WalkerPad

Live writer blog test

In her first ever tournament she placed second and had the dubious honor of being the first person to perform.

The consumerist has a couple more reports up from people getting ignored by the banks like WF (just like us) and all the delightful and ongoing ‘mistakes’ that seem to happen… gotta wonder at what mistakes become a pattern of… well anyway. The commits where mostly pretty depressing, much of hte same. One person said they heard/read that only %6 of eligible folks have been getting any modifications.
Anyway going to try the loan counselor number they featured on Monday and see if it helps.
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/consumerist/full/~3/11iggxM5mZU/what-do-i-do-when-my-lender-isnt-playing-fair-with-loan-modification

So even after a year and several prods Verizon still can’t find Scotts Valley with it’s service deliver tools for fiber. It’s ok just to say we don’t have service in that area, but no Verizon actual denies that scotts valley exists and keeps insisting that I’m entering the address wrong :p. So much for getting any competition around here. Kind of boggles my mind that their tool is still so bad after all these years (had the same problem for two years in Sunnyvale too).

ATT won’t offer any competition to Scotts Valley either but at least they can find our house. Though they keep in insisting on calling me at dinner time to sell me their (get this) ‘now really FAST dsl’. Doesn’t exactly make me want to give them more money anyway.

Frankly it’s just nice to see that competition is alive and well in our market… oh wait…

Ok sorry if the site has been rendering really slow. The upgraded my hosting server which borked my slightly outdated version of gallery and caused it to stop rendering thumb nails which forced the full sized image to be rendered down each time the page loaded…. anyway, I know nobody cares about the dram of site maintenance.

Kaden (and yeah you can’t see it in the picture) is finaly getting his first tooth in, so from now until he get’s his second he is dubbed ‘Fang’, or sir fang of the gram cracker kingdom if you want to be all formal.

In other news, Wonder Girl just got her Blue belt and I guess is on her way to a lasso and silver bracers. Seriously though she worked hard and earned it . She was ‘Very’ exited to move up a belt color.

Speaking of high drama, apparently my Mom feels that Kaily is not dramatic enough and sticking her into a theater camp for a week and we are headed up to SF tomorrow. I suspect she will have a very good time .

I spent a little time playing around with the iPhone 3GS camera today in moderately poor lighting. My conclusion is that even with the auto focus control it’s still a pretty poor camera, even for a phone, and that Apple did us all a big disservice by not including a flash like the pre has, ah well I guess they had to save something for next year. I don’t think anyone expected it to be a pocket SLR, the ability to focus tight, almost macro (but only decent light) is a big plus. There is still room for a awfull lot of improvement on the software side and almost infinite growth on the hardware. You still be lucky if your batting one in ten for keepers on a good day if your shooting kids.

Kaiden’s really getting strong he can sit up for a long time now. Still no crawling, though he is trying super hard!

So after much pushing the bolder up hill Wells Fargo finally admitted our paper work exists (3 months later) and we are good for review for the modification program.
Except not really, it seems they decided to wast two weeks by sending us a snail mail letter requesting some more documentation.

Now that nature of this documentation of kind makes me chuckle given that they (wells fargo) owns the loan and had all this type of documentation prior to agreeing to lend us the money in the fist place.

1. Listing Agreement (as the buyer, why would I have that, the seller owns the listing agreement. Sure hope that is the paper work for some reason)
2. signed purchase contract/Est. closing statement (ugh ok, but you guys have that stuff)
3. Buyer’s Pre-qualification letter (seriously? why isn’t that sort of water under the bridge)

I’m honestly not sure hot to interpret 2 and 3 or why they could possible matter now, other then they are stall, random noise to slow the process, or a fishing expedition for some reason to deny the process. I mean really, who keeps copy’s of of pre-qual letter laying around for years… Luckly I think I have it stuffed in Gmail.

And of course it must be “returned within ten days or the request is considered canceled”.

