Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
— H.L. Mencken
So, I went to the my property tax appeal yesterday.
No, this isn’t the start of a lame joke and no, I didn’t appeal my property taxes.
The City of Pittsburgh appealed my taxes to the County of Allegheny (yes, these ones). Apparently they, like most municipalities and school districts in the area, do this automatically when a house is sold. They have a formula that helps them figure out whether to appeal or not, but basically, at the core, the heart of the matter is… they want more money.
My job was to fight the appeal.
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As you may know, I have had a Mac Book Pro (15″ - glossy) for a few months now. I am starting to feel pretty comfortable in it and have started to learn more of the advanced features that I don’t need to get things done, but because I like learning how stuff works.
In this case, I discovered how to create dialogs from the command line or a shell script. In Linux, I’d use gdialog or something similar.
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I like LEGO and have since I was a little kid. As an adult, I’ve gone through phases of enjoying LEGO and just keeping it safe in storage. However, now that I own a house, I think I’ll make space for my LEGO collection so I can play with it.
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My server has been down for about a 6 days. The short story of why my site has been down is because Verizon sucks. The long story however…
I discovered on Thursday (Feb 7th) that my server, gerf.org was down. I went home to check it out and discovered the dreaded blinking DSL light.
I called up Verizon’s Business DSL Support and to put in a trouble ticket. I have to do my usual song and dance to get around the fact that the Verizon phone system think I’m a non-business customer and wants to redirect me to the residential support the moment it knows who I am. I have been told this is because the phone number I was given for my DSL (which is a dry loop; it has no phone service, just DSL) used to belong to a residential customer and the system is confused. I was told they would fix this when I signed up in November.
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There is a new META header being proposed called X-UA-Compatible. It was thought up by Aaron Gustafson and has been added to IE8.
This is a flag for browsers to change how they render the web page, not by standards that are being followed, but by the browser that it is known to work with.
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I had this idea of this huge post I’d write about how I went about getting a house and the paperwork and all that stuff.
Well, it turns out I really don’t want to write that. Instead, I’m going to write about one of the people that I can really recommend; Cathy Ferguson our “mortgage advisor.” I think mortgage advisor is a fancy word for mortgage broker. Not sure, though.
We wanted to know about our mortgage options before we started looking at houses. We knew what we wanted in most ways, just not in money terms. Read More »
So, me and my wife got home from Ikea with a new Billy bookshelf for the dinning room (aka, book room #2 — book room #1 is the living room). We lucked out and found a spot nearly in front of our house, right on the outside of the curve that our house in on.
We unloaded the shelf (it weighs a bloody ton) and had just finished getting it together when I heard a bang noise. I thought perhaps the storm door was open and the wind pushed the door open or shut.
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My laptop has died a horrible death and I’m not happy about it. I bought it about 3 years ago from Linux Certified, way back when Linux laptops was a novel concept.
Currently, it just flat out won’t power up. There is power from the power cord (checked it with a multi-meter), but the light won’t light, the power won’t pow and the battery won’t batter.
This will slow down my blogging, emailing, and working on It’s All Text! Read More »
So, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Part of the reason is that Robin and I have been working on buying a new house.
This is very stressful and scary. We’re almost done. We close on November 16th. I plan on blogging about the people and companies that provide excellent service during the process. However, I’m waiting till I’m all done.
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So, I’m trying to find out how old a boiler is. It’s in a house that I made an offer on and I want to know how old it is and any other information that would be helpful.
When I viewed the house, I took a photo of the model information so I could look it up later. I thought this especially clever since the owners didn’t know how old it was; only that it pre-dated their purchasing of the house in 2003.
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I found this article about Getting things done with mutt. It talks about using the the techniques from David Allen’s productivity book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“. I’ve been reading GTD for a week now (taking my time, you know) and think it’s pretty interesting.
Since Mutt is my favorite email client, I spent a little playing with it and making changes. I’m using a diferent editlabel script and my way doesn’t require patching and recompiling mutt.
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Amazon redesigned their web-site, shrinking my name even more than previously…
Ciao!
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