Curiositech

As those who know me are already aware, I’ll be moving to San Antonio in the near future. We’ve been going crazy in the past few months trying to find the ‘perfect’ house for the Curious, but have mostly found that the Curious are exceedingly picky. An enabler of pickiness is, of course, the Bexar County Property Tax Assessor’s office, with the web site at BCAD.org. Similar to the type of sites we data-mined while I was studying under Avi Rubin at JHUISI, BCAD gives you the ability to find out quite a bit of information about a property once you know the address, the owner, or either of a couple of obscure identifiers I won’t address here (see the site if you want more info on those).

I use the site to find out actual property layouts for homes I’m looking at. For example, this listing shows up on the realtor.com site as being on a dead-end road, but not on the cul-de-sac at the end of that road. Go here, enable hybrid view, and zoom in as far as possible, and it appears that the house is actually on the other side of the road. However, BCAD tells you that the house is actually at the END of the cul-de-sac – by far the most desirable location, given the local schools and all the benefits of being on a cul-de-sac.

BCAD – another tool of the curious overtaking the world by technology.

For those who have tons of music on casette, and want to transfer it to electronic format, here’s a link. The authors talk you through how to transfer that old groove to an MP3 fairly easily. They also address the invariable question of ‘why bother?’ (H/T: Lifehacker)

So we had a guy come look at our HVAC unit the other day. Way back in Aug, we noticed that the A/C wasn’t working right so we had someone come look, and they recharged the Freon in the unit – which fixed the problem. However, when we returned from our visit to Boston in Sept, the A/C was broken again. We again called a repairman, who established that one of the two HVAC units leaks coolant – but he couldn’t establish which one. He promptly charged us $200 for the sleuthing, and disappeared.

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