Sub Ubi

I spent a lot of time in the past few weeks reading about sub-prime mortgages. You see, I’ve just entered into a mortgage, and I wondered what my risk was. Was I in danger, in some way, because of all of this financial foolishness? Well, of course: everyone on the block around me could loose their shirt, and my home purchase would be devalued. I don’t think that’s going to be the case, however, so lets just say that my largest risk is probably general economic collapse.

But what if I were in a different situation? Say I had purchased a condo for around $200K. I purchased it with a short-term ARM (perhaps a 5-year) about four years ago, and I now need to decide what to do. The rate is about to jump, I don’t want to sell just yet, but at the same time, I don’t want to watch my monthly payments double in the next few years. Because I’m in a good financial position (right now), I decide to refinance. There are two ways I could do this.

It’s fine!

I used to live at 3 Woodland Way in Canterbury, England. In this house, we had a saying: “It’s fine!” Usually, this is said forcefully while something is on fire. Typically, that particular thing (whether it is a microwave or a coffee machine) should not be on fire. It was an assertion, not an assessment, intended to calm any housemates who may be witness to the unfolding disaster.

I could look around at my local economy, and declare “It’s fine!” I might, then, refinance with another 5-year ARM. Doing a bit of reading:

Under this model, an ARM that starts at 5.75 percent can increase to 7.75 percent in the second year, to 9.75 percent in the third year, and 11.75 in the fourth year. This means monthly payments will nearly double.

So, if I believe that my local economy will outshine the global economy, and that I will be able to refinance and sell within five years without substantial loss, then I should go ahead with the 5/1 ARM. Why? Because I pay less interest now, offload my property in three years, and save money in the process.

We’re screwed, Cap’n

I heard my housemate Ed say this more than once: this was often stated in aftermath of declaring “It’s fine!” The US economy is fcuked. We are in recession. We are getting hit hard on jobs, oil, and the ongoing debacle that is the subprime crisis. Hell, people have even stopped buying Hum-Vees.

No economy in the US will weather this well. I take that back: small, isolated micro-economies (rural towns, etc.) will continue to do as poorly as they ever have. In other words, they won’t be effected by large wiggles in the economy, because they run on a lower baseline and the ripples aren’t felt as fiercely. So, arguably, small economies will do better as the fecal matter hits the rotating blades.

Large economies (cities) cannot fare well. Cleveland is already being gutted (charts and graphs) by the subprime scandal, and we haven’t yet seen the fallout from this. To claim that any one market will do better than another is crazy-talk; certainly, I’d want data to support such crazy-talk, but… oops! That data comes from the future. So, I guess I won’t be seeing that data.

Snark aside, there would seem to be only one option: financial conservatism. The safest move is to refinance on a stable, 30-year mortgage. A 30-year fixed at 6.25% will involve a monthly payment of roughly $1200. This is a bit higher than the ARM, and yes, you pay $250K in interest over the life of the loan. However, the life-of-loan figure is a lie. We can refinance later if the rate comes down—not to buy a new car, but to jump from a 30-year to a 15-year mortgage, thus saving substantial cash. (We avoid the 15-year now because of the higher monthly payments; the 30-year gives us more breathing room right now.) Or, we can pay on a bi-weekly basis to cut the 30-year to a 22-year mortgage… if we’re making a steady flow of serious cash. (Remember the golden rule: the bank will always take your money.)

But again, if the goal isn’t to keep the property forever, it is simply a matter of “when” we are going to sell, not “if”. Hence, we shouldn’t care about the interest, or refinancing, or anything else for that matter. Instead, we should just care about getting into the safest financial position we can find now, and make sure that it is a position from which we can weather any coming crisis. If we manage to sell in three years, we paid a relatively small amount more (per month) for the safe 30-year loan over the unsafe 5/1 ARM. If the economy is in such dire straits in three years we cannot sell, and we’re lucky we’re employed and still have a place to live, then we want to make sure that our loan doesn’t yank that stability out from under our feet—which a 5/1 could easily do.

Keep in mind, I don’t actually know anything about long-term finance, but I am having a hard time finding ways to argue for the higher-risk strategy unless you’re prepared to loose. I, myself, would not be in a position to see base housing costs double.

Of course…

The safest-est move is to dump the property while/if there is a local economy that is in the mood to buy. Then, the whole discussion becomes moot, and the financial burden is covered by an SEP field… it becomes Somebody Else’s Problem.

