Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • The Floating Pool

    We had one of those totally gorgeous Saturdays. About 80, sunny, no humidity, nice breeze. Perfect. So I took Danielle to check out the new pool in our neighborhood.

    New York is a funny city in that its waterfront property isn’t optimized for recreation. The city was built on commerce and much of the waterfront property is for shipping, etc. But that has really started to change lately. The entire west side of Manhattan is now a bike path with park areas.

    The latest effort is to create a big park in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Bridge (our neighborhood). When it gets finished it will be awesome. As an experiment, the city floated in a barge with a pool on it. It’s The Floating Pool.

    It’s free, but they control the amount of people who can go in. You get a wristband for an hour slot in the pool. If you have to wait, they have built a big beach there. There are concessions stands and it’s very nice.

    When it’s your turn, everyone lines up and heads in. It’s very nice. The whole thing is brand new (the barge isn’t, but the contents are). There’s a big Olympic size pool. They have two lanes reserved for lap swim and the rest is for recreation. The whole pool is 4 feet deep. There are nice locker rooms, showers, etc. You have views of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. It isn’t very crowded. It’s pretty nice.

    We’ll be back…

  • Tracking down a virus

    Here’s an interesting post from a guy who is a malware research director. He discovered a fairly lame trojan horse virus and tried to track it back to it’s author, YoGangsta50, simply by using readily available web information.

  • How about a nice game of chess?

    For those that remember the 1983 movie War Games, this is the line that the computer utters after it realizes that Tic-Tac-Toe is unwinnable.

    Well, let’s add checkers to the list. Not that it’s true when most humans play, but scientists have proven that the top checkers computer program cannot be beaten.

    Another memorable line from War Games (the heros were trying to escape an island):

    Well, what kind of an asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn’t even know how to swim?

    There’s no point to that quote, it just makes me laugh…

  • We’re going to Guatemala

    It’s been a bit crazy, but we finally have an appointment with the embassy in Guatemala. We had set a closing date on our apartment and we had been working with our congressman to get the final approval. Suddenly we get a call from the adoption agency saying they have the approvals and we can come on the 18th.

    But our closing was set for the 17th. And the 18th was only five days away. Can we get our lives together that quickly? Maybe not. So we asked what would happen if we asked to reschedule. Our agency said, no problem, they’ll give you a date a week later. So we said let’s do that.

    The only problem is that all you can do is send a request for a new date. You can’t ask what the next date would be and then decide.

    So we asked for a new appointment on the 25th. And we waited. And waited. We expected to hear by Monday. Nothing. Finally at the end of the day on Tuesday the 17th we get word that the next available appointment is Friday the 27th. We’re going.

    In some regards, this works out for the best. We get to take possession of our new apartment on the 24th. We thought we’d be in Guatemala then, but now we’ll still be here.

    The bad part is that if you have your embassy appointment on Friday you can’t get the Visa for the baby until Monday. So you have to be in Guatemala longer. Originally we didn’t think it was a good idea to bring our daughter Danielle. Long flights and bureaucracy aren’t exactly optimal for a four year old. But this would mean being away from her for six full days. I’ve never been away from her for that long.

    So she’s coming too. It will make the whole trip more complicated, but overall it could make it even better. Danielle will always remember going to Guatemala to pick up Victoria.

    Tori and Dan…

    Tori and Dan

  • Homeowners – sort of

    Our closing went off without a hitch. More than I can say for the rest of the process. For those that have followed this entire saga, it looks like our place is going to get certified as a three bedroom. This is amusing to me because we renegotiated the price (down obviously) when it appeared that it was a legal two bedroom. So now it looks like we got the price reduced and still got a legal three bedroom. Bonus.

    The closing was a little less satisfying than normal since we don’t actually take possession for another week. It’s nice walking out with the keys.

    On a related note, I was looking through some studies on stress (I have some self-interest here) and one of the high stress items was a “new mortgage over $100,000”. Either that statement is really old or whoever made the list doesn’t live in NY…

  • Closing walk-through

    We’re closing on our new place tomorrow. So we had our walk-through yesterday. We showed up only to find an apartment completely furnished and lived in. So my first question was, “uh, when are you moving?”.

