Month: March 2007

My brother-in-law is in town for a job interview, so last night we went out get some dinner. He was craving a burger, so we went to The Diner in Adam’s Morgan. I’d never been. I’d recommend it – the service was good, my burger was good, and they have Sierra Nevada on tap. Ten minute wait at 8pm on a rainy Thursday wasn’t great, but it could have been worse.

What was great, though, was watching the end of the Duke-VCU game. I had been glancing at the score now and then throughout the second half. Like any normal person from the DC Metro area, I hate Duke. And so the highlight of the evening was definitely when VCU’s Eric Maynor pulled up and hit a quick jumper from the foul line to put VCU up, 79-77, with 1.8 seconds left. Most of the restaurant yelled. The two girls sitting at the table in front of me, who probably didn’t even know there was a TV in the place, let alone a tight game going down to the wire, jumped.

It was anti-climactic when Duke missed their desperation three to end the game. But it was still nice to watch.

Have I mentioned that I love living in the city? Now, when we have guests, we can walk 5-10 minutes and find all kinds of cool stuff. A walk like that from our old place left you in a little strip mall with an old Safeway and a Radio Shack. We can give them directions to Sticky Fingers rather than Dunkin’ Donuts. They can hop on the Metro when they need to go somewhere instead of borrowing a car.

Actually, we don’t need guests to do all that. But we have guests now (Well, technically we have A guest until his girlfriend arrives, and I think she’s on the Flyer from Dulles to West Falls Church right now).

A Pet Cause Celebre link via my mom

“They have never eaten meat in their whole lives,” [Ward 1 Councilman Jim] Graham said. “They are about as green as you can be for white Westies.”

Well, that’s nice to know. Our Councilman buys additive-free food for his dogs from a local store. I still don’t know much about him, which is probably something that should change. I imagine he’ll be up for re-election at some point, and since I don’t (yet) have a senator, I’ll be desperate to get my voting fix.

And I think I might have to drag the wife down there to get some additive-free food for my crazy cat, too. Actually, dragging the wife probably isn’t going to happen. It’s pretty clear that it’s MY cat, not OUR cat.

Anyway, maybe they have something to keep the cat from being so weird. She is more active at 5:15AM for about half and hour than she is the entire rest of the day. Luckily she didn’t adjust for Daylight Saving, and now she doesn’t bother me as much because I’m usually awake. But this morning she was scratching at something for a while, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to get out of bed and see what it was. I didn’t see anything destroyed, so I guess it was something harder than her claws, but it’s never good to hear your pets (Or children, I suppose, but I don’t yet have children) making destructive noises.

Every weekday, the right side of Harvard Street is closed for parking during rush hour, both morning and evening. That gives traffic two lanes on this one-way street, and parking one lane. It’s a big cut-through between 16th and 14th, so traffic is pretty heavy at times.

On Tuesdays, they clean the left side of the street. So there’s no parking there all day, and the parking restriction on the right side of the street is lifted. In the winter, there is no street cleaning, so these rules don’t apply.

However, the result of this is not that Tuesday is the same as Monday and Wednesday through Friday. What happens on Tuesday is that everyone ignores the “no parking on the left side” signs, and obeys the “You can park on the right side today” signs. So they park on both sides of the street all day, meaning that the afternoon rush outside my window is particularly heavy. I’m glad I’m already home and parked right out front.

It looks like it might have been sort of my fault that our wireless disappeared. I may have inadvertently changed the name of my neighbor’s network instead of ours. Which wouldn’t be possible if Comcast actually set different passwords on the routers. It also shouldn’t have happened because I told my computer not to connect to the neighbor’s network any more after we got our own, but it apparently didn’t get that memo.

It seems to be resolved now. I still have my old modem from Cox cable, so I plugged that in, Comcast activated it, and I’m using my Linksys router like I wanted to originally, and everything seems to be fine.

The quality of our cable tv is still poor, though. I still stand by my statements about Comcast sucking.

Let me count the ways in which Comcast sucks. First, it took them over a month to recognize that my house had been converted to condos. The guy upstairs spent that whole time fighting with them. Even after they finally acknowledged multiple units and installed his cable, their customer service was unable to schedule an install at my house for a few days because it wasn’t in the computer.