*sigh* I think I would be a lot lest resentful if they would make even the vaguest effort to be a little more direct and transparent. I guess fast would be good too, the whole 90-120 process time still just screams how broken this process is.

So I spoke to a very nice, and apoligetic person in the SC property tax office who explained how things work under California law. Basically you are SOL if you trying to be proactive. They don’t have any programs to offer you at all unless you have defaulted. If you do default then they can offer you a five year repayment program (135$ application fee) where you pay 20% a year but, and this is the fun part, they charge you 18% interest. You are better off credit carding it and juggling the balances :p. She mentioned that the tax code has not been looked at all for the current economic situation and the two programs they had for elderly and disabled folks has in fact been cut.
Aparatly the state getting it’s cut is more important then food on the table + 18% :p.

I had a slightly more hopeful conversation with the county assessors office, apparently our parcel/area is being evaluated automatically right now and I can call back in the the first part of July to find auto their adjustment, and there is a process for if I think it should be lower.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/20/philips-tapster-stereo-bluetooth-headset-loves-your-voice-needs/
and six months later, still not out. Little early with those product anoucments guys… :p

Well hopefully it is the first of many diplomas and not the last but Kaily graduation from her Pre school today and is off to the character building word of Kindergarten after summer break.
For the record Kids Cottage (Santa Cruz parks and req) rocked. Teacher Christa and teacher Johny did a awesome job, ran a tight ship full of fun and love. It was amazing to see how much the kids grew up over the year.

Planet money has a interesting blog/podcast up talking about the issues we have been having trying to get our terms changed.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/05/hear_your_future_mortgage.html#commentBlock

Two scary bits.
One: NPR couldn’t get a reasonable or even intelligent response from Wells Fargo. They did get specialist bank that has been doing a lot of modifications to talk tto them. But nothing to enlightening.
Two: Most banks like Wells Fargo seem to be in such a state of dysfunction that they are foreclosure because they can’t get together to not to, even though it is costing them more money to do that then a modification.
Crazy how they are just able to grind on posting huge profits and ignoring their clients trying to hold them to their responsibilities for taking Tarp money.

So nobody ever called me last week, just the useless auto message. However today I got somebody on the phone who seemed useful. They took are finical information and claim to be sending us paper work to sign signifying that it’s true etc then that will go to the negotiator (insert bad movie pun here). So something might start to happen, I’m not super optimistic but at least there will be a paper trial now. They also offered us some kind of forbearance program but after 6 months we would owe a 9K balloon payment. Hellow bankruptcy :p.

I find valve’s claim of two new versus maps in the DLC to be pretty disingenuous. Retool two existing maps to work with that play mode is *not* the same as two new maps. That survival mode is fun (but man is it hard). I’m glad they released but lets call a spade a spade already.

Last weeks check up went fine he is a bit over 14 pounds and about 30 percentile for size. He has turned into quite the little flirt and is definitely easting well.

Well I guess today was a step forward in talking to Wells Fargo. Nobody could tell me anything about what is going on with the home owner stabilization program other then we probable qualify. However I also was not transferred to some unrelated company in Canada like last week. The cherry on top was that they took my information (again) and promised that somebody from Wells Fargo would call me back within 24-48 hours who would be able to tell me all about the program (I’m not sure what that means but looking forward to finding out). So maybe, just maybe this means the ball will nudge forward this week.

EDIT: LOL, I just got a automated prerecorded call from Wells Fargo saying they are announcing the program and to go to their website (which of course it still totally useless and has no way to get a engagement going). I sure hope that was not the call I was promised, but rather a positive sign prelude.

I have to say this constant redirecting people to web site that is never updated and contains no useful information accept for a self assessment and no way to take action or get updates or start a engagement is pretty lame and and very we are big company 1.0 go away. What a wast and a fundamentally failed way to communicate with customers in trouble chomping at the bit to real information.