Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer - my everyday fights with reality

I have just got my order placed at Embedded Data Systems. I have one masted 1-Wire bus controller (DS9007U) and couple of temperature sensors.

One day, one hard drive and couple hours later…

For test purposes I hooked up two sensors and put them in our current house - one in bedroom, one in living room. Below you may see temperature reading from last night.

As you may see the temperature in bedroom constantly goes down. Strange uh? No if you keep in mind that we left the window open :-)

As you may also noticed, the graphs ends around 2:50a.m. That’s when my hard drive said “I won’t work any more for ya!”. Lycky me, I had backups.

It wasn’t that bad. Only one high priority error which took me over 5h to solve. It figured out that there was % char missing at the end of sql statement. Urghhhhh.

Today’s big day. Bunch of clients go live.

It wouldn’t be a problem but today’s portion uses part of the system I’m working on for last two weeks. Recently bug squashing party was moved to level 3 - we actually started to create something.

I’m scared to come tomorrow to work…

Month ago when I started looking for a house I discovered, the average realtor’s commision in this country is about 6%. Which seemed to me unbelievable high. Then we went to the bank and Todd Davenport told us that we need a realtor.

And here first surprise. If you are abuyer his services don’t cost you a dime. Buyer’s realtor gets half of the seller realtor’s commision. Of course it’s a lie because nobody else but me pays for the house, but that was that kind of lie I could live with.

Today we set an appointment with Todd for closing our transaction. And here next surprise. From all that stuff that you have to make when you buy a house all we did is choosing a house and signed some documents. That’s all. All the restis done by the realtor (probably mostly his assistants). At this point I don’t regret that he is getting that money.

More information after closure - then I’ll be ale to finally say something about our realtor, his services and our feeling about doing good business

We aren’t rich. We aren’t poor. We are just starters. So what?

In short words it means that we don’t have many things… yet. At one point we definitely will have but now as far as I can tell all will easilly fit into our Jepp and Ford so the whole move-out-in thing will be simply one trip from the old place te the new one.

But what is has to do with home insurance? When you buy insurance for condo you have to choose for how much you want to insure your part of the building and how much are worth your personal belongings. It turned out that many insurance agencies have pretty tight rules about how to calculate those things. Most popular is the rule-of-a-thumb, which in short words multiplies sqare footage of your house by some abstract parameters (e.g. quality of stuff) and comes out witch funny amounts. Some other won’t let you to insure the building for more than your personal things.

All this crap is for one purpose - yes, you are right! - to maximize profits. The effect of those tight connections between values is that you usually have to overinsure one part of the equasion to get the second one covered enough. It’s clearly visible when you have to overinsure private stuff - as it has the bigest premiums (house is hard to steal, isn’t it?) - overinsuring it just by $10k may make your premium one third bigger.

So be carefull and smart when you are shopping around. Ask as many questions as you can, get at least 5 quotes. Keep in minde that you are insuring your house for a year - if you plan big investments (new furniture, home entertainment, computers etc…) move your amounts up. And if you are pretty sure what you want, go to State Farm.