Reviewed the townhouse again last night. There’s a lot to be done.

For those unfamiliar with the process, here’s a quick overview of the steps required in buying a home:

1. Look for homes that are being sold. You can do this through an agent, or not. The standard trade-off applies: If you use an agent, you have have to pay him/her fees when you “close” (more on that later), but the agent does a lot of footwork for you, finding homes within your price range, talking to the homeowners, etc. My agent was great, and well worth her commission. I just told her when I could go looking, and when I arrived at the office she’d have a list of a dozen properties that matched my criteria. Cost: None.
2. Visit homes that are being sold. At this point, you’re looking at major factors: Is it big enough? Do the appliances look new or old? Do you like the layout? You’re not inspecting the plumbing under the bathroom sinks. Cost: None.
3. Put a contract on a home. This is not purchasing. This is essentially a document that prevents the seller from selling the property for the time being. It’s a way for the purchaser to state his/her intention to buy the property. The buyer can still opt-out later. If you’re going through an agent, the agent will charge you fees to set up the contract. In my case, it was $3,000.
4. Buyer Walkthrough. The buyer “walks through” the house, almost always with an accredited home inspector. The inspector’s job is to inspect everything in the house, from the insulation in the attic to the heat pump in the basement, in detail. Ideally, the inspector will explain every test and result to the buyer during the walkthrough. Either way, the inspector then gives the buyer a complete list of ”walkthrough items” that needs repair or improvement. For example, in my townhouse, the inspector discovered that one circuit breaker was overloaded with two wires—not imminently dangerous, but a violation of county codes—and that the fan in the upstairs bathroom didn’t work, along with numerous minor details. Cost: about $150
5. The buyer gets a mortgage. A mortgage is essentially a big loan, which is calculated so that it’ll be paid back after a few decades. Most mortgages last for thirty years. However, with many mortgages, you can pay it off early. So, for example, I could sell this townhouse in two years, and use that money to completely pay off my mortgage (assuming I sell it for at least as much as I paid for it). I’m not locking myself into make mortgage payments for the next thirty years of my life. Cost: $3,000, in my case.

Note: Some mortgages require a down payment, which is a small chunk of the loan that the buyer has to pay immediately. A down payment is required if the buyer has insufficient credit; it’s a way for the mortgage company to be sure that the buyer is really serious and actually has access to significant money. The down payment is usually 5% or 10% of the full mortgage amount.

6. Settlement (a.k.a. Closing). The buyer and the seller sit down with a title officer (not sure of the exact job title), who explains all the details of transferring ownership and provides the paperwork that both parties need. The buyer and seller sign the appropriate paperwork, and the title company transfers ownership of the property from the seller to the buyer. Done!

There are a lot more details involved, but I think I’ve covered all the major points.

In other news, I finished watching the first disc of Gundam SEED yesterday. The first few episodes were just okay, but it’s improved steadily by the end of the disc (episode five). It’s got a solid cast of interesting characters, in the best Gundam tradition.

They’re also raiding the weirder bits of original Mobile Suit Gundam for concepts, which they’ve reworked beautifully into items like the Mu La Flaga’s mobile armor. From what I can tell, they took the ill-fated G-Armor, which was a clunky fighter/bomber that docked with Gundam to protect it and add firepower, and added the separatable gun pods seen in later Zeon prototype mobile suits, and combined them to create the blazingly fast mobile armor. All of the coolness, none of the drawbacks.

Well, that’s it. I closed on a townhouse this morning. I now own a home, as much as anyone actually owns one.

Amazingly, I’m not a complete basket case. I’m pretty calm about it. This was a decision I came to slowly and deliberately. This feels right.

More VR story coming later today.

I read Donald Norman’s The Design of Everday Things last week.

I expected a set of case studies in product design. Perhaps each chapter would be devoted to a particular modern appliance or tool — the teapot, the toaster, the microwave oven — and illuminate its faults and successes.

The book does study various everyday things, but it’s much more of a manifesto than a set of case studies. It’s a call for reasonable design. It pleads with designers to ask themselves, How will our users use this? What do your users need? Make it easy for users to do what they need to do.

Norman uses the phrase “it probably won a design award” disparagingly, as he points out that the profession of design often rewards aesthetic balance more than practical usability. For example, glass doors with no handles or plates, so you have no idea where to push or pull them. As you approach them, you wonder, Are they automatic? Do I push the door on the left side or the right?

Fortunately, he recognizes the inherent difficulty in achieving good design. He illustrates this with airplane cockpit design. A physical dial that shows altitude is more difficult for the brain to interpret than a digital readout, but a digital readout can fail while a dial will continue operating. Which is better? The decision isn’t easy or obvious.

But many design decisions aren’t that difficult, and Norman provides an excellent overview of the problems involved and the need for simply usable design.

This past week has been a complete blur of work.

The customer came in to audit our documents. This translated to half a dozen folks sitting in front of computers in a conference room, electronically reviewing documents and writing up “Formal Action Items” if they found anything wrong. A Form Action Item is essentially a description of a problem that needs to be resolved before the customer will accept the documents.

