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

“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.”

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)

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.

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.

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.

Do you have other videos to share?

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

Recently this got me thinking as I got a Google Voice account (by having one in GrandCentral which Google bought a while back). Here is how we do telephony in our household:

• Mobiles – both of us have one but it’s always on silent/vibrate not to risk waking up our baby, so we do miss calls. Also a lot of times we are not home and wish to make international calls to family, in which case having Google voice (see below) & a Rebtel account really helps.
• Landline – We have a skype-in number (with skype-out feature) that we use through a Voip phone (Netgear SPH200D) which hooks up directly to our internet router so we are not dependent on a computer (and skype software) being on. And it ends up being much cheaper than paying monthly fee for landline. Of course if your internet connection is down, so is your ‘landline’ with this solution.
• Google Voice (GV) – And finally the part that brings it all together: Having a GV nr allows people to call this nr, which in turn will ring all the other phones until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail. Voicemails gets transcribed to text and searchable from gmail. Further you can receive txt msgs on this nr.  There are tons of other features on GV beyond these though. Some of my favorite features:
  • Calling international numbers (call your GV nr and then dial an international nr, not free but very cheap)
  • Having your voicemails accessible from the web and any of your phones
  • Voicemail transcriptions
  • ListenIn
  • Call screening vs. Call presentation
  • Switching phones during an incoming call
  • Temporary call forwarding
  • Sending all calls to voicemail
  • Recording outbound calls
  • Conference calling on the fly
  • Call widgets
  • Goog411 integration

And I expect soon enough Googletalk will be part of this solution which then really makes the possibilities endless.

Hearing about it on the radio today, something similar is, in smaller scale, happening around us here in the US at least. It seems with the ongoing recession and home sales so low, real estate agents are taking to new tricks to sell houses: they hire actors to play the roles of good neighbors and plant them around in the emptynext door house or as dog walkers up and down the street or lawnmover neighbor 3 houses down, or a few kids playing on the street…you get the picture.

I personally found it quite disturbing, especially when the buyer in the story realized this after buying the house and moving in that his street pretty much has only empty foreclosed houses.

So, next time you are house hunting and meet a friendly future neighbor, make sure they actually live there.

PS. This is not a April’s fool joke.

PS. I do have a twitter account (curiosity) but I think I have logged into it maybe twice in the last 6 months.

The UN and rest of the world has passed resolutions one after the other and this has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian goverment that they can’t just continue do as they please.

And here is the goverment’s latest shameless play: they arrest seven of the Baha’is, imprison them and charge them for espionage. After this, the Noble prize winner and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi declares that she will represent the Baha’is and stand up for their human rights. The government then charges Ms. Ebadi with tax evasion and once imprisoned, this is then followed by formally charging these imprisoned Baha’is for espionage.

Further the timing of these events certainly are interesting. In the light of president Obama studying what to do about the relations with Iran, I personally find the timing of these event very interesting and cunning from Iran’s side. Why? because as mentioned violating the rights of Baha’is has been a thorn on the Iranian goverment’s side and now is their chance to see if they can get away with it with the new US president. I.e. is President Obama willing to prioritize this down in favor of starting a dialouge with Iran and instead focus on other matters that also are in contention with US (e.g. nuclear energy development).

Whether this is all one big consipirasy theory or not remains to be seen over time, but one thing is and continues to be clear. Iranian goverment is ready to sink as low as it takes to continue their shameless persecusion of Baha’is.

What I see happening is that we are either too lazy or overloaded with information that majority seem to want the news to be fully processed/digested so that we do nothing but be fed, be influences and move on to the next piece of information we need to absorb. And media sources are greatly taking advantage of this to the degree that sometimes the reality seen through their eyes is very distorted if you stop for a minute and think about what they serve us critically.

Even the small sources, e.g. blogsphere, be it technology or financial can’t help themselves and stray away from just telling the facts and background and leaving it to the reader to do the digestion.

So really not much has changed since the days of the past and although we can all agree that the media have both a powerful influence on people’s attitudes and perceptions and a weighty responsibility to contribute to social integration, it is not where they are and that is probably more of a reflection on where our society or mankind as a whole is. Sooner or later though this will need change and the future of journalism will have to be impartial, objective and factual, not processed or entertaining.

