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I'm Homeless!!!
Mar 08
I'M FINALLY 100% HOME FREE! Today, the couple interested in my house finally signed all the paperwork and "closed" on the house. I've wanted to write more about the process and how things were going but for some superstitious reason, I waited until it was all finally over. Gone are the days of throwing away $1,381.44 a month and the $16,577.28 I wasted over the last year in a futile effort to keep my credit score at a decent level. Foreclosure and credit scores really aren't as bad as society makes them out to be, it's all scare tactics fabricated by the banks.
Putting It Into Perspective
From November 1st of 2008 to November of 2009, I had 26 house showing, 15+ open houses and dropped the price $10,000. Pretty much nothing was happening and it appeared that I was going to be sitting on it over another winter wasting my money and time. Then in late October, a couple looked at it several times and made an offer of $148,000 which was $11,990 less than I had it listed at. At this price 'we' would have lost roughly $19,000 split in half. At this point I was plenty happy with the offer and was glad just to get the heck out of the place
As usual, nothing could go easy. I went to court and a probama judge basically did nothing. At this point I was 100% ready to give up, I was worn down to the point that if all I had to lose was a hundred points on my credit rating, oh well. The first thing I did was go out and get a credit card in an effort to help my score while I stopped making payments. As November wore on I waffled back and forth on whether I would make December's payment.
Thanks Upper Management
Then out of nowhere our entire Marketing department got outsourced to a totally awesome marketing agency with super cool audio effects on their home page and we (as in the majority of us) got laid off. "Well that makes my decision easier" I thought. December's house payment was skipped. Ironically if I had made December's payment this entire process would have been pushed back another month and probably cancelled.
In the meantime, for whatever ridiculous reason the people that made an offer on my house still wanted the place, I hated with ever fiber in my body. It was difficult for me to fathom that somebody could desire something I despised so much but I digress. Ultimately all "parties" agreed on a short sale. My credit score would likely be hurt just as much as a foreclosure but at least I wouldn't have to live in hell for another year.
I ended up finally finding a job (at a company I will keep to myself and at a time I will keep to myself and moved to a location which I will keep to myself). As the months (i.e. 3 of them) wore on I started to panic more and more. Would I come home some night and find the place on fire? What about if I woke up one morning and the basement was filled with water? Then there's the furnace, how much longer will that thing last? It looks like it's as old as the house? I was just waiting for Finagle's law to come into effect...but it never did. For those months nothing ever went wrong. I was shocked. "How could this be?" When everything that could go wrong did for the past year nothing did during the short sale process. The place still stands, the basement is dry, and the furnace works like the day it was installed.
Then I expected some crazy amount of money to be due at closing which I knew would be a huge issue, but it never came. $0 was due and it was all over. So here I sit, in disbelief that I'm finally homeless.
Fin...
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How Many of Me (1) - Kate Hu
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Poll: Prefered Holiday Greating?
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Merry Christmas
56% -
Happy Holidays
11% -
Happy Hanukkah
11% -
Joyous Kwanzaa
0% -
Bah! Humbug!
22%
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Tech: Don't Like The New Facebook Home Page? Fix It With 5 Lines of CSS
Feb 08
New Facebook Home Page
Above is a screenshot of the new Facebook home page. One change on the new page is showing all types of updates rather than just status updates.
Facebook has once again decided to redesign their home page. These types of changes usually result in millions of users joining groups titled "I hate the new design" or something similar. Being a web designer I sympathize with Facebook.
One thing they changed with the recent redesign was removing the "status updates only" option on their home page. I'm now forced to sift through every group, fan page, image and application post my friends have made. Facebook does give me the option to hide specific applications but with 1000's of apps out there, it isn't practical to hide each and every one. Enter Stylish.
Hacking Facebook's CSS
Using a Firefox addon called Stylish I was able to sift through Facebook's HTML & CSS and determine if they did a good job giving their home page elements proper class names and IDs. For whatever reason Facebook uses custom HTML attributes. One of these was called data-ft. The first value in that attribute is a number that represents various home page types. The example below uses "46" which is plan ol' vanilla status updates:
<div class="GenericStory UIStory clearfix aid_718391393" data-ft="{"sty":"46","actrs":"718391393","fbid":"328181226116","s_obj":"11","s_edge":"1","s_prnt":"11"}" id="div_story_1630882208_328181226116"></div>Show Status Updates Only
By adding the code below into Stylish it will hide ALL types of updates on the Facebook home except for regular status updates:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("facebook.com") { .GenericStory { display: none !important; } #pagelet_intentional_stream div[data-ft*='sty":"46'] { display: block !important; } }Below is an example of this would be entered into Stylish:
Other Update Types
You could also substitute the number 46 above with one of the below to show only these types of updates by default:
Attribute Value Table Update Type Number Value Fan Page Added 161 Application 237 Friend Added 8 Group Added 21 Photo Added 65 Photo Album Added 247 Video Added 128 To Each His Own
Some people may love seeing everything their friends do on Facebook. I'm more interested in what they have to say and the rest just feels like noise. Feel free to take this code and make it your own.
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Photo Gallery
Photo 1 of 5: I ended up playing 3 hours of Skip-Bo with my uncles for our Christmas party this year which was probably the first time I've ever done that. I assure you, we did not talk about politics the entire time, well, yeah we did. Neal Grosskopf (0)
Review: ZDoom - A Doom Source Port
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Oct 06
I've always enjoyed playing old school videogames from my youth. I'm constantly reminded that graphics are nice, but gameplay is the most important factor in a game. Recently I got the itch to play Doom 2. I cranked up my install of Windows XP, installed the game (if you can call it installing) and played it. Unfortunately the game is so old (almost 15 years) that I was unable to use the mouse in the game. After 15 minutes of playing terribly, I looked for a solution. I first found a mouse driver but that didn't work. Next I tried an old school joystick I use to use but that didn't work either. Finally I found on a Doom wikia, a source port called ZDoom.
Back in the 90's Id released the Doom source code for Linux. Some savvy people took this code and converted it for Windows. The next step was to enhance the game to make it playable with modern technology. One of these enhancements was a source port called ZDoom.
ZDoom adds many of the features of modern first person shooters. You can now jump and crouch. The game also lets you define custom controller options (something that was lacking from the original Doom.) Because of this I was able to apply my tried and true FPS controller settings to an old school game like Doom 2. In a way, this made me a super-player and made the game much more enjoyable.
Probably the coolest thing about ZDoom is the modders went back and updated many of the textures in the game for higher resolutions. I can now play Doom 2 fullscreen at 1920x1200 without extremely blurry graphics. The graphics don't look earth shattering but I will say they look good enough that I can once again play the game without being distracted by the blurriness.
ZDoom also comes with an updated network play option that supposedly makes it easier to play against friends. I haven't tried this yet but it would be fun to play with friends.
A few other features the game includes is an updated HUD that is much more useful than the original Doom 2 HUD. The new one shows you your ammo for each weapon along with with other stats like secrets found/total secrets and enemies killed/total enemies.
Overall ZDoom takes a classic game and makes it playable again along with a few modern conveniences we come to expect from modern FPS. I give it a 8/10.
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Video: Google Asks People: What is a Browser?
Being a web designer and often hanging out with mostly tech savvy people, I think we sometimes forget that not everybody cares or knows as much about websites as we do. This video is a great example of how little people know about web browsers and is a wake up call for many of us who want users to switch from IE6 to something better. Neal Grosskopf (0)