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This is about an interior fence in Arlington that is so revered by the Russell Place Condo Board, that they can think of absolutely no change that can be done to it, whether small or large.

Is this a border or boundary fence, you might ask? No, it isn't.

Is this a structural fence, you might ask? No, it isn't.

Is this protecting an important section, guiding peoples' passage, you might ask? No, it doesn't.

It ends up a pretty funny story and shows the absurd logic of the Board in defending their "No" answers regarding any change to the wooden fence.

The web is filled with the stories about crazy things that Condo Board of Trustees do. Most stories are nightmares, such as the Home Sweet Hell news report, and an entire blog devoted to Condos Nightmares And Other Enigmas.

The links above have quotes like "... That meant they controlled what condo fees everyone in the three-unit building paid, what would or wouldn’t get done to the property’s common areas..." and a description of what happens to normal people when they have to deal with a board of trustees - you enter the world of Rights-Deprived Citizens in America!

The articles above suggest that very small condo associations are a problem because a small number of people can gang up and completely control what goes on in the entire condo complex.
And that larger groups are much better, because no one small group can dictate their terms over all.
It sort-of makes sense, but turns out that does not turn out like that in practice.

For most of this year (2011), the calling card from Reliance GlobalCall has been a disaster to use. Every time I connect from the US to some number in India using their local access numbers, the audio abruptly cuts out. And there is just silence on the call. This happens anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes in the call. At peak times on weekends it is really bad and cuts off in under 10-30 seconds.

Most of the "customer support" submissions on this issue never got any reply, but finally last month, they contacted me to try to fix the problem. No luck - I spent so much time on this issue, including having them monitor the call multiple times while I dialed the number, but to no avail. Their engineers could find nothing wrong. But they any went ahead and said "we fixed it" even when they never really fixed anything - the next call I made would cut out in the same manner.

So I now have a calling card that is basically dead and unusable.

Other calling cards work just fine: I had a backup card Tata trueroots which worked just fine. And now there is also Google Voice which also works without any audio cutting out or dropped call issues. Both these options are much better than Reliance in terms of call quality and connectivity, the Reliance card is just not worth it.
Prices are much better with the Google Voice product and their rates are much simpler and easier to understand than the numerous plans and options with both the Tata and Reliance products.
As for customer service, I suspect all three of these have extremely poor service - so the point is to find something that will just work, and avoid the problem calling cards.

So Craigslist is making it hard to post ads for real posters who care about their privacy (Craigslist Wants Your Phone Number) and simultaneously letting very easy-to-spot scam postings totally fill their vacation rental pages!

New York, and London - just look at the vacation rental pages on craigslist. So easy to spot the scams - when you see the same pattern of ad repeated many times, it is a scam. In addition to scams, craigslist is now filled with useless Airbnb postings which are just noise and do not provide a contact email address or phone number. The Airbnb automated postings are for Airbnb members only - craigslist should not allow them, they are just ads for Airbnb.

There are many sites with information on scams: Rental Scams, and here's a guide to craigslist scams. And important to note that while it is easy to spot the scammers that are from out-of-town, there are also scams involving local people, as shown in NY Times - Renters Get Swindled and Scammed article.

The easy signs of a scam are poor English in the posting and in subsequent communication, too many postings that look the same with different rentals and different email addresses, "contract" does not contain dates (they want you to fill in dates which means they don't really care), you can change dates a lot and apartment will still be available, and sometimes - low prices (no way a NYC midtown 2-bedroom apartment is available for $200/day). And if you ask to see the apartment and the renting agent immediately (even just as a bait - ask this even if you are not in that town), they will make up a reason why that is not possible, and that indicates a scam.

[This posting applies to MA residential property only.]

Tax abatement for residential property is one of those topics where there are a large number of misunderstandings - some owners think they are paying too much (but they aren't) others think they may be paying too less (but in fact they may be paying more than necessary).

The most important thing to remember is the assessment - "Total Real Estate Value" on the MA Real Estate Tax form - has absolutely no relation to the market price of the property. It is simply a number used to calculate your property tax.

It does reflect the amounts assigned to similar properties - so all properties in your town that are largely similar to yours, will (should) have similar "Total Real Estate Value" amounts.
This makes sense since the goal is to spread the tax fairly, and as long as similar houses are valued the same, applying the percentage property tax means everyone is taxed fairly.

But - this is where things can get out of sync. The Board of Assessors in the town Tax Collector's office only has the actual real estate sales figures to go by. And it is very difficult to figure out what other "similar houses" exist in the area. So the assessment is made on recent sales, corrected for any information the assessors may have regarding similar property.

This system has a tendency to inflate property taxes for recent purchasers of property. Their house values are higher than the other similar houses that were bought way in the past. There are other reasons too why these values can drift apart, for both recent and past purchasers. This is where the tax abatement process comes in. Property owners can file for tax abatement - and as long as they provide concrete data regarding relative values of comparable properties - it becomes easy for the Board of Assessors to update the value of your property.

I had not used for craigslist to post classifieds for a long time and had never run into this problem. But looks like now any posting to craigslist requires a phone number where they send a code which has to be entered into the phone authentication page.

They now want a phone number for posting a $10 ad about selling old chairs? Why on earth?

