This has got to be an experience that’s unique to the first world: you walk into a bathroom and your nostrils are hit with the scent of artificial lemon attempting to mask harsh disinfectants that will kill anything and you think “Clean.”
Pack a power strip
Whether you’re at the airport or on jury duty, busting out the power strip can make you look like a genius. The non-geniuses are the ones walking around hunched over, laptop and power cord in hand, desperately looking for an open outlet that just doesn’t exist. Power strips are also handy for dealing with the ridiculously short length of Apple’s iPhone USB cable.
IM on the go with meebo for iPhone
I’ve already talked about using meebo’s web app, but now meebo has an iPhone client:
one app to rule them all
The Meebo native iPhone app. It’s fast, it’s pretty, and it just flat-out works. Available now for iPhone and iPod touch.
Like the web app, the iPhone client has an elegant interface and keeps you logged in and alerted to all your latest IMs. Now that they’ve got both the web and the iPhone covered, I can’t imagine using anything else for IM.
Bringing Facebook comments back to WordPress
If you use WordPress, import your blog’s feed into Facebook Notes, and are a little annoyed that the Facebook comments aren’t reflected on your “real blog,” then you might want to install Facebook CommentsTNG:
Facebook CommentsTNG is a plugin for your WordPress blog that will spider your notes page and find imported WordPress blogs and bring the comments back into WordPress.
The Facebook comments show up with the comment writer’s name, a link to Facebook, and a Facebook logo as the avatar.
I suppose there are a couple small privacy concerns here.
First, you need to provide your Facebook credentials in order to crawl the notes and import the comments. I’m guessing Facebook Connect doesn’t provide an API for this. So it’s a question of whether you trust a guy named Phil to write a benevolent WP plugin. You might want to take a few seconds to view the plugin code.
Second, your “friends” who have commented on Facebook haven’t necessarily opted in to having their full name published on the Internet outside of a closed system like Facebook. But if this is something that actually concerns them, I’d advise that they not comment on anything on Facebook. Just visit the WordPress blog and make up an anonymous handle. Trusting a website to keep you safe/anonymous/private is stupid. You need to take responsibility for your own online presence.
Rent vs. Buy
Somewhere along the way people lost their common sense when it came to real estate. Houses that used to sell for $250k started looking attractive at $1m because everything else was selling for $1.1m. But while the prices of comparable houses in a submarket gives you some indication of the market value of a house, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should buy that house. The cheapest overpriced house is still an overpriced house.
One thing I like to look at is a simple comparison of rents and mortgage payments. Calculate the mortgage payment for a property you are looking at, then compare it to the rent of a comparable place. This can sometimes be difficult when trying to evaluate a large single family detached house, since there may not be too many comparable rentals in the area, but for a smaller house or a condo, you shouldn’t have a problem.
In my neighborhood, I’ve seen plenty of condos that are being offered as rentals for $2000-3000 a month. Assuming an interest rate of 5.25%, this payment would translate to a mortgage of $362,000-$543,000. Assuming a 20% down payment, this results in a house price of $453,000-$679,0000. Comparable condos actually sell for $550,000-750,000.
Looking a little wider, 2 bedroom single family detached houses are renting for $3000-4000 a month, translating to a house price of $750,000-$900,000. The asking price of these houses are still $1m and up.
This simple calculation doesn’t even take into account the additional recurring costs of homeownership: property taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Nor does it take into account the time or transaction costs involved when you happen to find a great new job and have to extend your commute or sell your house. Nor does it put a price on the risk of falling housing prices.
But never mind all that. Just keep it simple and look at the rent vs. mortgage payment as a starting point. Purchasing a house is a big emotional as well as financial investment, and emotions run pretty high when you’re talking about owning a piece of property with your name on it, providing a shelter for your family, and possibly regretting the biggest financial mistake of your life. By starting simple, you might be able to run a sanity check: Is the pride of homeownership worth a $100,000 premium on that small 2-bedroom condo? If you saved the $1000 difference every month in an ING Direct account at 1%, what could you do with the $61,500 you would save over 5 years?