If this were me, selling right now would mean I’d have to move in with my parents for a while, and it would be inconvenient… but I’d sleep better knowing that a clean, empty condo sells better than one with people in it. However, prepping a property for sale so that prospective buyers want to buy it as soon as they see it is another post entirely.

I have to move stuffs from an apartment in Boston to (free, short-term) storage in Cleveland.

A U-Haul truck would cost me around $600 one-way from Boston to Cleveland. I’d get it for four days, which means I could conceivably do Boston-Cleveland-Meadville-Cleveland… if I hurry the whole way. The car would be towed behind. The cost of the rental would be approximately $700, and the fuel would probably cost between $250 and $300 (for Boston to Cleveland only). The total cost for a U-Haul-based move would be around $950.

If I go with something like ABF U-Pack, I can get a cute little 6′ x 7′ x 8′ box dropped off outside our apartment. I pack it full of our crap, and then they take it away. The cube gets dropped off at the same place I’d have to drive the U-Haul. The cost to ship a single cube from Boston to Cleveland is roughly $800. However, in-between, I don’t have to drive the truck; instead, Carrie and I would just hop in our little Echo and drive to Ohio. A U-Haul truck from Cleveland to Meadville and back would cost around $300 (rental plus milage), and fuel would cost around $100; so, the total cost for a U-Pack based move is $1200.

The final twist is that the real estate agency we worked with on purchasing our new home (yeah, that’s a subtle announcement) provides a truck that we can use for free. We could scoot out to Cleveland, pick up our stuffs, and drive back to Meadville, the only cost being fuel. Fuel would cost around $100. So, we could ship our stuff to Cleveland, and pick it up using the agency’s truck, and our total cost would be around $900.

In other words, I think I can avoid driving a truck across the country, and it comes out to roughly the same price. I like that idea a lot.

Update, later that day…

Pete D. points out that having free access to a moving truck only involved buying a house. So, to be fair, that truck cost a lot more than any of the other options…

653 miles, 11.5 hours. Our little Echo got almost spot-on book values the whole way at 34 miles per gallon. And the MacBook did well, too: on battery, I roughed in 19 pages of a paper I’ve been trying to write in fits and starts since this summer. (Mind, I did over half the driving, so that wasn’t 12 hours of battery.)

	I received 70 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz Canon S5

And then I got home and took this sound-effect quiz. Why? I don’t know. I missed a few, which disappointed me. Clearly, my sound-effect-fu is wanting.

I have a lot of crap on my desktop.

I think that I need to do some cleanup on my laptop. The desktop is just garbage, and the Documents folder is mostly virtual machines. Time to buy some external drives.

Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.)

Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner quoted in Anderson’s “Security Engineering”; found here.

I’ve been much more organized since I finished my PhD. I wrote a small application to help me keep track of things that need doing, but… the granularity wasn’t right. That, and the theft of my Powerbook really made me realize that computer-based productivity solutions have limited utility.

When I heard that David Allan (author of “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”) declared there would be no second edition of his book, I decided to buy it. (At least, I read somewhere that he declared there would be no second edition… but I can’t find the source, now. So that may be a complete lie.)

Either way, I’ve found two sites really useful in my “getting organized” kick that I’ve been on today:

1. http://www.diyplanner.com/, a site full of do-it-yourself daily planner templates (of exceptionally good quality), and
2. http://incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/, a site that lets me quickly and easily create graph paper.

It’s great awesome. I’m in the process of creating a daily planner that has the stuff in it that I want, and tailoring it to a fairly GTD-ish process that I’ll work at implementing over the next few months. Getting this ramped up before the move north (more on that later) means the move will be less traumatic in the end.

I’m selling a Samsung SC-D353 miniDV digital camcorder on eBay.

It is, for all intents and purposes, brand new. I opened it, I tested it, it works, and I never put it to use. It has sat on a shelf for eight months.

It opens at $100, and can be purchased outright for $200.

Buy and enjoy.

