My big home renovation project for 2010 was tiling the kitchen floor.  If you have read previous posts, you know I dabble a bit in home improvement.  But, I think that this is the first big project that I have taken on.  I honestly never really set out to tile my own floor.  The original idea was just to demo the existing linoleum and then hire someone who knows what they are doing to tackle the rest.  But when getting estimates, we seemed to get two types:  (1) a cheap estimate from a guy without insurance, or  a (2) ridiculously high estimate from a company with insurance.  I really did not want to take a risk on option 1, and I didn’t want to triple my budget for option 2.  So, I was left going the home handyman route.

Luckily, I had a bunch of family and friends that knew what they were doing.  I got help from the wrangler, two brother in-laws, and one soon-to-be father in-law.  They basically set me on the right path and helped with a lot of the work.  If you have never tiled before, there are really just 5 steps to the process:  (1) demo the existing floor, (2) lay the backer board, (3) lay the tiles, (4) grout the tiles, and (5) seal the floor.  Out of these steps, I think that step 2 is really the most time consuming.  This really surprised me.  In all the videos, it seemed to be the most straight-forward step.  But, in reality, this took a lot of time.  In our kitchen, we were installing the tile around existing fixtures, so we had to make a lot of cuts.  Surprisingly, this was easier with the tile, because of their relatively small size.  With the backer board, it seemed like we were always making crazy “L” shaped cuts to get it the board to fit.  We used a jigsaw for most of these cuts, and the board really teared through the bits.  After we got the backer board down, the rest of the process went pretty smooth.  I did run into a few problems with tiles not being the same size (1-2mm makes a difference).  But, I rectified this by measuring the tiles before laying each and throwing out the inconsistent ones.

Before laying tile, I got a lot of good advice.  Such as (1) don’t worry if it looks a little off before grouting, because the grout will make it look better, (2) make sure to seal the floor with a good 30 year sealer, and (3) take your time.  I would add to the list, (1) make sure to clean the dried mud from the cracks really well before grouting and (2) prepare to spend a couple weeks on this if you are not doing it full time.  I honestly thought that this was a weekend project and it turned out to take a couple weekends to get it complete.

So, with all of that said, here are the results.

Before (after demo):

After:

Some nice transition details:

Microsoft is releasing Project Natal this fall.  If you haven’t heard, it is a NUI add-on to the XBOX360 that allows for motion-based gaming without the controllers.  This is extremely cool, but I honestly do not think I am going to buy it.  And, it is not because of the $149 price barrier that Gizmodo projects.  I will probably not buy the device because the Wii sucked so bad.  Yes, there were a few fun games here-and-there.  But, most of these were first party games.  And, some (like the New Super Mario Land) barely even used the motion sensors.  In the end, the Wii was essentially a gimmick that for me at only a short lived appeal.  I am lucky enough to have a choice between the 360 and the Wii on a daily basis, and 99 out of 100 times, I chose to go play the 360.  I think this is pretty true for my age demographic.  A number of people I know that have owned the Wii ended up getting a second console.  I think this is because (1) there are very few games on the Wii targeted at gamers my age (not 5-15), (2) motion-based gaming really only works well for a few genres, and (3) playing SD graphics on an HDTV just kind of sucks.  While the 360 does throw HD into the mix, I just don’t see this as being enough for me to really want another motion-based console.

I am really digging what Google has done with Android.  Froyo (the just released update to Android) features beautiful iconography, smooth transitions, and just about everything you could want from a modern mobile OS.  The problem is that a lot of the third party manufacturers that are releasing Android devices insist on adding their own third party skin to differentiate their offering.  HTC offers Sense, Motorola offers Blur, and Samsung offers a  horrible new skin with their Galaxy S device.  While some of these are nice, they really are not much better than Froyo (I actually prefer Froyo to all of these skins).  And, these skins really slow the upgrade time when new versions of Android come out.  So, my question is why do this at all?  I personally will not purchase a device that does not feature stock Froyo.  And, I know that a lot of Android enthusiasts feel the same way.  I really think that the way for manufacturers to differentiate their offerings in the Android ecosystem is via responsive upgrades, hardware specs, industrial design, and apps/widgets that work with the stock Android offering.  I really think that all of these custom UIs are bad for the manufacturers and really bad for the Android ecosystem.

