Couch Potato Setup

I’ve always liked computers, but I’ve never been a huge fan of overwrought TV media setups.  You end up having 10 components with 15 remotes and 20,000 buttons, most of which have redundant or never-used functionality.  The setup takes up a great deal of space and sucks up a bunch of energy through 10,000 different cables and wires.

Several changes have happened in the last few years, simple but significant, to change the TV media ball game.

1.  HDMI

HDMI = HDTV as computer screen

HDMI is the digital video/audio connection for HDTV.  Previous connectors required 5 separate connectors, all usually bundled into the same cable (ugh!).  HDMI bundles everything into the same connection.  So okay… we’ve simplified one out of 20 million cables.  Not bad.

The really cool thing about HDMI is that it uses the same digital video signal as computer screens (DVI).  You can spend $5 on an HDMI/DVI adaptor and another $5 on a cheap HDMI cable, displaying computer content on the TV for $10.

2.  Internet Video

With sites like Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix, file transfer protocols like BitTorrent, and services like iTunes, people have easy and cheap access to movies and shows to play on their computers.

Combining #2 and #1 is a no brainer — all you need is a $10 cable to watch Hulu on your HDTV.  Hollywood doesn’t want you to know this though, because the entrenched industry doesn’t want you to stop paying separately for HD cable TV.  They want to control exactly how you pay for the content, regardless of what is technologically possible.  They want it so bad that they’ve infected hardware manufacturers with crippling technologies like HDCP.

3.  Video game systems similar to computers.

Video game systems have always been computers, but traditionally (NES, SNES, N64, etc.) they’ve been hard to recognize because they’re so specialized.  But since 2000, video game systems have been converging with computers.

A mac mini today is $600.  At release, Playstation 3 was $600.  Both come with hard drive, RAM, a drive for movie playing discs, digital video output, and a wireless internet connection.  Both are capable of running traditional PC operating systems (Linux being the obvious choice).

This convergence has changed people’s expectations about what the big screen in the living room should be used for.  If a customer pays $600 for a Playstation 3, they feel like they should get their money’s worth.  So they’ll try out the audio player.  They’ll try out the blu-ray player, the picture viewer, the web browser.  Some of these features will stick, and people will use them over and over again.  Others will fail, either because the interface is bad or because a competing activity or option wins out.

Today, the living room media landscape is much different than twenty years ago.  Here are a few more examples:

1.  Sling Box.  A device that allows you to view the Cable TV you have at home from the Internet.  If you’re traveling with your laptop, you can watch HBO from the airport.

2.  Apple Airtunes.  A device that allows you to listen to music on your computer from somewhere else in the house.  Wireless means that you don’t have to have your speakers and your computer in the same location.  Speakers on the patio — computer in the bedroom.

3.  Sony LocationFree.  Watch the DVR in your living room on the little TV in your bathroom.

4.  Popcorn Hour.  A box that allows you to download BitTorrent and Internet content, save it on a hard drive, and watch it on your TV.

5.  OnLive.  An online service that allows you to play really fancy video games without owning fancy video game hardware.  All you need is a modestly powerful computer and a good internet connection.

In the past few years, the number of options for the living room has exploded.  Some of the stuff is cool — but most of it fails for one reason or another.  The industry is trying to “get it right,” both in terms of providing appealing new abilities to consumers as well as providing themselves with new profit opportunities.

If you’re in the market for a big TV and a nice couch potato setup, you have two options.  You can either go back to school and get a degree in living room media setups, or you can throw your money at the shiniest box at Best Buy with no real idea of what’s going on.  Yes, I think it’s really that bad.

I’ve noticed most other people my age think it’s that bad too.  That’s why most aren’t buying TV media hardware.  Instead, they’re watching Hulu or Netflix on their computer.  Occasionally, they’ll spiff it up with one thing or another — maybe an external set of speakers (2 small ones and a subwoofer).  Maybe they have an XBox 360 for video games, and they’ll watch streaming Netflix on the TV they use for video games.  But there isn’t a single reliable option that most people are going for.  The most popular living room appliance among young people I know is the laptop.  The most popular monthly service is Netflix.

Nevertheless, I’ve been on a quest to fill my living room full of crap.  Technology begets more technology.  If you buy a nice digital camera, you have to take a bunch of photos to justify the money spent.  If you have a bunch of photos, you have to buy a hard drive to store them.  If you buy an iPod, you need music to fill it.  The music needs a hard drive.  If you have a bunch of cool music to play, what’s the point if your speakers suck?  Well, if you’re going to get speakers, they might as well be surround sound.  Now that you have surround sound and a bunch of cool photos, why not buy a nice TV?  You already have that video game system with blu-ray, you already watch Netflix — it would have a lot of value.

