our life

My favourite week of the year

Hang and I are not big believers in the whole consumer sheep thing about the holidays, so we try to turn it around and use the boxing week as a week to go and stock up on the things we need instead. So instead of gifts before the holidays, we spend the week buying what we want during the sales. Less stressful, and less wasteful.

Yesterday Hang and I visited the cambridge big box area. Hang did better then me. I found two shirts at Old Navy, but Hang found a bunch of shirts and pants at Jacob. Today we went to the Fairview mall in kitchener, and I found some sweaters at the Gap, and Campus Crew. Hang looked around for some more suit jackets for work, but no luck so far. I've been wanting some waterproof hiking boots and I finally found something at Softmoc today. So happy - no more wet feet when I'm shoveling the driveway.

Tomorrow is Ikea - want to get closet organizing stuff. As a treat we'll visit Mandarin - eating a lot over the holidays - not so good. Then last stop is in Missisauga to Big Als fish store to buy some Koi fish for our fish tank.

Vacation Dom

I think now as I write this I finally have settled into vacation mode. I had thursday and friday off, but I'm on call for the holidays, and I got a few calls from work with questions regarding things in our server room - so I still kinda felt like I was in work mode.

A lot has happened lately with our plans for the new house. The offer that I was so sure was going to go through a while back ended up just being one of many offers - they aren't even events now - so we know all the different angles now to the whole negotiation and they go by pretty quickly. We've had a few low ball offers that were a bit of a waste of time ( but understandable since the weather got colder so why not make the offer ). Our last offer actually would have worked, but a few days prior we made a major change to our plan.

We found a better deal on a house then the Carson Reid home. Our goals were to find a home we liked ( looked nice ), with a double car garage, house about 1800 sqft, a 2 story design, a property backing onto some sort of green space - a bonus would involve water, and it must be on a quiet road. The Carson Reid home fit this, and was priced well. Its located on the east side of guelph, and while its a good value ( the east side ), prices are the way they are on this side of town because it is lacking in community resources. Schools in guelph move to the new area's of town since that is where young families are ( so most schools in the east are closing - and they are going to open a new one ( think mega school )). The shopping ( old Zehrs, and Price Choppers ) are decent but they are the oldest ones in town so are smaller, and Victor Davis community Centre is the oldest of the Community centre's.

What we really wanted was to move to the south. Home prices in the south keep going up at a rate that is far faster then the rest of guelph. This is due to the services that exist now, and will come soon to the area. Also the area is zoned for residential, with no wierd mixing of large commercial, industrial, or high density housing ( large ugly apartment complexes ). The area is also nicely green, with parks, green spaces, ravines, and walking trails everywhere. Also Hang works there, so it would be the best for our daily car pooling commute.

So what stopped us was that the major builders had prices that were averaging 20K more then the east end for what we wanted compared to the east end. It was almost justifiable after watching the resale of 3yr old homes ( they were getting 3 times the rate of appreciation compared to the east end ). We decided it wasn't worth it for what was availible.

We hadn't firmed up on the Carson Reid home yet though ( only a $500 refundable deposit ), so we had the luxury of waiting ( this is also why we could just wave off the lower offers on the house ). We decided that we would have to make a decision in January. We'd either firm up on the Carson Reid home, or see what the prices were on the next Phases for Carson Reid, TerraView homes, and Reids Heritage Homes in the Westminister Planned community area ( think gated community ). This would allow us to sell our home during the spring ( for a much better price ).

So I did some digging to prepare for this. I found a list of the smaller builders in town via the New homes Magazine site, and I found a section on the Guelph municiple government site that showed the site plans for the areas. Finding those plans were the best part. Its the kind of info that the builders would never tell me. How many lots would be there, how big they were etc...they just told you to wait and see. So while I waited for the builders to release pricing in January, I decided to call up the smaller builders. Some smaller builders really only build half million and better homes, so ahh...they passed on my request. But I did find three that were going to be building in the south end beside Carson Reid, and Pidel homes. Hira Homes, Gatto, and Diamond. Gatto would take a deposit of 10K, and then ' we'd talk in the spring '. Not a good idea if I don't end up liking the pricing, but I'm not locked in either. Diamond had some nice designs, and he includes an HRV with each home. His pricing is fair - about the same as Carson Reid and Pidel, BUT he builds a better home ( better doors, wood molding, wrapped basements etc ). The last guy is a builder who has been around for 5 years, and this is perhaps why his pricing was better. We decided to go with him - finally firmed up with somebody. His pricing was good enough that there was no point in waiting. I have a pretty good idea of what the price increases will be for the next phase, and I have the information packages for every builder for the south end for the last phases. Basically his pricing was 10K to 20K less then the last phase, so my best guess is that in the next phase it would work out to be 15K to 25K less. The best part though for us is that we wanted a finished basement apartment - full legal setup. We've been quoted $35 to $40K for this. He offered to do this for $22k. So he was cheaper - but the he also was building a better house - even better the Diamond. Real wood doors, large wood trim, oak railing, wrapped basements as standard. The other reason was the lot. We get to be in a very nice area in the south end. Diamond homes are 3 houses down from our lot - he said he could only build a home if we spent $350K with him ( ditto for Gatto ). The Pidel and Carson Reid homes will end up being in that range too, but the smaller builders will make a nicer home for the same money. Including the basement apartment, our home will be 60K less, but will be about the same sizes so will fit in nicely in the area. Hira unlike his competition has much lower overhead since he doesn't have a large compliment of staff - its a family business so its much more cost effective. So he can offer great prices. Being small though, he has 10 lots in the area, and even though they won't be built till next fall, he will likely sell the last 2 lots in the next 2 weeks. All this without any advirtising. Thats just how fast houses sell in the south end of guelph.

