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dlatin

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by dlatin

  1. You might find a cheaper quote but I don't think you would find anyone who is going to try and replace just a single pane of a double pane window. At very most the quote might be $100 too high... for a remodel job your going to be able to save more with your time somewhere else.

    I agree, we are just at the very end of the remodel and I am pretty over cash going out the door. Need to get it rented and cash coming in. Funny how little stuff like this can be difficult, yet I just dropped $16k on a concrete driveway! It’s just such a tiny window and the quote kinda shocked me.
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  2. This is on a house we are remodeling and renting. This is a back window that likely will have blinds or drapes closed all the time so I was hoping to just replace the glass vs. the whole double pane section. It is pretty small so $350 seemed like a lot. They don’t want to replace the single pane because it will get moisture between the panes pretty quickly they said. I’m tempted to give it a try.

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  3. Some really great advice and suggestions here so I’m not sure this is needed but I wanted to share our success story.

    Son diagnosed with severe ADHD in kindergarten. We were at a private school where all the kids in his class were a year older and at that age, developmentally the difference was enormous (we never even thought about holding him back for that advantage). The Dr. said he would not be able to function without drugs. Wife did a ton of research and we decided to try to find food sensitivities/triggers. We cut everything for a week except raw fruits and vegetables and slowly added foods back 1 at a time. We found anything artificial was a huge trigger, particularly artificial colors and preservatives. Gluten as well. We found we could tell within minutes when he ate something he was not supposed to eat. He would wet himself, get very emotional, act wildly. At the same time there happened to be an acupuncturist from Costa Rica staying with my sister so we signed him up for 10 treatments. I didn’t believe any of that stuff but I figured why not. After just a few treatments, along with the very strict diet the change was striking. We moved schools and kept this up through 5th grade. Very strict diet, virtually no cheating, healthy clean eating. He’s excelled, never been on drugs and he’s going to be a senior next year and he’s absolutely crushing it in school. We moved out onto a lake 7 years ago and didn’t keep it up but he’s found ways to cope as he’s gotten older. One additional upside is because he ate so clean for all those early years, he is in great physical shape from not eating all the crap kids eat. He doesn’t have the physique of any kid I’ve seen.

    TLDR: diet can have a big role in behavior, it’s extremely difficult to maintain (no cheating) but we found it, along with acupuncture, he’s been able to achieve things I nor the medical community thought was possible.

    Good luck! I know how difficult and emotional this all can be.

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  4. TWP is what we've used.  If it is a new build of treated boards, they need to air out a couple of months before staining. 

    Yeah, we are going to let it dry out a few months. I think TWP is what my boathouse was stained with. I like the color a lot, was maybe hoping for a bit not waterproofing.
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  5. We just added a large deck to a property that we will need to stain once it dries out.  We recently added a new boathouse that was stained but used the recommendation of the builder and recently re-stained a back deck at our house using a stain the guy suggested.  I'm not sure how I feel about either of the stains used.  Anyone have a recommendation for a really good long life stain? 

  6. I say prime location being across from a lake but it is east texas so perhaps not so when it comes to property management.  I will definitely look into this though.  I acknowledge we need to do a bunch more leg work before we go live to learn about this all but surly is often a great place to start :).  How would you go about getting rental history from a prospective tenant?

  7. 2 hours ago, Snake Diggity said:

    I would suggest doing the math on BnB vs long term if it’s in a prime vacation rental area.  The numbers on that have changed dramatically in the last 2 years.  You can cash flow pretty good in some places now, and you don’t have to worry about getting a bad renter you have to deal with for a year.

    That's a really good point about short term vs. long term related to how long we may deal with a bad renter we need to consider.  The location is pretty prime.  There's actually an air bnb next door and across the street (lake side).  That would require we would need to furnish it, be responsible for water/electricity, trash and yard maintenance, bookings fees, etc.  This is something we have been thinking about.   

  8. 10 hours ago, UT_OB1 said:

    Ready how?  I mean what are you doing if you are renting long term.  Did you have to do repairs?  
     

    How much do you think it will rent for?  What will your mortgage, taxes. Insurance, and prop management be?  
     

    If you’re doing long term, either you or your property manager needs to meet every prospective tenant for a tour. Weed out a lot of people that way.  Inspect the house every 6 months, start with 3 if you get a tenant you’re not sure about. “Oh I just ignored the drip” is a lot cheaper to fix after 3/6 months as opposed to 12-24 later when they move out. 

    Yeah - the property sat unoccupied for a couple of years and was a disaster.  Pretty much a complete remodel on the inside except ripping all sheetrock out.

    Question:  when weeding out tenants, do you just not approve their application?  Can you just do that for any reason, except race/religion/etc...? 

    No mortgage, I know taxes and insurance.  I think the hard part will be pricing it.  The location is prime, awesome view of the lake with a small boat ramp (not private but not really used) directly across the street.  We were thinking going on the high end to perhaps weed out some tenants.  Since we live a few doors down I was planning on getting a property manager, hoping my wife can handle those needs.

