Archive for September, 2005

Sold In 11 Days!!

// September 21st, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Life

Hopefully…

Tuesday our realtor called with two offers. Our realtor let the buyers know there were multiple offers and gave them an opportunitity to revise their offers before presenting them to us. One raised their price by $4,000 off the bat. The other made no changes, and remained much lower than we’d be willing to go. We negotiated a higher sales price with the higher bidder and signed a contract.

We’re in the option period until October 2nd. They’re sending their inspector on Monday.

If all goes well we’ll close at the end of October.

We’re moving forward getting our new home design rolling, which we were planning on doing even before we knew about the offers.

We’re hoping to start building by January 1, 2006 and be moved in by June 30.

Home-Selling Progress Report

// September 19th, 2005 // No Comments » // Life

For Sale SignOur home has been on the market for 10 days now and it’s been shown 9 times. That seems like a good pace so far. We had four showings yesterday alone. Two were people returning to see the house for a second time.

As yet no offers but it’s nice to know in this short time already ours has been among the group of houses people are “narrowing down” to.

Hopefully the right family will come along soon so we can get on with building our next house.

Although I’m confident our house will sell, and probably sooner than later, the whole selling/renting/building/moving cycle keeps our minds occupied. There are still a lot of “what if’s” out there.

It took my Mom and Step-Dad two years to sell their house after I left for college.

Lets hope ours goes more quickly…

Thank You Vincent Hancock

// September 13th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Shooting Sports

USA Shooting Logo2005 has been a stellar year for 16-year-old Vincent Hancock of Eatonton, Georgia. After making the US Shooting Team only last year in Skeet shooting, he has gone on to absolutely own the event on the world scene.

At his first World Cup in Korea early this year, he won the gold medal, set a world record, a junior world record, and a finals world record, and picked up a coveted quota slot for men’s skeet at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. At his second World Cup in Rome, he won silver (missing gold by one clay). At the World Championship (held only every 4 years), he again won gold. At the World Cup in Belgrade, he won silver. At the World Cup in Brazil, he finished the year as he started it, winning gold and tying his own world records.

I can’t begin to emphasize how rare this accomplishment is. I can’t be sure but I’d guess there have been only a handful of instances in the last 109 years of Olympic style shooting where an individual has held this kind of dominance over an event.

Now remember this was done by a 16-year-old young man…

Congratulations are an understatement, but certainly in order for Vincent.

Beyond that, thank you Vincent for showing us all that an American can dominate a shooting sport worldwide. It’s a great inspiration to everyone involved in the Olympic shooting sports.

Read more at USA Shooting

Six Dumbest Ideas In Computer Security

// September 12th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Security & Privacy

Marcus Ranum has an article with his take on the “Six Dumbest Ideas In Computer Security”.

In short, they are:

  1. Default Permit – Allowing broad access by default.
  2. Enumerating Badness – Trying to handle the many “bad” things, rather than the few “good” things.
  3. Penetrate and Patch – Designed with flaw-handling in mind, rather than secure by design.
  4. Hacking Is Cool – Glorifying the hackers and the hacker culture.
  5. Educating Users – Essentially “Penetrate and Patch” for humans. Constantly having to educate users on the bad things and how to avoid them.
  6. Action Is Better Than Inaction – Cultural idiosynchracy that convinces us we have to “do something now” and be an “early adopter” rather than pausing and thinking and letting someone else walk the new technology minefield first.

Here here.

Read more at Marcus Ranum’s site.

Deep In The Home-Selling Malaise

// September 5th, 2005 // No Comments » // Life

Home RepairWe’ve spent the past week or so preparing our 10-year-old house for sale. The place is looking pretty good. The yard needs more help and money than I’m willing to throw at it at this point so hopefully people will be able to look past that. The major stuff that’s left is the landscapers are coming to trim the trees and install some edging around our flowerbeds. Then we’ll stock it with flowers.

Our realtor will come Wednesday and take pictures, then we’ll be on the market.

The real irony of it all is all the fix-ups we’ve wanted to do for years are finally getting done. I suppose that’s always the case. We’re burning money by the stack but hopefully it’ll pay off on the other side.

We’re still waiting to close on our new lot since the bank we’re using is in Baton Rouge which has been without power since hurricane Katrina hit. We finally talked with them today and fortunately the folks I’ve been dealing with are safe, as are their families. We’re on track to close on the lot on Friday.

Ready to be done with the fix-up phase and on with the showing phase. Ready to start construction on the new house before the labor and materials costs start to go up due to the hurricane and gas prices, which is projected to really start increasing around the end of the year.