Wednesday, February 26, 2003

The Signing This morning, Paulette and I signed all the documents for our first home. All the stories you may have heard are true. The stack of legal papers is daunting. What's funny is both Paulette and I started reviewing it page at a time, and after several pages, one of the loan people asked if we intent on reading every page. I guess both of us are just in the habit of reading contracts before we sign them. Once we got a glance at everything (and it was all in order), we started signing. First, the load officer would pull the top page of the TBD stack, I'd sign, then Paulette, then the page would go face-down on a DONE stack. This process itself took almost 15 minutes. About half-way thru the stack, I thought to ask "has anyone counted the number of signatures in this thing?" Of course not. I should count the signature lines in our copy, just to see... but I'd have to guess almost 100 signatures. Anyway, it's pretty much a done deal now. We wire the rest of the money next Thursday, and pick up the keys the following day... weeeh! 11:51:43 PM

Time Magazine Discovers Craig's List If you live in the San Francisco area, you're probably quite familiar with Craig's List. Sometimes I wonder how anything ever was done in a time before Craig's List. While there are plenty of big name sites with lots of marketing dollars, most people looking for a job or a place to rent look to Craig's List first. It's been that way for ages. So, it's a bit surprising to see that Time Magazine has just discovered Craig's List. I know that the site has expanded to many other cities, but unfortunately, the article doesn't say how well it's catching on in those places. [Techdirt] We're actually quite familiar with Craig himself. He's always down at Reverie Coffee on Cole Valley. A quirky guy. It was pretty cool to see his picture in Time and recognize the unique lamps hanging from Reverie's ceilings :-) 12:06:30 PM

7.6 billion miles later, Pioneer 10 falls silent Jed sez: "Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday." It's 7.6 billion miles away; in only 2 million more years, it should reach Aldebaran. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jed!) [Boing Boing] Such a huge distance away. I wonder if our first contact with another life form will be from a dead satellite. 12:03:56 PM

ASCII Art stereograms AA3D is a random-dot-stereogram ASCII Art generator: feed it a 3D map and it will spit out a grid of ASCII characters that will converge to a 3D image if you stare at it in just the right way. LinkDiscuss (via Stuff About Things) [Boing Boing] Arg, my eyes hurt! 12:02:11 PM