Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:57 on 7 July 2019

The deal that fell through is on again. Late Friday morning, I received a call that the offer that beat me out had collapsed and the property was back on the market. So I made a last-minute trip north to inspect it in person. It looked as good as it seemed online, so I told my agent to prepare an offer.

Then, since I was most of the way to Boston Bar, I decided to take my friends who have a summer home there up on the standing invitation to visit them, since it was going to take a few days to prepare all the paperwork needed in making a contingent offer anyhow.

It’s all been signed, so now comes the waiting. There’s still a frightfully large number of ways this all could fall through:

1. The seller accepts someone else’s offer (not out of the picture, given how quickly that place attracted the first offer).
2. The seller does some random flaky thing (also not out of the picture, given how the seller jumped on a quickie offer so soon instead of doing the more typical thing of waiting for multiple offers to come in, if one offer comes in surprisingly fast).
3. My current place either fails to sell, or fails to get an offer for enough money to afford the place in Bellingham (also a possibility, given how slow interest has been in it so far).

Published at 16:50 on 3 July 2019

An interesting condo was listed for sale on Monday. I immediately contacted my agent up there and requested we do a walk-through via Skype. That happened today, and it still looked interesting enough that I made plans to see it myself the next business day (i.e. Friday).

And now we learn that it has sold already. So be it. I’m unwilling to buy anything sight unseen, particularly after that experience with the mold-infested unit that looked so nice in pictures. Plus while the location was beautiful (on a dead-end street adjacent to a greenbelt), both the street network leading there and the complex itself were bicycle-hostile.

Exactly how hostile was a matter of question, and part of my due diligence on Friday was to ride around on my bike and get some feel for how bad the trip downtown would actually have been. I’m still planning on doing that, simply in case anything else in that area comes up for sale (there’s lots of condos in that part of town).

Ah, well, the search continues.

Published at 08:57 on 2 July 2019

That’s the question I have after seeing that this condo just went pending within a week of it hitting the market.

You see, I happened to be in Bellingham doing some house-shopping on the day it hit the market. Initially, I was excited, as it seemed to have most of what I was looking for: a location that was both quiet and central, plus no upstairs neighbors.

Then I toured it and the disappointment hit. Or, should I say, the musty smell hit my nostrils: there was a distinct moldy odor as soon as I walked in the door. That was after noticing the shabby condition of the exterior siding. The truth was immediately clear: the HOA had deferred exterior maintenance to the point that enough water had leaked in and fungi were now busy at work in the building.

Needless to say, I took a hard pass on that one.

It had an open house the past weekend. One wonders if any of the typical backhanded realtor tricks were employed: baking cookies in the oven, opening all the doors and windows, etc. In other words, anything to disguise the telltale mustiness. Or maybe my allergies have simply made my ability to detect mold more acute than the norm. Or perhaps a slumlord snapped it up and plans to use it as a low-end rental.

Who knows? The important thing is, I didn’t get stuck with it.

Published at 21:38 on 9 June 2019

I’ve basically just about totally given up finding a job in the world of bigoted tech bros, because, well, they are bigoted (and thus incapable of believing  someone who’s obviously over 50 can do a good job).

By implication, that means moving out of my current home, which is not affordable unless I earn the sort of income one does as a computer professional. Which, in turn, means moving significantly further away from the big city of Seattle, a place I only moved close to under the assumption that I could find a tech job here.

All things being equal, I’d much rather live someplace with fewer people and more nature. So, there’s a silver lining to the dark cloud of inconvenience that moving (something I’ve done too much of and am generally sick of) represents.

Another bright spot came to light last week, when my investigations revealed that although there has been housing cost inflation there, Bellingham is at least as affordable as Olympia is. That was unexpected, as Bellingham is probably my preferred destination; I’ve long fantasized about what it would be like to live there some day.

Then tonight I learn that I’ll probably get significantly more money for my current home, should I sell it, than I had estimated. I was dreading hearing the opposite news, for the simple reason that the universe has tended to frustrate my life decisions and make everything a struggle in recent years. Could it actually be that that sorry period is finally ending?

Published at 10:44 on 2 June 2019

Many cults have their members dress distinctively in public. Here’s one stereotypical example from the 1960’s:

How is that fundamentally different from this (snapped recently on the ferry one afternoon):

Answer: it’s not. Not so far as I can tell. Both expect you to turn over your life to the cult. With cult religions, it’s rituals and faith-based beliefs in things that cannot be proven. With cult employers, it’s the cult of high technology.

Both cults expect you to devote your life to the cult, wearing the clothing the cult provides, and devoting your “free” time to activities the cult approves of, generally ones that support the cult’s mission.

And I think that, in addition to my age, is really hurting my employability. I have my lifelong interests, and I’m not interested in putting them on the back burner in the name of prioritizing any cult’s interests (no offense, geeks, but role playing games and science fiction simply don’t interest me). I’ve developed my own idiosyncratic sense of personal style, and I’m not interested in changing it in order to become a human billboard for some business. I regard social networking as a baleful influence on society, and participate in it only reluctantly, under an assumed name. I firmly believe that what I choose to do in my unpaid hours is none of any employer’s business.

If you value your personal liberty, you don’t belong in a cult of any kind. It’s just that simple.

Published at 16:55 on 30 May 2019

It’s 17:00 on a Thursday a full ten days from when I interviewed for a job, and not a peep out of them, despite my sending a followup message. So you know what that means: they’re pursuing someone else but haven’t quite finalized things yet. But rest assured the odds are so insignificant they can safely be disregarded: at this stage, I have about as much chance as being hit by a stray meteor.

