June 21, 2023
News
I am under contract for a house. The closing date is June 30. Ilana and I plan on moving in that weekend. Very exciting stuff. If you want to see it shoot me a text and I will send you the address.
I've been doing nothing lately but sitting on my butt. I tried to start going to the gym to lift weights again but I injured myself. Now my back is shot and I have Physical Therapy scheduled to fix it. In the meantime all I can do is keep sitting on my butt.
I tried to start playing Zelda on the switch but it's kinda boring. Mostly I've been reading and watching sports. Baseball is for sure not the best sport; but it is always on, so I've been watching a lot of baseball. The Braves are playing fantastic. They go play in New York over a weekend in August and I am tempted to go up there and go to the games but I probably won't have the money.
I have been reading a lot. I am 10 pages short of finishing Anna Karenina, an 800 page book by Tolstoy. I am very proud of that. It actually was quite good. It has not feel as long as it seems. It's a fairly easy read and entertaining throughout. Next up is "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which I have never read before. After that I might do one of the nonfictions I have on the bookshelf.
There will be a lot of house work to do next week so I should enjoy the laziness I can have now. Of course I am excited for all of the house work. But I never dislike time spent reading or watching sports. We also just got tennis channel on Youtube TV. For whatever reason Youtube TV decided to add that. So that's amazing.
The new Killer Mike album is really great.
Real Estate
Here's the highlights of the house:
- The lot backs up to the beltline
- Nice front porch and back deck
- 2 large bedrooms and 1 small bedroom
- 2 renovated bathrooms
- Renovated kitchen
- Garage with utility room
So I am super happy about it. Another interesting point is that the City of Atlanta is supposed to be expanding the streetcar, which currently only operates downtown, to connect with the beltline. According to the master plan, there is supposed to be a stop that is right at my property. We will see if this ends up happening, but I'm very excited about this possibility.
I was extremely stressed from the time I started considering making an offer until the time the offer was accepted. So Sunday night through Tuesday afternoon. There has been a lot of drama with negotiations. It was very relieving once the offer was accepted.
Coding
I decidedly have no projects to work on outside of my job. This is definitely contributing to my general laziness. I wish there was some coding project I was passionate about to work on, but nothing has come recently. Mostly my extra coding work has been to guide Ilana as she continues to learn how to code. She is doing fantastic. But it takes a long time and a lot of guidance so I'm sure this will continue to take up more of my time, since she really has just started. I would love to have a project to work on though. If anyone has ideas, let me know.
Ilana is going to be working on this Friendmail site, and I think we might pivot this into a plugin for substack or ghost. So the idea is that people can write their blogs on substack and then readers can press a little button if they want new issues of the blog to be sent to them by mail, and that's what friendmail would handle. So we'll see how that goes. Whether or not it's successful, working on this will be great experience for Ilana.
One thing I have been considering is setting up a sort of business that installs IoT technology into your home. So a customer would just call the business and the business would set up everything the customer needs in one day. Door locks, security cameras, lights, whatever. And it would all be integrated into a single app so that the customer can control all of the stuff in their home. Anyways, I want to try to set up some of this IoT stuff in my own house. The problem is that they are shockingly expensive. A regular door lock is forty dollars, but a door lock you can control with an app is two hundred dollars. It would be just as good and much cheaper to put an internet-connected motor onto a regular door lock. And this could be done with most things. An internet-connected switch could be put behind every lightswitch. Cheap cameras can be setup to stream their feed to the internet. Thermostats might be tricky, but I don't think something like the Nest costs very much actually. Internet-connected doorbell. Two-way speaker. There's a lot of things that could be made much more cheaply than they are being sold for, and if they can be put into an easy-to-use package with a simple mobile app then it could be a good idea.