Jeff Billimek’s Journal

This morning I called up Kevin the mortgage lender guy to check on specific numbers for an interest-only 5/1 ARM type loan. He ran some numbers and quoted me a rate of 4.625%. Because I would only be putting down 5%, I would need a second loan to make up for the other 15% in order to avoid the PMI fees. He figured about $600/month for homeowners insurance and $2200 for property taxes and came up with what my monthly payment would be. I was very happy with the figure he quoted me.

One of the large burdens for me around the whole home purchase thing was the huge monthly payment I thought I would be facing. This is mainly because I used those online calculators which figure for a 30-year fixed at something like 6.5%. Kevin’s numbers seemed much more doable and so I’m actually pretty excited about the whole thing now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the cost.

For lunch today Casey, Brian, Alex, Susan, Bob, and I went to a new burrito place next to Oz pizza and the east point Marta station. It’s a lot like Moe’s or Willy’s. I had a chicken burrito and it was pretty good. It’s actually pretty small inside the restaurant but I don’t think they can do much about that.

Outside today it was a gorgeous day. It was in the 70’s and sunny. What a nice preview for spring! I’m really excited about the next few months.

Today we completed the server swing task. We took three servers from the integration environment and dropped them into the production environment. This additional capacity should help eliminate the CPU bottleneck we have on our existing six production servers and help identify where the next bottleneck is.

I’m a little upset about the whole process because I haven’t been as involved as I would like to be. With this new first and final project I’m leading, I’ve been sort of cut off from the performance & architecture role I was serving in before.

Before leaving work I stopped by Andy’s desk to talk about branching strategy for our next release. Andy is a great guy to work with and I often enjoy working with him when it comes to release engineering stuff.

We currently have been building branches off of other branches in a sort of cascading or waterfall pattern. I’ve been a little nervous about this because we haven’t gone back to the /MAIN branch in a very long time. I asked Andy about this approach and he suggested that we merge back to main and then branch off main again. Chris V. overheard our discussion and came by to chime in. Chris felt strongly that the waterfall approach was appropriate. I stood back as Andy & Chris debated about the two approaches and got even more confused than I was before I spoke with them. Eventually they both suggested I keep doing things the way I currently do them.

I was in contact with my Realtor, Laura, throughout the day. I told her that I was pretty interested in the second unit we looked at yesterday - the one with all the upgrades.

She did some checking and came back to me that Bernie would be able to push out closing at the end of April instead of the end of March which would buy me an additional month, but I would still have to deal with a double mortgage payment in June (one for mortgage and one for rent). I checked with Post and they didn’t seem willing to work anything out regarding the month of June.

After work I drove back to the Highlands View Townhomes property. I wanted to take another look at #67 - the one with all the upgrades that I looked at yesterday.

When I got there Bernie, the sales guy, saw me and wanted to talk about #67. I told him that I just wanted to take another look at it and he gave me the key and a map and sent me on my way.

I stopped by my car and grabbed my camera so I could take some pictures inside. I didn’t change lenses, electing to keep the 28-135mm lens. I figured that would be wide enough for inside.

(This is a view of the front of the townhome)

I entered from the garage on the lower level and looked around as I worked my way up to the main level. Inside the living room were two laborers who were treating the hardwood floors with some sort of solution (turpentine?) I asked them something about looking around but I don’t think they spoke English, so I just smiled and went about my business.

After looking around, I headed back to the office. I wasn’t able to get any indoor photos because the 28mm wasn’t wide enough (with the 1.6x crop factor). I should have brought the 15mm fisheye instead.

Back inside the sales office, Bernie and his partner were on the phone with Laura, my realtor. She had called them to try to negotiate a lower price for me since I had to eat a month of rent in June. Unfortunately all she was able to do was to get Bernie to pay for one month of my association fees.

Bernie wanted to know if I was interested in #67 and Laura said that she would have to speak with me first and I mentioned that I would like to sleep on it.

As I left the property I called Laura and talked about it with her. She advised me that it is a good deal but suggested I sleep on it.

Back home I called up speakeasy to see if they could check on DSL availability for the townhome community. I spoke with a friendly guy named Jason. He couldn’t find the property address in their database but gave me a website to compute and latitude and longitude for the address. I could then email him the coordinates (33.826075, -084.498958) and he would send it to some people to check and get back with me in a couple of days.

I got a call from Laura who said that it looks like we have to make a decision right now instead of waiting for the morning. Bernie called her and said that he has another person who is very interested in #67 and wants to put a contract on it, but he wants to give us the right of refusal. She apologized to me for having to make a quick decision and reminded me that if we can’t get this one, there are going to be plenty of other townhomes at the property & other properties to choose from.

I decided that I want to do this and told her to call Bernie back and put things in motion. She called back a short while later and we set up a 4pm appointment with Bernie tomorrow to sign the contract and pay the $2,000 earnest money.

Jen invited me over to her house tonight to have dinner and help her study. I left my place around 7:30 and drove over to Jen’s house.

Jen baked a home-made pizza. It had spinach and tomatoes on it with soy cheese. It was very good. The cheese didn’t really taste much different than ‘normal’ cheese too.

Lisa, Jen’s friend, came over and had some pizza with us. We had some drinks and had a great time.