Author Archives: Alan V

Adventures in Houses

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So remember the house I mentioned a while back that we turned down because of the potential for the fans in the adjacent grocery store to be too loud? Yeah, turns out they’re pretty much silent, so the house would have been totally fine.
That said, I still think we made the right decision. Given the potential for badness there (and the difficult resale that would come with it), we did the best we could with the information we had. It’s just a shame that the house didn’t come on the market a month or so later.

But I think that house is now destined to become the house by which we measure all other houses, because it really was the perfect house. (Certainly everything else we’ve looked at since then has been compared to it and found to be lacking.)

We ended up signing a new lease on the current apartment, so we’re good through next July. Which means we now have more time to look at houses without being pressured into buying due to our lease being up soon.

We looked at another one yesterday (a few blocks West of us instead of North). It had all the right features: 4 bedrooms (actual usable bedrooms), a garage, a reasonable (but on the small side) yard, 1.5 bathrooms, the most amazing kitchen… but for some reason it just didn’t click. There was a while where we were tempted to go for it anyway, because it was certainly “good enough”, but I think our agent ultimately talked us out of it because it wasn’t “right” for us, even if it would probably have been fine. (The shared driveway to the garage and the need to repaint pretty much the entire downstairs were the main negative points for me.)

Speaking of which, I want to call out our agent, Joan Elko, because she is really the best buyer’s agent ever.
We’ve been looking for things with her now since February, and in that time and the many houses we’ve seen, we’ve never felt pressured into anything; really, the opposite… she’s better at talking us out of decisions that probably ultimately aren’t right than trying to talk us into buying or looking at things that aren’t right. (Like how she talked us out of the house yesterday, saying that we “shouldn’t settle” but should instead find and buy the house that we really want.)
Besides that, she knows her stuff. I feel like she has an excellent sense of house values (given that we’ve seen final sale prices now for some houses that we looked at with her, even though things have been crazy this year in the seller’s market with a lack of supply), and she also has really good knowledge of houses… like we’ll walk into a place and she’ll start rattling things off about the house and windows and floors and things that need work.
I also feel bad for her given how much work she’s done for us (over 4 months), and we’re no closer now to a place than we were then. We’re probably the worst clients ever. :P (Certainly one of the pickiest.)

So we’ve had nothing but good experiences with our agent, even if the search itself has been less than ideal.

The house hunt continues.

ITG, 7 Blunders, BBQ, and Keith Manor

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Life has been full of stuff recently. In roughly reverse order:

The ITG machine at the storage facility in the South Side exists, and it is awesomely full of charts I love. In the year-ish absence from ITG, it seems my reading has not suffered at all but my stamina is gone. I can’t even make it to the jacks in Perfect Cherry Storm anymore, and probably generally can no longer pass an 11 (although I didn’t try). The fact that the place is a small, enclosed space with no cooling other than fans probably doesn’t help either.
It’s good to have ITG machine access again, even if it means a bit more work than previously to access.




7 Wonders is one of my favorite board games, and it gets played around once a week. I already have the Leaders and Cities expansions, as well as the promo leaders, wonders expansion, and extra fan-made boards from board game geek (for a total of 23 wonder boards). We decided to try a variant of it last games night that Max affectionately titled “7 Blunders”. The goal is to get the lowest score possible, but you’re subject to the 2-player-style rules where you can’t sell a card unless you are forced to, cannot buy resources if you could make them yourself in some way, and must build for free if you can. It makes for a very interesting game, especially depending on whether your wonder gives you lots of points or not… do you save the wonder stages for burying large-point-value age 3 cards, or do you take care of them early so building is harder for you due to lack of resources?
We’ll certainly play it again and see how that goes.

Chris and Rob hosted a last-minute Memorial Day BBQ, and it was tasty.


In other other things, Keith’s kitchen is sad. His ceiling had been cracking (I guess one of the screws holding the ceiling up came out or something…?), so we spent a Saturday helping him remove his kitchen appliances and stripping the wallpaper from the room (which ended up being quite the experience due to the painted double layers of wallpaper, going as far as 4 layers deep at the top where there was trim). Apparently his ceiling came crashing down on Monday (which was the alternate day for wallpaper removal), so it was a good thing we did it when we did.




Also here’s us being crazy after midnight at IHOP, attempting to recreate various bad stock photo scenes.





Life, Washington, Kickstarter

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life has been updated. The photo journal is now current to today, and the stats page includes updated photos from the last 4 months. I feel like I should probably add more Pittsburgh people into stats (like Austin, Michael, Yubin, and Max), since I’ve known them for long enough now that stats will actually be somewhat interesting.

In any case, we got back yesterday from our trip to Washington, D.C. Photos are here.