As a side note, what is Samsung thinking?  Their hardware for the new Galaxy S looks great, but this new UI is just horrible.  Does anyone is S. Korea really think this looks better than stock Froyo. Really?  I am pulling for you guys because you make some awesome TVs, but you have to rethink this strategy.

Update: I was reading more about Sense UI (and other add-ons) and apparently you can at least disable them.  But, I still think it would be pretty annoying if you have to wait to upgrade every time Google releases an update to Android.

Another Update: Case in point, here is yet-another-horrible UI on top of Android. What is Acer thinking? Are design aesthetics really that much different across the pond?

I actually remembering watching the first episode of Lost six years ago in the basement of my parent’s house in St. Chuck.  I was hooked from day one, and apparently brought another devotee with me.   Sunday night, I watched the finale in Eric’s loft overlooking the mean streets of St. Louis.  It somehow seems fitting that what began in a dark basement lit by the glow of an SDTV, ended in a fancy loft surrounded by DTS and HD.   Looking back over the last 6 seasons, I think it was a brilliant use of time.  While sometimes a bit slow, the underlying plot and all the questions kept me coming back year after year.  This was capped by a moving finale that tied it all in a nice bow.  Do I still have questions that were unanswered?  Yes.  But, am I complaining?  No.   There are a plenty of answers on /r/lost, Dark UFO, and Lost… and Gone Forever to keep me entertained for weeks (and perhaps longer).  In the end, I think it was as good as a TV show can get.  It effortlessly mixed science, technology, theology, and meta-physics into an easily digestible 1 hour block.   I will remember it most for the great 1 liners, the poignant questions, the interesting characters, and the great arguments with my friends Eric and Theodore.

In The web sucks. Browsers need to innovate., the author (the co-founder of  posterous) compares the types of apps found on the iPad and iPhone with what is on the Web and comes to the conclusion that the web sucks and we will soon “see a decline in web traffic and search in the coming years”.  He proposes that browser vendors break from following standards, develop their own APIs, and begin innovating on top of these APIs.  While I think that this is a very shortsighted recommendation, I think he makes a very interesting observation: does the web suck (on mobile devices)?

Better UI in the form of proprietary technology has always been around.  It is not unique to the iPad and iPhone.  What is different about mobile app development is that web browsers were really bad on mobile devices, and apps were really good.  This huge disparity in quality was brand new, and really drove proprietary mobile app development.  Not only were the browsers bad, but developers did not target these devices, so viewing websites was horrible as well.  So, apps filled the quality gap and became wildly popular.

But is this success short lasting or sustainable?  To answer this question, we need to look at why web apps won over desktop apps in the first place.    When it comes down to it, web apps won out because they were open and connected.  Their openness allowed them to run anywhere making it easy to access the service from any device.  And, because they were open search engines could easily find and index data making it a breeze to get information fast.  In addition, web apps did not stand alone.  They were connected to each other making it easy for a user to transition from one site to another.  Mobile apps, on the other hand, are not open and not connected.  The portability of the devices make them as available as web apps, however, their closed nature makes them a lot less connected than web apps.  I think this is where mobile apps fall short.   In the long run, we have the better UI of mobile apps versus the openness and connectivity of web apps.

What is really interesting about this article is the new perspective of the iPhone age.  Prior to the iPhone, everyone’s first source of information and entertainment was the web.  Now, it is shifting to mobile apps.  I personally believe that this was due to a deficiency in mobile browser vendors and developers to provide a good experience on the web.  But, it will be interesting to see if this trend continues.  I personally think that in the end, the same advantages that allowed web application development to overtake desktop development (openness, connectivity, etc.) will win out over proprietary mobile app development.  But, only time will tell.

If you haven’t heard yet…via Letterman, Modern Family, major newspapers, tech blogs…the iPad is being released tomorrow.  But, this is not a review.  If you want one, check out Walt Mossberg’s piece.  And, if that is too long, let me sum it up for…great for consuming content, not so great for creating content (well, text-based content).  I think I read that somewhere before.

Regardless of the reviews, this device is going to be pretty big, because lets be honest…it is freakin’ cool.  As a web developer, the question I have is—how is this going to affect the web?  Is it going to be good for web development or bad for web development?

