Negotiations Complete

We just found out that the seller will do some needed repairs, reshingle roof, add vents and flashing, and we will purchase the home with other damages being our worry. As long as everything goes well with the reshingling we should be moving in sometime in the near future.

Yeah, jumping up and down, rejoicing, you get the idea.

Mortgage Details Complete, On to Inspection

We met with our banker, very nice guy at Wells Fargo, and have settled the mortgage stuff. 20% down 30 year loan, No PMI, No tax and insurance ecsrow. Low monthly payments and we deal with monthly or whatever for insurance and taxes since we will be putting down the 20 perent.

If you can scrape, beg, borrow or whatever the money I highly recommend getting 20 percent of the home cost for a down payment. It leaves yourself in control with more options in handling your money as the monthly payments will be so much less.

Now we go to inspection which is Monday, yeah, whoop, and jumping.

We will get to see first hand everything that we can about why we should not buy the home versus what we will have to fix sometime in the future. That is really how I see the home inspection unless there is soemthing major like main damage to the roof that is only visible from the attic. Other than this kind of stuff we are sold on the home and just have to wait till the closing with a few more appointments and such.

We will also be going to the insurance agent to get the insurance up and ready but not till after the inspection, one step at a time.

Home Purchase and the process

We offered on a two story 2,000 sq foot home not far from our current rental. They accepted verbally and when the sellers realtor received a written confirmation we are going forward with the purchase.

We must get with our banker and update our loan information with current payroll information and make sure all the mortgage details are settled on. We scraped enough money together for a 20 percent down payment which means no PMI, Private Mortgage Insurance, so payments will be less.

We also need to get the home inspection taken care of which will happen on Monday, fun times. We will have to pay this out of our pocket as is usual for home inspections. A home inspection is important so you know any problems small and large that you should know about and have taken care of eventually. A home inspector will be experienced in looking at things that you may not know of or think to. Either the seller or buyers agent will arrange to open the door for the inspector and I plan to be there to watch, check out any problems as he finds them and do some measuring.

We also need to get to our insurance agent and start home owners insurance, but with the 20 pecent down payment we may be able to deal with this on our own instead of having to deposit monthly payments into an escrow account. We will find out from our banker if we are required to deposit monthly into an acocunt to pay the insurance and taxes or if we can deal with this on our own and pay the insurance and taxes ourselves.

These are the first steps when a home offer is accepted: loan and mortgage with banker, insurance and home inspection.

After this it will be up to the banker to arrange the appraisal and other things.

Another Offer (and this one looks promising)

We offered on another home, yeah. Better yet, they accepted.

The house is an old one, older than me and my wife put together. But it has character and hardwood floors with enough rooms upstairs to have our bedrooms and an extra room as a craft utility room.

The main floor has a living room, dining room and large kitchen with a bathroom on each floor plus another room for my office. Basement does need some TLC but we don't figure on using it other than to store plastic tubs, monsters and the boiler. The garage could fit about a half dozen cars, it looks like it may actually encrouch on the two properties. We may be doing some demolition work to get the garage down to a usable and decent size instead of a shop, garage, rumpus room and storage for squirrel nuts for a couple dozen critters.

Now its on to appraissal, inspection and paperwork until the current tenant in the upstairs apartment is moved out.

Now I'm Pissed at MS and Bing

Bing again hijacks users of Firefox by adding .NET framework to hijack the address bar of mozilla users.

This is ridiculous and a sure sign that Microsoft has not thought through their use of a search engine as a simple device to enhance peoples internet use. They view it as a way to garner more users and frustrate users of other browsers as well.

If you use Mozilla and type in something into the adress bar, not the serach bar, and it doesn't take you to an address but takes you to the Bing search page go here for the patch to correct it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963707

Microsoft is really dropping the ball with Bing.

Bing goes to far

,and I still don't see what the fuss is about.

I was playing around with Bing and it changed my search engine when I opened it which I thought was something I did. But apparently I am not the only one who is saying this as well. Here's an article on PCWorld about the same thing.

I usually use good old Google and wanted to check out Bing, which was not my default search engine. When I started using Bing it automatically changed my default search engine to Bing on its own and did not even ask me about it.

I do not like programs that change main default settings on me without asking, this is bad for Microsoft if this happen by default to a lot of people as many will not like it at all. People want the choice and will go out of their way to use something else if the company tries to force a program on them.

Whats the big deal about Bing?

Well Bing works, at least mostly.

I tried it out and am not all that impressed as well as being confused. I inserted "jeffsreviews" to see what it would come up with and the first entry doesn't even have the words "jeffsreviews" on the page.


Kind of fishy but my son said it is still needing some work and that brings up my first point about coming out with new high tech software. It should work right off the bat when released after all the hype or the company should be ashamed. Of course more complex things like operating systems are going to have bugs but something like a search engine should at the very least find the words or characters you're looking for.

The cached page did not even list anything on the page that it found so why did it list this page for the first search found. I don't think this is a good way to start off a release and am not all that impressed with the newest Microsoft product even if it is free.

I think I'll stick with good old Google.