And before you know it, you have all this stuff.  In my case, it’s about like this:

1.  Samsung 46 inch LCD HDTV

2.  Sony PS3

3.  Xbox 360

4.  Nintendo Wii

5.  Mac Mini

6.  500GB hard drive

7.  Sony Receiver

8.  Boston 5.1 surround sound

And that’s not even mentioning the other stuff…

So once you have all this stuff, it becomes a question — what don’t you need?  Many devices have redundant functionality.  Xbox 360 and PS3 games are the same, but Xbox 360 has streaming Netflix (PS3 doesn’t), and PS3 has a blu-ray player (Xbox 360 doesn’t).  Could I just upgrade the internal hard drive of the Mac mini, and get rid of the external one?  The Wii isn’t high definition . . . but it does have Mario (and Mario is really friggin’ fun).  Do I really need a receiver, or should I sell the receiver and surround sound to pay for a surround system with a built-in amplifier?

At the time of purchase, I rationalized the purchases in different ways.  I spent all night at Best Buy trying to get a PS3 at launch — I sold it for $1600, so really I had $1000 profit from that one.  I got the 5.1 surround sound system for $100 bucks (a $600 system) when Circuit City went out of business.  The mac mini I bought because I wanted to run a webserver from home, to learn how to setup apache/php/mysql from scratch, so I would have full control over a website.  I also wanted to house all of my photos, music, and video at one location (not my laptop), about 200GB of data.  The Wii I bought because the other two systems weren’t as social — I wanted something I could play with friends.  The XBox 360 I waited and waited to get, because I heard about them overheating.  I wanted to play the new Halo.

At the time, everything made sense.  But now that I have them, I notice I don’t play many video games anymore.  The mac mini can do streaming Netflix, so the PS3 is the only video game system that is used often (for Netflix blu-rays).  The mac mini is actually getting more use as a media center than as a webserver right now because I’m not paying for internet access (and therefore can’t justify running a website off a mooched internet connection).  Seeing the stuff day after day has led me to think about how I might simplify it if I could do it again.

The answer?

Wall mounted HDTV + mac mini + 2.1 sound system with built-in amp (bose is quite good).  The $9.99 netflix subscription, and a decent (3 Mbp +) internet connection.

Since I haven’t installed the 5.1 speakers on the wall, the “surround” aspect is overrated.  The best part of it is the base response.

The mac mini can handle streaming netflix, which is how I watch most of my movies.  It can’t do blu-ray, but eventually I’d be able to buy a USB blu-ray player (and Apple’s software would support blu-ray playback).  DVDs look good, and they can be ripped and saved (unlike blu-ray).  The video game systems have been fun, but at the moment I’m more focused on activities like reading and writing.  The computer has the added benefit of being able to check up on e-mail/facebook/twitter just by switching from one desktop to another — literally 2 button presses on a small bluetooth keyboard.

I’ve wanted to believe that specialized interfaces like remotes and video game controllers are a lot better than a wireless keyboard and mouse for TV.  But I haven’t found that to be the case.  You end up having a lot of remotes (in my case, at least 5: wii, ps3, xbox, receiver, TV), when you could just have a keyboard and mouse to handle everything.

Surfing the internet on the TV is begging for eyestrain.

$600 for a mac mini can seem steep compared to

$200 for Wii,

$250 for XBox 360, or

$300 for a PS3,

but mac mini offers an unparalleled feature set.  By having a standard web browser, the mac mini gives you everything on the Internet —  so much stuff that I wouldn’t be able to list everything in this note.  More audio and video content than you can shake a stick at.  The Mac mini, unlike the Wii, is capable of playing HD video, so all you have to do is find the HD content (streaming Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, BitTorrent, etc.)  And there are enough games capable of running well on the mac mini that, although the graphics won’t necessarily be as good as XBox 360 or a high end PC, all but the pickiest and most hardcore gamers can be satisfied.

The mac mini is about to be refreshed.  The 2009 mac mini (what I have) plays HD content without any trouble, mainly due to the updated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card.  The new mini will no doubt be more capable, smaller, and/or cheaper, so there’s no doubt in my mind it will be an excellent machine to connect to an HDTV.

The setup I’ve described also has very few cables.

A word of caution.  The mac mini runs best when at least two memory slots are filled.  This means you can get a great performance boost for $70 (2 2GB ram sticks).  Doing this upgrade requires you to open up the machine though, which is a bit tricky (but not impossible).  In the process of upgrading my own machine, I stripped one of the tiny screws while putting it back together (doh!) and broke a little plastic piece connected to a wifi antenna.  This has no impact on the performance of the machine, but it does void my warranty (which will be up soon anyway) and make it more difficult for me to upgrade the internal hard drive.  Upgrading the hard drive is something I’d want to do ideally, since then I wouldn’t have to have an external drive, which is actually bigger than the mini itself and adds unnecessary cords and power consumption.

