I bought a house for $150,000 eight years ago and had a loan of $120,000. The value of my house increased to $350,000. I took advantage of the situation and refinanced, being a conservative person, only borrowing $280,000 at a favorable 5.5% rate fixed for 30 years paying $1,600 per month for the mortgage and another $400 per month for real estate taxes and insurance…

In discussion with a colleague, I mentioned that Wordpress.org was able to provide very nice functionality with excellent usability through php, mySQL, and Apache. She said these were simpler technologies not particularly suitable for today’s complex corporate environment where more complete frameworks are required to satisfy all of the business requirements. I challenged her by saying that some of the blogs get millions of daily hits with this simple architecture while some corporate systems stall after a few hundred users. She told me that the data model in a blog is much simpler than in any corporate system. I know…

Growing up in an apartment building, we had a hallway that had four doors to four homes. My mother would always clean the entire hallway but for some reason our neighbors would only clean the small area between their own door and the hallway entrance. It would always puzzle and bother her why they only cleaned in front of their door. Did they think dust in other areas would not move? A few years later…

This might be a bit long but I have to share. A couple months ago I met with a few paving contractors (actually their salesmen). One of them (let’s call him Chief), an elderly man, in poor health with difficulty speaking came by, measured, gave me the lowest quote and left. He came across as trustworthy. In all my recent dealings I look for integrity and trustworthiness above all…

Having experienced the house building process, I have learned a lot and wanted to share a few thoughts here in case you ever face the dilemma of building vs. buying. There is an Armenian saying that every man must “plant a tree, have a child, and build a house.” I think the last one is questionable in the literal sense (though in the saying it’s really about making a home for a family)…