Finally, they came out and installed the cable. They did this while my wife was home, not me, so I was unable to check what the installer did. First, he used a combination modem/wireless router. This probably saves Comcast money, but is really annoying for those of us who have a Linksys wireless router with integrated Vonage phone jacks, and don’t want to use Comcast’s crappy router. Never mind that Comcast assumes that I’m incapable of changing settings on the router, and doesn’t leave me login details. I found the IP in my history, and he had saved the password, but that hardly seems sufficient. Then he set the name of the network to my last name, which is exactly what I want to be broadcast to anyone in range.

Luckily, it wasn’t hard to fix the settings, although if IE ever forgets the password, I’m going to have to figure out how to reset it. I turned off the wireless of the Linksys router, and the phone works, so that’s only a minor annoyance.

Then, after about 24 hours, my computer stopped seeing the Comcast router’s wireless signal. I tried cycling the power, and still nothing. I plugged in with an ethernet cable, which worked, but I was unable to get to the router login to check and make sure it still thought it was broadcasting the signal. So, currently I have what is effectively a wired modem/router, and I’m using the wireless from my Linksys. This would be fine if Comcast had just set me up with a modem and let me provide my own wireless. But since they provided a wireless router (Which, actually, provides a slightly faster connection than the Linksys. Although that may be only because the Linksys has to go through the Comcast router. Anyway.), I would like to be able to use it.

The cable, however, was even worse. I paid for HD, and wanted to switch over once my wife started watching ABC in SD. I found the second ABC channel, which seems to be something in between SD and HD. I’m not sure what it is, but it kind of sucks. It sucked even more because the Comcast installer was running coax to the tv. Can you even send an HD signal over coax? It comes in from outside over coax, but I didn’t think it was an option from the cable box to the tv.

I didn’t think it was possible to nostalgic about my mediocre experience with Cox, but Comcast has not done a single thing right since I started dealing with them. I’m tempted to try to bribe Verizon to bring Fios to our neighborhood.

In any event, I hope to have this resolved this week. Currently everything is working, just not very well. I’m sure you can guess how excited I am at the prospect of sitting on hold with Comcast tech support (Their automated phone service refused to accept my home phone number, and wouldn’t give me a person, so I had to wait ten minutes on hold with customer service to be transferred to wait on hold for tech support).

Area has high number of subprime mortgages

Never mind that this article is using data from 2004 to talk about the effect a large percentage of subprime loans has on the current market. The larger problem is that they’re ignoring the other details.

First, the DC housing market has a bit of a crutch that other areas don’t have, and that’s the federal government. There will always be federal jobs here, and so there will always be demand for housing. I think if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that the DC area is less susceptible to recessions and things like that because the government never goes away. Second, the housing market generally picks up with the warm weather. January was probably as bad as it’s going to get for a while (NB: I am not in the mortgage industry. I worked at Fannie Mae for a year in 2002-3, but that hardly qualifies me as an expert.).

That doesn’t mean that people with bad credit who have taken on loans that they can’t really afford aren’t going to get hurt. But the real issue there is not the housing market at all. A strong market does help people get out from under their homes if they can no longer afford them. But it doesn’t address the root of the issue, which is that these loans never should have been made. I know there has been a push for more regulation on subprime lending, and I know it’s a fight to balance between allowing people with little credit or bad credit to buy homes and protecting the uninformed from bad decisions.

I hesitate to push for more regulation, to force lenders to teach potential homebuyers about what they’re getting into. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a push for more transparency. I just bought a home, and with a degree in math and a year in the secondary mortgage industry, I still had trouble deciphering all the paperwork they threw at me. Even my wife, a lawyer, had trouble wading through all the paperwork. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. It SHOULDN’T be that complicated. I think that’s where we have to make some changes. If everything is out in the open, in plain and simple English, we will reduce the problem because people will better understand what they’re getting themselves into.

We’ll still have people who take on mortgages they can’t afford. But we can’t protect everyone from their own stupidity all the time.