Downsides.  The mac mini’s DVD drive is louder than others, but not intolerable.  The cost isn’t ideal but is justified by the benefits.  The mac mini doesn’t play blu-rays, so you won’t be able to take full advantage of the “HDTV experience,” but the online HD content is good enough, and I expect it will only get better with time.  Reading on the tav kinda sucks, not going to lie, but if you pump up the magnification in the web browser, it’s not absolutely terrible.  You won’t be reading novels off it though (get a refurbished Kindle for that).

I’ve always liked computers, but I’ve never been a huge fan of overwrought TV media setups.  You end up having 10 components with 15 remotes and 20,000 buttons, most of which have redundant or never-used functionality.  The setup takes up a great deal of space and sucks up a bunch of energy through 10,000 different cables and wires.

Several changes have happened in the last few years, simple but significant, to change the TV media ball game.

1.  HDMI

HDMI = HDTV as computer screen

HDMI is the digital video/audio connection for HDTV.  Previous connectors required 5 separate connectors, all usually bundled into the same cable (ugh!).  HDMI bundles everything into the same connection.  So okay… we’ve simplified one out of 20 million cables.  Not bad.

The really cool thing about HDMI is that it uses the same digital video signal as computer screens (DVI).  You can spend $5 on an HDMI/DVI adaptor and another $5 on a cheap HDMI cable, displaying computer content on the TV for $10.

2.  Internet Video

With sites like Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix, file transfer protocols like BitTorrent, and services like iTunes, people have easy and cheap access to movies and shows to play on their computers.

Combining #2 and #1 is a no brainer — all you need is a $10 cable to watch Hulu on your HDTV.  Hollywood doesn’t want you to know this though, because the entrenched industry doesn’t want you to stop paying separately for HD cable TV.  They want to control exactly how you pay for the content, regardless of what is technologically possible.  They want it so bad that they’ve infected hardware manufacturers with crippling technologies like HDCP.

3.  Video game systems similar to computers.

Video game systems have always been computers, but traditionally (NES, SNES, N64, etc.) they’ve been hard to recognize because they’re so specialized.  But since 2000, video game systems have been converging with computers.

A mac mini today is $600.  At release, Playstation 3 was $600.  Both come with hard drive, RAM, a drive for movie playing discs, digital video output, and a wireless internet connection.  Both are capable of running traditional PC operating systems (Linux being the obvious choice).

This convergence has changed people’s expectations about what the big screen in the living room should be used for.  If a customer pays $600 for a Playstation 3, they feel like they should get their money’s worth.  So they’ll try out the audio player.  They’ll try out the blu-ray player, the picture viewer, the web browser.  Some of these features will stick, and people will use them over and over again.  Others will fail, either because the interface is bad or because a competing activity or option wins out.

Today, the living room media landscape is much different than twenty years ago.  Here are a few more examples:

1.  Sling Box.  A device that allows you to view the Cable TV you have at home from the Internet.  If you’re traveling with your laptop, you can watch HBO from the airport.

2.  Apple Airtunes.  A device that allows you to listen to music on your computer from somewhere else in the house.  Wireless means that you don’t have to have your speakers and your computer in the same location.  Speakers on the patio — computer in the bedroom.

3.  Sony LocationFree.  Watch the DVR in your living room on the little TV in your bathroom.

4.  Popcorn Hour.  A box that allows you to download BitTorrent and Internet content, save it on a hard drive, and watch it on your TV.

5.  OnLive.  An online service that allows you to play really fancy video games without owning fancy video game hardware.  All you need is a modestly powerful computer and a good internet connection.

In the past few years, the number of options for the living room has exploded.  Some of the stuff is cool — but most of it fails for one reason or another.  The industry is trying to “get it right,” both in terms of providing appealing new abilities to consumers as well as providing themselves with new profit opportunities.

If you’re in the market for a big TV and a nice couch potato setup, you have two options.  You can either go back to school and get a degree in living room media setups, or you can throw your money at the shiniest box at Best Buy with no real idea of what’s going on.  Yes, I think it’s really that bad.

I’ve noticed most other people my age think it’s that bad too.  That’s why most aren’t buying TV media hardware.  Instead, they’re watching Hulu or Netflix on their computer.  Occasionally, they’ll spiff it up with one thing or another — maybe an external set of speakers (2 small ones and a subwoofer).  Maybe they have an XBox 360 for video games, and they’ll watch streaming Netflix on the TV they use for video games.  But there isn’t a single reliable option that most people are going for.  The most popular living room appliance among young people I know is the laptop.  The most popular monthly service is Netflix.

Nevertheless, I’ve been on a quest to fill my living room full of crap.  Technology begets more technology.  If you buy a nice digital camera, you have to take a bunch of photos to justify the money spent.  If you have a bunch of photos, you have to buy a hard drive to store them.  If you buy an iPod, you need music to fill it.  The music needs a hard drive.  If you have a bunch of cool music to play, what’s the point if your speakers suck?  Well, if you’re going to get speakers, they might as well be surround sound.  Now that you have surround sound and a bunch of cool photos, why not buy a nice TV?  You already have that video game system with blu-ray, you already watch Netflix — it would have a lot of value.