If this is supposed to filter spam, it certainly won't - spammers will find it worth their time to provide a phone number. And it has not cut down on spam at all - the electronics section is so full of spam - it is mostly spam - with text not matching the title and a big image on the page displaying a web site to go to for "deals". And vacation section pages are full of people posting from other cities and completely useless for actually finding a place in the local city.

So, craigslist has just made life difficult for ordinary citizens, who no longer have a phone or don't want craigslist to know their phone number. Another site gone to the dark side, what happened to all the free speech principles that founder Craig Newmark seemed to have started off with in the early days of craigslist. Now all gone by the wayside ostensibly for spam prevention but probably more of a corporate strategy to get more information about the posters. So sad.

craigslist is now completely useless for posting any ads. Need to find other online classified site that can use automated means to weed out spammers, and don't penalize real users of the site by asking for unnecessary information such as private phone numbers.

Public Libraries in the US have now started offering audio book downloads. For example, in my local library, the books The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, The Dork of Cork, Candide, and many others are available for online borrowing as a MP3 download. There is a limit to the number of audio books checked-out and downloaded and each book is licensed for playback for a certain number of days only.

Visit your local library web site to see if they offer NetLibrary downloads. Available at most Public Libraries in the US and UK, and many other countries too.

These specific audio books are Microsoft DRM protected, so no Apple iPod support.

Audio books are a great invention given the amount of time spent commuting stuck in a car, or waiting at bus stations, train stations or airports. MP3 player user interfaces have not caught up well enough with this use, though. While it is great that books can be played on extremely tiny flash MP3 players, these players don't yet offer good bookmarking capabilities, only a single pause/resume capability is offered for all content on the MP3 device. Listening to books would be a much better experience with a multiple bookmarks capability per book...

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Read the First Chapter at New York Times. Throw out the Gaussian! In with the Power Law??
Excerpt:
The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars?

The book is written in a very confrontational style, as if the author was emailing text or posting on Usenet, very harsh tone at times towards economists, and others, and a very professorial tone in laying traps that the author uses to berate reviewers on missing his clues! But taken with a hint of humor (which may have been the original intent) it is quite entertaining. Ignoring all such exclamations, and the times when it seems that the author is taking things to the extreme to make a point (are people really that taken with the Gaussian?) the technical parts of the book are very illuminating, and the central premise of the existence of Black Swans is certainly important. The author certainly is an interesting character, in another article, the simple question of Street Charity is turned into long winded response bordering on the incomprehensible, in this Freakonomics - Street Charity Quorum!

The Dork of Cork
by Chet Raymo

With humor, the story describes the life of Frank Bois, a dwarf who is obsessed with all things beautiful. Reviews and Comments available at the Amazon.com web site.

The book starts with ‘Begin with beauty’, and continues with tales of interesting personalities and their travails. The ending though is a major let-down, completely different from the flow created by rest of the story.

Candide
by Voltaire

As I was listening to this book on my MP3 player, I was stunned at the story - seemed incredulous. Then I read the historical background to this story, and then it starts making sense, and it becomes a great, fantastic tale. A google search yields many reviews, many sites have the whole book online, here's one Literature Network - Candide.

Excerpts:

...
Master Pangloss ... "It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end.
...
"Now we are upon this subject," said Candide, "do you think that the earth was originally sea, as we read in that great book which belongs to the captain of the ship?"
"I believe nothing of it," replied Martin, "any more than I do of the many other chimeras which have been related to us for some time past."
"But then, to what end," said Candide, "was the world formed?"
"To make us mad," said Martin.
...

This book is also available in MP3 Audio Download format. Unfortunately, this is DRM protected and requires support for Microsoft DRM (so no Apple iPod support). Available at most Public Libraries in the US and UK. Visit your library web site to see if they offer NetLibrary downloads.

Asset Allocation is a key factor in analyzing an investment portfolio.
Surprisingly, it does not seem very easy to get an asset allocation analysis done based on a particular set of specific asset classes. Every financial web site seems to have a portfolio analyzer - but they use a predetermined set of asset classes.

Self-directed investors will likely need more than just knowing about percentages allocated to "stock, bonds, cash", for example, following the lazy portfolios, one might settle on the following classes in 2007:
Large-cap US
Small-cap US
Europe
Emerging Markets
International
Inflation-Indexed Securities
Bonds
CDs/MoneyMarket

Getting any of the portfolio analyzers on the web to provide analysis based on above set is not possible. But with just a little amount of research, it is very easy to get the data and create a spreadsheet to help with the analysis. Assuming a portfolio of around 10-20 mutual funds (which seems to be a popular recommendation), it should not take more than a hour or two to collect this data which is reasonable time to spend once every year on portfolio analysis.
As an example, here is a Microsoft .xls format spreadsheet that determines the asset allocation for a portfolio based on the asset classes shown above. The spreadsheet also has formulas that can be used to enter actual amount invested in each fund, and it will print out total percentages for each asset class. The basic instructions for using the spreadsheet are:
Step 1: In the first section - "Percentage Holdings" - create a row for each fund, enter unique code, and with information gleaned from Annual Reports, enter the distribution of holdings in that fund. Create new rows by copying or replacing one of the existing rows.