I'm living in rural Florida (USA) with my wife, son, two cats, and quite a few computers. I actively work in several areas of interest but still find time to manage several websites, execute home improvements, ride the Harleys, and play with cool toys. I'm reasonably fit for an Old Guy, equally comfortable wielding a keyboard, torque wrench, or spatula. I've got a scary-low tolerance for bullshit.
This points to a LONG article but it’s something you should read anyway. The title is exceedingly misleading – the author doesn’t actually get into talking about Tesla and Musk and his cars until more than halfway in! On the way there are lots of things to see and think about. Many well-thought-out graphics, links to sources and citations, and good footnotes, too.
Besides being interested in the subject material, something else that helped me breeze through the article is that I liked the writing style. You may or may not agree.
Depending on your interest and/or free time might take you a couple of sittings to work through this. Seriously.
So if the car industry has a cupcake and its parents are forcing it to eat vegetables, the oil industry has a cupcake but its parents are forcing it to eat razor blades. The car industry will resist the veggies and have a little tantrum before grudgingly giving in—the oil industry will furiously try to gouge the parents’ eyes out in resistance because for him, this is life and death.
I’ve used this old and outdated Windows mail client since it was kind of new, more than 25 years ago. I chose it when I was moving my message store from a shell account to a PC, right around when PCs started to get reliable enough such work. Eudora was the first client I discovered whose message store was a simple transfer from Unix, drop-in, and run. I never looked back. Since then I’ve developed a rather extensive set of filters and such to efficiently manage dozens of email accounts and tens of GB of messages.
Bummer, Eudora hasn’t been actively supported since Qualcomm gave it up in 2006. Yeah, I know, it went Open Source. But IMHO they went and screwed it up.
As with any unsupported software, sometimes the passage of time breaks things. More than a few times I’ve cast about for another capable email client. It’s always gone the same way: I find none, get tired of searching, and turn my attention to propping the old girl up just a bit longer.
One afternoon in October last year one of my email hosts suddenly rejected its SSL certificate. It happens. When it does, Eudora offers to trust the new certificate. Thereafter all’s well. Not this time.
It wasn’t my host, and it wasn’t a critical account. Via trouble tickets, I went back and forth with the admins at the hosting company for the better part of a month. They’d suggest something, I’d try it – and maybe try a few things on my own – but nothing worked. Along the way I cast about for a replacement client and I came up dry. Finally I just shut off SSL for the account and got on with life. Not the best solution, but it worked. I really do need to find a new client! Maybe tomorrow… Yeah, right.
Last night Eudora rejected more certificates. This time it affected a multiple accounts on different domains. These were more important to me so I needed a solution.
And I found one.
First, some groundwork. My Eudora is version 7.1.0.9 running on Windows 8.1 Update 1. Of note, Eudora has a patched QCSSL.dll, needed since Microsoft made some changes to a library that caused the old client to loop for a Very… Long… Time… on the first use of SSL. I think that was around the time Windows 7 launched. Depending on your version(s), you may find differences in the dialogues and steps. I tried to give enough detail that you might find your way.
Let’s get started. The certificate rejection error looks like this:
Server SSL Certificate Rejected
See the question in the dialogue, “Do you want to trust this certificate in future sessions?”
It once was a simple matter of clicking the Yes button and that would be that. But that didn’t work in October and it didn’t work last night either.
Heres what to do to fix the problem.
Close the error dialogue and open Properties for the affected Persona. On the Incoming Mail tab (because it’s likely that a receive operation failed first), click the Last SSL Info button. The Eudora SSL Connection Information Manager opens. It looks like this:
Eudora SSL Connection Information Manager
There’s some weirdness in this dialogue, some confusion over host names. I think it’s a junk message. Click the Certificate Information Manager button. The Certificate Information Manager opens, and it looks like this:
Certificate Information Manager
Look at the section called Server Certificates. See the smiley face? That means trusted status. Expand that certificate tree in the usual way – click the plus sign next to it. Keep expanding, drilling down until you see one that’s untrusted. That’s the one with the skull ‘n crossbones. Of course.