And before you know it, you have all this stuff.  In my case, it’s about like this:

1.  Samsung 46 inch LCD HDTV

2.  Sony PS3

3.  Xbox 360

4.  Nintendo Wii

5.  Mac Mini

6.  500GB hard drive

7.  Sony Receiver

8.  Boston 5.1 surround sound

And that’s not even mentioning the other stuff…

So once you have all this stuff, it becomes a question — what don’t you need?  Many devices have redundant functionality.  Xbox 360 and PS3 games are the same, but Xbox 360 has streaming Netflix (PS3 doesn’t), and PS3 has a blu-ray player (Xbox 360 doesn’t).  Could I just upgrade the internal hard drive of the Mac mini, and get rid of the external one?  The Wii isn’t high definition . . . but it does have Mario (and Mario is really friggin’ fun).  Do I really need a receiver, or should I sell the receiver and surround sound to pay for a surround system with a built-in amplifier?

At the time of purchase, I rationalized the purchases in different ways.  I spent all night at Best Buy trying to get a PS3 at launch — I sold it for $1600, so really I had $1000 profit from that one.  I got the 5.1 surround sound system for $100 bucks (a $600 system) when Circuit City went out of business.  The mac mini I bought because I wanted to run a webserver from home, to learn how to setup apache/php/mysql from scratch, so I would have full control over a website.  I also wanted to house all of my photos, music, and video at one location (not my laptop), about 200GB of data.  The Wii I bought because the other two systems weren’t as social — I wanted something I could play with friends.  The XBox 360 I waited and waited to get, because I heard about them overheating.  I wanted to play the new Halo.

At the time, everything made sense.  But now that I have them, I notice I don’t play many video games anymore.  The mac mini can do streaming Netflix, so the PS3 is the only video game system that is used often (for Netflix blu-rays).  The mac mini is actually getting more use as a media center than as a webserver right now because I’m not paying for internet access (and therefore can’t justify running a website off a mooched internet connection).  Seeing the stuff day after day has led me to think about how I might simplify it if I could do it again.

The answer?

Wall mounted HDTV + mac mini + 2.1 sound system with built-in amp (bose is quite good).  The $9.99 netflix subscription, and a decent (3 Mbp +) internet connection.

Since I haven’t installed the 5.1 speakers on the wall, the “surround” aspect is overrated.  The best part of it is the base response.

The mac mini can handle streaming netflix, which is how I watch most of my movies.  It can’t do blu-ray, but eventually I’d be able to buy a USB blu-ray player (and Apple’s software would support blu-ray playback).  DVDs look good, and they can be ripped and saved (unlike blu-ray).  The video game systems have been fun, but at the moment I’m more focused on activities like reading and writing.  The computer has the added benefit of being able to check up on e-mail/facebook/twitter just by switching from one desktop to another — literally 2 button presses on a small bluetooth keyboard.

I’ve wanted to believe that specialized interfaces like remotes and video game controllers are a lot better than a wireless keyboard and mouse for TV.  But I haven’t found that to be the case.  You end up having a lot of remotes (in my case, at least 5: wii, ps3, xbox, receiver, TV), when you could just have a keyboard and mouse to handle everything.

Surfing the internet on the TV is begging for eyestrain.

$600 for a mac mini can seem steep compared to

$200 for Wii,

$250 for XBox 360, or

$300 for a PS3,

but mac mini offers an unparalleled feature set.  By having a standard web browser, the mac mini gives you everything on the Internet —  so much stuff that I wouldn’t be able to list everything in this note.  More audio and video content than you can shake a stick at.  The Mac mini, unlike the Wii, is capable of playing HD video, so all you have to do is find the HD content (streaming Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, BitTorrent, etc.)  And there are enough games capable of running well on the mac mini that, although the graphics won’t necessarily be as good as XBox 360 or a high end PC, all but the pickiest and most hardcore gamers can be satisfied.

The mac mini is about to be refreshed.  The 2009 mac mini (what I have) plays HD content without any trouble, mainly due to the updated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card.  The new mini will no doubt be more capable, smaller, and/or cheaper, so there’s no doubt in my mind it will be an excellent machine to connect to an HDTV.

The setup I’ve described also has very few cables.

A word of caution.  The mac mini runs best when at least two memory slots are filled.  This means you can get a great performance boost for $70 (2 2GB ram sticks).  Doing this upgrade requires you to open up the machine though, which is a bit tricky (but not impossible).  In the process of upgrading my own machine, I stripped one of the tiny screws while putting it back together (doh!) and broke a little plastic piece connected to a wifi antenna.  This has no impact on the performance of the machine, but it does void my warranty (which will be up soon anyway) and make it more difficult for me to upgrade the internal hard drive.  Upgrading the hard drive is something I’d want to do ideally, since then I wouldn’t have to have an external drive, which is actually bigger than the mini itself and adds unnecessary cords and power consumption.