The trip was primarily because Greg wanted to see Eddie Izzard, and the closest place he was performing was Washington. (The tour later added Pittsburgh and Cleveland locations, so we probably didn’t have to make the trip out… but hey, D.C. trip!) Headed out on the Megabus Thursday evening and came back Sunday afternoon.

We stayed with Mark, Greg’s friend from undergrad, and his wife Christine. They had cats. The cats were adorable.



The Eddie Izzard performance itself was pretty awesome. This was my first time seeing him perform, but he was a lot better than previous comedians I’ve seen.

Interesting thing I learned: Apparently the place is not “Washington D.C.” but rather “Washington, D.C.” as it’s the city of Washington in the District of Columbia. For some reason I’d always assumed that the entire place was just the district, whose proper name was “Washington.” (Apparently D.C. was supposed to have had some other cities it in, that either were returned to Virginia or gobbled up by Washington itself? So the entire district is one city, so I’m not entirely off in thinking that.)
Whee.

In any case, we weren’t there too long, so we didn’t really get to see very much. But we did take up a lot of time (most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday) seeing the Newseum, which was quite interesting and awesome to visit. Greg and I lamented over the lack of exhibits for editing and layout, but what was there (covering all forms of reporting and media) was well done. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of Pulitzer-winning photographs. It was also interesting to see front pages from papers from all 50 states. On Friday, the most popular front-page news item seemed to be Spiderman 2 (followed up by Obamacare enrollment articles).


There was also, of course, time spent photographing… in particular, we wandered around the Tidal Basin at night photographing the Washington Monument (unfortunately still closed) and the Jefferson memorial (which apparently has a museum in its base O_o).



The low photo trend continues, with only 644 photos from the trip (representing 911 shutter releases).

In other, totally-unrelated-to-anything stuff, there is a new Kickstarter for art. Because art is awesome. (Also my friend David has art in this anthology.) So you should back it.

Yay for life.

Movies, photos, People Wars, work

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In the past few years, I’ve only seen a couple movies in theatres: Frozen this past February with Austin, Yubin, and Max; and The Lego Movie this past March with my dad when I was in Phoenix.
It’s interesting then that I’ve seen both of these movies again in McConomy: Frozen with the rest of the in-town Fairfax group over Carnival weekend, and The Lego Movie tonight with Greg when we were out of ideas of what to do and decided to see whatever movie was showing at CMU.
They’re both really well-done films made for kids but enjoyable by adults. So that’s kind of awesome. I keep thinking I should buy Frozen in Thai when it comes out on DVD. I already enjoy looping the Thai version of Let It Go while I work.

In any case, life has been really uneventful lately. Due to whatever reason, I’ve been taking far fewer photos than usual. A quick check reveals that I only have 318 photos since the end of Carnival (since April 14), which represent a total of 619 shutter releases.
So it’s both interesting how much I edit down what photos to keep now (a huge difference from in high school and college when I would just dump my memory card and keep everything), and how few photos I’ve been taking (619 photos used to represent a single day of photos for me).
A lot of the editing is because tagging photos has grown to be a chore. It’s super useful to have tags to be able to find photos by person or event or location, sure… but having to manually do all that for every photo I keep is rather frustrating. This is probably a good thing for my hard drive consumption anyway.

I think it would be interesting to stop carrying my big camera around all the time. I do so now half out of a sense of fear of not having a camera with me for that one big thing or some important moment I want to capture. And it’s also kind of neat to have photos of mundane everyday life. But my little camera is sufficient for that… and after all, I survived for several months (after the death of my D50) with only the little camera. We shall see.

Work has started on the next People Wars expansion, Hijinks. It’s themed around Climbing characters and Route cards, which enhance task playing and scoring.
I’m worried about maybe having overbalanced the game toward tasks given all of the task-centric cards entering the game recently (and given that I haven’t actually played a game with cards past the Exchanges expansion)… but it kind of feels like attack decks have it so much easier that tasks should be getting boosts. Who knows.





Work has been rather interesting lately. The other senior dev on the team recently left Salesforce, leaving the role of senior team member once again solely on my shoulders. Between that and a bunch of planned vacations from other developers, there are days when I’m the only developer working, and we’re probably down to about 2/3 of our previous productivity. Which will mean interesting things given the jam-packed plans for the upcoming release.
I guess time is showing me to be a terrible leader and coordinator, especially given how I already know I do badly under stress (or, rather, I will get the shit done, but I’ll feel like shit the entire time while doing it and hate my life).
We’re hiring a new senior developer for the team, who will hopefully be able to ramp up and help handle a lot of the knowledge, planning, and design work (which right now I think is falling mostly to me). But until then, onward as best I can.
It’s just frustrating though when a lot of time is being eaten up by bugs and questions and emails. I pulled a task last last Tuesday (the 15th) with the intention of starting it the next day. But between bugs and other things, I ended up not having time to do anything on it until this past Thursday (the 24th).
Let’s hope that’s not a sign of things to come in the coming months.