The Certificate Information Manager panel, with the untrusted certificate, will now look something like this:
Certificate Information Managed – Expanded to show untrusted certificate
Click the offending untrusted certificate to select it then click the View Certificate Details button. The Certificate opens. It looks like this:
Certificate panel
Select the General tab, if necessary, and click the Install Certificate button. The Certificate Import Wizard panel opens. It looks like this:
Certificate Import Wizard – Location
Choose a Store Location – Current User or Local Machine – as needed for your situation. I chose the Current User because I’m the only user on this box. Click the Next button. The Certificate Import Wizard continues, and it looks like this:
Certificate Import Wizard – Certificate Store
The wizard asks where to store the certificate. Windows can automatically choose the Store based on the type of certificate, and that’s a pretty good choice. It’s also the default. Click the Next button to display a confirmation panel. It looks like this.
Certificate Import Wizard – Completing the Certificate Import Wizard
Click the Finish button.
Whew! It looks like the import was successful.
Certificate Import Wizard – Success!
Click the OK button to close the Certificate Import Wizard.
Now, you’ll be looking at the Certificate Information Manager again, just how we left it.
Certificate Information Managed – Expanded to show untrusted certificate
With the untrusted skull ‘n crossbones certificate highlighted, click the Add To Trusted button. Then click the Done button to close the Certificate Information Manager.
Finally, try to reach the server that rejected the SSL certificate in the first place.
Did it work?
If it did then you’re finished.
Uh oh, waddya mean, it didn’t work?
You’ll need to go back and follow those steps again.
I hear you now. “Only an idiot does the same thing over and over expecting different results.”
Well, you’ll notice that the next time through the Certificate Information Manager will show a deeper tree of Server Certificates before you get to the untrusted certificate. You’ll need to drill deeper.
You may need to import and add several before achieving success. After a couple of imports it’s easy to forget the Add To Trusted button. Don’t ask me how I know!
I hope that helps someone.
Sometimes I think I’m the very last Eudora user out there. I’d love to hear from others. In fact, if you’ve moved off Eudora and found a decent replacement, I’d love to hear that, too. I know it’s only a matter of time.
Additional information added April 17, 2015…
One person described, in the comments below, that he she had some difficulty with the Add To Trusted button in the Certificate Information Manager when working with Google’s new certificates. His Her insight came when he she realized that he she was simultaneously viewing this post with Google Chrome. When he she closed Chrome and went through the process again, everything worked.
A big THANK YOU goes out to one Pat Toner for checkin’ in and increasing the value of this post with his her feedback. I owe you a beer, Pat. And an apology for my gender assumption based on name.
I was wondering if you had to register for the draft, or you’re in that “gap†group where Selective Service was doing next to nothing? At one time, some of us had to show younger co-workers what a draft card looked like and explain it! You’re younger than I am but maybe not THAT young.
I DID have to register.
I was designated 1S because I was still in high school. Vietnam was in full swing and I watched a number of my older friends leave to serve. (Some made it home whole, some not so whole, and some never made it back at all.) During my final year, 1973, the draft was still going strong. I had left home that spring and as school wound down I was watching that lottery stuff pretty carefully. I’d soon go from a safe 1S to a prime 1A target. Now, I was a skinny little shit, not especially keen on combat. Having already lost friends there, frankly, it scared me. There was this other, fairly new designation – Conscientious Objector, or 1AO – that one could apply for, and I tried for that. As a 1AO, if inducted, I’d serve but wouldn’t be assigned to active combat. There was a bit of paperwork, I collected letters from teachers, church… wherever I could… to substantiate my application. It didn’t work. I became a 1A. Then, in the lottery, my number: 26! It looked like I’d be going in. I waited for my letter. It never arrived and in August the whole thing shut down. The active draft was one of the first things to stop, it was such a political hot button. I’m fairly certain I got very, very drunk when the news hit.
I learned, as I filled in the gaps of this story, that the groundwork for an all-volunteer U.S. military began as early as the end of January, 1973, although it took a while for the shutdown of the draft to actually happen. It leads me to wonder how many young bodies inducted after Laird’s signature but before the last kid shipped out didn’t come home…
I’m pretty sure I still have my draft card somewhere but I can’t recall seeing it for a very long time. It’s probably in that file of papers I dutifully (and securely) care for when I relocate. Stuff goes into that store after which it seldom sees the light of day.
Funny thing. Registration was compulsory when my kid came of age. It was easy, not like it was when I registered and had to personally appear at an office downtown. The process may have actually started with something as simple as an extra checkbox on his DS11 when he upgraded to an ‘adult’ passport at 16. Shortly after he turned 18 he received a letter containing his registration information. There’s no active draft today but his registration card is, actually, a draft card, should the government choose to start drafting again.
