I got the Commitment Letter from the bank, but it came with enough conditions and clauses that I might as well start from scratch. Turns out I don’t have enough open credit lines, which means the bank doesn’t know whether I will be repaying them on time. So, instead of a nice credit card report, they are asking me to provide a ton of documentation from other places where I have to pay regularly.
Continue readingGreat! So there is an underdog horse with an underdog jockey, but they win all races and power a whole generation of men and women desperately seeking a role model for overturning odds.
Seabiscuit was the star of 1938. The one that already had given up on twice, who managed to recover and achieve the greatest results when he should have been long history.
Made into a novel later on, the story of Seabiscuit the horse and of the men that made him into a star got to become an exciting movie, whose duration of two and a half hours is the only serious limitation to enjoyment.
Continue readingThe very memorable Jennifer Garner stars in this forgettable action-packed movie. Elektra is a spin-off of the recent Daredavil, starring Ben Affleck, which bombed at the box office.
Since Spiderman captured the audiences and ranked in the Top Ten Highest Grossing Movies of All Times, comic book characters have become the targets of big budget Hollywood. It worked with Superman decades ago, it worked with Spiderman – why wouldn’t it work with Daredevil, too?
Continue readingHow on Earth could I have lived almost 38 years without ever seeing “The Life of Brian” to the end? It is a movie in its own category, even within the Monty Python group; friends had been telling me I had to watch it for a long, long time.
Now that I am through it, I have to admire the incredible finesse with which the MP crew packs a short amount of time. It is bound to be the highest concentration of satiric jokes on DVD. Some of the skits they came up with are so amazingly to the point, you can’t really laugh because there is too much depth.
Continue readingShort trip out to L.A. to visit a conference. It’s funny to fly out to L.A. for work, being used as I am to the city as a vacation destination.
My first time was in 1998, shortly before I moved to the States for good. It was the last weekend of my stay in San Diego, and I had decided I needed to at least see Los Angeles before flying back and returning who knows when.
Continue readingIt’s been several years that I store all my email in Kmail. It used to be Outlook back in 2000, but I soon got fed up and converted to a Linux box where the .pst format was quite useless. I used a nifty utility to do the conversion on a Windows box, and everything worked just fine.
Now it’s time to move again. This server has a new IMAP implementation that polls my POP3 provider every minute, performs filtering, then allows me to connect from anywhere. That’s very usable, especially considering that I always run the email client at home and it would be quite annoying not to be able to read home email during the day.
Continue readingIt looked at first as if this might become a challenging day. The low clouds were hanging around dangerous, and it was hot from the get-go. The typical mixture that yields that dreaded fog that hovers over the City all day, putting us sun-loving Californians in a stupor.
You probably couldn’t live here without the cooling influence of the Pacific. It is amazing how cold it is on the ocean side, and how hot it can get just ten miles East of here. Between our two poles, the City wavers undecided, with the Richmond siding with the cold, the Mission with the hot weather most of the time.
Continue readingI was reading Mark again, the shortest of the Gospels. I reached the passage where Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, getting ready for the last days. The emotions are tense: the High Priest comes with armed soldiers to arrest Jesus; Jesus himself has not slept in days, and has urged his disciples to pray; Judas Iscariot is getting ready for the betrayal that Jesus already prophecied.
Luke has a better account of the story. He will mention that Peter struck one of the soldiers with a sword, cutting off the soldier’s ear. Jesus will reprimand him and heal the wound, while commenting on the cowardice of the High Priest, who could have arrested Jesus at any time in the Temple, but didn’t do so to avoid public uproar.
Continue readingA nightmare over several days. I had set my mind that a local store was no good, because I needed to be able to access my email from outside the apartment, and decided that IMAP would be the way to go.
Technically, what I needed to do was to take the mail I got from my outside provider and download it to my server (this one). Then I needed to pass that email to an IMAP server, finally to get to it from the outside world. This seems stupid at first, but I run a dozen filters on my email, so that it makes very little sense for me to access the email directly on my ISP’s site.
Continue readingThat’s how the whole house thing is slowly working out. There is always something new to learn, something new to do.
Today I found out that appraisal fees are twice as high in Hawai’i as they are in the Bay Area. My loan officer explained it was an appraiser market on the islands, and that I was very welcome to look for my own appraiser. We turned the conversation around quickly, and I really like her.
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