We’ve finished moving. It wasn’t too bad thanks to the movers. They packed everything well and worked pretty efficiently. We’ve still got a lot of unpacking to do of course, but almost all of our stuff is in the new place. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with work and the move, but most of the heavy lifting is done. Tracy has done a lot of work prepping the old house for sale and there will be probably two open houses. One this week and one next week.

New House!
We’re moving. We’ve been working on buying a house for a couple of months now and the process is almost complete. We close on Thursday on a house in San Jose near 85 and Prospect. It fits most of our important criteria: more space, good(Cupertino) schools, good location, not in terrible shape.

It’s been a long and painful ordeal, but I think we’re close enough that we can say the deal is pretty much done. We’ve got the inspections, financing, title, and everything else settled. We have movers for Friday and then we’ll be working on getting the old house sold.

Here are some pictures. It’s 5BR 4BA of about 3000 square feet which is much bigger than we had hoped for. It has an excellent layout with tall ceilings and a nice open floor plan. It’s also in excellent condition because it was a complete remodel about 8 years ago by a professional contractor who lived in the house. So it also has a lot of nice updates in the kitchen and bathrooms. There’s also an extra room in the garage which could be an office or storage. The lot is kind of small. There is a hot tub and the landscaping is well done. They put in small fruit trees in the back. There’s also a pool table which the seller threw in with the deal, but we’re going to have buy some furniture to fill the place.

We’re pretty excited about the move. I’ve always liked the South Bay a bit better and we wanted to move before Lucas goes to school(which is still a couple of years away). We also wanted more space.

We’ll have a party in a few weeks to show off the new house.

If you or anyone you know is interested in a very nice 3/2 in Belmont with 1410 sq ft on a 9000 sq ft lot and a nice layout here’s our house on Zillow. It will be listed on MLS listings as soon as we decide on an agent and we’ll have an open house in about two weeks.

I got a Blackberry from work. I’m still learning how to use it, but it’s got some nice features including: very good battery life, very good integration with Exchange for email and calendar, good customizability for alerts, a decent WAP browser. I put on a Google Maps application which seems to work OK.

We have a medium sized jar of change, probably between 1/2 gallon and 1 gallon. We’ve been cleaning up lately so Tracy took the jar to a Coinstar location. Two things impressed me about the process:

1. how they attempt to ream you for 8% of the value as a service fee
2. how we get almost $400 out of that jar

Thankfully at least they’ll give you 100% value on a gift certificate from a number of big name e-tailers like Amazon.

Someone at work was showing me a site called Collective2.com which is an independent web site to verify securities trading systems. It’s pretty interesting as a platform. Anyone can create their own trading system, then show the results and Collective2.com will verify the results.

There are some other features too, like you can subscribe to trading systems and you’ll get email whenever the system makes a trade. You can go one step beyond that and AutoTrade a system and it’ll trade the whole system for you. You somehow link your account to an affiliated broker(specialized brokers for traders) and then you’ll do the same trades in real time when the system makes them. Trading system developers can also charge for their systems, some only charge for profitable trades, most charge $10-500/month with almost all of them offering 10-30 day free trials.

The trading systems look a lot like personal mini hedge funds. There’s a wide variety of systems, from conservative to heavily leveraged. So if you always wanted to take the some risk to gain some ridiculous ROI, this might well be the way to do it.

There’s a lot of equities, futures, forex, and derivatives trading systems out there. Some with mixed results. Some I might be tempted to try, but most likely not.

It’s amusing to see how quickly some of the trading systems crash. I like to look at the recent heavy losers. They are inevitably leveraged forex systems that crash 90+% after one or two bad trades.

You can claim any property that has been taken custody by the state of California. I know a couple friends who found hundreds or thousands of dollars at Unclaimed Property Search web site.

We got back from a week in British Columbia. We spent 2 days in Whistler and 5 days Vancouver with Tracy’s family. It was a good time, Tracy’s family really enjoyed spending time with Lucas.

The weather was beautiful. Sunny and 75-85 every day. It was a bit strange to have 18 hours of sunlight from 4:30 AM to 10:30 PM.

I’ve been skiing in Whistler once before and it is the finest ski area I’ve ever been to(I haven’t been skiing that much). The trails are nice mixes, the mountain is huge and the Village is really nice.

Whistler is going through some heavy construction to prep for the 2010 Olympics. The access road is just two-lanes, but they are widening it to four so the traffic was heavy.

There was a BMX bike competition the weekend we were in Whistler, so I watched a bit of it while we were there. I’m not really a fan of the sport, but they did do some pretty cool tricks.

I also got a couple good workouts in Whistler. Running hills is pretty challenging as you’d expect. The elevation didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would, I didn’t realize the base is only 2100 ft above sea level.

Whistler Village is a happening singles market. There were a lot of bachelor and bachelorette parties going on, the restaurants were very upscale and trendy. The crowd was young or very young(though that might have been due to the BMX crowd).

Unfortunately the exchange rate sucks pretty badly, so everything was just a bit more expensive than it is here in America.

After Whistler, we came back down to Vancouver for the rest of the week. It’s a very diverse community. Here in the bay area we think of ourselves as diverse, but whether you’re asians, whites, latinos and indians, you’re still American. In British Columbia, even the whites are a pretty diverse, there’s a lot of Candians, American British accents, a lot of native French speakers, and a number of other European tourists as well. It feels like more real diversity than we have here.

Stanley Park is a great tourist spot. We stayed at the Westin right near Stanley Park, so for my morning runs I got to see quite a bit of it. It’s just a bit bigger than Central Park, so there’s a lot to cover. There’s a petting zoo, an aquarium, a few restaurants, and several monuments. We also spent a half day at Granville Public Market which was a somewhat typical open market.

We spent a half day hiking up and touring Grouse Mountain. It’s a very tough 1.5 hour hike, but at the top, you’re treated to a mountaintop cafe and some beautiful views of Vancouver. For the lazy, there’s a gondola that can take you up as well. At the top, there’s a grizzly bear habitat where you can get 20 feet from the bears if they are feeling co-operative or hungry.

We had good luck with our food selection. Restaurants visited include: Monk McQueen’s, Milestones, Whitespot, Norboo, The Sequoia Grill, the Stanley Park Grill, The Watershed Grill.

Ever been annoyed at how rental car companies charge you usurious amounts of money for not refilling the tank? Well Hertz in Canada now has an option to do away with that and instead, they charge you a usurious amount in a new way. Old way: Charging you %20 more than the prevailing rate when you don’t refill your tank. New way: refilling it for you without charge, but making you pre-pay for a full tank of gas at %10 less than the prevailing rate. This is a clever way to advertising that they are “saving” you money. Though it is not hard to figure out that it is only a savings if you are able to return the car with a tank that is %10 full or less. I’ll stick to just refilling it myself thank you very much.