[sigh] Over the decades, like many others, my views on military service have changed a great deal.
I haven’t thought about those experiences for a long time. That was a good question, thanks for asking.
Today I spent a goodly part of the day wrenchin’ the Dyna. An interval service was a bit overdue and I wanted t get it done before Biketoberfest. Bummer, I found a few issues…
There’s a bit of debris in the thick part of the tread on the rear tire. It’s about a millimeter thick by maybe 3 millimeters long. No leak, I doubt it goes all the way through, but I didn’t pull it out, either. When I get back I’ll order a new tire. I’m not happy because this tire, while not new, isn’t all that old either. But I don’t like to screw with tires, they’re too important. For the near term I’m going to gamble that it’ll survive the next week or so. I hope that’s not a mistake.
There’s been a nagging hot-start issue for a while now. No issue on cold starts at all, only hot. So I tore into the starter wiring which, for this bike, meant removing the battery and the caddy it lives in, along with associated hardware. I discovered the boot covering the battery positive on the starter had obviously been dislodged for a while. The terminal nut’s torque was a bit under spec, too, so I cleaned that all up and put it back together. Not sure if it cured the issue but it hasn’t been touched since 2008 so maybe…
While the battery caddy was out I had partial access to the back of the electrical caddy on the other side of the bike. I’ve wanted to get back there for a while. For nearly a year I’ve chased an intermittent demon that causes a fuse to blow. The fuse takes out the signals and brake lights. Not good.
Intermittent problems are hard, but careful observation has me believing it’s only triggered when actuating the left signal. It never occurs when I ride alone, only when Pam’s ridin’ bitch. The frequency has been on the rise.
So, poking around back there with a powerful flashlight I thought I saw the glint of copper through some worn insulation. Digging a little deeper confirmed it. The harness had rubbed the back of the starter housing, and apparently for some time.
It’s going to take some effort to effect a permanent repair. There’s very limited access there, and no less than three separate bundles enter the harness just upstream from that spot. It’s all got to come apart so I can open the harness. From there it might be as simple as wrapping the worn spots or as hard as replacing one or more individual wires.
I just don’t have the time now, I need the bike running for Biketoberfest. So I wrapped the offending spot with insulating tape as best I could.
The lesson here is not to put off service until a few days before an event. You never know what you’re going to find.
Tomorrow I’ll finish up, clean and put away the tools, Â and give the ‘ol Dyna a much-needed bath.
See you in Daytona!
[UPDATE – August 20th – Not a single fuse has blown in several hundreds of miles of two-up ridin’ so I think that’s one problem fully identified. The permanent fix will be a bit of a pain in the ass, but that’s okay. The hot-start issue remains. Daytona was  a blast.]
It’s been a long time – maybe too long – since I took inventory of the boxes we use regularly for various purposes around the house.
Except for the DOS box, and maybe the AutoCAD box, these are all in use with frequencies ranging from 24/7 to at least weekly. Omitted are the embedded things, iPods and so on. Making this list just now was a good exercise that surprised me. I mean, no wonder people look at me funny.
(no name) – MS DOS 6.22
Exists solely to run VisiCalc, the very first electronic spreadsheet that the world had ever seen. I fire it up now and again for folks to show ’em just what computing used to be. It has no name because, well, machines didn’t need names back then. You turned ’em on, used ’em, turned ’em off. Pulling the plug was every bit as good as thumbing the power switch.
change – Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit This laptop runs software that I need to use in weird places, like out in the garage tuning motorcycles. It got its name because I bought it with pocket change. I told the story in another post.
coco – IOS, version 8 I suppose, too lazy to look
An iPad tablet. It’s good for reading magazines or looking something up quickly at the dinner table or controlling the TV. Bummer Safari sucks so bad.
darthvader - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
The media client that lives out by the pool, so we have cool tunes out there when we get tired of the radio.
dbox – GNU/Linux 3.13.0-36-generic x86_64
A VirtualBox host machine.
family – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A secure, encrypted file server where the family’s data jewels are stored.
hydra -Â Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1Â – 32-bit
Out in the garage, this runs a long-term project 24/7 – when it’s up. Presently it’s down, though, because a fan protecting its I/O hub is threatening failure and needs a little lube. I’ll get to it.
