New blog

Just a quick update: Rachel and I have started a new blog, landedgentry.wordpress.com, to chronicle our trials, tribulations and successes in renovating the new house. So, check it out!

House update

So, I think we’ve found THE ONE. Or least, we’ve found one that we’re going to put an offer on. Well, we’ll make an offer after an inspection. In any event, you can view it here.

The biggest drawback is the front yard. The driveway will need to be immediately replaced and the retaining wall along the front had disinigrated. For better or worse, though, we’ll get someone in to deal with that immediately after we close, and once we do, the house becomes much more livable.

Fortunately, the house istelf seems like it’s in great shape. It’s fairly old, so I’m sure it has some quirks, but what house doesn’t?

Silver Spring Houses

We went out with Tom and Nancy (our realtors) on Saturday morning to see five houses. Tom and Nancy are both really nice, although I think we both find them a little too perky for our tastes at times. That being said, of the five houses we saw, we’re really interested in 2, so I think they did a pretty decent job.

I think before we even set foot in the first house we had pretty much decided against it. It had a gigantic car park in front, which was fairly unattractive, plus the yard was in crappy shape. That being said, of the five, the first one had the most interesting (in a good way) interior—very modern and open, which we both liked.

The second house is probably the most intriguing of the five. It has a beautiful wraparound front porch, five bedrooms (well, five only if you count something the size of a closet as a bedroom), an basement apartment and a pretty big front lawn (the house itself is on a corner).

The downside is that it’s a short sale, so even if we make an offer, it may be days or months before we hear back. More importantly, the backyard is a disaster. At a minimum, we’d have to level, break up a crappily-constructed concrete pad and put a new fence in. The interior is pretty nice, but there were definitely some warts—bad drywall jobs, excessive wear-and-tear, etc.

On the other hand, the third house, which we also really liked, was in much better shape—we could basically move in as-is without having to put too much work into it. I really liked the third one, but I wasn’t wowed by it in the same way the second one did. Still, there’s something to be said for not going crazy trying to renovate yourself…

Anyway, I just wanted to update y’all. I’ll try to post again in a couple day about the joy of getting a good faith estimate from a bank (think of it as root canal without anesthesia).

House hunting tomorrow

Eep! We’re actually going to look at houses tomorrow. I find this prospect to be mildly terrifying—my God, am I really an adult with a wife about to buy a house? How’d that happen?—but mostly really, really exciting.

In terms of what we’re looking for, we have a list of must-haves (in no particular order):

1. A reasonably sized kitchen with a dishwasher—the dishwasher is especially important because we’re both sick of doing dishes three times a day.
2. At least 3 bedrooms—though we’ll almost certainly turn the third bedroom into something more functional (like a craft room), we definitely need a place for guests to stay (and potentially a place for an as-yet thought about child to sleep).
3. Near some type of mass transportation that will get us into and out of DC—I think we’ll probably end up somewhere in the greater Silver Spring region, though College Park/Hyattsville also look like contenders.
4. A place for my grill—what can I say? I’m a male and I love grilling. Rachel has repeatedly pointed out that I’d be lost without my grill. I completely agree.

I think that’s everything that we absolutely need. There’s a much, much, much longer list of things we’d like, but I’ll save that for later.

David Carradine is dead

This is really sad—I loved watching Kung Fu and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues when I was growing up. And, of course, he was awesome in Kill Bill.

NASA rover

I’m infinitely impressed by the response to this little kid’s suggestion to rescue the Mars rover. I applaud NASA for actually take the time to recognize and reward a 7-year-old’s idea. I’m sure he’ll be addicted to science for life now.

Dvorak Keyboard

So, I’ve decided to try out the Dvorak keyboard this week (Disclaimer: this post was typed using the standard QWERTY keyboard because I suck too much at the Dvorak). The hope is that I will largely conquer all carpal tunnel problems if I can make the switch to using the Dvorak full time. Also, it loosely fits into my highly stylized Kaizen approach to life.