Downsides.  The mac mini’s DVD drive is louder than others, but not intolerable.  The cost isn’t ideal but is justified by the benefits.  The mac mini doesn’t play blu-rays, so you won’t be able to take full advantage of the “HDTV experience,” but the online HD content is good enough, and I expect it will only get better with time.  Reading on the tav kinda sucks, not going to lie, but if you pump up the magnification in the web browser, it’s not absolutely terrible.  You won’t be reading novels off it though (get a refurbished Kindle for that).

Lots Has Happened.

A lot has happened, but it’s never been my intent for the blog to chronicle my life — I have memories and handwritten journals enough for that — but it’s worthwhile to say a few things.  I finally closed and moved into the condo.  I quit my job.  I went to Burning Man.  I got a part time job.  I’ve been reading books, most recently “Pride and Prejudice,” which despite being occupied by excessively conservative characters definitely has moments of reader joy.

The mac mini is hooked up to my TV now, serving mainly as a media player aided by DVDs and streaming netflix.  I’d like to use it as a webserver again, but I don’t have the money for internet, so I’m mooching and plan on doing so until I can gain adequate income.  During the empty moments of my part time, I hope to improve my writing through practice.  I can already tell Jane Austen is having an effect — I sound stuffy .

Kill it with fire

11  PhDs, two millionaires, from schools like MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, etc. working night and day on the product, and this was picked for advertising.

The hoop earrings says that she’s only wearing the headphones for show, and she doesn’t really care about the game.  Holding the controller without having fingers on the triggers indicates that she’s also only doing tha for show.  The cord coming out of the controller indicates that the game is at least three years old.  Her horizontally striped, skanky dress shows that she’s really only there to bone whoever is making teh ad in the first place.  Her face has a grating New Jersey look to it, and her skin is the same color as the background, which is orange.  I wake up in the morning and cry that this was approved.  Comic sans, anyone? </barf>

An ad that communicates the message, “Our product will help you meet trashy, shallow, female convicts from New Jersey in a solid orange room.”

How to investigate / buy a house in the bay area

1.  Check property tax.  In San Jose, you can use:

http://payments.scctax.org/payment/jsp/startup.jsp

2.  Check crime in the area:

http://www.crimereports.com/

3.  Check comps in the area:

Use:

http://www.zillow.com/

to find similar properties, then use

http://www.redfin.com/

to look at their sales history.  Probably best to make a spreadsheet.

4.  Go see the house and look for any obviously necessary repairs.  Get an inspection after you’ve done all other homework.

5.  Use Google Maps to estimate your commute time.  You can even search according to the time of day.

6.  Check to see if the house is FHA approved.

7.  Check Craigslist to see rents in the area in case you want to rent a room to help you cover costs / in case you lose your job.

Being Drunk

It occurs to me that — just as there are things that I will only think to say while drunk, there are messages that can only be approriately interpreted while drunk.  Almost like message in a bottle, but more like, “drink three shots before you read this.”

Documents necessary for loan approval

General:

Deposit slip to show earnest money has been deposited to Title company.

FHA Survey for spot approval of property (if loan is FHA)

Bank statement / deposit slip from person signing a Gift Letter.  You must show the money leaving their account and entering your account.  Otherwise, the money could’ve come from somewhere else (like a loan), and therefore would not be a gift.  The bank can’t risk that you’re paying the closing costs with a loan.  Before the bank loans you the money, they want to see that you have liquid assets or liquid income that you can use for the closing costs / to make the monthly payments after closing.

401k statements.  I strongly recommend you *not* cash in a 401(k) to afford the closing costs.  This is generally  a stupid financial move.  If you are older, you might not want to make prepayments on the property and might want to invest the money into 401(k).  It depends on when you want the cash to be available.  A lot of times you come out financially better if you pay off the house with your 401(k) rather than prepayments, because the return rate of the market in a tax deferred 401(k) is greater than the interest of the home loan.  But it depends on what you want.  For example, if you are young and working a $100k tech job, but want to be a poor artist instead, you might pour a ton of money into prepayments so that you own the small condo in 4 years and are then free at age 29 to pursue your dreams while owning a property that will surely appreciate.  On the other hand, if you like your job, you might want to put the money into a 401(k) and be extremely financially secure at retirement.  Your choice.  Long term financial gain vs. satisfying job in your 20s.

Any investments or major assets.  You own stock?  Show proof that you own it.  The more money or income you prove that you have, the more likely the bank is to give you the loan.

2 most recent months of:

Paystubs

Bank Statements

2 most recent years of:

All Landlords + contact information

W2’s — Make sure there are no gaps.

Proof of Enrollment if you have been in school in the last 2 years.

All documents must have identifying information.

Contain your name and/or social security number and/or account number.

I suggest you scan and e-mail everything.  This way you have a dated record, and you can access the forms from anywhere and easily transfer them again if necessary.