isolation – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
A sacrificial machine, stuff that needs testing and vetting in a Windows environment isolated from everything – EVERYTHING else – runs here first. Air-gap stuff. Easy to wipe and restore to a known good image.
jesus – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1Â – 64-bit
My son’s gaming rig and desktop. It’s slightly dated now, but as we built it and installed things, stuff completed faster than we thought possible. We’d look again, and yup, it was done, leading us to exclaim “Jesus!” The name stuck.  UPDATE - FEBRUARY 2013 jesus died, according to the BIOS status LEDS, of a processor initialization failure. jesus was replace by lucifer.
lucifer – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1Â – 64-bit
Essentially jesus with a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. My son’s gaming rig and desktop.
macnam – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A MySQL database server. Firesign Theatre fans will recognize the name.
magic – GNU/Linux 3.13.0-36-generic i686
The family’s intranet server. Holds subscription material, a software library, and so on. A basic LAMP server where, sometimes, a bit of Web development gets its start before being deployed elsewhere.
merc -Â Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1Â – 32-bit
An old, small HP netbook with a great keyboard. I’ll write with this out on the deck because the keyboard is so good and the battery life is measured in days.
minecraft  – GNU/Linux 2.6.38-16-generic-pae i686
Duh, it’s a minecraft server, what did you think it was?
overkill - Windows 7 Home Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
Used exclusively for secure communications with entities that require that sort of thing. Well-patched, no email, no browsing, no nothing except its one single purpose.
porky – Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
My primary desktop. It replaced whisky, the desktop I blew up with a ham-handed move with its internal power cables – while it was running. Oops.
rdnzl -Â Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
An old, old laptop, usually hardwired to the DSL modem because sometimes the modem needs a direct connection to recover when  it misbehaves. On the other hand, just the other week it came in handy to run some old proprietary software to collect audio files from a Sony dictation device. You just never know. Frank Zappa fans will recognize the name.
sheepdip - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit Runs AutoCAD Architect, with which I heavily modified the design of a home. We presently live in the result of that effort. Named for a blended  Scotch whisky.
showtime – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A media server. Music, video, and more.
success – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A QuickBooks server supporting the business. Does double-duty as a file server for the business, too.
thor - Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
Pam’s desktop. Next in line for a refresh, the overclocked Intel quad-core’s getting a little long in the tooth.
twoface2Â -Â Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
A first generation Microsoft Surface Pro, this is the travel box. Good enough for me and/or Pam to do just about anything when we’re on the road.
udesk – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-63-generic-pae i686
Just a plain ol’ Linux desktop, when I’m home and a Windows desktop doesn’t quite cut it.
win7-32Â -Â Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1Â – 32-bit
For running stuff that I don’t want cluttering up a work-a-day machine. These days, that’s photo gallery processing, mostly. Naming this one wasn’t one of my most creative moments.
winnie – Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
An unsupported holdout. Then again, there’s software that modern OSs won’t cope with, or have no modern analog, or I just don’t care to upgrade. That stuff runs here. One good example is when I need to pull something from an Outlook message store; I’ll be damned if I want Outlook near anything valuable.
I used to collect my pocket change at the end of the day and dump it into a jar. When the jar filled I’d roll the contents and and put the rolls in a box on a shelf in the closet. That went on for a long, long time.
One day I bought a laptop with it.
Well, it wasn’t actually a one-for-one exchange. It’s even better than that. I ordered the laptop, paid with a credit card. And when the bill came, I deposited the rolls into my bank.
I took ’em to the bank in a smallish cardboard box that weighed a good hundred and fifty pounds.
When I entered the bank I knew it was going to get a little weird. I warned the receptionist that I needed to deposit a large amount of coin. Then I warned the guard that I’d be back in a minute with a small, heavy cardboard box – and a hand-truck. They summoned a person with a cart and a shitload of those little aluminum roll-counting trays. When I returned we set to work.
I deposited something exceeding two grand.
Every computer in the house gets assigned a name – for life – when it gets access to my network. The new laptops name?
Change
Still have the thing, too. It’s resting in the closet, pretty much unused. Not too far from some rolled coin.
We have lots of lizards in Florida. Today, one less.
Pam had been out in the driveway hosing down a trashcan. We like to keep ’em clean – bears, y’know – and Pam was handling that chore while I was in the garage installing new foot controls on her motorcycle. She called me outside.