It’s not really a surprise or anything, but it is annoying, given how good a match the job in question was for my skills, and how well I solved one of the programming problems on the whiteboard. But there’s only so much you can do when not having any gray in your hair is one of the prime qualifications for the job.

And I’m certain the experience is equally frustrating for anyone who’s female, or who’s not White or Asian.  Just keep this all in mind the next time you hear some stuffed shirt from the technology sector whining about a lack of qualified talent.

Published at 09:53 on 10 May 2019

There’s basically two kinds of plants you can grow: annuals and perennials.

Annuals come up fast but require a lot of tending during the growing season. But the growing season is also the outdoor recreation season, and I’d much rather be communing with native plants someplace wild than stuck at home trying to repeatedly assert control over a tiny plot of urban land. Yard work sucks.

Perennials are not nearly so high-maintenance, but they are slow to settle in. I, by contrast, just don’t settle in. It’s never happened in my life, and given that I’m well into my fifties, that means the odds are it’s never going to happen.

I tried to settle in to the home I am sitting in right now, but it didn’t work: I had overlooked how ageist and cultish the high tech world would become, and how much this would adversely impact my employabality in it. And if I can’t have a high-paying, high-tech job, it’s very hard to justify the expense of living in a region as costly as the Seattle metro area.

So this year I’m leaving. The year my native cacti in the window boxes are finally going to put on a huge bloom. The year my thimbleberries (after years of getting settled in) have flower buds on them. The year the dewberries finally flowered (female flowers, we’ll see if there’s a nearby male and I get fruit). The serviceberry is still a little thing, a decade or more from looking settled in.

Someone else is going to enjoy the results of the work I did. Not me. Or, someone else won’t appreciate all those “weird plants” that are not the ornamentals everyone else grows, rip them out, and replace them. Either way, I am going to get little benefit for the work I did.

It would be nice if my life were more compatible with gardening, but it’s just not.

Published at 08:26 on 9 February 2019

This is easily the most snow I’ve seen since moving to the island five years ago. About 9 inches and still coming down! Quite the birthday present from Mother Nature!

Published at 11:20 on 1 December 2018

This is a day that I’m usually pretty quiet about, because it’s a puzzle to me how to respectfully respond to it. You see, I’m a queer guy (not a gay guy) in his mid-fifties. Personally, and for reasons I won’t get to in greater detail here, that difference between queer and gay is a huge part of the reason why I managed to both avoid that HIV bullet myself, and avoid the experience of having most of my close friends die, despite being the “right” age to have experienced both.

Therefore, I can’t really relate any sort of the personal horror stories that most gay men of my age can, nor do I really feel in any way like a survivor (or have any consequent survivor’s guilt). So I’ll just have to say that while I haven’t personally experienced much of the impacts many of my friends my age have, I understand that many of them have, and that it must have been terrible.

I will say that I have had the pleasure of meeting many unassuming people who were fierce warriors during the era when AIDS was a crisis in the First World. That latter part is important; in many parts of the Third World, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is still a huge crisis today. It is due to AIDS that many African nations have a lower life expectancy today than they did 30 years ago.

Published at 08:46 on 9 October 2018

I remember when I first figured out I was naturally good at discrete math, probability, and statistics. It was in a probability theory class, which up to that point had been easy. Then came the unit on Bayes’ Theorem. Up went a welter of new and confusing notations on the board, accompanied by a confusing, mind-numbing, and nonsensical welter of jargon. For the first time in the class, I was lost.

The end of the class came. Unexpectedly, the teacher assigned a problem which to my eyes had nothing to do with all the confusing mumbo-jumbo of the past hour. Moreover, the apparent answer was so cryingly obvious I couldn’t fully understand why the professor would ask anyone to solve such a self-evident exercise. Hoping to clarify the past hour of confusion, I blurted out a question to the effect “Well, offhand, the answer is intuitively (some number), because the second event is a sub-event of the first, and that’s a product of the two probabilities, but I’m not sure that’s right by the theory you just discussed.”

The professor scowled at me, because I had just ruined his homework assignment by answering it and explaining the logic behind it, and he now had to cook up another one on the spot. It was then that I thought back about times I’d run across sets of math problems in puzzle books: generally difficult, but with a few mysteriously easy probability or statistics ones thrown in for some reason.

It dawned on me: those “easy” problems really weren’t intrinsically easy; I was gifted at solving them. The problems just seemed easy, because they were easy… to me. In the absence of any data on how challenging those branches of mathematics were for others to understand, I had been operating on unrepresentative information and laboring under the misconception that my level of talent was representative.

That latter assumption is usually a valid one, of course. In most things, talent is distributed according to a bell curve, and odds strongly favor one being somewhere near the middle of it. The rub is, usually and always are not the same thing.

Nearly everyone has at least some areas where they excel far above the norm, but the principle above can make it difficult for one to realize those strengths. For those trying to assess their strengths, or to build a career based on them, this can make that task difficult.

For those trying to advise others, it can render their advice far less useful. Consider this article. It’s a common thread I’ve run across: just follow your passion and everything will sort itself out.

Sorry, wrong. No, it won’t—not unless you’re very lucky and by random chance happen to choose something that’s marketable. I speak as someone who pissed away four years of his life doing just that sort of passion-following and hoping for something to come of it. Nothing ever did.

You see, that author has innate entrepreneurial ability, and I do not. While he was “simply following his passions” he was also filtering them for marketability without even realizing it, or at least without realizing how difficult that can be for others not so gifted as he. He simply assumed he was normal and virtually everyone else shared his special ability. He wrote a whole book on helping the innately entrepreneurial make careers for themselves while believing he was writing a book useful for everyone.