Whenever I can, I read from my iPhone. Email, blogs / RSS, books – everything. (I am a Google Book Search PM, it’s kind of my job – but my interest in this pre-dated the job – check out my iPhone skin).
So it is annoying that I can’t read The Economist on my phone. No mobile version of their site, no iPhone app, it’s painful. I trust they will get there, but it’s annoying they haven’t yet.
In the past (college) I would have implemented this myself. Not anymore. This is an interesting observation. In college, I had mobile phone email by auto-forwarding emails from my personal server to SMS, and vice versa. Well before Gmail for mobile. Now, I trust that progress will solve many of these little annoyances, and there is enough competition for my attention / interest that if something isn’t perfectly meshing with my desires, I find something else that is. (Or, for The Economist, which deserves my attention, I put up with its annoyances).
Our family has settled in Scituate. We think we’ll be here for a good long while too. With Gabriel on the way, we were looking for houses in the Boston area, and ran into this cute little cottage over Thanksgiving (Abe’s Uncle lives 4 houses down the road). Franny and I drove back the next day to check it out, and we were sold. We pushed the sellers down an additional $85k from their ask, and we had a deal.
We bought the house without a realtor or lawyer – saving $$$ – go us. We can read our own contracts, and who is better aligned with our own interests than, um, us? (If you’re interested, there are great HBS cases on why realtors are completely unaligned with either the seller or buyer’s interests).
We were then the proud owners of a house on a cliff, overlooking the ocean, with a beach at the foot of the cliff for surfing and playing. This was literally the way Franny and I would dream about our perfect house – “wouldn’t it be nice to have a house on a cliff, with surfing waves, by the ocean?”
The house was being sold as a knockdown. We knew better – but it was a scary proposition. The house was built in 1920, fairly solid, but hadn’t been occupied in 8 years, wasn’t completely winterized, and had been destroyed by a bad 1970’s makeover.
Long story short – we are in heaven, we bought at the low point in the market, at a truly hardball price (paid for land only) and then “flipped” our own house with the help of tons of family and friends – thanks everyone! We now live in a beautiful, inspiring, livable, warm Cape Cod summer cottage, we play daily at the beach with our children, and we wake up to sunrises over the Atlantic. Incredible.
