Evil Doctor PorkChop: Computers and Internet

House Hunting, Microsoft Style

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:44:15 GMT

Well today boys and girls, we are going to talk about all the software and hardware tools you can use to make your house hunting a little easier. In a Tim the Toolman Tayloresque fashion, I've been augmenting my home search with technology to make my visits more productive.

A note, I do have a real estate agent, but it's been a bit fun to do my own searches. I have a hard time describing what I want, but I know it when I see it. My agent is just thrilled.

SEARCHING THE NIGHT AWAY

In my "spare" time, I use the following websites for basic information.

http://nwidx.com/SearchListings.aspx?site_id=11085 This site seems to have one of the most flexible MLS search sites I've found for the Pacific Northwest. It's good if you are searching by price or some other attribute.

http://www.cbbain.com/ I like their site for searches if I'm doing a map based search. They have a really cool way to do that and allow you to specify search parameters like number of bedrooms so that you can narrow down the results. They also have an address lookup so you can look up property if the only information you have is the street address.

I also use Craigslist.com and other For Sale by Owner sites. The search portion is actually fairly time consuming since you have to reference so many sources.

CHECKING OUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD

As I look up homes, I have http://local.live.com open in another window. While almost all house listings provide photos of the house, they rarely show you the neighborhood. I'm lucky enough to be shopping in a market that has the bird's eye view pictures in live.com. This allows me to see things like the neighbor three houses down has two junk cars in the yard. Also, since developers are building up neighborhoods so quickly in Seattle, the later bird's eye photos have allowed me to locate houses that don't show up in the map and satellite views.

PLANNING THE HOUSE VISITS

Once I find houses I want to visit, I open up Microsoft Streets and Trips and create stops for each of the houses. This is handy when you are attempting to plan out your day of seeing houses. You can use the route planner to order the stops and see what the route would look like.

Of course, I've got the version of Streets and Trips with GPS. Combine that with my Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet PC and you've got a power house touring setup. I've got the second battery on my tablet so I get about 5 hours of power. 5 hours is about all I can stand when looking at homes. However, I can definitely see where a car charger would come in handy.

TOURING, TOURING, TOURING

As I'm driving around, Streets and Trips is busy getting my position with the GPS and reading the next turn information to me. Since I'm new to the area, this has been a life saver. I've been from Duvall to Snoqualmie to Seattle and have yet to get lost. (Okay, I got lost once when both of my batteries died. I was in the deep bowels of Kenmore, WA after the sun went down and I had never been there before. It was at this point the car charger looked real attractive.)

The GPS feature can also trace your progress on the map. This has been handy when I've spotted another house while on the road. I can review later while sipping my latte where I diverted from the planned path. Clicking on the diversion location in S an T provides me with the address. Beats trying to write and drive!

HI, I'M HERE TO LOOK AT THE HOUSE

Once I'm at the home in question, I use OneNote to take notes about my likes and dislikes of the house. Since OneNote is pen enabled, it's a lot easier to take notes on the tablet when you are walking around rather than trying to type up everything on your notebook after the fact.

Visual records are a must. Once you've seen five houses, the details all start to blend together. So, I am using my camera phone to take outside pictures of the houses. Real estate websites tend not to show you the "whole" story. I am also using my Logitech WebCam and Windows MovieMaker to take video of the inside of houses for later review. Sometimes you overlook something that the video picks up. The folio case for my tablet holds the webcam at just the right angle so I don't have to carry it in my hand. I can then record voice comments as the video is captured on the tablet since the webcam has a built in microphone.

I WANT MORE!

While all of this has been productive, I can see where it could be improved. Here's my wishlist of stuff for house hunting.

NIRVANA: A Live.com Local based house search which incorporates data from MLS, Craigslist and For Sale by Owner sources, has the groovy search that my first search link has and could send the results data to Streets and Trips for trip planning. Then, in my househunting OneNote notebook, I have a OneNote page generated automagically for each stop in Streets and Trips and can link them so I can double click the S and T stop to bring up the OneNote page. It all runs on a lighter Tablet PC that has 8 hours of battery with a built in webcam and GPS.

Otherwise, these would also be nice.

A send address from webpage to Live.com Local plugin
A send address from webpage to Streets and Trips plugin
A send stop from Streets and Trips to Live.com Local plugin
A send pushpin from Live.com Local to Streets and Trips plugin
A send highlighted text from webpage to OneNote plugin
Someway to link info from Streets and Trips to OneNote
Built in camera into the tablet.
Move the speakers so that the screen doesn't cover them in tablet mode. This would make it easier to hear the lady when she tells me to "take a right in 0.2 miles".

