Proud Geek

I’m having a venti Pike’s Place Roast coffee, with half-half milk and three packets of pink (Sweet n Lo) sugar.

And it’s toe-curlingly good.

Starbucks is touting that this particular line of coffee is brewed every half hour, so that it’s always fresh.  And as I walked into the store, I could smell coffee being grinded — such a delicious aroma!  Good move, Starbucks.  At times like this, I wish I had a fragrance emitter hooked up to the Internet.   Much better than smelling burnt sandwiches (which I hear that Starbucks is discontinuing).

But I must admit, I’m not too crazy about Starbucks’ new logo color.  I like its “fresh” green color.  The brown color … It’s a bit drab.  Yes, it’s coffee-colored, but still, it doesn’t stand out in people’s hands or on the streets like the green-colored logo does.

We’ve been conducting a lengthy, 8-month-long experiment: we tried to sell our house and then move by just using the web and via email.  We’re trying to do this without any phone calls at all.  Here’s the result of our experiment:

* Find a realtor via the web and who’s willing to do everything thru email:  check.  After driving around our target communities, we sent emails to several realtors that we saw signs for, and heard back only from a few.  We interviewed one in person, and hired her.  She was always good about emails, and even text messaged us when on the road.  And she did a wonderful job selling our house in this difficult market and finding a wonderful new home for us.  Thanks, Lisa Giuliani with Keller Williams Realty!

* List our house in several places on the web: check.  Our realtor listed our house via the MLS listing service (which shows up on Realtor.com and Homedatabase.com, our two favorite home listing websites, as well as many other public websites).  I also listed our house via Zillow, Yahoo, Google, and Craigslist.  The buyers of our old house saw the MLS listing for our home, and now they live there!  We had several open houses, but they didn’t seem to generate offers.

* Find a lender who’s willing to deal exclusively via the web: mixed.  My Federal credit union’s website could collect some info, but I had to call for prequalification.  I found the lender I ultimately went with through my realtor — Vincent with Countrywide.  He responded quickly to my emails, and would accept / send documents as PDF via emails.  The loan approval process went smoothly.  Thanks, Vincent!

* Switching or starting new utilities and services for our house: mixed.  I had to call Comcast to cancel cable / Internet service, but was able to make arrangements with Directv for television service entirely via the Internet.   Washington Gas did just fine entirely via the web.  I had to call to change water / sewer service.   I think I could have made arrangements with Verizon via the web, but my on-line account access was messed up a long time ago so I had to call to transfer voice and start DSL service.  (Too bad Verizon FIOS service is not yet available in the new home’s area.)  But when we moved into the new house, we realized that recent renovations had cut off or eliminated all phone jacks throughout the house!  So now we’re anxiously awaiting a contractor who’ll install a couple of jacks so that we can have DSL Internet service.  Hard to live without high-speed Internet at home!

* Find a mover who’s willing to deal via web and email: check.  We were deluged with postcards of various moving companies.  We threw out those without web addresses.  When it was time to make moving arrangements, we visited those websites and discarded those that didn’t have a form where we could fill out info on the various rooms, furniture, dates, and other details.  We filled out several, and got responses via email from two movers.  Both came over, and we hired one of them.  We kept in touch via email up till moving day.  Thanks, Hassan with 1st Class Movers!

* Changing addresses of allllll our various organizations, favorite stores, banks, employment-related sites, etc etc: eehhhhh.  Haven’t done most of thm - I’m dreading this … But a vast majority of these can be done via the web, thank goodness.

So, our online selling / buying / moving experiment has yielded mixed but mostly good results.  Thanks to all of the sites and people who dealt entirely on-line - you made life considerably easier.

Hi folks!  I’ve not blogged for over a month.  Two big reasons why.

Moving:  My family and I finally sold our house, after 7 months on the market.  We’ve been packing and will be moving next week.  Wish us luck!

Free time (what’s left of it): My partner and I both noticed that when we’re on the computer at home, either during the evenings or in between tasks during the day, we become impatient with each other and with our children.  We’ve cut back on our computer use — and you know what?  We’ve got more time, more energy, and more patience with each other and our children.  I’ll be continuing this by spending much less time on the computer than I used to.

