Kevin's Weblog

42) Buy a House

On Sunday I had an offer accepted on a house! It’s a cute Victorian bungalow, just a block down the street from where I am now. Although there’s lots of small houses in this neighborhood, most of the houses on the market have been bigger than I need, and pushing what I can afford, leading to questions of whether I’d be happy renting out a room to someone, or buying a duplex and living in half of it. This house is just about perfectly sized for me, and comfortably priced.

We’re in the inspection period currently, but the house seems to have been well cared-for, so I’m hopeful that we won’t discover anything problematic. Beyond that, things still move pretty slowly at this point in the process. Stay tuned for updates (and pictures) later.

(Aside: please don’t feel that you need to comment on this post with your speculations about the future of the housing market or mortgage market. Suffice it to say that I’ve been paying attention too, particularly to the local market here, and given my needs and plans (and my ability to still qualify for a mortgage on excellent terms) I am comfortable with this purchase.)

I took the shotgun approach to this year’s OSCON call-for-proposals and submitted 3 talks. My biggest fear was actually that all three might get accepted. But, it worked out as I hoped and they picked just one. I’ll be talking about “Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang”. The talk will be an improved and expanded version of my presentation to PDXfunc last month, demonstrating how easy it is to convert sequential programs in Erlang into concurrent / distributed programs taking advantage of your multi-core machine, or a cluster of machine.

I’m slightly nervous, because I’ll freely admit that I was likely selected to give this talk more because I’m good at writing proposals, than because I’m the most qualified person out there to discuss Erlang. That said, I’ll make an effort to draw on the expertise of others to help make the talk as good as possible and as effective as possible at drawing new people into the community.

As a minor aside, I’m currently scheduled for Wednesday morning, which is ideal as far as I’m concerned. I get to give my talk, then relax and enjoy the remaining 2 days of the conference.