I see this from two perspectives.  On the positive side, Apple has eschewed Flash and implemented standards-based HTML5 for video.  If I was a flash developer, I would be concerned.  But, as a web developer, I always saw flash as a necessary evil, and really am not too sad to see it go.  The second positive thing about the iPad is that it is definitely going to make the web more accessible.  Every iPad has a browser.  I don’t think it is going to bring more people to the web, but the mobility of the device might just increase the frequency people hit sites (even just a little).

Now for the negatives…the iPad has essentially done what Microsoft has been trying to do for a couple years now…pull people off the web and put them into proprietary applications.  Not only did Apple accomplish this, but they did it in a way that they now get 30% of the sales price of all applications sold on the platform.  This is brilliant… a coup of epic proportions.  But, this is also extremely troubling for web developers, as 70% or so of these new apps are really just websites wrapped in a touch friendly container.  Is this a shift of the magnitude as what we saw in the 90s when all desktop apps began moving toward web apps?  Probably not.  But, it does mark an end of an era…where most new and innovative apps were web apps.

Nokia—Right now it looks like my e71 will be my first and last Nokia device.  While there are a few really good things about the device, its seems that Nokia’s next generation offerings (Symbian^3 and Meego) are simply evolutionary.  With Android looking better every day and WP7 looming, it will take a lot for any of their devices to break into my short list.  Honestly, I think they are done in the US unless they snap up Palm.  This seems pretty obvious to me…a company with great hardware and a so-so OS acquires a company with a great OS and so-so hardware.  Problem solved, right?  I just don’t see Nokia swallowing their pride and going this route.

Apple/HTC Lawsuit—This is such an odd lawsuit. To me, it seems like Apple really got pissed off about Android, but rather than suing Google decided to go after its smaller, weaker friend.  It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.  If Apple can successfully defend its multi-touch patent in court, what does that mean for the rest of the industry?  Will we not be able to see multi-touch on WP7, Android, and Palm?  Or, will these company’s be forced to license this tech?  My guess is that it will do little to deter Apple’s competitors.  And, most will just fine ways to circumvent the patent.   But whatever the outcome, I think most people agree that patenting a means to interact with an interface is ridiculous.  Apple should not be able to patent multi-touch.  Could you imagine what would have happened, if companies tried to enforce patents on the keyboard and mouse?  Hopefully, the continued criticism coming out of this lawsuit will finally cause the US patent office to change how it deals with IT patents.

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote  a month ago about selling my home by owner.  The outcome of the prior is now pretty obvious:  I was completely unsuccessful at selling my home by owner.  But given that there are 5 other homes that are still on the market that were up for sale by real estate agents in my neighborhood, I really do not feel too bad about that failure.  The truth is that the real estate market sucks.  And it is even worse for owners of condos and townhomes, because the only real differentiation they have is price.  It was particularly difficult in my neighborhood because one of the homes went up for a short sale and essentially undercut the prices of all the other sellers in the community.  But this is the reality of the market, and honestly, does not seem to be getting better any time soon.

Given this reality, I was left with a few options:  keep the house on the market and continue a price war with my neighbors or try my luck on renting the property.  Given that there were already two other properties on my street that were rentals and that I had enough equity to make it fiscally realistic, I decided to go the rental route.   Keep in mind that I was not flying blind into this decision.  Last year, I took a semester long real estate class as part of my MBA, so I had a pretty good list of prerequisites before making this decision.  I figure that I would share these before I started as it was pretty good advice when it was given to me.  The first prerequisite was that I had at 20% down on the home.  Apparently, this is a magic number for renting property.  At 20%, you are free of any PMI obligations that increase your monthly costs on the home.  Also as a good rule of thumb, you can rent your home for around the same cost of a mortgage on 80% of your home’s value.  The second prerequisite for me was that I had enough money set aside to maintain my mortgage if my renter defaulted on the property.  And, finally the third prerequisite was that I fully understood the laws around renting in my state.  Missouri really makes it easy, because they publish a guide called the Missouri Landlord/Tenant guide.  I gave this a quick read through prior to advertising my property to ensure that I knew what I was getting into.

