Month: August 2006

Eh, Never Mind

I’ve gone and looked at a bunch of houses, and some of them are fairly nice. But…

…I just can’t overcome the little voice in the back of my head that tells me I’d be crazy to pay nearly double its current assessment value. I can afford the mortgage payments, but it would make my budget a lot tighter, and what’s the point of gaining more freedom if I can’t afford to do anything with it. And it’s not like I’m moving in from out-of-city and absolutely need a new place to live.

Add on to that uncertainty at work, a feeling that I may not be mature enough to handle it, and that I’m entirely alone in the decision-making processes, with no other voice of reason to back me up or challenge me, and I don’t think I’m ready for this just yet.

Some financial groups speculate that this may be a permanent market increase and not just a bubble, due to meeting some kind of ‘fundamentals’. If so, then maybe my future just doesn’t lie here in Calgary.

Irony Is Dead

I’ve been seeing a bunch of Hummer commercials lately that all follow the same pattern: some man or woman is embarrassed or backs down in a social situation, they immediately march off to a Hummer dealership, point out one, and drive off in smug satisfaction.

I never would have imagined that they’d so blatantly embrace its reputation as a vehicle that people buy to overcompensate for their inadequacies and use it as a selling point in their own ads…

Certainty

Forget history. Forget ‘the market’. I’ve already said to myself that upon finding a suitable home, I would be willing to pay ‘x’ dollars. So, I’ve talked to an agent. We’ve scheduled a day for viewings. For a couple weeks I will go look at houses, and evaluate them.

If they meet my criteria, I will make an offer on them, and possibly successfully purchase one.

If they do not, or my offers are rejected, I will simply continue in my current arrangements.

If there are any regrets, I will just note to myself that they merely displaced the regret of not even trying.

Uncertainty

The current home sale stats for the Calgary area are rather…unhelpful.

You can clearly see a huge upward trend over the last 10 years, not just this last year. Checking against the city’s assessments, houses are often selling for $100,000 or more over their assessed values.

But things do seem to be cooling off. The average sale price dropped last month, for the first time in quite a while. The percentage of sales versus listings also dropped a lot. Some of the specific listings I’ve been looking at have even dropped their prices by $8-15 thousand. Maybe I should hold off and see if things drop even more.

But there’s no guarantee that the drop is an ongoing trend, and people still seem to think that the labour shortage and oil boom are just going to make things worse. If I wait too long, prices could suddenly turn around and skyrocket even higher. But I don’t really want to overpay by even the current inflated amounts, or get stuck with a crummy home in a bad area.

I think I’ll go hide under the bed for a bit…

Another 30 Seconds

Titan Quest: It’s pretty much a direct clone of Diablo 2, but it does it well. The main differences are in the historic settings (Greece, Egypt, and China), and a dual-class skill system that allows a lot of different combinations. All it needs is an expansion pack to provide some more locations (perhaps some random dungeons too) and smooth out some rough spots, and some tweaks to the loot system to allow more upgrades and variety, and it’ll be a worthy successor to D2.

SiN Episodes: Emergence: I played this after HL2 and its latest episode, and SiN is a bit of a disappointment in comparison. The graphics are fine, but there’s not enough variety, there are too few ‘set piece’ battles, and the choice of weapons is weak (the shotgun in particular). I don’t think I’ll be buying the following episodes.

Yoshi’s Island (GBA): This is one of the few Mario games I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. I think I was putting it off primarily because the focus wasn’t really on Mario, and because of the different, ‘kiddie’ visual style. It’s too bad I waited for so long, since it’s actually quite a good game. There’s lots of variety in the levels, and the boss fights are all uniquely different and challenging, unlike some other Mario games where they’re only slight variants.

Chronicles of Riddick: Games based on movie licenses usually suck, but occasionally there’s an exception, and this is one of them. It combines shooter, stealth, and adventure game aspects smoothly, and is one of the few FPSes with a decent hand-to-hand combat system.

Catchup

I often run across URLs that I can’t check right away, or want to come back to later. Since I’m not necessarily at the same machine I want to check it from later on, I throw them into a file called ‘urls’ on my file server.

I just realized that that file is now over 1200 lines long.

I’ll be surprised if half of them are even still there…

Epiphany

I’m not particularly introspective, but as time goes on it’s harder to avoid thinking of most of the problems in my life, and the things I should do or have done but haven’t. Why not? The pat answer would be that I’d be afraid of failing, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I’ve already failed at them by not even trying for so long.

No, I’m starting to think that the answer may actually be that I’m afraid of success. Succeeding always sounds great, of course, but it always brings additional complications, responsibilities, and other unknown factors into your life, and I think that’s what scares me the most. I’ve gotten comfortable in my little life as it is, and become suspicious of any potential changes to it.

Damned if I know how to fix it, though.