For now, I'll just have to settle with the current setup.

Microsoft never sleeps...

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:24:12 GMT

Microsoft is the first place I've ever worked where you can send an email at midnight and get an answer almost immediately.

Got a new LG PM 225 Phone and it rocks!

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:12:12 GMT

I finally got a new phone from Sprint and I love this thing! It's small and easy to use while delivering great calls and fast internet access.

The camera is VGA and I can take 20 shots of fine resolution, 640X480 shots. I had to go into the downloads area to clear a bunch of "sample" stuff taking up room to get 20. 20 is about right as compared to a roll of film. The upload to folder function works really well.

I'm trying out the IM clients right now and learning T9 entry. MSN messenger is slightly ahead of Yahoo Messenger in my opinion for one reason. MSN shows you all of the conversation on one screen. Yahoo either doesn't or I don't have something set up correctly. Otherwise, I find the Yahoo functions much faster. MSN insists on loading icons which don't do anything for me. Neither seem to alert the phone that someone is trying to reach you. Again, this might be setup issues on my part.

PROS

Man, this thing is small. It fits in my front pocket very easily but is still big enough for me to accurately press the buttons with my big fingers. Also, it has no external antenna so no poking you when you least expect it.
Sound quality is great. I've had no problems with people hearing me or vice versa.
Reception. Again, much improved from my old Samsung. I haven't hit any out of service areas in the middle of my house and I'm not roaming in most places I frequent, unlike before.
Easy to navigate. The center 5 way switch and the two softkeys allow you to reach the most used functions quickly. Combine this with the bookmark function and I'm never more than three selections away from everything.
Battery life. Wow. I've been hitting this phone hard with my unlimited Vision use and I've only gotten it to take away one battery bar after a full day of data use. Very nice.
The clock on the phone supports two time zones. Very nice for those of us who travel. I can set one for my home time zone and let the other default to where I am.
I've only used the speaker phone once, but it seems to work fine.

CONS

Hey, I have to have a few of these to be fair.

The outside of the phone, while it looks good, is slick. As we get closer to winter and dry hands time, I can see me pulling the phone out of my pocket and watching it go flying. But, I guess they couldn't put any tacky stuff on the outside if they expected you to be able to easily get it in and out of a pocket easily. Just something to be aware of.
My biggest peeve is that there's no way to disable the photo button on the outside. I keep taking picutures of the inside of my pocket. While not serious, it can be annoying as I have to clean up the photo folder occasionally. I'm learning to live with it.
The other oddity is that both inside and outside LCD stay on when charging. While this makes for an interesting nightlight, it can't be good for the screens. I'm hoping that a phone update will address this soon.

My Summer Camp business (OK, shameless plug! At least I'm being honest.)

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 17:17:18 GMT

I've have a business which allows parents to search, register and pay for summer camps and after school activities across multiple providers based on the parents needs. (i. e. I need a class on Tuesday afternoons, what's available?) Think Travelocity for youth activities.

While it's wonderful that so many schools and camps are adding online registration, it is very time consuming for parents to go to multiple websites to figure out the total picture. My service gives you the total view from one site.

The profile editor for parents allows them to prefill repetitive information which is then used to prepopulate registration forms. If you have two children in 4 camps a piece, that's 8 forms of mostly the same data.

For the providers, they get direct access to an interested market of parents where they are more likely to sell their offering. Our purpose is to facilitate the booking of these activities. Some of the support tools they get are credit card processing and electronic capture of registration forms.

This service can also be used to augment rather than replace their current registration systems. If you think of the money lost on empty seats, this service provides another easy way to sell them.

I've worked for the last year to make this service desirable for parents and providers. I think I've got most of what they need with more coming soon.

We are looking for more activity providers. Know anybody who might be interested in such a service? Please let me know.

Check it out! http://www.freeyourtime.com If you like what you see, tell your friends!

Also, if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. I'm always looking for ways to improve the site and to expand the reach of the listings.

In case you missed it at Demo...

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:36:10 GMT

I was reading Robert's blog as he was talking about Homestead's presentation at Demo. They are rolling out something called Quicksites.

Being ever curious, I went out to http://www.homestead.com/quicksites and lo and behold, there they were. Well, within two hours, there's a press release that's taken the place. However, you can still see some at these links:

http://rittuscanykitty.homestead.com/index.html

http://rfdburgandy1erik.homestead.com/index.html

http://cafecasualwooster.homestead.com/index.html

Enjoy while it lasts!