With that said …  I miss blogging.  And I miss you folks.  I’ll get back to blogging, although not on as regular a basis as I used to.

See you soon!

If you understand even half of what Weird Al is talking about, you’re a fellow Proud Geek!

For the record, I understood EVERYTHING. Yes, honey, you have reason to worry.

This video was subtitled for us fellow deafies and posted onto Overstream. Thanks, grwebguy! And thanks, Bill, for pointing me toward this terrific video.

CompUSA will be closing down. I can’t say it’s a sad day — I hated trying to get service there, and I still distinctly remember feeling helpless while looking for someone, anyone, whoever, to give me assistance while at CompUSA. And exactly a month ago, I almost gleefully blogged about the fact that CompUSA had closed numerous stores. So, the total closure of all CompUSA stores does not come as a surprise.

That means good close-out sales at the remaining stores. But good luck in getting someone to help you …

This blog hit its 100,000th viewer around noon EST today.  I know it doesn’t compare to other ultra-popular blogs that get millions of hits A MONTH (or even in a day).  But for something that I work on a few minutes a day, 100,000 hits since last March ain’t too shabby.

My peak month (with 17,827 hits) was last August, when several of my Vista Annoyances posts appeared on the front page of StumbleOn.   My most popular post ever is ironically one of my geekiest posts ever, Windows Vista Annoyance #3: file / folder sharing between computers on a network.  It’s regularly on the top of my DAILY list of most-viewed blog posts, mostly because of Google searches, partially because of Stumbleon, and partially because computer shops apparently use this when explaining to customers how to make their computers work nicely with each other across networks.

Since August, I’ve been averaging 13,000 - 14,000 hits a month.  When I write a post on a daily basis, I average about 400-500 hits a day.  But some weeks, I only write one or two blog posts — and my hits go down to around 300-400 a day.

Thanks, faithful readers.  It’s folks like you that makes it worthwhile for me to keep bloggin’.  Stick around, willya?

We’ve all heard of the immense distances between our star and our neighboring stars.  But like all near-infinite numbers, it’s hard to get a grip of just how far away everything is.  I regularly read Daily Kos, a political blog site, and it has a regular science writer.  He recently wrote about the discovery of a new planet that has some moons that seem to be in the correct position for inhabitable conditions.  This planet (and moons) orbit the star 55 Cancri, which is about 40 light-years away.  And then DarkSyde, the writer, goes on to say:

To get an intuitive handle on those formidable numbers, consider that if our sun was the size of the period at the end of this sentence, the earth would be a microscopic dot a mere 2 inches away. On that same scale, the two stars in the Cancri binary would be separated from one another by 50 yards, but reside a whopping 75 miles away from the earth and sun! The fastest spacecraft to date would take about half a million years to reach 55 Cancri. And it’s one of the closest stars. Most are much, much farther away.

Whoa.  Man, that’s far.

This caught me by surprise.  Usually, I know well in advance when a large chain store like CompUSA plans to close a good number of its stores. CompUSA, which used to be one of my favorite computer stores until Best Buy became ubitiquous, has closed what looks like a good 50% of its stores all over the nation. That includes closing 3 out of 5 stores in Maryland, and 27 out of 35 stores in California.  I’d visit the Rockville and Gaithersburg (Maryland) stores quite often, but I remember feeling very irritated that it was difficult getting someone to help me.  Best Buy staff, in contrast, always seem to appear at a snap of my finger (not that I snap my fingers, but …).  Both Rockville and Gaithersburg stores are now closed; if I want my CompUSA fix, I’ll have to go to a Baltimore suburb, or cross the border into Virginia.  Whoops, all four Washington-area CompUSA stores in Virginia are also closed, leaving three in Richmond or the Virginia Beach area.  Geez.

Someone did a comparison list showing which stores are closed and which is still open. Green is open, and red (both dark and light) means closed.

Definitely does not bode well for CompUSA …

I love gadgets. But sometimes we can have too many gadgets. Take bag clips — they can be cool, but somehow they feel … excessive. Yes, it feels a bit too much to have bag clips. But don’t we need them to keep our chips from going stale?

Turns out we don’t need bag clips. Check out this video. (Thanks, Staz!)

See related blog posts here, here, and here.