Pam was saying something about the hose and the water and how it wasn’t flowing, and my mind raced ahead. I was thinking the worst, of course: plumbing failure, well pump failure, and so on. I caught myself and tuned back in. Pam had checked the hose for kinks and, finding none, removed the high-pressure nozzle. And the root-cause of the flow issue had become painfully obvious.
A lizard apparently entered the garden hose. Then Pam came along, connected the hose to a spigot and added the high-pressure nozzle in order to work on the trashcan.
The lizard was undoubtedly quite surprised by the face full of water.
The exit hole of the high-pressure nozzle is no more than 3/16 of an inch when fully open. The considerably larger lizard made a valiant effort at getting through that tiny hole, tail end first. It failed. But along the way it managed to slow the flow of water to a near stop.
And that’s where I came in.
Lizzie was in pretty bad shape, as you might imagine. I tried, for a bit, to clear the nozzle. But it quickly became clear that tools would be needed and it wouldn’t be the most pleasant of jobs.
I suggested the medium-pressure nozzle and Pam resumed her work. I left the lizard-clogged nozzle in the grass and resumed my work.
With that move the lizard assumed its place in the food chain. By tomorrow or the day after, I figure, the nozzle will be clear.
No pictures because, well, y’know, it’s really kinda gross. I’ve got no qualms dispatching insects but dead lizards are sort of sad.
I’m convinced. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe the moisture, I don’t know,
Dead flipflops exhibiting ‘talking shoe’ syndrome.
but it’s something. Stuff rusts that never did before. Stuff rots, falls off, just stops working… you name it.
A week or so back my flipflops failed. Notice the ‘s’? As in plural? Yeah, both of ’em. At the same time. In the same way. The soles began to delaminate. At first I thought I had stumbled over some irregularity but no, they were falling apart. The classical ‘talking shoe’.
“But they’re nearly new!” I complained. “And they’re the best damned flipflops I’ve ever had!”
“Bullshit,” Pam scoffed. “they aren’t new. You’ve had them for years.”
They came from Land’s End so I checked the records. Pam was right, of course. I bought them on July 29th… 2006.
I remembered thinking, back in 2006, that at $24 those were some pretty expensive flipflops. I guess after having a zillion pair of those plastic $2 flipflops they were pricey.
New flipflops, just delivered.
I began thinking about what I might do… contact cement, glue, epoxy…
“Just get some new ones already!” Pam advised.
She was already at her computer. Land’s End still had ’em, but what was once cloth or some sort of synthetic was now leather. I braced myself.
$59! But wait, they were on sale for $29. She placed the order.
And today Dan, our mail delivery guy, brought ’em.
They’re comfy and look like they’ll last forever. And they’d better. Let’s see… 2006 price divided by… Yeah, these should last until around April 2034. Later, if you adjust for inflation…
But Florida kills stuff. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
BASIC was my first computer language. I already had it in my bag of tricks when I bought my first computer, an Apple ][. It cost about $1,400 new, a huge amount of money back then. With that I became the first person I knew that owned their own computer!
My friend Joe who, to this day, doesn’t dick around much with social media, had been doing some CompSci work at college. He couldn’t understand why I’d spend so much on such a bitty box. What the hell could it possibly be good for? He came over to see the thing for himself.
Joe and pulled our first all-nighter programming Conway’s Life – in BASIC – into the box. I think the inspiration came from an article in Scientific American about cellular automata. (There may have been some burnt vegetable matter involved, as well.) By dawn we were watching patterns of dots crawl around on the screen. But hey, they were OUR dots, playing by OUR rules!
(Pam saw it! We go back *way* further than that. I doubt it made much of an impact on her; it would be a long time indeed before computers became generally useful enough for non-geeks to take seriously…)
Soon Joe had an Apple of his own.
We each found our way into lucrative careers in technology that have lasted to this very day. Our professional paths have intersected several times over the decades.
But I doubt either of us have programmed a single line of BASIC for a very, VERY long time. Lemme give it a shot.
1 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
Now go read this great article from Dartmouth, where BASIC got its start. (Eh, the original link died. This one is an okay substitute, especially if you watch the video.)
I had a pair of sneakers like these once. Well, okay, maybe they weren’t Converse – dunno if they were in business back then – but they were bright red and high. I was just a kid.