Unfortunately, the customer was there from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and I had to be there at the same time. Because of my late-night sleep patterns, this wrought havoc on my body. I was exhausted all morning, and by the afternoon I’d been forcing my body for so long that I never felt 100%.

So, it was a tiring week. But the customers only wrote twenty Action Items, all of them minor, and they seemed content with the documents. It’s always a bit hard to tell, as they’re reluctant to praise.

On another positive note, despite my tiredness, I still completed over half of the items on my weekly to-do list. And some of the completed items were fairly time-intensive, like watching a Great Movie and assembling a new BeOS machine to replace the one that died.

This is on top of a week that included the roller coaster ride of my mortgage. First, the underwriters wanted very specific documentation about a line of credit that I have with my Mom and Grandmother, and it took several phone calls to various people to satisfy that requirement. Then, the underwriters wouldn’t approve me for a loan with no down payment; they insisted on 5% down. But I don’t have that kind of money on hand, so I had to arrange a quick loan from my parents.

Just to make sure I understood everything properly, I called my loan officer on Friday. She told me that I’d need to bring to closing the down payment ($10,000) plus $3,000 for closing costs (taxes, title insurance, fees). On Saturday, I received the estimates in the mail, and according to them I needed to bring the down payment plus $6,000. A worried call to my loan officer this morning revealed the situation: the mailed estimates were the first estimates we’d done on the property, and to be safe the loan officer had written in the highest possible amounts. We now have much more accurate estimates, which are indeed $3,000. Whew.

This whole mortgage issue has been quite a headache, actually. If nothing else, I’m annoyed at the number of hoops I’ve had to jump through and the confusing terms used to describe the money I need to pay. If a firm were to provide the same service in a package that eliminated all the jargon, I imagine they’d have a lot of happy customers.

Anyvay, I still have quite a bit to take care of: I called an insurance place to get some homeowner’s insurance, and they’re setting up a policy for me now. I need to call about buying a parking sticker. I still need to withdraw the cashier’s check for closing on Wednesday. And I haven’t even bought the place yet.

I look forward to the day when I’m at least somewhat familiar with this process.

It’s been a looooong week.

But at least I have my weekend free. Saturday afternoon will be spent working on Otherspace Productions animations. In fact, I assembled a rough version of one shot last night.

It’s an odd emotional experience, assembling animation. I envisioned this thing months ago, and I saw it clearly in my mind, but that’s all that existed. Thoughts. But last night, I clicked “Render” in Premiere, and lain walked towards me. A lain that I had created out of a random idea. I dreamt it, and now it’s happening.

Meanwhile, my pending mortgage continues to be a thorn in my side. The underwriters are asking for all sorts of documentation, from detailed bank statements to money down. But it looks like everything is calmed down to the point where I know exactly how much I’ll need to bring to closing ($3,000 for all the various fees, plus a 5% downpayment of $10,000), and all the underwriters need now is a detailed statement from one of my accounts, which they should be getting today. So it looks like I may actually be able to buy this townhouse on Wednesday.

In other news, I’ve been watching a ton of anime lately, trying to get through my stack of twenty or so anime DVDs to see. This includes .hack//Sign, .hack//Legend of the Twilight, Gundam Seed, and Angelic Layer, all of which I’m enjoying on various levels. I’ll post more detailed reviews once I’ve actually had a chance to get through a disc or two.

Forgot to mention: a couple of weeks ago, I went out with a friend to see I, Robot. I liked it. I’m a major Asimov fan, too, so this may surprise some people.

The fundamental plot of the film concerns the Three Laws of Robotics, which are essentially a straightforward moral code for robots, and their potential for mis-application. This is a theme explored in Asimov’s book I, Robot, which is really a compendium of short stories dealing with early robot development and various interpretations of the Three Laws. In all cases, the robots follow the Three Laws, but some robot models apply the Laws more liberally and some more conservatively.

In the film, this leads to an apocalyptic ending that is far too action-packed and melodramatic for Asimov’s cerebral style. But the basic story does follow the pattern laid down in the I, Robot book, and there is nothing in the movie’s philosophy that fundamentally disagrees with Asimov’s futuristic beliefs. This is not an anti-robot film, or an anti-progress film. It’s a film about the dangers and limitations of an exclusively logical approach to human problems.

Now that might have gotten Asimov’s beard in a twist, as his books expressed his aggressively Carl Sagan-like belief in the ultimate superiority of the human brain to solve all problems. The greatest weakness of Asimov’s characters is their tendency to analyze and talk about everything. Many of his books are little more than long conversations between characters. Anything could be solved if simply thought about for long enough.

The film of I, Robot points out the weakness of that approach, though again never in a way that undermines Asimov’s stories or faith in the future. In fact, the film is an ironic pointer to the flaws in Asimov’s characteristic approach to problem-solving (namely, extensive analysis and dialogue), demonstrating that that often isn’t enough to solve difficult human problems. No amount of analysis can prove the existence of a soul.

I seem to be recovering, according to my normal schedule (fine on Monday, dive on Tuesday, plateau on Wednesday). My mortgage continues its rocky road; I now may need more money than I expected. I can’t really think about it enough to write about it, though.

For now, here’s more VR story:

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