in to give the sales person one less parameter they can milk more profit from. This is the story of how we tried our best to minimize the risk of overpaying for the car.

In short, it came down to the following steps (we happened to get our car right towards the tail end of this year’s model and in fact only teen nr of odysseys of the model we wanted remained in our vicinity as one dealer looked it up):

1. Know the EXACT car you want, brand, model, down to options, exterior and interior colors.
2. Find out how much the MSRP price & invoice price (e.g. from truecar.com), how much the holdback is (usually 2 or 3%) and if there are (marketing) incentives offered to dealers/consumer by the manufacturer (typical ahead of next year’s model to get rid of last inventory of the current year)
3. Calculate what price you should be paying based on this info e.g. invoice price minus holdback minus incentives (this is as far as you can get with arming yoruself with the info)
4. Get a list of quotes from internet (e.g. from InvoiceDealers, Cars.com, Yahoo!Autos, Autos.com, Edmunds.com, MyRide.com and CarsDirect)
5. Get a list of all dealers within a readius of X miles from your house (ie as far as you are comfortable to drive to get the car if you get a good deal) from yellowpages.com
6. Start calling the farthest one.
7. Important! Ask for the fleet manager or internet sales (fleet manager is someone who is on a fixed salary vs sales people that get commission based on how much they sell)
8. Tell the person you are looking to buy a car today (don’t lie if you are not planing on this) and are calling a few places to get the best price and go in and close the deal. Then ask them what they can offer if they have the car in stock.  If they are savvy they will ask what price you currently have and you can share the lowest price you have and ask if they can beat it. Here is where it gets tricky. When I did this, a lot of them would just say thats a good deal, you should order it from the internet then. Don’t waste time and move on to the next one as if you want to wait, you can always order it from the internet site.
9. Make sure to confirm that this is the *bottom* line price (usually including everything but tax) as otherwise you will be surprised how much other fees they will try and insert in there. Some will refuse to give a bottom line price over the phone saying you will use it to call the next guy for a lower price. Again, don’t waste time, you started by telling him/her you are looking to buy a car today and if he is not trying to work a deal, chances of getting a good deal from this person are next to none.
10. If they do, ask to call back, call the next dealership closer to you and repeat the process until you get the price closest in step 3.
11. Go and buy the car!

Common comment from sales person : I am giving you the car at invoice and not making any money. Well, they may have paid the price of invoice to manifacturer yes, but then they get different rebates and holdback, so in reality that is not how much they paid. Example: if you buy a watch for $20 and you get a mail-in rebate for $8, your invoice was $20 yes, but you actually paid only $12.

How did we do? After buying the car, it turned out one of the parents whose kids are in the same age group as our daughter and we have seen each other a few times works at a dealership and when I told him about the price we paid for the car, he said he would look into it and told us later that we got a really good deal, as good as it pretty much can get for this area.

and here is a very comprehensive site about buying a new car.

I thought I had heard/seen most traditions and customs in the Persian culture, at least the common ones, but here is one that caught me off guard. The other night at a dinner party with some very well educated people, one being a well versed scholar in Persian history and culture, as my wife came in with our new born son of two months, the gentleman looked at him and then with a smiling face looked at my wife saying : he is very ugly!….long silence…. My wife and looked at each other very puzzled but managed somehow to not show it smiling back in silence, thinking “what da?!?”.

Later on we found out, this phrase is said to ward off the evil spirits, for those who believe in it I guess. So I guess you learn something new every day and if this happens to you (at least when someone Persian says it), they don’t really mean it; you can hope.

Our house was build in early 50s and although we remodeled somewhat a few years back, many factors contributed to our decision of tearing down the house and rebuilding a new one. In this series of posts I will talk about each step as we take it and while it will be a good read 20 years from now when all the details will be long gone from the memory, hopefully it will help any readers out there in similar situation to take advantage of our learning during this process as well as maybe soliciting feedback & tips that will lead us to make better decisions.

So let’s get started on the steps taken so far. Here is a summary in bullet points

• Custom plan vs. stock plan – after much going back and forth on this, we started by looking at stock plans sold by variuos firms and since we found a plan that had pretty much 90% of what we wanted, we decided to go with a stock plan and modify it rather than do a fully custom plan which would have cost probably 5-7X the amount for a stock plan.
• Permits - once the modification was done with the stock plan and we were happy with everything which took about 3-4 months (tips: do not rush into finalizing the plan, sleep on it, then sleep some more on it as something that may sound great for a day or two a week later may sound blah) you submit it to the city and wait for request for revisions and clarifications etc. That’s all part of the process and there is no way you can get your plan approved in one shot. With the semi slow market thankfully this has gone pretty smoothly so far. and that’s where we still are to get the permit finalized. The plan itself includes multiple dimensions of the house from draining plan, structural plan, foundation plan, the house itself (layout) and a few others and each go through a review and approval through various experts within the housing department of the city.
• Moving out – this is going to take a while as for some reason we humans are good at collecting junk over time and not getting rid of it, so moving once in a while a good thing as it allows to get rid of the junk.
• Salvaging the house – being environmentally conscious we didn’t want to have the entire house to waste so we called several companies that salvage parts of the house (anything from light/bathroom switches/fixtures to the floors, doors, windows and some parts of the exterior of the house. Benefit of this primarly is the fact that there will be less junk produced as most of the salvaged parts get resold/reused by other people and we get some sort of tax deduction as you are donating that material. We called three companies available in our area
  
  • Re Store – never got back to us despite several calls
  • Earthwise  – came and assessed and we went with them.
  • Second use – came and assessed and felt it was not worth their effort.
• Old appliances, computers and other stuff - our appliances were all from early 70s and worked so so, along with a couple of old desktops, laptops, cables, vases, chairs and other items that was no longer any use to us. Craigslist.org was invaluable as anything we put on there as free to be picked up, were gone in less than 24 hrs! I also put the house to be salvaged further after the company above came and there people that are interested in salvage more items from the house! This was a great surprise and since others find this useful, it’s win win as far as I am concerned.
• Paying the costs – From the blogsphere I came across this credit card from Schwab that according to them : “You earn 2% cash back on all retail purchases, including purchases for services and recurring payments. This excludes transactions relating to refunds or returns, balance transfers, cash advance transactions (including the purchase of money orders or other cash equivalents), out-of-network payments made through FIA Card Services’ Bill Pay Choice® service, purchases made by or for a business or for a business purpose, fees, finance charges, unauthorized/fraudulent transactions and other charges.” Hey, that’s better than any other useless credit card out there that gives you 1% cashback on selected transactions or lots of air milage or other crap that end up never using. And while I won’t be able to pay for the entire house using this card of course, whatever I gain back can be used for other purposes at least.

Once we have the permit ready, next step will be to getting contractors to tear down the house and excavate…and that will the topic of the next post.

A few video’s that once again reminds us about the amazing things we humans are capable of, and while some of these can’t be achieved through hard work, most become apparent only after hard work and perseverance.

Do you have other videos to share?

UTF Cast bulk converts files to UTF encoding.

PowerMenu gives useul features in windows eg keep always on top, transparency etc.