After making the decision to rent the place out, I was really left with two key problems I needed to work out.  The first was how I would advertise the property.  And, the second problem was once I had found the renters, how would I do background checks to make sure they would be a good fit.  The first problem was actual quite an easy one to solve.  I called up a couple of my friends that were renting properties and asked them how they found their place.  The overwhelming response was that they used Craigslist to find their future home.  This really just reinforced what I had already known—if you want to rent a property in St. Louis, start at Craigslist.  The second problem was a bit more involved.  It is common sense to run a background check on potential tenants to screen them before they rent the property out.  But if you have never done this before, it is a bit overwhelming to get started.  Like with most decisions, I turned to the Internet to try to get some answers.  And believe me, I found a bunch of services willing to help.  What I found pretty amusing was how bad each of these service’s websites are.  As a web developer, I tend to judge a book by its cover, so it was pretty tough to trust financial information to a company that overlooked the design of the site.  In the end, I selected Transunion’s SmartMove service to do background checks.  I liked this service because it was from a reputable provider and they verified the prospective tenant online versus having to put the onus on me to collect the social security number and appropriate sign-offs.  With that said,  I never ended up using this service.  But, more on that later.  After selecting a service, it is extremely important to determine what your criteria is for selecting a qualified candidate.  Doing this ahead of time really makes the final decision easier, and it is actually pretty important if you run into any legal questions about how you select tenants.  My criteria was simple.  The rent could not be more than 35% of their monthly salary (preferably closer to 30%), they had to have clean credit, and had to have a good rental history with their previous landlords (no evictions, etc).

After I had all the prerequisites and process questions out of the way, I set out to find a potential tenant.  I posted the ad in Craigslist and to my surprise I started to get serious inquiries right away.  Within the first week, I had two showings scheduled.  The first showing was a bit nerve wrecking at first.  Going into it, I had to prepare a rental application to hand out.  This turned out to be pretty simple.  I grabbed one of the Internet that matched up well to ones I had filled out in the past.  I then modified it so that it would describe the rental process that I had put into place and so that it collected all the information that I needed to put the SmartMove process in motion.  The showing itself was much different than what I had experienced when selling my home by owner.  Rather than rely on the other real estate agents to show the property, I had to do it myself.  Most of the questions centered around month-to-month costs and square footage questions.  Since I had done a lot of that ground work when I was selling my house, it was pretty easy to field these questions.  The most surprising part of the process was the willingness for potential tenants to give away personal financial information without me really even asking.  I would simply mention the need for a credit check in the process and I would get a life long credit history complete with long stories about how they ran a foul.  I ran this by a friend of mine who also rents properties and he said that this happens all the time.  He told me that you will get a lot of “sob” stories, but just to hold out because there are tenants out there that have good backgrounds.  I thought that this was the best piece of advice I got before renting a property.

One of the first people to contact me about the place was not a potential renter at all.  Her name was Diana from stlrentit.com.  She runs a website that connects landlords and tenants.  She said that she had a few tenants looking in the area and would like to have them come out and take a look at the rental.  I was of course a bit suspicious of the service to start, but her process was very straightforward and the agreement I had to sign put no risk and (most importantly) no costs on my end to show the place.  So, I agreed and showed the property to her clients.  I went through the same process that I had gone through before to show the place.  But this time, they were interested and filled out an application.  Rather than going through SmartMove, I opted to use Diana’s resource for credit checks.  This made the process a little easier, but did require a little bit of trust on my end.  After receiving the credit information, I read through the reports for about an hour.  I had gone through my own a couple times before, so I had a pretty good idea what to look for.  I then made a few phone calls to verify employment, call references, and confirm positive rental history.  This actually ended up taking a couple days because it was tough to get a hold of people and I really only called references that I could verify the phone number from a secondary source.  After a bunch of positive results from my screening, I then accepted the application.

The only stumbling block left was getting the lease signed.  For my lease, I decided to go with EZ Landlord Forms.  I chose this company because early on I used them as a resource to find out more information about renting the property.  They then allowed me to create a sample lease and I found that their wizard was not only very intuitive but it covered all the points that I had read about in the Missouri Landlord/Tenant Guide.  It was nice that it was not only easy-to-use, but also it was thorough and was reviewed by attorneys in the state.  The form ended up costing me $20.  I thought that this was a little expensive, but the quality was apparent.

As you can tell by this post, the process to rent a property and become a landlord is pretty involved.  In the end, I think that I did my due-diligence to find my new tenants.  But, it goes without saying that no process is 100% bullet proof.  In the end, I stuck with my criteria and made what I consider to be a sound decision.  But at the end of the day, I still worry a little about the decision and hope everything turns out for the best.