Had this bicycle, too. A righteous chopper, it was. Cobbled together out of a couple of junk frames and whatever other parts could be scrounged. Amazing what you can do with no cash, some imagination, and dad’s welder (when no one was lookin’). No brakes on that SOB. Stopping was an exercise in contorting one’s body enough to jam the bottom of a sneaker-clad foot against the front wheel.
I think you see where this is going. The sneakers didn’t last too long at all. The left one quickly got a groove worn clean through as I tried to check my speed going down the hill where Adam’s Lane crossed the Northeast Corridor. Delivered a nasty burn that, if memory serves, took an awful long time to heal.
Mom was pissed. So was Dad, when he got home from work. New sneakers, ruined. Bein’ where I ought not be. The illicit welding of bicycle parts of questionable origin. A burnt foot bottom that made me walk funny. It was that last that was the tip-off. Life wasn’t good.
I wore those sneakers, hole and all, for a long time. Must’ve been a lesson in there somewhere ‘cuz I still remember it pretty well.
And not just an ordinary death, either. I killed Whisky, and I killed it but good. Here’s the story…
Whisky’s – er, was – my desktop computer. One of the early Core-i7 systems back in 2009, it rocked rather nicely and handled anything and everything I threw at it. Okay, I hear ya: by today’s standards it was certainly getting a little long in the tooth, but I didn’t care. It still ran like the day I built it. Until March 27.
That morning I was running through the logs, see. We run lots of machines here and I like to keep tabs on ’em. And I found that one of the terrabyte drives, an old Seagate, half of a mirror of some rather important data, had failed. I knew the day would come eventually. Over a year ago the drive reallocated a couple of sectors, but the count was stable at 2 and never rose. I’d figured it’d start throwing more and I’d notice and replace it. And every time we’d be buying drives for this or that I’d shrugged it off. “Next time.” So there wasn’t a hot spare on the shelf.
So instead of getting on with my morning I set out to protect the data. I pulled a couple of other drives and a SATA card – spares for a Linux server – from the shelf and went to install ’em in Whisky’s cavernous case. The plan was to build a new mirror array and copy the data to it. But Windows was balky, seeing the card but not the drives attached to it. Hmm.
Not Whisky, just a representative image. But the damage is just as real.
The data cables were known-good but the modular power cable came from the parts box. So I grabbed another, plugged it into the power supply and the other end into yet another unmounted and unattached drive, figuring to see if it would spin up.
And that’s when the smoke came out.
I heard it and smelled it and nearly hit my head on the underside of the desk as all the internals went dark.
With eSATA you can do that, hotplug, the power connectors are such that you can apply and remove power without trouble. Not so with a regular raw SATA Molex. Clearly, I hadn’t paid enough attention.
At that point I wasn’t sure what had died.
But data data recovery was most important. I walked the good mirror half into the garage where there’s a project running on an old AMD box. Hey, any place where there’s some space, some power, and a network jack’s fair game, right? Windows 7 would be able to make sense of the mirror. Something more than an hour later the data was safe on our internal network, not a single byte of lossage.
I started troubleshooting hardware with the power supply. I found the 12V motherboard 8-pin connector voltage lacking. This is rural Florida and everything isn’t as available as in the northeast. I found a new one, retail, at a store about an hour and a half away. I used the trip wisely, stopping at other stores out in that area: Costco and Ikea.
Later that night I stripped Whisky to the motherboard and attached the new power supply.
I threw the switches. No response at all.
That smoke they put inside this stuff smells. Eau-de-silicon, we call it. It’s an expensive smell.
As I went through today’s snail I found that my CenturyLink invoice had risen by a not-insignificant 28%. CenturyLink bundles a bunch of stuff. There’s the POTS (and its requisite long distance), DirecTV, and High Speed [cough, cough] Internet. When I mentioned Internet, my kid – ever the quick wit – quipped…
“You mean we *pay* them for that???”
I nearly dropped a nut.
He’s right, though. This is rural Florida and the Internet service well and truly sucks. They SHOULD pay us, rather than the other way around. At the far end of a 12,000-foot copper haul to the DSLAM, you just KNOW I’m not makin’ it up.
But that’s not why the bill went up. It was DirecTV. DirecTV’s portion alone rose by fifty-four damned percent. And I know why. A couple of promos, granted when we signed up last year, expired. As if that pap that passes for content was worth the promo rate in the first place. A thousand channels of crap. Thank the almighty Lord in heaven none of us give a flyin’ shit for sports!