  9. I hope to have my first rental ready soon, so I’m really interested in what others that have experience can share. We stumbled upon an amazing deal for a lakeview house about 8 doors down. I was considering airBnb but was thinking long term would be easier. I’m starting from scratch with no idea what I’m doing.

  10. Hopefully you don’t mind If jump in here too. Bought a house I’m renovating and will rent. I need to swap out the hot water heater. Was really wanting to go tankless but it’s not an option so I have to go old school. Id like to go economical but the reviews I see are scary. Anyone also want to recommend something?

  11. Very interesting thread. I never wanted kids but after 3 years of marriage we had our first and it was life changing that can’t really be explained or truly understood until you have kids. He was so good we decided to have another shortly after. #2 was not as easy and we decided to stop at 2. I agree with just about all that’s been said above with just one important addition. I owe a lot of how great being parent is to how amazing my wife is. She is an amazing mother and just an amazing person. Having a non-crazy wife is huge. She helps me be a much better dad. Also, it’s important to know if you are controlling, a neat freak, etc because if so, if either party is, it can be a real challenge.

    I’m going through the teen years now and it’s pretty scary, you worry so much about them, about their future. You try to help teach from all your mistakes but the reality is that’s the only way to learn, by making mistakes so that’s challenging to know. You just have to have faith that you raised them well and all will be ok. And even if you did, there still will likely challenges. There’s nothing more heart breaking than your child in pain, physically or emotionally and that is a guarantee to happen. I am convinced my life wouldn’t be as fulfilled sans kids. However I’m sure I would be on a sailboat in the Caribbean right now if we were childless.

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  12. I feel a bit naaive for posting this but was already aware of the geographical interest Russia had with narrowing their NATO defensive front over the Eastern European Plain.  What was new to me is that Ukraine is also ripe with shale gas and potentially recoverable crude deposits.

    Forward to 12:32 if the embedded timestamp in the link below doesn't work.

    Cliffs: The 'breakaway' regions are precisely in the discovered rich oil deposit regions. Crimea has access to large gas discovered deposit regions. Russia is a large gas station economically. The entire region is crucial to land defense of the Russian state because geography. Ukraine'ss discovered/known oil/gas deposits would make them the 2nd most important in Europe after Russia and 14th largest in the world. Ukraine is set to compete with Russia selling to Europe and ripe for Western petrochemical partnership/development.
     

    I just watched this and was going to share as well. Really great piece. It all makes a bit more sense.
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  13. 1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:
    Back to the Durham thing.
    This latest filing repeats, in less than a paragraph, what is detailed in Sussman's indictment.  It's not new at all.  It's a mere summary rehash.
    What's interesting though is that Sussman's indictment is 27 pages long to allege a single count of lying to the FBI.
    For perspective, the Manafort indictment was 31 pages long to allege 12 counts of relatively complex financial crimes.
    When it takes that long to explain a relatively simple crime, the prosecution may have problems.
    Also interesting is that, if the work on the DNS server data was so unlawful, why have none of the actual actors there been charged under the CFAA?  It may constitute "spying" in the broadest sense, like you can spy on who comes and goes from a house or a place of business, but it does not appear to be unlawful.
    At least one "end" of a DNS server is, by necessity, public and open to sniffing or observation.


    This is a good read if you hadn’t seen it.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/us/politics/durham-sussmann-trump-russia.html?referringSource=articleShare

     

    Spoiler

    WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

    But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

    Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

    The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

     

    The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

    Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

    Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

    “The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

    There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

     

    The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

    Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.

     
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    “What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

    In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.

    After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

    A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

    Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

    Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.

     

    Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

    (Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)

    Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.

    A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.

    Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.

    The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.

    Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.

     

    But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.

    “Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said.

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  14. Smoked a 14.3 lb prime brisket and a 9 pound pork shoulder for NYE dinner. Both turned out amazing. The flat was so perfect I ended up serving everyone sliced flat then chopped the point up for leftover deliciousness. I’ve been smoking meats for about 10 years and rarely did brisket but I embraced the brisket in 2021 with some nudging from my BIL and am so happy I did. I never felt I could find ribs or pulled pork as good as my own anywhere but never felt that way about brisket. I now think mine is as good as I can find and makes the time and effort worth it.

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  15. I’m jealous, I was just looking back at pics from our sailing trip around St. John this past summer. I was really looking forward to sailing both US and British waters but COVID kept us in the US. STJ is my favorite island so spending 10 nights just off those beaches was pretty awesome. I enjoyed sailing the mono we rented when we did the BVIs (46’ Jeanneau). It was so easy to sail. I found the cat harder, largely due to the setup and lack of clutches. It was crazy comfortable though. My goal is to retire onto a boat in the Caribbean in a few years and my wife wants it to be a cat. I wish I could get more sailing time. I am lucky enough to live on a lake so I get lots of powerboat time.

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