    The response was, “the 24th”. Huh? They said, “didn’t your lawyer tell you?” Well, no. So there wasn’t really much point to doing a walk-through.

    It turns out that their lawyer never told my lawyer. There was a contingency in the contract to give them an extra week if needed. They have to pay some fees to cover our expenses. It isn’t a big deal because we weren’t planning on moving until August anyway. But it would have been nice to know a while ago.

    Buying a place is stressful enough…

  • The $1,975 iPod

    Here’s an interesting iPhone review. While it gets good reviews as a gadget, this is what it said about the iPhone for professionals:

    The unhappy fact is that for all the glamorous marketing and positioning, iPhone turns out to be the worst $1,975 investment (iPhone plus two years minimum, mandatory service) you could make in mobile communications. If you put that kind of money into a BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile, or Symbian device, you will be blown away by what a genuine professional mobile handset can do for you, out of the box, through incremental improvement by the manufacturer and wireless operator, and extension by downloadable third-party software.

    Ouch.

  • Approved and Closing

    The co-op board approved us and we will be closing on the 17th. We will be homeowners again. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

    I was talking with someone in Amarillo today who was highly amused by this whole saga. He told me that in Amarillo you could buy a house and close in three weeks. Oh well, that’s life in the big city.

    No adoption update thought…

    Speaking of life in the big city, the swift-boating of presidential political candidates has begun. The international firefighters union has a web site called Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend. The firefighters have been upset with Giuliani for quite a while. They have three major gripes, two legit, one partially legit but very emotional.

    1) The firefighters had defective radios and Giuliani knew this for years. The defective radios added to the deaths on 9/11 (firefighters didn’t get the evacuation call).

    2) He picked 7 World Trade center as the command center when the World Trade center was an obvious terrorist target.

    3) In November of 2001, Giuliani curtailed the search for bodies at ground zero. Conspiracy theorists (and this site) say that once they recovered the large amount of gold that was known to be buried at the site, other recovery efforts were stopped. This was a hugely emotional issue for the firefighters and was never forgotten.

    Ah politics…

  • Adoption Stress

    OK, no one ever told me an adoption would be an easy process. Today both me and my wife got voicemail from our adoption agency saying “I need you to call right away”. My wife has the remarkable talent of assuming the absolute worst, so she’s in a total panic.

    It turns out that the US Embassy in Guatemala lost the CIS (Citizen and Immigration Service – now a part of Homeland Security) approval form that was sent to them back in September. This would be the I-171H form, of course. Without that form, nothing can happen.

    It’s not a huge deal. You just have to get the NYC CIS to resend it. Sure, piece of cake, get one bloated bureaucracy to resend a document.

    My adoption agency suggested contacting my Senator or Congressman. Well, I’m sure Hillary Clinton would take my phone call, but just for kicks I went with our congressman. They were actually quite helpful. All politics is local, right?

    So we currently have our congressman’s office nagging CIS and our adoption agency lawyer nagging the embassy in Guatemala. Maybe someday this will actually go through…

  • Co-op boards and baby showers

    Since we are buying a place in a co-op, we have to get approved by the co-op board. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a co-op, refer to an earlier blog. If the board doesn’t approve you, you’re out.

    In some of the fancy shmancy Manhattan co-ops this may be a big deal, but in Brooklyn this is largely a formality. The broker selling the place knows the sort of people that will get approved by the board. For the most part they are looking for people who can pay the monthly maintenance fee on time, will be neat and not be loud.

    We fit that definition pretty well. Maybe not the neat part, but we can keep our messes out of the halls.

    So we met with the board last night. It was very casual and they were very nice. We’ll hear soon and then we can set a closing date.

    On another subject, my wife’s friends surprised her with a baby shower. When you are adopting you don’t really expect a baby shower so that was a nice touch.

    Lastly, I’ve recently added a Sonific Songspot to the blog. This is a site that allows you to link a song to your blog. I’ve been in a Latin jazz phase lately so I’ve been picking random Latin jazz songs from groups I’ve never heard of. I try to pick a new song for every post. This time I went with the blues. The hard part is that the song selections are pretty random. It’s no one you’ve ever heard of (well, you get what you pay for).

    Do people like this? Is it annoying?