Apparently the theory is that since the QWERTY, having been designed in the 1860s before typing existed, is inefficient…which makes sense if you stop to ask why common letters such as “e,” “n” and “t” are so relatively far away from your fingers home position. I’m hoping that once I’ve mastered the Dvorak two-hand layout, I can move to the one hand layout to maximize mouse and keyboard interplay. 

All this is to say that if I respond to any of your emails/IMs with relatively short, terse messages, the reason is probably that I’m laboriously trying to remember where each letter is and not because I’m being snippy.

Data.gov

So, data.gov was officially unveiled today and lots of people are extremely excited about it. The site’s official mission is to enable “the public to participate in government by providing downloadable Federal datasets to build applications, conduct analyses, and perform research. Data.gov will continue to improve based on feedback, comments, and recommendations from the public and therefore we encourage individuals to suggest datasets they’d like to see, rate and comment on current datasets, and suggest ways to improve the site.”

Not to be a downer, but what member of the public is actually going to do any of this? I mean, honestly, the data-driven nerds out there would have already found these data and started using them before data.gov. And the non data driven nerds are, by definition, not data driven, so they won’t presumably want to wade through .csv files. 

Anyway, perhaps I’m being a little pessimistic. I certainly hope that people start conducting their own analyses, but I will remain skeptical until I see it happen.

Long time, no blog (yogurt too)

Hi All,

Sorry for the long time between posts. I will try to be better in the future (and yes, I know that promising is different than doing). In that spirit, I’m at the very least going to try to post interesting recipes as we try them. 

Anywho, I just wanted to pass along a very tasty, easy-to-make yogurt recipe that Rachel and I have been obsessing over. It’s pretty simple. All you need is some milk, starter yogurt and a crockpot. What’s nice about this recipe is you can control the fat content in the yogurt by using different milks (i.e. whole milk, 2%, skim). 

We like to make curry a lot, which only really works when you have a yogurt with a sufficiently high fat content that it won’t curdle when you add it to the curry. So, rather than having to make special trips to find a good Greek yogurt, we can essentially make our own. Right now, we’ve just been making plain yogurt, but at some point I’d like to try adding flavors.

We also used the yogurt to successfully make frozen yogurt this weekend. The only minor knock against it was that it has slightly crystalized, but I think that was more a function of the ice-cream maker and less a function of the yogurt.

Salmonella

Ian Ayres has an interesting solution to the recent food-safety problems (i.e. Salmonella outbreaks) in the US. Basically, like the court food tasters of old, he’s in favor of making the producers of a product sample that product before it hits the shelf. By doing so, the hope is to deter producers from purposedly shipping tainted products. In the case of the recent Salmonella outbreak, then, Stewart Parnel, the president and CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America, would be required to sample his peanut butter. He, of course, would shy away from doing so, knowing that it was infected with Salmonella.

Except, I wonder if he really would. I’m not sure I would in that situation. 

If I eat the PB, I may get Salmonella, which would certainly suck. However, in all likeliehood, it wouldn’t be fatal. I’d be miserable for a few days, then get better. On the plus side, though, I would be making many thousands (or potentially millions) of dollars. On the other hand, there’s a pretty good chance I may not get Salmonella, in which case I’d just get thousands of dollars. Either way, life is pretty good—there’s no incentive for me to voluntarily recall my product and thus lose thousands of dollars. 

I think a much better way to prevent producers from intentionally infecting consumers with deadly bugs is to encourage industries to police themselves. When the Peanut Corp releases Salmonella every peanut manufacturer suffer from Peanut Corp’s negligence. As such, there’s a strong incentive for other producers to deter Peanut Corp from releasing tainted products. While the producer police could perhaps report Peanut Corp to the FDA, I think there’s an even better solution.

The beauty of making Parnel try the peanut butter is the threat of bodily harm. Unfortunately though, the threat isn’t credible. A good self-policing industry must therefore find more physical methods—methods which ideally involve big sticks with nails through them. 

Finally, the federal government will still retain the power to enforce anti-monopolizing laws, thus ensuring this scheme won’t fall prey to the colluding nature of guilds, which artificially inflate the market price of a good.

Anyway, just a random thought as I watch Michigan State vs. Kansas.