Buying a House/Condo in SD? Don't Think So.

I've been looking since last year for a place to buy.  After waiting for about a decade for real estate market to finally come to its senses, I figured this was now the right time.  So what do I find?  I find that to buy a place in my range, I'm getting elbowed out by all cash offers from investors.  This article from Voice of San Diego describes EXACTLY what I am going through.  My offers aren't bad.  In fact, I've been told that my offers would be "contingent" offers in case what sellers accepted didn't go through.  But I am not doing all cash offers -- my offers still involve loans and downpayment.  And how many have I offered?  I'm pretty sure I have submitted at least 10 offers to buy condos with no luck.  I stopped counting.  But like most buyers who actually want to live in the property they buy, I'm also not going to increase my offer to a price that is not reasonable.  If investors want to be stuck with property that they can't even walk away from (all cash offer means you can't just walk away to leave it to bank for foreclosure if you can't flip or find renter) because they think the real estate market is going to turn around that quickly, good luck to them.  I sense that most prudent buyers who didn't get caught up in real estate frenzy (as most comments posted in the article show) will rather sit by frustrated than throw more money than what the property is worth.  

San Diego Asian Film Festival

As a movie lover, I like to attend festivals especially if there is one held locally.  When I lived in the San Francisco bay area, I attended SF International Film Festival without fail.  San Diego scene is a bit smaller... but I'm always amused that there are more festivals than I know what to do with here.  Last month, I saw a few movies at the San Diego Film Festival, held at the downtown Pacific Theatre in San Diego.  Unfortunately, I felt the movies I saw were lesser quality than the movies I've seen in the last few years.  

Right now, San Diego Asian Film Festival is going on in San Diego from 10/15-10/29.  In festivals, you never know what you might like.  It's a hit or miss, and generally there's something you don't like seeing.  So far, though, I am delighted and really impressed by the quality of the movies I've seen.  I saw White on Rice, which was a hilarious movie about an unemployed, divorced Japanese man living with his sister's family in America.  One of the few films that actually made me laugh out loud this year.  I also saw The Things We Carry; it was an emotionally charged movie about sisters who had to deal with a mother who was addicted to drugs.  For a 77 minute film, it felt longer because of intense drama.  Hopefully, these movies will somehow make it out of the festivals and end up being shown more widely...because they definitely are better (funnier and more dramatic) than some bigger Hollywood movies I've seen.    

Finding Ways to Surf Faster

My attention has been devoted to my laptop recently to try to maximize power, disk space, and see if my use has been efficient.  I have plenty of things to do (uhhh bankruptcy work) but one of my drives keeps telling me I'm about to run out of space.  I also wanted to check if I can install Microsoft Windows 7 because, well, Vista is pretty darn slow.  

In the process, I deleted out some old programs.  I also got to see how much space some of the programs takes up.  Being ridiculously redundant that I am, I actually had 4 different web browsers -- Internet Explorer (came with the laptop), Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome.  My default browser I used was Firefox.  It was one of the innovative browsers that came out with tab browsing and was nimble.  Well, that was then.  In horror, I realized that Firefox and Chrome took up 40-60 megabites.  Opera takes up less than 8.  And despite Google's campaign that it's an insanely fast web browser, Opera is incredibly fast.  In fact, Opera even comes with Opera Turbo to kick up the speed if a site is too slow.  So being the rebel that I am (or so I like to pretend), I decided to take out Firefox in favor of Opera.  

Then I discovered new Yahoo! homepage can be customized.  It can be customized so that I can preview sites I normally brought up when I first open the web browser .. such as email sites (yes sites) and news sites.  Awesome!  Now I can go to one site -- Yahoo! -- and quickly preview all the sites I would normally tab through.  If I get emails I care to check, I will then click through to go to my email sites.  I also discovered iGoogle has similar customizing feature.  However, iGoogle is too busy because it comes up with pages with small preview panes of each sites, whereas Yahoo! interface is extremely clean.  

So last weekend was spend figuring out how to surf through computing world faster... so I can spend more time in the real world.  =)

Life on a Curve

When I was in elementary school (in Korea and here in America), basically, I was graded based on objective means of achieving the grade. Meaning, if you get everything right, you got a 100 out of 100. And if everyone in the class also did well, they got the same score. That means everyone could conceivably 100 and everyone would get an A.

Starting in high school, there were some classes where "curve" for grading the class was introduced. During college days and beyond, getting graded based on a "curve" was the norm. What being on the "curve" meant is the teacher or professor decided that top 10% would get the top grade, vast middle would get average, and then bottom 20-30% may fail. Each test would result in some folks necessarily getting A and some folks necessarily getting C, D, or F. Needless to say, students hated it. I would still hate it if I were a student right now. If everyone did equally well, why punish some and not give credit to everyone? What is wrong with giving 100 out of 100 (based on objective means) if that's what a person did?

Well, apparently in life, we MUST decide that only few things are great and rest much not be. This WSJ article discusses how consumer reviews are too positive. So, now there's a movement to try to find reviewers who will give negative reviews or count only negative reviews for determining ranking for businesses. In general, my observation is that people tend to give positive reviews when they are impressed and talk about them with their friends. People will also give strong negative opinions when something really bother them. But if things were ok? Most people probably wouldn't remember and not take any action. So then it's not really a surprise that online consumer reviews tend to be positive... because folks who were really impressed probably went online to review. Why bother reviewing if things were so-so?

So if business impressed some folks so much that those people took the initiative to give positive reviews, should some business still be penalized? Isn't it great that a business does something that impresses some folks enough to take the initiative to give positive reviews? And what is wrong if surviving business got great reviews? Isn't it possible that businesses that do not generate positive feedback are out of business anyway? Basically, the article is pointing out that we as a society must grade all business on a "curve" and that's how our life should be. Which is really too bad... because I really miss the simplicity of going for 100 out of 100 and encouraging everyone else to do the same so we can all be great. But hey, that's just me.

By the way, in making the above observation, I am assuming that negative feedbacks are not deleted by anyone monitoring the review sites. Obviously, any business generating such negative reaction that people take the initiative should get negative review. If negative reviews are being deleted, shame on those deleting them. What happened to free speech, what our founding fathers fought for?