Archives for July 2009

One of the things that’s always difficult about bringing up a new site, particularly a personal branding/image site, is writing an about page that isn’t laden with bizspeak buzzwords. It’s perilously easy to end up with something that sounds like it came out of the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Unfortunately the mission statement generator is no longer online, but a quick google search will find many examples such as http://www.bioteams.com/2008/09/27/mission_statement_generator.html.

I’ve been mulling over how I could write something that wasn’t completely annoying for the past few days. While I was avoiding the problem, I read Wednesday’s post on The Fluent Self by the amazing and brilliant Havi Brooks. She mentioned that Kelly Parkinson from Copylicious recently posted a killer awesome guide to writing an online bio. That was just what I needed. I actually followed Kelly’s process without skipping steps and came up with something far better than I would have on my own.

The first draft ended up looking something like this. After a bit of editing, I reduced it down to this, but thought it was kind of long, so I split it into an About page with a condensed version and a Biography page. I was feeling pretty good about it, so I wrote a thank-you comment on Copylicious with a link to what I had done. Kelly was kind enough to actually read what I had written and propose significant improvements – note her reply comment just below mine.

I implemented pretty much what Kelly suggested and made a few minor improvements to end up with is now a very solid about page. Thanks Kelly, if you ever need help wrestling with database stuff, just let me know! You may find it amusing that I overwrote the older version of the about page, so I had to go extract it out of last night’s WordPress database backup. Sometimes those geek skills come in handy.

After last week’s fiasco with Wells Fargo not processing the payment from my short sale closing, I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. I called today to confirm that the payment had been received and that the loan had been closed. They said yes, they received the payment, but no, the loan wasn’t closed. Apparently they need a stamped HUD-1 from the title company. Supposedly they asked title to send this to them late last week. That’s almost two weeks after the closing. Why they couldn’t have asked for that right away is beyond me. These obstacles continue to come out of the woodwork. I don’t think that I am at risk, and I sure hope that the buyer isn’t at risk. But it’s damned frustrating to have made it through the entire short sale process and still face loose ends.

I ran into yet another stupid bank trick from my HELOC lender. Their statement came in the mail a couple days ago and showed the same past due amount as before even though they received $3k from the short sale. Rather than applying the 3k as a payment, they applied it as a principal reduction without reducing the past due amount. Doesn’t matter, they will get nothing from me anyway. But I found it interesting that they want to make it hard rather than easy. They refused to release liability as part of the short sale, which will push me over the edge into Chapter 7. It’s just plain stupid on their part. They should realize that if I had money to pay them, I wouldn’t be doing a short sale in the first place, and that the odds that they will ever collect on that loan are minimal.

If nothing else, this experience has proved to be an education. I’ll follow up when I know more.

I’m very picky about web hosting. Too picky, in fact. But I finally found a hosting company that has met my overly demanding expectations. Cartika Hosting has worked flawlessly for me since I signed up.

I was so frustrated with the state of available commercial hosting that I hosted myself from home over cable modem for a number of years. When I bought a home in the country outside of broadband coverage, I tried several options and finally settled on a linux virtual private server at quantact.com. That worked very well for me for several years.

Recently when I moved back into town, I signed up for business FIOS instead of residential and built myself a Ubuntu Server box for hosting my websites and email along with sites for some friends. That also worked out well, but the business service cost $80 per month more than residential service, and I found that I was spending more time than I should playing server admin and tweaking on stuff. I was also concerned with backups and redundancy, which turned out to be both difficult and expensive to achieve on a home network.

So I decided that it was time to give commercial hosting another try. I spent several hours searching for information and reviews of various web hosts. My biggest concern is effective spam filtering. I have had the same domain and email address for 10 years, and I don’t want to give it up. But over the course of time, it has gotten spread around enough to generate way too much spam – often more than 100 spam emails per hour. I also want reliable and snappy performance and good support. Cost obviously matters, but I’m willing to pay a bit more for effective spam filtering, accessible and prompt support, and good performance. I looked at some of the bigger hosts and found a lot of negative reviews that mentioned poor support and extended outages. Then I found Cartika Hosting.  They seemed to be the perfect fit for me, so I signed up for an account and set up one of my domains. I noted that they have an active forum community. The president of the company often responds directly to user concerns and is very wired in to what’s going on with the customer base and the infrastructure.

Aside from a tracking down where to find everything on the control panel, everything has gone flawlessly. I opened support tickets for a few minor questions just to ensure that I got a timely response. Every issue I raised was resolved in a timely manner, some within minutes. I signed up for the MailFoundry enterprise grade spam filtering addon, which has taken my spam from over 100 per hour to 3-5 spam per day. I know I probably sound like a fanboy, but really, it has just worked. Another nice feature is the backup system which has hourly backups for the last 24 hours (if I remember correctly) and daily backups for the last 30 days. But I’m still kind of paranoid, so I run a daily wget script to pull everything to a local linux box on my home network.

Negatives? The cost is higher than many of the cheap hosts, and the disk space limits are fairly low. But that’s because they are using mirrored SAS drives and the enterprise backup system, which costs more than some guy throwing a cheap server in a colo rack somewhere and calling it a hosting company.

Bottom line, I highly recommend Cartika Hosting. Full disclosure – my links ARE affiliate links. But I only recommend products or put up affiliate links for things that I have used myself and that meet my expectations. Feel free to hit me with questions or share both good and bad experiences with Cartika Hosting or other web hosts.

The long and painful process to disentangle myself from the albatross that was my previous home finally came to a close last week.If you’re interested in the whole story, I wrote about it on my family blog at The housing bubble hits home for the Stankavich family and Short Sale Auction for my Previous Home. Then I got an email from my real estate agent late last week. The buyer received a Notice of Default from my mortgage lender in the mail and was concerned. So I called the lender and asked if it was a matter of the payoff and the default process crossing in the mail. The call center rep  told me that the loan wasn’t paid off yet. Naturally, I asked why not. The call center rep said that they didn’t receive guaranteed funds so they hadn’t deposited the check from the title company and closed the loan. At this point my frustration level took a sharp turn upward. I asked the rep if they had notified the title company. She said no. I very nearly lost it. I started to read the riot act to the phone rep, then thought better of it. I told her that I was extremely frustrated, but that it wouldn’t solve the problem to take out my frustration on her. Let me tell you, that took some serious restraint. They were just letting the check sit there, doing nothing, and had no intention of contacting the title company to resolve the situation. Unbelievable.  I was able to get the title company on the phone with the lender and negotiate a resolution. We’ll find out if everything went through cleanly later this week.

Once everything is completely wrapped up I’ll share more details of the timeline, the dollar amounts, and generally how everything played out. Despite the frustrations, some things did go well. I built a great business partnership with Dianne and Jeff Yake from Easy Street Real Estate.  If you need a real estate agent in the Portland, OR metro area, I definitely recommend Dianne. She has spent a lot of time learning about short sales over the last few months, and she has real world experience to go along with the training. I also found Richard Geller’s Mortgage Relief Formula very helpful. I picked up a lot of good information about short sales and short sale auctions from Richard’s website and ebook.

I hope to be able to truly call this done by the end of July. It’s been a long time coming – two years since we first listed. If you’re interested in the wrap-up and hearing more thoughts about real estate, technology, and business development, subscribe to receive future posts by RSS feed or email.