Astoria!

Hello loyal readers! I'm sure I'm addressing no one since i haven't updated my blog in such a long time. But if you're still out there, good day!

actually I had two different people read my blog recently and tell me about it, so i'm inspired to write a little something.

Random: when I watched the goonies a long long time ago, I got the feeling I wanted to live where ever that was. When I saw Kindergarten Cop (yes I've watched that movie), I wanted to live in that Oregon town. I recently found out that both were filmed in Astoria, Oregon. So that's on my list now of potential retirement spots.

Some interesting sites I've spent some time on recently when trying to relieve some stress:

http://www.pacificnorthwestmovies.com/
http://weht.net/

Disaster Preparedness

With all the terrorism and natural disasters lately, I'm sure that there are more people preparing their disaster supplies, working out a exit strategy, etc. Of course that got me thinking...

One random thing that can be done is to minimize the amount of time cars are on bridges and overpasses. For example, on the Golden Gate Bridge, tolls are only connected going southbound into the city. The toll booth is on the south side of the bridge though. So that means you drive across the bridge, wait at the toll booth (sometimes for a very long time, but at a minimum to slow down to pay) at the end and then go through. Why not have the toll on the north end, so you wait and pay while you're on real land, then zip across the bridge, so that your time on the bridge itself is shorter? That seems like it would be helpful in case of earthquakes or terrorist attacks.

I wonder why they originally decided to put the toll booth on the south side so you have to wait on the bridge and are other bridges like this too? I can't remember for the other bridges I've been on.

Along the same lines, traffic engineers could also retime lights to minimize wait times on overpasses. I see a lot of cars overhead waiting for red lights when I'm driving on the freeway.

Rain

Rainy season is almost upon us in the west coast, which means it will soon be a good time to visit your favorite waterfalls. This site is great, I don't remember how I stumbled upon it. It's got all the details you need to plan a hike that has an actual destination instead of just "around".

For those of you in the San Franciso Bay Area, here are a few more sites I find helpful when planning an excursion:

• BA Hiker
  
• CA parks
  
• Santa Clara County Parks
  

Speaking of rain, I've been cleaning my gutters the past few weeks. It's one of those tasks that you uncover a lot of gross, dirty stuff while doing. But you really wish there were people around so you could show them exactly how bad it is. Of course you only share this with your most precious loved one or closest family member/friend. This seems a little strange, but my guess it's a quite normal reaction (or am I really the only one). Of course, for gutters it's not really a convenient thing to show. I'll have to "enjoy" this one by myself then, and now I really want it to rain. I'll probably walk around looking at downspouts when that happens. Strange, but true.

Blue Marble

Stuff like Blue Marble make me want to go work for nasa.

I'm a bit of a map nut and I found these composite satellite pictures to be quite cool. I grabbed the "topographic & bathymetric shading" one and with some resizing made it the background on my dual monitor setup at work. It wraps great, so the transition when in tile mode is seamless, which is great.

There's more interesting pictures to shake a stick at, so knock yourself out.

iTunes help

Someone asked me how to automatically get rid of those pesky "!" in iTunes next to songs that got recently moved. Or maybe you moved your whole music folder and now you have 2 versions of every song, but one of them is the old location, which currently doesn't have a "!", but will if you click on it. Annoying!

Anyway, a little searching turned up this gem, hope it helps you.

I'm back!

Ugh, haven't updated in almost 2 months! Work has been keeping me too busy... it's not changing much now, but I'll have to find some time to do a few updates now and then. Stay tuned my loyal reader(s?), if you are still out there!

In the mean time, go wash your hands!

California Real Estate : Schools

This is installment number two of California Real Estate.

Obviously the school district is an important factor in buying a house. So how do you figure out the district the house you are looking at belongs to and if it is any good?

Some counties have sites that take information about the property and tell you the district information. Here's an example of from Santa Clara County. Just type in the address of the property and it provides the elementary and high school districts. Of course, if you are serious about putting an offer down, you should call the district and make sure that the information on the website is accurate and when the last time they redrew district lines to get a gauge on the stability of the district mapping.

To see how good the district is, I use this site. Select a state, and you can search by district, school name, or property address. Navigate the links until you get to the school you are interested in. Then I find that clicking on "Compare This School" and then sorting by the various criteria that I care about is the best way to figure out how good the school is.

Good Luck!

Comments!

It's nice to get comments from my loyal readers! : ) Even though there are only a few of you, reading your comments are fun to read and they make me want to write more. So leave me more comments and thanks for reading!

California Real Estate : Prices

Hi,

I've gotten some questions/requests about this, so here's a site that I use to get information on housing prices in California. It's called California Moves and although it's run by Coldwell Banker, it has listings from all realtors. Of course, it's asking prices not final transaction prices, but I think it's a reasonable first approximation if you just want to get a rough idea of what the market is doing.

The site should be self-explanatory, but for me the most useful way to get data is:

• Click on Property Search (not on Open Home Search)
  
• Select a county in either northern or southern california and click 'submit'
  
• Then you can either select all cities, one city, or a part of one city and click 'Search'
  
• Finally, enter your own criteria for price, rooms, zip code, etc. Or enter nothing and just hit 'Search Now' to get all the properties sorted by price.
  

Some of the listings have more information than others, with the ones going all out having virtual tours that you can click on. Some don't even have pictures.

Then again, sometimes I just stay on the main page, watch the pictures scroll through, and click on ones that catch my eye. Most of those houses I'll never see the inside of : ). Happy Hunting!