Master Of His Domain

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Fun  

Seems legit

Everyone knows that the best chow mein comes from Guatamala.

Everyone knows about shrinkage, right?

Went to my doctor for a physical today, and despite being several pounds lighter than she’s ever seen me at, somehow the summary of my visit reported a record-high BMI. Because I somehow got four inches shorter. On paper, anyway.

Is that a camera in your pocket?

Or are you just happy to see me? Sony’s latest ($1,800) phone uses the same sensor as the RX100 VII ($1,300). Fortunately it doesn’t also use the 24-200mm f/2.8-4.5 zoom lens, or every customer would be packing suspicious bulges. Why so big? To shoot 20 megapixel stills at 20 frames/second, plus 4K video at 120 frames/second. They also included a chipset that can keep up.

(meanwhile, the camera body I want might be back in stock in mid-January, lord willing and the creek don’t rise)

MS365

I’m testing out Microsoft 365 Business as an email provider, mostly because it’s $30/person/year through the company store, and there’s only one of me. I moved one of my idle domains onto it first, to see how much work is involved in setting up dozens of incoming aliases, a handful of outgoing addresses, and a catchall mailbox for the domain.

There’s no official (GUI) support for a catchall, but it can apparently be set up with a few quick web-CLI incantations and a shared mailbox that doesn’t consume an additional license. It also looks like you can easily put the same user into multiple domains (with different sets of aliases), so one license can span them all. Some of this I was familiar with from when we moved Ooma from Intermedia to Office 365, which was… entertaining.

Migrating an existing domain that I control the DNS for was pretty painless. There’ll be a lot of testing before I move a domain that I actually receive significant email on, especially my primary, which has an extensive list of vendor-specific aliases (~400) that need to be entered once I’m sure the catchall works.

And, of course, I need to test the Synology backup app for MS365; if it works as well as the Windows backup has so far, it will add to my peace of mind.

Virtual house-hunting

I am not (yet) moving out of California back to Ohio to be near my family. I am, however, idly checking out the housing market near their place, and I’ve found several houses that I would cheerfully buy right now if I had a commitment from work that I could be 100% remote forever, and I knew what sort of regional compensation adjustment was involved. My direct manager is on board, but the pre-Covid policy required approval at at least the director level, and they haven’t finalized the post-Covid policy yet (“January…”).

There are a lot of folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere pushing to reduce or eliminate the regional adjustments, because fundamentally you’re paying for their talent, not the size of their mortgage payment. Based on the prices there and my equity here, I wouldn’t have a mortgage, and I have no other debt at all, so (shh! don’t tell!) some amount of adjustment wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me.

Which means I’ve been looking at Zillow listings for a lot of houses in the $250,000-$500,000 range in the general vicinity of Kettering, OH, occasionally peeking at things up to around $750K. If you’re curious and wish to play along, my searches are currently centered on zip codes 45440 and 45429.

(I don’t want her view, I want the view of her…)

This has led me to add some new rules to my existing preferences:

  1. Reject if any edge of the house is within 20 feet of the property line.

  2. Add $10K for pain and suffering if there’s an HOA.

  3. Add $15K in landscaping costs for each side of the house or back yard where you can see a neighbor’s windows.

  4. Add $10K for gratuitous steps, up or down, indoors or out. Not “two-story with basement”, but randomly split levels, purely for effect, and walkways that could have either been completely flat or gently sloped.

  5. Reject if the kitchen looks like a Food Network set. I don’t care much about the brand of appliances, but putting a sink on an island with no backsplash is at best annoying, and putting a range with a drawdown fan on an island is a sure sign that you don’t actually cook. Certainly you’ve never done any pressure-cooking or deep-frying. Extra points off for hanging pots and pans directly above such a range. Double points off if there’s no power on the island (“dammit, Gilligan!”), or only token power on the counters.

  6. Actually, I’ve rejected a lot of houses based just on the kitchen layout. A lot of them simply can’t be fixed.

  7. Reject if there’s wall-to-wall carpet in the kitchen or bathroom. Seems obvious, especially around a toilet, but I’d never actually seen someone carpet a kitchen before this week, and I thought carpeted bathrooms went out in the Seventies.

  8. Flatly reject any house without a place for delivered packages. A surprising percentage of the houses I’ve seen are laid out so that you can’t do anything to hide even a small package by the front door, but the worst are the ones that don’t even have a dry spot. In Ohio, where it can rain at any time.

  9. Reject brand-new construction. This is not an “Apple .0 release” problem, it’s a combination of small lots, immature landscaping, intrusive HOAs, and architectural incontinence. I’ve looked at half a dozen active developments in the area, and not one of their model houses was worth the powder to blow it up. Design anti-patterns aren’t just for software!

(yes, my current house breaks 1 & 3, which is why they’re important, and while it doesn’t actively embrace the food-show anti-patterns, the kitchen does have a faint whiff of early 5-ishness, with a “conversational” sink and a poorly-designed breakfast bar, both on the angled peninsula that I’ve griped about before)

(the only thing keeping Yuka Ogura (NSFW! Javascript off!) from being the perfect woman is the lack of cat-ears; perhaps she could borrow some from Komi-san)

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