The bank will run a credit check.  Sometimes they will require that you pay off certain things.

Closer to closing

The lender may require you to give yet *another* bank statement showing that the closing money is in your account.

What happens if I default on the loan?

In the state of California, if you fail to repay a mortgage, the lender can either go after your home, or they can sue you to pay it back.  If you’re poor, it’s a no brainer — they’ll foreclose on the home (Cali realestate is chaching).  If you have assets greater than the market value of the home, even if they are assets you don’t feel like you can comfortable liquidate (401(k)), the lender may go after them.

If you are buying with little or no down payment, my advice is to buy a place you can very comfortably afford.  For example, with an income of $95k, I can probably get approved for $250k, but I’m only going to buy a property with a loan of $150k.  This frees up more of my money for 401(k) or other diversified investment opportunities.  It allows me the flexibility to have kids or start my own business.  It allows me to rent out a room and pay very little for housing.  Having said that, I’m buying an area where the average price is about $750k, so even though the property is cheap, it is sure to appreciate.

San Jose / Santa Clara County Property Tax Relief

Today I analyzed a house that a friend was thinking to buy in San Jose.  The price was less than half the peak value, and although the place needed some work, it had a lot of charming couples and the layout matched well with what she was looking for in a house.

Since it was a distressed property, out of curiosity, I decided to see if / how much property tax was owed.  You can google

’santa clara county property tax’

or you can go to this link:

http://www.sccgov.org/portal/site/tax/

Link on the right: ‘View & pay property tax online‘ leads to

http://payments.scctax.org/payment/jsp/startup.jsp

Containing several links.  We want

View/Pay Secured taxes

http://payments.scctax.org/payment/jsp/currentSecured.jsp

Now we can enter the address.  If there is an N in the address, like

455 N 12th St. San Jose CA

Then fill the boxes like

‘455′ ‘12th’ ‘St.’ ‘San Jose’

And viola!  Now you can see what tax is owed on the property.

The particular property I looked at was bank owned and listed at about $260,000.00.

It needed repairs, and about $4700.00 in back taxes were owed on the property.  I’ve heard the buyer usually has to pay the back taxes when buying a bank-owned property.  Kind of funny (more like horrible), considering all the tax-payer bailout money the banks are getting.  So, if you’re an elected official reading this, change it .

Since the property’s peak value was a bit above $600,000.00, the yearly property tax was about $8600.  That works out to about $720.00 a month in property tax!  Buying the property at 4.75% interest on a 30 year fixed, the monthly payment would come out to a little above $2000.00.

She was looking with her husband to buy with an FHA loan.  3.5% down.  On top of $2000.00 a month, they’d have to worry about:

ulitilies, home/hazard insurance, mortgage insurance, and repair costs.

And get this.  Even with the minimum 3.5% down, it would take $25k+ to close.  Crazy!  They are both teaching in California public schools, and they’re not even sure if they’ll be able to afford a 2 bedroom house.

They might be able to get some property tax relief if they jump through government hoops:

http://www.sccassessor.org/portal/site/asr/agencyarticle?path=%252Fv7%252FAssessor%252C%2520Office%2520of%2520the%2520%2528ELO%2529&contentId=fc70bb3166b34010VgnVCMP2200049dc4a92____

No wonder so many people jumped at the high interest you’re-going-to-get-screwed loans.  Even in a bad economy, looking at a property in a mediocre neighborhood when interest rates are at a 40 year low and property values have dived to 40% of their prior value, a middle class California couple with college + masters educations struggle to buy a 90 year old house so they can fix it (the front is literally falling apart) and not live with 1/2 their possesssions in a 10×10 storage unit (they currently both live in the same 784 sq. foot condo).

On the other hand, though, is this ‘tragedy’ just a product of a society where people have unrealistic expectations about the sustainability of aggregating a large amount of physical crap?  California is the biggest state by population — 35 million.  Check out

http://www.resourcesforlife.com/small-house-society

I simultaneously think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they just decluttered their condo by selling and/or donating anything non-essential.  In my experience, ’stuff’ is overrated.  Living in a small places forces people to get out and be social, and that can be great.

Whatever the case, one thing is clear.  The process of buying a house in California is absolutely rife with people stick their hands in your pockets to grab at money they don’t deserve.  Yuck.

California Lease Assignment; Ending a Lease

Disclosure:  I am not a lawyer.  I’m not even close — I’m a software engineer.  This blog post is to give you a general idea of what the legal landscape looks like from my point of view.  Consult an attorney for actual assurance.

If you are looking to move out before the expiration of your lease in California, you can get started here.  I’m currently engaged in the process, and unless you read and re-read your lease and California State Law, you may lose mucho money.

Read this guide:

http://www.caltenantlaw.com/breaklease.htm

San Francisco Tenant’s Union:

http://www.sftu.org/

California State Law

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html

Sections:

1950.5 (Deposit)

1995.210-1995.270 (Assignment)

1951.2 (Landlord reponsibility to mitigate damages)

More detail if you need it:

Bottom line, you want to move out, what should you do?

