William Reardon’s Blog

So, still haven’t heard back from the place I mentioned last post. They’re going to be reviewing offers today at 8pm and will let us know tomorrow. They said they will definitely counter, so I figured might as well keep the line in the water & keep looking.

With that, I found another place, just a stones throw away & yes, this time I took photos:

http://www.wdr1.com/gallery/album09

By total coincidence, their asking price is the same as the townhouse. The area is roughly the same, meaning I have to decide do I want a 1940s 3/1 house (roughly 1,000 sqft on 6,800 sqft lot) or a 1980s 1,70 sqft 3/3 townhouse?

Advice is welcome.

Update: So I decided to not only pass on the house, but houses in general. A house would be nicer from an investment point of view, but I realized, I just wouldn’t be as happy there. And this is more about where I want to live than an investment. I’m going to live there for 2-3 years at least, so being happy with it is the most important.

On the townhouse front, they came back yesterday with an counter reducing their price just a tiny bit, so I countered back going up just a tiny bit. A fair size gap still separates us in price. The seller’s agent let my agent know that they would review the counter today and that there was an offer in higher than mine. This mythical Other Offer has been out there from the beginning, but we both doubt it’s actually there. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon enough.

8/1 Update: Looks like there actually was another offer and apparently better than mine. In a nutshell, “no townhouse for you”!

Put an offer in on a place in Burbank today… not sure what will happen, as the offer is certainly fair, but probably not what the owner is hoping for… anyway, here goes.

We bought Konfabulator!

Welcome guys! Great to have more ass kickers

As part of the whole thing, it’s being given away for free!

Go us!

Too cool — watch an ai program play tetris, with insturctions on how to hook in your own.

From Sang:

If WWII had been an RTS

Fucking hilarious.

CNet has listed the Top 10 Web fads.

Coming at number 3 is All Your Base Are Belong to Us. Yes, that’s right, they placed them third! Third!! Are they insane? Granted you can’t put it at number 1, because it’s even better than that. To relegate its greatness simply to the web does it grave injustice.

It deserves to stand up with the thoughts passed down to use from the greats… Socrates dialogues… Hobbes’ Leviathan… Locke’s Two Treatises of Government… and now All Your Base Are Belong to Us!

Plato himself would be proud of such an association, for is this not obvious this the form of the good?!

BTW, all you base are belong to Calvin & Hobbes!

Showing CNet’s madness knows no bounds, Ellen Feiss was 7!

Kind of a… bummer.

Excellent editorial in today’s LA times: China’s stealth war on the U.S.

Never mind Iraq, Iran or North Korea — China is the biggest long-term threat to our national security.

A coworker lent me the CD versions of Getting Things Done Fast. Listening to the CDs is fun in that it’s a lot like having David Allen personally cheer you.

There isn’t much new there that isn’t in his book, but having read the book sometime ago, it was a great refresher. There’s a lot of good stuff in the GTD methodology and it’s unlikely you’ll incorporate it all in your first fell swoop. (I know I didn’t.) It’s a bit like the Perl of time-management. You can learn as you go, it makes you more efficient, it’s practical and people look at you a little crazy when you tell them how much you love it.

Three big things I got out of this go round:

1. Bring GTD into the home
   
2. The difference between collect & process
   
3. The importance of just getting things out of your head
   

1) Not being one for structure, I first cringed at the thought of using any type of “time management” at home. I like having time to follow my impulses, reading or doing whatever strikes me at the moment.

However, after only a few days of giving it a go, I’m convinced. I spent this weekend getting an inbox for home, organizing the various pieces of paper, receipts, books lying around my apartment. Aside from having a cleaner house, I’m also better organized, meaning more efficient, meaning I have more unstructured time.

2) There’s a big temptation & natural tendency to combine collection & processing. E.g., in a meeting, I would attempt to place next actions on my next action list as they came up, etc. Inefficient, as it requires bouncing around multiple contexts, hunting for the appropriate one, etc. These days, I just make a quick note in my spiral notebook and move on. Some simple notation (a ! before to call attention to action items, etc.), helps when reviewing notes for collection at the end of the day.

I believe Allen says you can throw your notes away at that point, but I’m a little too paranoid for that.

3) Like notes in a meeting, I’ve taken to make it a point to quickly jot down any random thought. From the trivial to the big, it’s quickly out of my head, and in written form, waiting to be collected and process latter in the day.

Oh yeah, a quickie: Wedding Crashers — great movie. Go see it. A little bit of a howto. Vince Vaughn — funny guy. You’ll love it. Good stuff.

Craig, when we crashing some funerals baby?

If you’re a fellow member of the GTD cult, you really need to check out nextaction. Like Tiddly Wiki it’s a DHTML app can run locally off your desktop (meaning no server needed, meaning can work regardless if you’re online or off). However, nextaction is much more geared towards GTD, allowing you to create & place actions not just in contexts but also in projects. Very, very useful when you want to a two dimensional cut of your tasks.

Despite being fairly new, it has a good “feel” to it. The most recent version 0.13 runs cleanly on a Mac now too. There are some caveats: you need to manually save your tasks and you need to stay away from the back button (big pita and a little scary the thought of losing data), but Steve Yen, the author, mentioned he is working both auto-save and syncing to a central server. Those not in dire need of a better GTD system, might hold off on adapting until either or those are complete.

A very promising application and an excellent demonstration of how the next wave of the web is about interaction not just consumption.