12 Mar 2007
I’m going to experiment with various forms of off-line posting. Although the WordPress posting interface is nice it does occasionally mess up formatting.
I’m going to try BlogJet (and possibly Ecto) for a couple of weeks to see how they stack up.
The ability to compose ad hocly and publish later is nice and lends itself to a desktop client. Being able to collect my thoughts prior to publishing might just improve my writing. If nothing else my spelling should improve.
I’ve also upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2. As part of the upgrade I spent a bit of time looking at alternative themes. The latest Eli Forner offering is nice but doesn’t appear to be publicly available. It’s built on the popular 5ThirtyOne V2 theme. I did play around with the 5ThirtyOne theme for a bit tonight but wasn’t able to suitably customize it so I’ll be living with *2813 *for a little while longer.
25 Feb 2007
I posted a few days ago about my trials and tribulations surrounding buying a home.
Turns out that everything worked out in the end and I’m now (assuming subject to’s come off) the owner of a new townhouse.
I’m not looking forward to moving, but it’ll be nice to have a place of my own. I’ll only have to deal with lawyers, bankers and real estate agents for another month or two now.
Again, the real winners in all of this… the real estate agents *(but followed closely by the bankers and laywers).
*
22 Feb 2007
A couple weeks back I decided it was time to _try_ and enter the real estate market. If you don’t know Victoria, it’s a fairly desirable west coast city to live in with not a lot of options when it comes to affordable housing. Average price for a house is easily ~400k+ and the townhouses/condos I’ve been looking at have been in to ~300k range, and that’s in the suburbs.
I’ve had limited success so far but have finally gotten to the point of making offers and battling over counter-offers. It’s very much a game, not unlike fighting with Product Management over requirements, scope and resources. With any luck it’ll be over soon and I’ll have a nice home office to work from.
The real estate agents will surely make out alright, a $300,000 sale would gross $12,000 in fees and I can’t imagine either the buying or selling agent having much in the way of costs.