So in the south end, I get a river in my backyard ( backs onto one ), we get the walk out basement, Hang gets a short trip to work, a brand new school two blocks away, and best part neighbours whose houses will pull our house price up 20K to 30K within the first year. That last part was the biggest reason to give up on the east end up. The house is an investment after all.

Perhaps it was this last part ( besides my parents liking the area ), that finally convinced them to move with us. Its been and on and off again idea for a long while. Yesterday they firmed up on a lot across the street. Hira Homes worked out an equally nice deal on an all brick home that they are very happy with. Its a variation on the one we picked, but it will be all brick, and inside there are a few differences. I really wanted my parents to move with us, because I really thought that by being close to each other we could really help each other much more. We could share things like the snow blower and other tools, eventually when we have kids I think it would be nice to have them close, and maintaining that computer I gave to my dad will be either - gonna hook him up to the house LAN via a wireless bridge.

Firefox is pissing me off

I've replaced having Mozilla as the backup browser, with Firefox, and I've used it on many sites. I am aware of a few of the incompatibilities, but I hadn't pointed it to my own website to discover this other issue.

None of my little DivX movies will show up in the Firefox browser.

I use a piece of HTML like this:

img border="0" dynsrc="http://kozmik.guelph.on.ca/gallery/somemovie.avi" start="fileopen" loop="infinite"

Works fine in IE. Not in Firefox. No clue yet how to fix it. But I'm still googling ( If Yahoo can use themselves as verb, so can Google ), so maybe I'll find something.

Ahh I found it. Netscape decided that the world should use ' src = ' for everything, while MS decided that ' src = ' would be for static images, and ' dynsrc = ' would be for movies.

Great. Good work guys.

The Googling continues...

[Update] Okay, its more then just a difference in syntax. Its become an IE exploit. Guess I'll have to find an alternative way of displaying the movies.

Dude your getting a Dell

Its finally official ( the writing has been on the wall for a bit ). IBM has sold their PC division to a chinese manufacturer who gets to keep the name for 5 years.

It makes sense for IBM since they have been turning themselves into a 'services' company ( its where the money is ), and only manufacturing what they can't outsource as a means to provide service.

Now what I'm wondering is what it will mean to the company I work for. We are a very 'Blue' company, but like most large companies Dell has been making inroads at the architech level. I wouldn't be surprised if I started seeing more Dell products coming in for examination in the near future.

Leap of faith

We've on and off shopping for a wedding ring and engagement set for a few months. With some local prices in mind we shopped in a Niagara falls recently and the prices were better, but I wanted to check out ebay one more time. We found something that we both agreed looked nice and decided we would take a chance. I have been looking at ebay for a while checking out different vendors and there are a few vendors have a been on ebay for a few years and have several thouand peices of feedback.

So after deciding that we'd go for it, we used Auctionstealer to snipe the auction for us. Trend wise I know that when auctions end during the morning of a workday they don't go for as much as on weekends, so I watched a few auctions closing on other rings, so I could figure out the prices trends, and then figured out a low price and then just kept sniping for it.

So we finally won an auction at the price that I decided on. Over the weekend I called up and did the transaction over the phone with a credit card. Most people don't like doing this, but I would rather talk to a person so I can make sure they understand how I would like the packaged shipped. For canadians its important to use USPS to send stuff up here, since they have the lowest brokerage charge, and frankly sometimes you win the Duty lottery with them and they don't charge duty. The other reason I use a CC rather then paypal is that if I have a problem my CC will work refund me the transaction, but they won't if I did it through paypal. Since paypal only processed the transaction they are always doing the job right and so there is no reason for a refund. You have to take it up with paypal, and frankly I don't trust them to help me in such a matter.

So after talking with the ebay vendor on the phone, I recieved his emails to confirm the transaction, and now we wait. He has to resize the ring, and have his partner do the paperwork for the ring ( GIA papers ). This will likely take a while. Maybe two weeks till it arrives. I hope in the end we are pleased and that what we get is what we was advirtised in the auction.