zutroy.net

First on my list today: Motorola. A little over 2 years ago, my wife and I were shopping for a new mobile phone package where we could share minutes and not spend more than $70/month. We found one from Cingular. We found that we could even get 2 brand new RAZr’s for free* (* should be read as “ok, not really, but the lawyers tell us we can kinda lie about it.”) so we signed up. Loved the phone. Loved the service. Loved the rollover minutes. I had quite the stockpile growing until I started my own business. So everything is just wonderful. Then on the morning of Sept 25, my battery was dying. I went to charge it up and it wouldn’t charge. “Crap, the charger died”, it’s the only logical assumption. So I brought it to work and tried my charger here. Still nothing. Tried it on Joel’s charger. Nothing. Tried another battery. Nothing. Tried my batteries in Joel’s phone and on his charger. SUCCESS! “Wait, so it’s the phone? Crap” Well I have been looking for an excuse to get an iPhone. So I went and got one. “Woohoo. now I’m happy!” Better call the wife to let hew know the good news. Hmmm, no answer. All day no answer. Get home and find out that here RAZr is doing the exact same thing. How odd. Two exactly identical phones; two identical mysterious, undocumented by AT&T support, Crippling situations. Coincidence? Come on, really. What are the odds? “Well I defy you Motorola! You’re not going to trick me into upgrading to another booby trapped RAZr!” Second on my List: Apple. I am more than pleased with the new iPhone. It’s almost what all the hype has cracked it up to be. No seriously, it’s freaking cool. I got a ton of things customized. So I have my old ring tones (which you CAN’T buy on iTunes) and I want to put them on my phone. Especially the one I want for my early morning wake up alarm. Well it turns out that I can’t. Apple has made it impossible to put your own ring tones that you have edited or created onto your iPhone without voiding the warranty. Sure I can go get any of 500,000 songs in iTunes and pay AGAIN to make it into a ring tone. But I don’t want those songs. I want “Busted” by the Social Comas. I want a bunch of other indi titles but NOOOOO! Lame Apple. Lame Lame LAME LAME LAME! Apple has historically been pretty good about listening to their users and giving them what they want.

Message to APPLE: Please figure out that people want their own ring tones before a halfway decent iPhone knockoff comes out. Because even if it was Motorola, I’d probably get it just so I could have MY ring tones.

So I have this theory. I think there have been way WAY to many investors entering the real estate market. With all the wonderful loans that have been abused over the last few years, more and more investors have been able to get into the market who shouldn’t have been able to. Not because I’m mean, just because they can’t afford what they think they should because a loan officer or a banker of some sort stretched the truth so that they could get a bigger commission. Actually it goes a lot deeper than that. There are quite a few people to blame, not just the lenders. But they are one that I particularly like to pick on so for the sake of short blog entries, we’ll blame them for now. So now all these investors are stuck holding on to properties that are not making them anything. In fact, they are losing money on them. So now they need to sell them. But there are so many sitting on the market, that only one in five is selling. I had a condo. I had it listed with an agent a few months ago. And because of a couple certain real estate agents (whom I will not name in this post [cough cough the Tornows cough]) we were not able to get the appraisal for what 4 (count them! FOUR) buyers were willing to pay. So we had to take it off the market. Our agent (Bless his heart. No really, he is awesome!) let us out of our contract because we couldn’t the appraisal that would cover our needs and his commission. So then we listed it for sale by owner. We had lots of people come look at it. We had several offers early on that we very close to what we needed. But not quite there. Then there was a short dry spell and then we got the offer we needed. So then we had to get serious about finding a place to live. We had been watching the housing market for half a year very closely. Prices had come down some 10%. They’re still coming down. So back to the theory. I don’t think they’re done coming down. I think they’re just getting started. So we’re not buying. We’re renting. It’s interesting to see the reactions of people when we tell them. Some get it. Some view this renting thing like some lower class station where only lowly $8/hr workers reside. They don’t consider that it could possibly be saving someone thousands of dollars. The ones that get it, they kinda light up. Then they realize that thy are going to be losing a lot of their equity until the market bottoms out. I have a friend who I have been working with on this very cool project who oozes real estate and finance knowledge and experience. He supports the theory but is unsure of the timing. But he’s in a place where even though he might lose a lot of his equity, he’ll also have a lot socked away to pick up a few of the foreclosures and make a killing as the market comes back in a couple years. So yeah, back to story 2, we sold our condo. He have moved to a house. It has a garage. I am sore. I can’t believe how much heavy crap you can fit in a 3 bedroom condo. I’ll tell you one thing, it’s more than you can fit in a 25ft truck from Timp Rental.