This weekend I finally got some time to sit down and play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.  I played about 4 hours (not at once) and made it to a level 16 ranking.  I figure I would spend a couple minutes giving my impressions from the viewpoint of a casual player.

One thing that you will notice early on is that you are playing against players of all different ranks.  This is in stark contrast to games like Halo where you play against players only that have the same rank as you.  At first I thought that this would really suck, but I honestly like it much better.  The game does a pretty good job of balancing the teams before each match.  So if you are brand new, you tend to get paired up with a bunch of really good teammates.  This helps a lot because they tend to hunt out the campers, and you can follow them around to learn about the level.  The downside to playing against really good players is that as a casual gamer, you are always at a disadvantage.  MW2 rewards experience with better guns and other perks that give higher ranked players a huge advantage.  So, it is often like you are “going into a gun fight with a knife”.  As a casual player, you can mitigate this advantage in a couple ways.  The first and probably most effective is that you have to crouch around and use stealth a lot more than other players.  In MW2, you really only need to put a couple rounds on an opponent to get a kill.  And I found that no matter what gun they have, if you get the first shot in and it is solid, you will get the kill 9 out of 10 times.  The second strategy I use a lot is that I take on a support role.  I find a player with a solid gun and some claymores and hold up in a bunker or building with them and essentially cover the back door.  This prevents you from being exposed to care packages and you get a lot of surprise kills when someone tries to come in through the back door.

Another thing that was pretty confusing early was all the gun and perk options you are given to upgrade your player.  Being new to Call of Duty multiplayer, this was a bit overwhelming.  It really took me a couple hours to get a grasp of all the options.  But honestly, it is this depth that really makes the game a lot more fun to play.  In Halo, you are always worried about your rank, because this is the only thing that your work to achieve.  In Call of Duty, the rank is really secondary to your perks and gun options.  So, I think this really makes the game fun for a casual player.  If you mute the other players, the game really feels kind of like a “career mode” to the single player story.  But the difference is that you have some really good AI to compete against.  For this game though, I really would like to see an option to purchase perks and guns with XBox points for casual players.  I know I will get a little flack for saying that.  But, honestly, as someone who can play maybe 5-10 hours a week, it would be nice to use some of the more advanced weapons in the multiplayer.  And, I most likely will never be able to earn them organically as I cannot put in 50 hours a week.

Overall, I really dig the multiplayer on MW2.  As a casual player (read: old guy), it provides a pretty good balance so that I can have a good time playing even if it just a couple hours a week.  With that said, I still think I would like to see a way to get better guns and perks without having to hire a 12 year old kid to play when I am at work.

When I saw the early press coming out this morning about Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7), I was absolutely stunned.  I expected a device that merged the current Windows Mobile platform (6.5) with a lot of concepts from the Zune HD and Xbox 360.   But, WP7 was actually a complete rewrite of the whole platform.  In every sense, it is a brand new mobile OS based on the Zune HD and XBox 360.  What is even more impressive, is that the new platform seems to borrow little from the current mobile market leaders—the Apple iPhone, Blackberry OS, and Android.  In fact, it eschews the current paradigm that a mobile OS is simply a gateway to your apps.  Rather than apps, WP7 focuses on hubs for content.  Each hub (people, pictures, media, games, marketplace, etc.) actively polls social media and pulls in content relevant to that hub.  For example, if I want to to view a contact on the device, I just click on their name and it automagically pulls in their recent Facebook, Twitter, and (hopefully) Flickr information and aggregates it into a single view.  And, based on the early walk-throughs, this works contextually for every hub.

Now that I have had a little time to digest all the news and watch a few videos, I am still pretty amazed that this product came from Microsoft.  Not because the UI is  so good (MS has recently came out with a number of good  UIs), but because the new UI is such a huge risk.  I honestly expected Microsoft to go the Bada route, and just come out with an iPhone clone.  This would have been a safe choice.  And, based on how bad Bada is getting panned, a fairly poor choice.  But, Microsoft decided to go the other direction and come out with a highly unique, very stylized creation of its own.  And, I think that this is going to really help differentiate them in the marketplace.

While there are a number of questions remaining about WP7, I think the initial showing was extremely positive.  I know that I personally am going to put off buying a new device until the fall to see how this platform plays out.