0) Make sure your rent is current.  If your rent isn’t current, you will likely be in violation of the lease.  If you are in violation of lease, you can lose a lot of money unless you can show that the landlord has broken CA state law / violated terms of the lease.

1)  Give 30 days notice that you intend to vacate without canceling the lease contract.  Some leases include a provision whereby you can cancel your lease responsibilities for a penalty fee (typically 2 months rent).  Decide if you want to go this route if it is available.  It will get you off the hook, but you will have to shell out money.

2)  Post an ad on Craigslist for the room.  Show the room to people at the rent price you are currently paying.  Take down the information of anyone who wants the room:  Name, phone number, address, etc. Include pictures of the room.  Talk it up in a nice way.

3)  Look in your lease and see if there is a clause saying something like “assignment is allowed with landlord’s written permission.”  Send your landlord a written request for consent including a good tenant candidate.  CA law says they can’t unreasonably refuse.  Landlords can’t refuse because they want a penalty fee associated with cancellation of the lease (case law).  Landlords *can* refuse if the tenant you are asking them to consent to assigning the lease to a financial unstable candidate or a candidate with a bad renting history.  Assignment is *not* lease cancellation.

4)  See if your landlord is advertising the room.  If the landlord isn’t advertising the room, take screen shots of Craigslist where the ad would be.  Keep newspapers containing classified sections that don’t have an ad for the room.  In CA, landlord are required to try and mitigate their damages in the case that you move out.  If they fail to do this, then they won’t be able to make a reasonable claim to sue you for damages they could’ve mitigated.

5)  Your deposit.  How do you get it back?  California state law says that you have the right to request a walk-through before the “termination of your tenancy.”  Legally, tenancy is defined as your right to occupy the property.  Termination of tenancy is not termination of lease. For example, if you assign the lease contract to someone new, you aren’t canceling the lease, but you are terminating *your* tenancy.  When you assign the lease to someone new, the new person gains rights to your security deposit. This means that you need to get the security deposit back *before* you sign a Lease Assignment.  If the landlord doesn’t agree to a walk-through, you can sue the landlord later, but you must show that you sent a written request for a walkthrough.  The usual procedure is for the new tenant to pay their deposit to the old tenant before the old tenant assigns the new tenant rights to his original deposit.

6)  If your landlord refuses to accept the assignment, or if the landlord refuses to determine your deposit, do the following.  By now you should have collected:

(a) evidence of the landlord not advertising the property

(b) written evidence that the landlord has unreasonably refused your request for assignment,

(c) written evidence that the landlord has refused the walk-through

(d) pictures of the property when you move out showing its condition and any damages (or lack thereof)

(e) Proof that you’ve been paying rent on time

(f)  Proof that a potential assignment candidate(s) is financially viable and has a responsible rental history.  The more the better.

(g)  Any e-mail / written communications of any kind between you and the landlord.  You won’t know what they’ll ask you to prove on-the-spot at court, and if you don’t have the paperwork, you can lose even if you are in the right.

(h)  Evidence that you have been advertising the property

If the landlord simply doesn’t respond, that is considered an unreasonably refusal.  Also, the landlord is legally required to respond to your request for a walk-through.  In this case, you should pay all your rent up to the time that you move out, and then you should sue the landlord for 3x the security deposit and court fees 21 days after you move out.  At court, the landlord will likely sue you for rent damages and other stuff.  You can show that these damages aren’t valid because he didn’t advertise and refused assignment to a reasonable candidate.

When you sue, you will show that you requested a walk-through and you can cite 1950.5.  You will also show that you always paid rent on time, and that the property was in the same condition as when you moved in.  Make sure in the future:  Always take pictures of a property *before* you sign a lease for it.  But since the landlord refused a walk-through, then he likely cannot claim any deductions from the deposit money.

Small Claims Court.  What’s the dealio?

Small claims court is terrible.  You want to avoid going to court if at all possible.  Even if you win in small claims court, enforcing the judgment is your responsibility and therefore a huge headache.  If it’s at all possible, resolve the matter before moving out, but do *not* sign any paperwork to cancel the contract, as this often invokes automatic penalties.

In my case, the penalty reads something like, “If this contract is cancelled for any reason, 40% will be deleted from monies received.”  Since I know this is a standard contract you can find free on Google (fill-in-the-blank), it’s likely many other landlords use it too.

Cool new capture (+broadcast!) software

Quick note.  If you’ve ever wanted to watch people playing video games, you can do it here:

http://www.xfire.com/live_video/

So apparently if you download XFire, you can capture / broadcast your video game to anybody at the same time.  There appears to be a 50 person limit, but most gamers have < 50 friends so that shouldn’t matter much .  If don’t care about XFire’s chat software, you can download only the broadcaster:

http://alpha.dyyno.net

This is a cool option because if you download the broadcaster separately, you can show *anything* on your screen, not just the video game.  But the video will show up at http://alpha.dyyno.net/, which gets considerably less traffic than XFire, so you’ll have to publish a blog or something to get more hits.  For me though, just watching other people play is better than cable.  I don’t like playing Maple Story very much, but I like watching it w/ techno.

