Articles

Nice little applet from NYT showing you when buying a house will start to pay off better compared to renting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/2007_BU…

What I like about it is that it lets you play with the rate of return on investments and takes into account things like your income tax rate, inflation, home price appreciation, etc. It basically does what I originally wanted to do in Excel, and does a better job illustrating it 🙂

Personally, according to this applet, based on what I pay for rent, there is no way that buying a house would be better in any number of years 🙂 I’m better off putting my money into a savings account and letting it appreciate.

Oh yeah, and hi to the only people reading this blog and bugging me to update it 😛

(Ooo… I love this article… seems like this country loves to reward stupidity. So what if you screwed yourself over by not reading the fine print or making a budget. The government will bail you out! http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/13/real_estate/subpri…)

Cingular blows!

Yup, then again, everyone knows it, even the BetterBusinessBureau as they’ve been kicked out of it!

So I’ve been struggling with this issue with my cell phone since they “upgraded” their voicemail network two weeks ago. Besides voicemail notification issues that wouldn’t go away, they totally broke the GPRS internet connection on my phone. Customer service is, of course, totally unhelpful. The first bloke claimed that it was a “nationwide outage” and that it should be fixed by the following week…

Which didn’t happen, of course… the next idiot claimed that it was an outage in their WAP Proxy server… which seemed plausable except that it was hanging my phone just trying to open Internet Explorer!

Then, today, after my 3rd call, the nice friendly and extremely apologetic customer service rep says that it’s a problem with my phone… and… oh look! How convenient. Your phone is two weeks our of warrenty! Would you like me to bill your account for $200 and send you a new refurbished phone? Erm… excuse me? If you knew about this two weeks ago, why not do it then?

bah, idiots… In the end, a simple search and firmware reinstallation fixed the issue. The timing all seems too convenient. I mean, that’s an excellent business model! Wait for your customer’s warrenty to expire, send a signal over the waves to conveniently break functionality, then offer your customer the opportunity to spend more money!

Seriously!

Here’s the plane and our captain on the right!

And… that’s it for photos! 

Wide angel shot of the Golden Gate Bridge… See all those little white dots on the water? They are all little sailboats! 

Another shot of Half Moon Bay airport taken with my camera… You can really see the whole airport and the clouds all around it. 

Golden Gate Park and the surrounding area… That’s our right wing right there in the photo! 

Oh yeah! Found a few more photos on my camera! All the other photos below were taken with Jeremy’s Canon Digital Rebel. This is a wide angel shot of Stanford taken with my puny little SD500 

Just before landing. That’s Palo Alto airport right infront of us. You can see all the tiny little planes on the ground by the runway.

Unfortunately, the airport is right by the dump. Right about now we can smell the stink from the dump whafting up into our little plane. >.< Still, you can see that we’re lined up perfectly for an awesome landing. We barely needed 1/4 of the runway to land and taxi off it! Small planes rock! 

Moffet Field & Shoreline Amphitheatre. That hanger doesn’t look as big when you’re looking at it from the air… even if it is just 2000ft up! 

Oracle from the air!