Recently, someone asked this question on the IDS email list:
Hi guys,
Can you please give me some reference or links on how to test IPS/IDS hardware box.
Clearly this person hasn’t read Eric Raymond’s How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Continue reading
This is a great report of a Q&A session that Warren Buffet gave to a bunch of business school students. While there was plenty of good business/economic discussion, my favorite quote had to do with Mr. Buffett’s outlook on life:
As Bertrand Russell says, “Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.†I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you. We’re all successful, intelligent, educated. To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.
Well once again my wife and I tried to work out a deal for “the albatross house” (as my Realtor likes to call it) in the mountains with its owners. It’s been about six months since we last placed an offer on it and the owners had lowered their asking price to $35K below our last offer. You’d be forgiven to think that makes it a no-brainer for us to offer the asking price and be done with it. Unfortunately, the housing market has suffered quite a bit in the last 6 months and the last time we looked at the house, we were blown away by all the positives that we tended to overlook the problems.
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Gah, it’s been a month since my last post… I was doing so well. Lots of big things have been going on in the last month. I’ve started to work out, working on my bike and we’re still looking at houses. Continue reading
This says it all:
So my wife and I found a nice home up in the Santa Cruz Mountains which we really liked. Since Murphy’s Law is in effect, the owners had to be TCHOFH (The Crazy Home Owners From Hell). Anyways, rather then trying to explain the long and drawn out process, my friend Eric summarized our ordeal in a few lines:
let put this in terms i can understand:
me: how much for this rug?
pakistani rug merchant: for you? $400. I promise there are no stains on this rug!
me: um, how about $300. Why would there be stains? It’s a new rug? Is there something wrong?
PRM: $350. THERE ARE NO STAINS! WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT STAINS???!!! no, you may not look for stains
me: $310
PRM: $450!
me: WTF?
Ok, I’ll admit, up until now, I really didn’t buy the idea that realtors (no, I’m not going to put it in all caps, you don’t see any other profession doing that) were really worth what they’re paid. I always just sorta figured if you had half a clue in todays Internet-enabled world, you could search the listings, drive around some and make a reasonable offer on a place and work it out with the seller who should obviously be motivated to sell.
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So my wife is always looking for new cooking related toys. I like playing with fire. Hence, when she asked me if it was ok to purchase a smoker, I was all for it. $200+ shipping later, we’re the proud owner of a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, aka the “Weber Bullet”. Continue reading
So about two years ago I started telling everyone to stop emailing me at aturner@pobox.com. It’s still rather amusing that people occasionally use that address, but I figure if you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m pretty sure the only thing that will teach you is for it to start bouncing. Hence, I’ve intentionally let my Pobox account die off.
So sooner or later they’ll stop thinking I just forgot to pay the bill and turn it completely off. Anyways, if you’re reading this and don’t have one of my current email (@gmail or @synfin.net) just search google and you’ll figure it out without too much work. If not, just use the feedback form to write me.
On a side note, I do have to say I was very happy with Pobox. Their service is reasonably priced, extremely reliable and just plain works. If you’re someone who tends to move around or change ISP’s and doesn’t like the free webmail offerings of Yahoo, Google, etc, then they’re worth checking out.
Yes, synfin.net was offline for about 8-1/2 hours due to my UPS failing. Oh the irony! Not sure why it’s dead, but it won’t even supply power when plugged into AC. So, everything hooked up to my UPS (my firewall and server) went offline just after midnight.
Anyways, everything is back up… guess I know what to spend my Fry’s gift certificate on!