• Manage my life.  One look at the home screen and I know what’s up for the day
• Triage (work & personal) emails. Mostly delete and quick/emergency replies
• Access/Manage my contacts which syncs with Outlook which in turn syncs with plaxo.com
• Access the web for quick info, price comparison when standing in a store etc.

Let review each phone (or rather OS) and what I like/dislike about them:

iPhone

I disliked:

• When replying to a work (exchange) email on the iPhone, it doesn’t show up as replied to in Outlook on the PC.
• You can’t flag messages like follow-up etc.
• Have to tell the mail client which account to send the message “from”. No default send account can be set.
• Switching between mail accounts required ~5 taps
• It syncs mail whenever it wants to.  I had personal mail set to sync manually.  It syncs when you open the mail client.  (I didn’t tell it to do that!)
• In contacts, the search wasn’t anchored at the top.  If I happened to be at Zach Zimmerman, I would have to scroll to the top to search for Buck Brown.  Not cool.
• It syncs ALL contacts folders in your mailbox – specifically it sync’d the folder I didn’t want on my phone, and I had no way to control it.
• Calendar – you can’t:
  • Create a request and invite others
  • Create a recurring meeting
  • Color things based on type (personal, etc)
  • Do free/busy
  • Change time zone of meetings
• Tasks – doesn’t sync from Exchange – not that I use them.
• Notes – doesn’t sync Notes folder from Exchange. Don’t really use those either.
• No Home Screen!  Looking at the home screen shows a ton of cool things to do: Facebook-which rules, iTunes, Safari-a browser that actually works well on a mobile device, and so many more.  Problem is the clock is miniscule and I had no idea what time my next meeting was unless I clicked into the calendar.
• Battery life – horrible – not even 1 full day.
• No Picture Text Messaging (MMS)
• No tactile keyboard – touching the screen keyboard was decent for typing.  I am way faster on WM keyboard devices.
• No video cam – not that important, but sometimes useful for a good joke or a concert clip.
• No copy/paste.
• No SD slot – makes transferring data more difficult.

Things I LOVED about the iPhone:

• INTERFACE – if you haven’t played with an iPhone, you are missing out.  The touch screen simply rules.  Nothing in WM comes close in my opinion. (Not even the Touch which has a cool home screen, then switches out to the standard WM interface inside an app.)
• Safari – their web browser actually allowed you turn surf the web. Interesting concept – WM take notice! (ps-we are making IE6 available to WM devices later this year.. should be a HUGE help)
• Built in GPS – very nice.  Google maps works perfectly and is very smooth and easy to use. (I realize we have Live for WM)
• Accelerometor – when you flip the device, the screen flips into landscape/portrait.  That’s nice.  (WM requires you to open the keyboard to do this.)
• Applications – the social aspect of the device simply rocks.  facebook, youtube, and so many other cool/useful tools (for social/personal use)
• I could tell it to always use First Last when creating/sorting Contacts.
• I never had to reboot the device once because it flaked out.
• It never ran out of memory
• Coolness factor

Nokia E71

Dislikes:

• Small non touch screen
• you can’t reply-all to everyone on an exchange appointment (if you are late) – same as iphone
• Very basic exchange features (worse than iphone in some areas)
• Symbian can be as user friendly as unix, menu system is not always friendly or intuitive.

Likes:

• Radio
• Podcast over 3G – awesome and can’t get it on iphone
• Very slim profile – I have to feel which pocket I have it in sometimes since its so slim and light
• Battery – goes without the need for charge for 2-3 days with moderate surfing and regular email download.
• Good GPS – that is not picky and get signal even in pretty covered areas (like driving in a car)
• Stable – have not had to reboot.
• Nice tactile keyboard – makes life easier when typing

Overall, very happy with my E71 and no regrets so far, although lack of good integration with exchange does sometimes make me start considering going back to windows mobile device, but until I find something that is good enough (HTC HD is the only possible candidate so far), I am not going to bother.

There is an ongoing debate on how Europeans do work hard (occasionally) but often stop to smell the roses along the way vs. Americans who are too focused to waste time on such things in their quest for consumerism. Of course, this is generalization and even within Europe people make jokes about other less efficient countries who do not but, oh say, drink wine and go on strikes…the point ultimately being that one side sees their way being superior to the other’s.