The lot of ’em – what a rip. I mean, study after study, survey after survey, who’s at the bottom along with lawyers and used car salesmen? Cable companies and phone companies, that’s who.
When you sell a home, you’re going to get to know two people pretty well: your agent and your attorney. Your team should enjoy comfortable working relationships with one another.
I’d had a business relationship with our attorney for some years. He had handled some deals with me in the past. Pam and I met with him March 27, 2013. We had no plans for staying in New Jersey with the sale underway. It had been a cold month or so preparing our home for market, and we were anxious to return to Florida to warm up a little. We left the meeting feeling comfortable with the representation.
I chose our real estate agent partly because I owed her a favor. She’d helped us to buy the place back in 2000. Over the years we stayed in touch and she’d done some market research for me along the way. At some point I said that if/when we sold the place I’d call. I do what I say I’ll do – it’s one of my guiding principles – so that’s who I called.
No, I’m not mentioning any names. The smallish agency she now worked had been in town for a long time, it was a name I knew. We signed our agreement March 29, 2013, planning to hit the market April 2. I sold our log splitter to my agent’s boss, a co-owner at the agency, as he left after a visit..
With that stroke of the pen we became part of the Real Estate Sales Process. We hit the road for Florida the very next day.
The Process Nobody talks directly in a real estate deal. All conversation with the buyer goes through agents and attorneys. It’s kind of like driving your car from the backseat, where the driver describes what they see and you respond with detailed instructions. “It looks like the road ahead may curve to the left a little and we could be approaching the right shoulder.” “Try reducing speed by 12% and rotate the steering wheel counterclockwise 11 degrees for… 3.5 seconds. How’s that?” It’s a hugely inefficient and frustrating process. When you’re a thousand miles away the process is accomplished with email, phone, fax, and the occasional overnight courier. I suppose it serves to keep the buyer and seller from getting nasty with one another. But still. The process, in (very) broad strokes, goes something like this:
Take an offer and negotiate a contract price.
Make a contract, which effectively takes the home off the market.
Have the attorneys review the contract, make adjustments, and create an actual contract.
Research the title.
Have a home inspection, wait for the results.
Maybe make repairs/adjustments, maybe negotiate the price some more, maybe revise the contract as needed. Maybe repeat.
Satisfy outstanding issues. Utilities, taxes, fees, town requirements, etc.
Close the deal.
This thing I’ve called a contract? In real estate, a contract doesn’t carry any more weight than the scribbling on the back of a napkin. The first thing attorneys do in their review is agree to remove any teeth they find in the boilerplate. It’s a roadmap filled with uncertainty. Buyer will put this amount of money on the table by some date, some more by another date, there’s this much time to get an inspection done, the deal may close by that date, and so on. But if anyone misses a milestone it doesn’t really matter. The paper may or, often, may not be rewritten to accommodate.
The contract doesn’t actually become concrete until the money and property change hands at the closing table. At that point it becomes nearly impossible to reverse.
If there’s a mortgage involved there’s more. The bank steps into the process early with their own brand of complexity. The appraisal is an important step, where they look into market data as well as look the home over before deciding how much the home’s worth. And, of course, the credit checks. When a buyer steps into the pipeline they might not have an existing relationship with a bank, essentially still shopping for funding. A buyer could be pre-qualified, which means the bank is open to considering loaning some funds. Or, the buyer could be pre-approved, which means that the bank has agreed to loan up to some amount – provided that the appraisal process doesn’t stop the deal along the way. These designations are archaic and mostly mean nothing today.
That’s the barest minimum description of the process that I can muster. It takes an average 60-90 days to get through the process. And while the process is underway you’re essentially off the market. A home could be shown while it’s under contract, but in practice it never is.
If you’re thinking the process is fragile, with many things that can derail the deal along the way, well, that’s right. We went through the process, to various stages, several times before we reached the closing table.
It seems like a long time since we – my family and I – took the decision to move out of New Jersey, but it’s finally done. The endpoint, for us, was the sale of our home up there. It was all of nine months on the market. It’s a funny thing, but all I hear is how the market’s recovering and home sales are up and positive news and trends from all over. But apparently that – like so much else – doesn’t just doesn’t apply in New Jersey.