Word is that Dyyno is using some P2P mumbo jumbo for the data transfer, so if it really works — don’t be surprised if a lot more game sites start publishing portals like this, given they won’t have the same horrible traffic costs.

A pretty big load of today’s everything

My front of my be is at an angle, perhaps twenty-five degrees, with the front of the coffee table.  Whenever I lean back while typing this, I start sliding to the right.  A recipe for scoliosis.  Read in my former creative writing professor’s blog that he read the same New Yorker article I read about David Foster Wallace.  The same New Yorker article a girl on the subway was reading, standing next to me.  That was before the weekly haircut, before the shave.  She was seeing a homeless man with an e-book reader.  I didn’t finish the article, but people talk as though he martyred himself in the service of writing, and I just don’t believe that.  Brilliant guy. Fantastic work.  Well liked, hard working.  Happened to suffer from depression.  Did not find the path to effectively combat said illness.  Died.  Maybe people will ask, have already asked, asked in the article if the same depression that killed DFW contributed to the quality of his work.  No, I say.  Depth of  feeling and effort do not necessarily a great writer make (to steal phrasing from a video game review stolen from Star Wars stolen from something less successful than Star Wars).  

On a different note.  I’ve successfully learned enough about PHP session creation and login stuff to implement a basically working system.  On the to do list:  encrypted passwords in MySQL, better MySQL database password protection, retrieving previously stored information about a user who has returned.  

you took me too seriously

you’re being elitist against my elitism

whereas I am accepting and inviting

a linguistic golem

Well, that was fun.  My professor said DFW never had a great work.  I don’t agree with that.  I thought (and still think) that Girl with Curious Hair was a great work.  I also think the Scanners I saw when I was six was a great work.  I almost don’t want to see it again.  Reputation survives in memory only, and it’s just RAM.  When the power goes out, so does a piece of accomplishment, a residual turd of genius.  My computer is smart enough to correct my spelling, but it is too stupid to know the word “turd.”

Okay.  Before I started writing this I had a shot of tequila — authentic stuff brought back from Mexico by my friends.  Smooth, 36.5%.  The percentage is stickered (yes, that is a word) to the front of the bottle at the end of the manufacturing process because they distill it to something like 60%, which is illegal, then they dilute.  I will be a little upset when this bottle is gone, because it was probably cheaper and better than everything I can get at the BevMo across the highway.  Best if they sold alcohol in a place alcoholics couldn’t get at.  Heaven, maybe.  After the tequila, the tea.  The chemical insurgency battling the organized forces of the megalithic left brain, still he was not satisfied.  Not wanting to deplete the tequila any more (learned today that only 60 rhinoceroses exist in the wild), I went for the brandy.  The Rhinos point again to a new environmental policy:  everyone goes on vacation to see the world before it goes to shit.  This will likely make it go to shit fast, but par for the course.  The top of this Ikea coffee table is warped so that the keyboard must sit perpendicular to the edge or will suffer disturbing tremors as I type.  That as the kind of Roald Dahl thing the little girl wanted to write down.  She will learn that the Indian engineer will say, “Just to give some constructive feedback.  No.  Don’t.  I will say this.  Just to give some constructive feedback, you only need to say ” but see by this point I’m not listening to him anymore.  I know what he will say, and I don’t have the patience.  A dread anticipation of future repetition.  Psychics must kill themselves; life would be so boring.

I spent $80 on the haircut.  For someone to cut away the hair that has already turned from unique blonde to common brown.  To clip away quickly what will fall out gradually for free.  Time scales not exactly geographic but comparably geographic.  Haven’t tried the hair paste since, despite having showered and shaved.  I think it’ll be a morning thing for me.  I need to get some deodorant.  Caffeine makes me stink.  On the way to breakfast I thought about building a website that would allow a group of around 5-10 people to quickly edit, arrange, customize a website.  User management would be handled in a “vote off the island” way.  Not by percentages but by numbers.  3 votes to kill a person kills them.  3 votes to invite a person invites them.  Later, on the way back from getting my computer and my haircut, I thought about my friend’s boyfriend, a guy from Stanford who is already building website.  fat or retarded dot com.  Websites that show more sophistication than I’ve ever been able to make.  Maybe tomorrow I should focus only on appearance.  DIVs, CSS, graphics.  Maybe once the graphics are in place, I’ll be more inspired to code more PHP and MySQL.  Based on my research I have a bit of an idea how to recall the variables I need.  The path to recalling a blog entry based on a user name and a date is clear.  Not sure about posting, but I think I did it before on my other computer, so I can just look up that code.