From my observations though, this does ring a bell in many aspects. A simple thing like vacation, when living in Sweden for instance I had 5 weeks vacation each year and during yearly reviews I (like others) would negotiate for additional vacation days or weeks rather than focus on salary (maybe because after certain level you pay 55%  income tax anyways); here in the States two weeks is the standard with more generous companies giving three.

At work here in the States, most people are not interested in your life, or to get to know you on a personal level, not necessarily because they don’t care (although that is the case many times) but because there is just no time to waste on those things. Or maybe this is just limited to the tech industry here? Anyways outside of my non-work friends, the concept of having lunch, coffee or phone chat for the sake of getting to know someone is rare here so unless there is a (work related) purpose to it what you will see is an initial small talk (usually short and somewhat awkward/abrupt) followed by getting to the point/topic at hand.

And in Rome you do as Romans, so I have realized I am doing just that, i.e. either avoid small talk altogether and go to the point from the start ( to avoid the whole awkwardness) or simply avoid talking to people about life outside of work even if I am interested so that they don’t feel like their time is being wasted or ask me politely “what’s up?” to stop the non-work related talk.

Maybe it’s the cultural in this fast paced industry where effeciency and results (followed by performance- and midyear reviews) is all that matters and there is just no room for much else  as there is not enough time in a day. Either way, I like to get to know people beyond their professional capabilities, so I have started swiming upstream, let’s see if I can make it last.

Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.

A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.

So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.

Nevertheless, what I really dislike is that many carriers (e.g. AT&T) lock the phones they sell to their own network. I am paying for the phone and you are already making me commit for 2 years to use your services, so the only way I interpret your move to lock the phone beyond our agreement is that you are insecure of the quality of your services, hence you use this method to shackle me down to continue using your network. Of course there is more to this as carriers usually pay through the nose to get exclusive deals with (hot) phone manufacturers and this is one way for them to try and get back that money. Bottom line though, it is not very customer oriented.

Anyways, for all you iPhone fans who are not on AT&T but still want want to be able to use an iPhone, here is a method to ‘unlock’ your iPhone and still keep your warranty (which other methods such as jailbreaking can’t do)

Moogle.com offers an unlock adapter to achieve this for $29.99. I am sure there are other sites that offer this service and the way these work is that they don’t modify any part of the phone itself, neither by hardware nor by software. The only thing they do is they intercept the data traffic between the SIM card and the phone, and when the phone asks for sim card’s operator code it gets a “fake” code back (basically, the phone thinks it’s using ATT sim card although it is not). That check is done once upon phone boot, sim insertion and/or signal re-acquisition. The other parts of the phone do not care (so they display proper operator logo, connect to the right network etc.) and do not ask for the code again.
Then again, I am sure it is a matter of time before Apple & the carriers who have exclusive deals with Apple tighten up the model further through the software updates so this stops working.

Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.

With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.

And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.

Still, there are many instances where I do wish I had something on my own blog, so to all my 22 subscribers  out there (according to feedburner.com), I will be posting a bit more frequently going forward.

As I watching this, it certainly saddened me to see ignorance and/or indifference when a human being is treated that way. It also reminded of a more tragic fact. In this case, let’s assume the by standers were apathetic or sided with the clerk because of ignorance and understood all Muslims to be terrorists because of the actions of a few rotten eggs. At least they had ignorance or being misinformed to blame it on.

What about all the Baha’is in Iran who have been and are being terrorized in countless ways? How can recognition of mankind to be one and wanting to unite all the people and races of the world possibly be used as a reason for persecution, imprisoning and killing? Further, how can this be justified to systematically vilify and subject innocent children to cruel treatment??

At least when I grew up in Iran, the government just expelled me from primary school (for being a Baha’i) and that was the end of it, rather than now humiliating and ostracizing in different ways before expelling.

Make no mistake, this is not prejudice. This is certainly not ignorance. This is nothing other than systematic attempts to eliminate human rights, and force people to stop believing in oneness of mankind, oneness of God and oneness of religion.

In our family we abandoned the paper calendar a while back in favor of an online one. This way you can access it from anywhere…this greasemonkey script gives you a integrated view of google calendar within Gmail. It applies only to FireFox and before doing anything you need to install the greasemonkey add-on to firefox.

And here is a guide if you have switched from PC to Mac….for faster acclimatization.