AtomJohnson Blog

For those of you rushing towards the DC area for our incredible real estate market, put on the breaks, check your blindspot, pull a U turn, and head back home. The get-rich-quick party has had its last call and the last of the party goers are being pushed out the door without the door prize that they were promised.

Today was my 6th Open House. If you don’t count all of the neighbors who came buy to sniff the housing butt of the neighbor, I’ve had about 12 potential buyers. After spending the past two days cleaning from floor to ceiling and repainting part of the basement, we had 4 people show up. One guy was dressed like Braveheart, so we are guessing that he might have just been trick-or-treating.

If we get an offer in the next week, we’ll be on the slopes of Colorado in December. Otherwise, the house gets pulled and we try again in January.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

One of the advantages of getting this new computer is that it is one that I want to spend time with. At the end of a long work day, I just can’t bring myself to fire up an IBM T40. There is just nothing inspiring about it. The Apple though is like a trusted friend that you want to sit down and have a beer with (or coffee on this particular Sunday morning).

Not being inspired to get on the computer after work has kept me from reading alot of the usual blogs and websites that I normally keep up with. So, this morning, I finally got around to reading my friend Meredith’s travel blog. He is currently travelling around the Southern part of the US with his wife Cindy. I can only comment so far on the entry about the Grand Canyon, but so far it is a great read. Meredith writes really amazing music, so I imagine that would translate well into blogs. Cindy has a graduate degree in English, so any words that she throws up on the blog are bound to be impressive as well.

So, head over to their blog, enjoy the wonderful tales of travel and adventure, but have a Dictionary close by for words like, ‘ignominious‘ and ‘quixotic‘.

When does Plan A turn into Plan B? I guess it starts when Plan A is so dependent upon the sale of something like a house. Who would have known that I’d have so much trouble selling my townhouse? This time last year, you could have stepped out your front door, yelled the words ‘For Sale’ and young professionals would drop a contract for their first born, a six pack of beer and their grandmother’s wedding ring to ensure that you accepted their contract. People weren’t even flushing their toilets for open house showings…it just didn’t matter.

It is a different market today. My house has been on the market now for almost a month and a half. We have had five open houses and have even dropped the price by $20,000. It is one of the nicest showing townhouses on the market and is priced well below what anyone else is asking. Who the heck knows?!?!?

There is a girl bringing her boyfriend by this morning for a second showing, so that is at least promising. We are having another Open House next Sunday. Then if we don’t get an offer the following week, we are pulling the sign and hunkering down until Spring. Like I said, Plan B.

Plan A was to sell the house, travel for about 6 months and then wind up somewhere in the mountains of Colorado to hike, bike, ski and fish. …and somewhere in there we would find jobs, a place to live, and a sandwich to eat for lunch. When I was in college, that plan made much more sense. I guess it still makes sense, but there is the lingering questions of, ‘then what?’.

Fortunately, I have worked out a situation at work where they are going to allow me to work remotely from Colorado. This is really the best of all possible options. However, it is going to require me to stay on until another one of our graphic designers gets back in the Spring from maternity leave.

So, if the house sells in the next 2 weeks, we pack up our stuff, move to Colorado, find a place to rent, and run out to REI to get snowboards, hats and gloves. If it doesn’t sell, we hunker down here, print out the Winter schedule for the 9:30 Club and try to keep the dog hair under control for that Open House in Spring.

So, I’m typing this email from my brand new 15″ Apple Powerbook. That’s right baby…I got a Mac! I know I threatened to get one in yesterday’s Camersutra post, but I honestly thought I would chicken out again. I spent several weeks a few months ago fighting off the urge to get a Mac. I was driving by Mac stores that weren’t on the way home, but usually avoided going in. If I did go in, I would sit there for an hour or so debating between the portability of the 12″ Powerbook and the resolution of the 15″ Powerbook. Well, I finally got frustrated enough with my PCs that I made the switch.

It all started on Tuesday when I excitedly brought home my Apple Airport Express in order to play my iTunes through the stereo. Upon booting my computer, I was about 5 minutes into nothing at all when the screen went blue for a second, then black, and then silent…nothing. Pressing the power button resulted in a Windows XP boot up screen that was doing anything but booting up. The Windows XP splash screen would come to a state of half-bright and then get bored and stop. So, giving up on that computer, I switched to my IBM. After 2 hours of trying to configure my Airtunes with that computer, I finally gave up….disheartened and frustrated.

The next morning, I hooked the AirTunes up at work on our old Apple G3 laptop and it immediately worked….no configuration needed. That night I took my IBM to the Apple store to see if they could help me get it working. The guy at the Genius Bar suggested I download Windows XP Service Pack 2. After my Windows Update downloaded 33 security patches (1 hour), I was finally ready to download Service Pack 2. Excited that my AirTunes experience lay just on the other side of this download, I worked through dinner on trying to get my machine AirTunes-ready. After a 20 minute download, a 20 minute backup and 15 minutes into the installation, it told me that it had failed in the middle of installation and that my Windows installation may or may not function properly. All I could think about were those Apple Switch Ads.

So, I woke up this morning, drove to the Apple store and purchased a Powerbook, Mighty Mouse, Apple Care Protection Program, and a year of .Mac…paid for in cash from my freelance work.

I must say that the computer brings a smile to my face to simply use it. The keyboard feels amazingly solid and the backlit keys are about the coolest thing ever. The dashboard widgets are addictive. My favorite so far is the iTunes lyrics widget. It downloads the lyricsof songs as you are listening to them….iths the coolesth (said with lysp of an excited 13 year girl with headgear). There is also a widget that reports the lowest gas prices within a certain radius of your zip code. Woodbridge, VA has the cheapest…I think Australia still has the most expensive.

So, I’m thinking of switching. I’ve spent the majority of this week wondering why in the hell my computer won’t reboot, or get on the internet…or why everytime I think about a word that starts with the letter ‘k’, I get the famous Windows blue screen of death. Nothing seems to work.

For example, I went out this week and got Apple Airtunes. This is a handly little wireless device that lets you stream your iTunes to your stereo wirelessly. I was all excited to come home, do some work, and listen to some Miles Davis (or Kelly Clarkson…or whatever…ok…Ashlee Simpson….who cares). I got it all setup, went to install the application…and what do you know….install error. So, after spending 2 hours at the Apple store tonight trying to get it to work, and 3 hours at home trying to install Window XP service pack 2 (which failed to install), I tried to get it running on the Mac laptop from work and it works flawlessly…the first time!

So, I’m making the switch. Goodbye PC, hello Mac. Hopefully my next blog will be written from a sweet backlit, silver titanium keyboard.