Barnson.org

About a week ago I picked up an XM radio. A pretty cool device. The one downside that i see is that there are still commercials. Not as many as there are on normal FM radio, but commercials still the same. One of the commercials that caught my attention was for a service called EJamming. Seems like a neat concept. It states that all you do is “Just plug any MIDI-enabled instrument into your computer, fire up the eJamming™ Station and you’re connected to your friends, making music together over the internet in real time – no matter if they live a thousand miles away.”

Has any one else heard of this service?

While talking with one of my coworkers, we happened across a cool new mapping program through google. You have to download a free program, but then you can type in addresses and view satelite imagery of so many things… You should check it out.

Cheers,

Jon

The process of a move can be a daunting task.

Here are my top ten nuggets of wisdom when it comes to buying and selling your homes, and the move between them.

1. Select a good realtor and have them do the selling of your home and the buying of the next… My realtor (Jeff Wu, Weichert) managed to time together the sale of my home, the purchase of the next, the rentbacks, and even sprung for the landscaping work – he made us some good cash and made our move a lot easier.
2. Know your location – check it out at midnight on a friday night… we loved out first home during the day, but soon found that there was a criminal element in the neighborhood.
3. Don’t hardball in a seller’s market. We turned away offers just because people seemed too difficult. And we selected our buyers because they offered 500 dollars more then another. In a seller’s market, offer a little more than the asking price if you really want it.
4. Look till you find what you want, then jump on it. We kept finding “almost right” places.. but kept looking and eventually found just what we wanted.
5. Buy Buy Buy – if you can possibly buy in a good market, do. Renting is giving your money away.
6. Budget the move out on the high end.. then shop for deals. We set a budget without shopping.. just using the first prices we saw.. we set aside that amount of money.. then worked our way down.
7. Give yourself time to move. We moved in 2 days with just one person at at time helping us. Mistake… thank goodness our friends are forgiving. It can take a few days.
8. Label your boxes – know which room and what is in them. Use a lot of smaller boxes and keep them well labeled, I didn’t and I am searching through boxes for little wires and plates and stuff. Eek.
9. Do one thing you always wanted to. For me it was the home theatre… for my wife it was the curio cabinet and the fireplace. It makes you feel special about the new place.
10. Don’t overspend… yeah, its hard, but make sure you can afford what you’re buying.

Okay, there’s lots more… maybe you guys have some.

EDIT by matthew: tpyos, formatting.

Feeling the financial squeeze from competition and burgeoning interest rates, credit card companies are now looking for ways to squeeze you even more.

Christy and I received this attention first-hand from one of our credit card companies. Bank One was recently purchased by Chase Manhattan Bank, which sports far more draconian policies on accounts, including a penalty rate which scales up depending on your balance. If you have more than $1200 on your credit card balance with Chase, you’re facing a minimum $35.00 late fee with any late payment (plus additional penalties per $1000 in credit), and an immediate rate hike to twenty-five percent interest.

We recently went on vacation, and were late on a payment. We saw the new 25% rate reflected on our next statement from our “new” credit-card company.

Christy called to complain, informing them that if they didn’t lower theinterest rate, we’d switch banks.

They refused to budge. Looking at our high balance, and our minimum-payment activity on that account (we have other bills we’ve been paying down on), they wouldn’t deal. At all.

We opened a new credit line with a new bank from one of the many offers we receive every week, and will be closing our Chase account on Monday.

Caveat Emptor applies to your credit, as with anything else. I’d rather deal with a slightly-diminished credit score for a few months due to opening a new charge account than deal with the pain of a 25% interest rate on our credit balance.

Buyer, beware. Watch your own bills to make sure they don’t sock it to you!

Its been pretty quiet around here lately…

Is everyone feeling ok?

Yes, I have come out of hiding.. for like 30 seconds..

I finally have my internet up and running after the big move. I’ve moved to another part of montgomery county and its been fun but exhausting.

Special thanks to “Rowan” for doing a lions share of the work moving my stuff into a moving van – will poset more later. I’ve been reading.. chack out the Harry potter spoiler link… it may indeed catch up to my SITH post.. eek!

Just found a new site today: it compares the number of web hits for any two topics. I decided to figure out who is more popular: Harry Potter or the Bible?

The results:

Googlefight: Bible vs. “Harry Potter”

As of today, the Bible edges out Harry Potter, with 22.6 million vs. 18.6 million pages mentioning the word or phrase. With Potter approaching Lord of the Rings numbers of sales (227 million copies sold worldwide now, 11 million of number 6 sold in just the first 3 days of release, vs. Tolkien’s 300 million individual copies (100 million copies of the complete trilogy, roughly)), I wonder who’ll win in the long-term?

Though if you do the math, it means Rowling has averaged some 40-million-ish sales per book. So she’s got a long way to go to 100 million, but by now, she has way more fortune than Tolkien ever amassed in his lifetime… most of his sales were posthumous.

Rowling… You go, girl!

All right, first I gotta fill a paragraph with some drivel that will go on the main page so no one sees something inadvertently. I’m so livid right now at Opie And Anthony… they dropped a MAJOR bomb about this book yesterday before I could change the channel. It was if someone had walked up to you before Empire Strikes Back and said “Dude, Vader’s Luke father.” So aside from my seething anger and rage at that…

SPOILER AREA You’ve been warned.

“There is still good in him… I can feel it.”

That’s all I can manage right now. Sorry…

Jen Gagne posted a link to a nifty little psychological quiz to tell you about yourself. The sad thing is, as negative as mine came out, I’m not at all surprised by the results. “Tell me something I don’t know” is my overall reaction…

If you try to post your own results, you may be a little disappointed. My blog strips possibly dangerous HTML from comments, which includes the table formatting used by this quiz. You might have better luck posting just your summary paragraphs. Mine read:

Stability results were moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.

Orderliness results were low which suggests you are overly flexible, improvised, and fun-seeking at the expense too often of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.

Extraversion results were high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.

trait snapshot:
craves attention, messy, open, rash, irritable, likes large parties, low self control, weird, fragile, does not like to be alone, emotionally sensitive, worrying, depressed, heart over mind, does not respect authority, dependent, not rule-conscious, not good at saving money, more interested in relationships than intellectual pursuits, likes to fit in, very social, frequently second guesses self, phobic, suspicious, not careful, outgoing, vain, compassionate, aggressive, likes to make fun, hates to lose

Well, it’s official: there will be no such thing as “regular TV” as of January, 2009. The only way to get traditional analog signals after that day will be to have a cable to your house, or be on satellite TV.

While a part of me mourns for the death of the primitive manipulation of carrier waves which have brought entertainment to our houses for a century, a bigger part is happy with the decision. When you carry a signal digitally, you can use nifty techniques like compression which allow you to fit a great deal more channels into a very limited amount of frequency. Today, the portion of the broadband spectrum sucked up by television signals is enormous. That’s the signal band which best penetrates solid objects; that’s part of the reason it was chosen in the first place. The day the last analog signal dies may mark the beginning of an era of ubiquitous wireless networks, true competition in mobile phone networks (right now you can only have two carriers in any given area, period), and more spectrum availability for personal use (home wireless networks and phones, etc.)

But gone will be the day that the home hobbyist can purchase a cathode-ray tube and a crystal to pick up television signals, unless he has also purchased a subscription to a satellite or cable provider. You’ll need to add a digital decryption device which honors the “broadcast flag” (http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/)to the mix in order to do so legally.

I can’t help but wonder if FM and AM spectrums may be the next to go? I have fond memories of building my first crystal radio. I wonder if my kids’ kids will.