I’m pleased. My ‘gtd’ script has evolved nicely over the last few days. By default, the output of the ‘gtd’ command line script looks like:

  20     3d @online  bills  Visa/MC/House bills
  10     3d @online  DIAS   PL email follow-up
  11     5d @online  CPA    CPA reg?
  19     6d @online  ICER   PhICER app deadline
  21  1w 1d @fun     life   6th anniv.
  12  2w 0d @PB      ACM    RoboDeb draft
   9  4w 0d @mtg     CPA    draft presentations
   1  4w 3d @mtg     DIAS   Manchester
   2  4w 4d @mtg     DIAS   Manchester
   3  4w 6d @online  ACM    SIGCSE paper due
   8  5w 0d @online  ACM    ACM SAC due
   4  6w 2d @mtg     CPA    CPA
   5  6w 3d @mtg     CPA    CPA
   6  6w 4d @mtg     CPA    CPA
   7  6w 5d @mtg     CPA    CPA
  13  8w 4d @online  AAAI   Symposium CFP
  17 070324 @fun     life   Sarah + Andy wedding
  14 070326 @mtg     AAAI   Symposium
  15 070327 @mtg     AAAI   Symposium
  16 070328 @mtg     AAAI   Symposium

There are a number of things I like about the tool as it has evolved. For one, I like the relative dates; they have more meaning to me, in the short term, than absolute dates. For example, it is more meaningful to me that I should handle my bills in three days time, rather than knowing I should do it on the 7th of August. I can also display this information by context (proceeded by an ‘@’) or by project. Of course, I can edit existing entries, flag items as being done, and if I want, remove entries from the ToDo list completely.

[Lyra] gtd > gtd -h
gtd [ <flag> ... ] [<todo>] ...
 where <flag> is one of
  -@ <context>, --context <context> : Add context to the ToDo in question.
  -! <project>, --project <project> : Assign this ToDo to a project.
  -# <date>, --date <date> : Assign this ToDo a completion date.
  -e <id>, --edit <id> : Edit an existing entry.
  -d <id>, --done <id> : Complete a ToDo.
  --remove <id> : Remove an entry.
  -s <regexp>, --search <regexp> : Search DB using a regular expression.
  --by-context : Show ToDos by context.
  --by-project : Show ToDos by project.
  --date-display <mode> : Date display mode; either 'relative' or
                             'absolute'. Default is 'relative'.
  --help, -h : Show this help

Because I’m using the MzScheme “cmdline.ss” library, I also get some nice help documentation “for free”. That’s quite handy.

The current default for the script is to render a .reminders file as well; this works with the UNIX utility ‘remind’ (useful links: 1, 2, and the home of remind). This is incredibly handy; I then render it to my desktop using Geektool:

As you can see, I render both a calendar and my ToDo list to my desktop; this way, it’s never more than a short keypress away. I like this, because it makes it very easy to figure out when I’m supposed to be doing what, where.

This may be one of the more immediately useful programs I’ve written lately. As in “this solves a problem I have, right now, and solves it the way I want.” That’s very groovy.

Here’s a corporate act of desperation: get big, A-list webloggers to pimp your product under the banner of “getting user feedback”.

Both BoingBoing and MAKE Blog (perhaps among others) were asked by Sony for feedback on their… not yet shipping?… eBook reader.

Perhaps this is because Sony was beaten to market by a higher-resolution (1024×768 vs. 800×600), less restrictive (TXT, HTML, PDF without DRM), more fully-featured eBook reader.

If Phillips was sharp, they’d have readers in the mail to both the BoingBoing and MAKE crews right now. If they can be bought with a request for feedback, Phillips can certainly score a free review by sending them product. Today.

If I want to write about CS education and concurrency, I can write about it on the Transterpreter weblog.

If I want to write about things happening in the CS world “at large,” I can use the Untyping weblog.

Now, when I want to write about cool things in Greenfoot, I can use On Walkabout with Greenfoot.

I still dream of turning CS-ED.org into a collaborative, group weblog written by CS Educators.

The truth is, I actually like having these obvious contexts for writing; whether anyone reads these things is another matter entirely. However, I enjoy my work on the Transterpreter, and having a place to put that content (that makes sense) is great. Likewise, I’m very excited about On Walkabout; I think it’s a great way to explore a new piece of software, and perhaps come up with some good material for teaching and learning besides. And who knows—perhaps I can still make CS-ED.org work.

Eh, we’ll see. I was, in some ways, wondering if I wanted to let this weblog go. Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t; we’ll see. If nothing else, this is a roundabout way to encourage people who are interested in teaching, microworlds, and Java, to start reading Walkabout. And for everyone else, if you wonder where the words are going, it’s just that they’re usually not going here.