I’ve been involved in several real estate ventures over the years and, looking back, none have gone particularly well. Whatever the reason, I seem to come out of it feeling like I should have done better. This time was no different.
But now it’s behind me. The the checks have cleared and I’m free to write about the adventure. And what an adventure it’s been! From my attorney to my agent to the potential buyers that made it to various stages in the sales pipeline to the haunting… yes, you read right… haunting… there are definitely some stories to tell.
Recapping, Florida moved up the list to ‘serious candidate’ status August 10, 2010. (Do I really keep track of that kind of trivia? Yup.) Things were already underway when I wrote Leaving New Jersey Behind In July 2012, announcing our intent to leave New Jersey. Our old home sale closed on December 12th. So… about a year and a half to consider and arrange for (what I hope will be) our last relocation. Seven months to build. A solid month of transition – long story there. Another year to divest the old property.
I’ve written before about troubles with the Aeron that cradles my ass. Between then and now the back failed and once more it was fully covered by Herman-Miller‘s incredible twelve-year warranty. Just like the seat pan incident, a guy was sent out to service the chair and cart away the residue, no charge.
The carpet casters were no match for the tile floor of the office. It took about a year for the grout edges to pound them into submission.
Seat pans and backs are expensive. The most recent failure was not. This time it was the casters.
When I bought this wonderful chair way back in May of 2005 my floor was carpet and so I specified carpet casters. I knew well the damage that an office chair does to carpet – don’t ask. By mid-year 2007 the carpet was gone, replaced with maple plank. The carpet casters were fine for that but to reduce floor wear I added a non-spiked vinyl chair mat. Then, in December 2012, the chair got a new home on a ceramic tile floor. I didn’t give it any thought at the time but in retrospect not caring for the wheels was a grave error. By summer the casters had begun shedding their rolling surfaces! Being me, I started collecting the pieces.
I considered pursuing the warranty thing again. Then I discovered that bona-fide Herman-Miller parts were only around $50. I guessed it would be kinda hard to find service here in rural Florida so I pulled the trigger. ChairPartsOnline.com had brandy-new Herman-Miller hard floor casters in my hands lickety-split. Installation took seconds. They don’t seem to have seat pans or backs or pneumatics but WTF, I needed casters and they delivered.
The warranty on this bad boy’s still good for nearly another three and a half years. Service options research is on my to-do list.
Unix, drop-in, and run. I never looked back. Since then I’ve developed a rather extensive set of filters and such to efficiently manage dozens of email accounts and tens of GB of messages.
from a safe 1S to a prime 1A target. Now, I was a skinny little shit, not especially keen on combat. Having already lost friends there, frankly, it scared me. There was this other, fairly new designation – Conscientious Objector, or 1AO – that one could apply for, and I tried for that. As a 1AO, if inducted, I’d serve but wouldn’t be assigned to active combat. There was a bit of paperwork, I collected letters from teachers, church… wherever I could… to substantiate my application. It didn’t work. I became a 1A. Then, in the lottery, my number: 26! It looked like I’d be going in. I waited for my letter. It never arrived and in August the whole thing shut down. The active draft was one of the first things to stop, it was such a political hot button. I’m fairly certain I got very, very drunk when the news hit.
Today I spent a goodly part of the day wrenchin’ the Dyna. An interval service was a bit overdue and I wanted t get it done before Biketoberfest. Bummer, I found a few issues…
Well, it wasn’t actually a one-for-one exchange. It’s even better than that. I ordered the laptop, paid with a credit card. And when the bill came, I deposited the rolls into my bank.
once. Well, okay, maybe they weren’t Converse – dunno if they were in business back then – but they were bright red and high. I was just a kid.
He’s right, though. This is rural Florida and the Internet service well and truly sucks. They SHOULD pay us, rather than the other way around. At the far end of a 12,000-foot copper haul to the DSLAM, you just KNOW I’m not makin’ it up.
This thing I’ve called a contract? In real estate, a contract doesn’t carry any more weight than the scribbling on the back of a napkin. The first thing attorneys do in their review is agree to remove any teeth they find in the boilerplate. It’s a roadmap filled with uncertainty. Buyer will put this amount of money on the table by some date, some more by another date, there’s this much time to get an inspection done, the deal may close by that date, and so on. But if anyone misses a milestone it doesn’t really matter. The paper may or, often, may not be rewritten to accommodate.
