Seattle’s housing market continued to inflate in 2007 and 2008. When I renewed my lease I accepted a small increase in those years. When the bubble burst here, thousands of underwater house and condo owners put their units on the rental market just as several large employers cut back on staff (Boeing, Microsoft) or shut down entirely (Washington Mutual). The drop in demand and jump in supply sent both rents and house prices plunging. Units that had been snapped up in hours in 2006 now linger on Craigslist for 7 days until the site mercy-kills their listings.

All this has meant two things: a flood of new information about the rental market and an opportunity to lower my rent. In 2009 and in this year I used the steps below to negotiate my rent down. I’m paying less for rent now than I was in 2006 — and less even than I did when I lived in Pittsburgh.

Step 1: Set up a search. Go to your city’s Craigslist site. Click “apts/housing for rent.” Search for your building’s name, address, or intersection — anything that will yield results from your own building.

Step 2: Subscribe. If your search returned any results, you’ll see an orange “RSS” link in the lower-right corner of the results page. Click on this, and you’ll see options to subscribe to a real-time feed of search results. I use Safari on my MacBook, but RSS readers are built in to Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows as well. There are also web-based RSS readers like Google Reader that you can access from anywhere. Sites like Feed My Inbox can even take an RSS feed and send you e-mail alerts of new listings.

Step 3: Take notes. Craigslist postings expire 7 days after they’re posted but many are manually removed earlier than that. Whenever you get a hit on your feed, save or print the listing. This will help you out at negotiation time.

Step 4: Start the conversation with your landlord. Over a month before my lease expired, I called my landlord and asked if I could discuss renewing my lease. I brought a listing of my findings. I told my landlord that I had seen similar units to mine renting for less, so I wanted to have my own rent reduced to match the market rate.

Step 5: Profit! My landlord told me straight up that if I were renewing in February and not July, he could lower the rent another 10%. Real estate is cyclical: people usually prefer to move in the summer months when school is out and the weather is best. I didn’t try to tempt fate by asking for a 6- or an 18-month lease to re-up in winter time. My landlord offered me $100 off my rent and I signed on the line.

Start your research early and know your market. Landlords would much rather keep you as a tenant than have their apartment go empty for a few weeks or months.

In microfinance, a lender provides a small loan to a borrower who can’t get credit from traditional banks. Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance organization, lent small sums to rural entrepreneurs, most of them women, in Bangladesh. The community spirit helped these businesses thrive and Grameen’s annual income is now in the tens of millions of dollars.

Kiva takes the spirit of microfinance and adds the ease of Internet shopping. After funding my account with PayPal and reading a few borrower profiles, I invested small amounts — as little as $25 — into shares of loans to be paid back up to 12 months later. Although the borrowers paid interest to the creditors who made the loans, I didn’t receive any of that as income. My first few loans were repaid quickly so I loaned the funds again to new entrepreneurs. Many times Kiva was so flooded with lenders that I had no outlets to lend any money.

In total I supported 68 borrowers in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Paraguay, Peru, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Of these loans only 6 ended in default, including two in Kenya during a time of major political crisis. I invested $1,000 cash and funded $3,375 of loan shares. My loss of $131 in capital represented only 3.9% of the total loan amount, more than double the Kiva average of 1.84% but well below the default rate I experienced on Prosper, a site which lends to US-only borrowers. I lost 13.1% of my cash to defaults but that’s still a better performance than if I had invested in the S&P 500, which lost 16.3% of its value in that same time frame.

Overall I was impressed with the principle of microfinance but I think it works best when a community is involved from end to end. With only a brief profile to connect me via Kiva and an intermediary finance organization to the borrower, I felt like I didn’t know enough about the loans I was funding. Some borrowers are in states like Iraq, Kenya, and Lebanon where political unrest is a major concern, making me wonder where my money would really go.

In the time since I started lending with Kiva and Prosper, I established a Charitable Gift Fund with Fidelity Investments. I donate to this gift fund and Fidelity invests it in stocks for me. I can then take this money which may have appreciated in value and grant it to charities both local and global. Overall I think that the core idea of microfinance is sound: invest in local communities and everyone will benefit. I plan to continue my investment efforts in vehicles where I don’t need to see my money coming back to me directly, but rather in an improvement in my surroundings.

I’d planned a trip to the 2010 Olympics ever since I moved to Seattle in 2006. How many times am I going to be a brief train ride away from an international event like this? My train tickets were booked last March, I got in on the first wave of event ticket preorders, and Andrea got her first passport ever — after much red tape and lost sleep.

Much has been said about these Olympics, but I learned a lot about the games by actually going there.

The U.S. is a minority

I thought that the Olympic events would be popular among U.S. residents. It’s pretty easy to get to Vancouver from anywhere in North America. Even Seattle expected a flurry of tourists flying in to Sea-Tac Airport and traveling to Vancouver by land.

I saw arenas filled almost entirely with Canadian fans even when Canada wasn’t competing. In a men’s hockey prelim pitting the U.S. against Switzerland, Canadian jerseys outnumbered American and Swiss supporters combined. The fans sitting to our right in the last row of the upper deck were Vancouverites who cheered for the Swiss and, polite to a fault, apologized to us for doing so.

I wore USA shirts and a USA jacket and I carried a 3-by-5-foot American flag, thinking I’d be surrounded by compatriots. Instead I felt surprisingly outnumbered but still very welcome.

Tourists are sheep

We stayed in Kitsilano at an apartment within walking distance of Granville Island and within quick bus range of downtown. Our first reaction when we went out for dinner Saturday night: “Where is everybody?”

Walking around Kitsilano’s commercial strips of Broadway and 4th Avenue, you’d never know that hundreds of thousands of tourists are in town. Most Kitsilano restaurants had no lines at all, and at Trattoria Italian Kitchen, the one packed house, the crowd was entirely local. Vanier Park, just across False Creek from the downtown core, was very sparsely visited on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

On many streets downtown, foot traffic was at or below normal tourist levels. There were crushes of humanity at Robson Square, home of the BC Pavilion; on main tourist drag Robson Street; and around the Olympic cauldron and its infamous chain-link fence. The LiveCity pavilions, home of many free events, had 60-minute wait times to clear security, but we got free cheese and chocolate at the Italian House with virtually no wait at all. It really was feast or famine downtown, and once you got even a block off the beaten path it was shockingly lonely.

Protesters? What protesters?

It’s not surprising that with the Olympics in the Pacific Northwest, there are protesters who want their voices heard by a major crowd. Much was reported of an event on Saturday the 13th when a few protesters, including one from the Seattle area, smashed windows at the Hudson Bay Company and at a bank branch nearby. That damage was quickly repaired. Aside from that, social action was much more passive.

We spent a fair amount of time downtown during the day and never saw any masked anarchists waving signs or chanting slogans. We saw a single person handing out flyers near a small display of tents to demonstrate against Canada’s public housing policy. We read op-eds in the local paper accusing the indigenous First Nations peoples of selling out their culture for games being played on their land. In true Pacific Northwest style, most protesters were passive-aggressive in their approach.

If you get the opportunity to go to the games in London, Sochi, or Rio, seize it. Going to the Olympics is a once-in-a-lifetime event that you’ll remember forever.

Earlier in the summer, I jumped at the chance to preorder Windows 7 for $50. My Windows computer at home does very little besides play media, but I figured that Windows Vista wouldn’t be supported for very long. Fifty bucks isn’t that much to pay for an upgrade anyway; by contrast, I paid $130 to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 and another $25 to upgrade to 10.6 just a few years later.

I dutifully waited until after the World Series (recorded on my Windows media box) to install the upgrade. I inserted the Windows 7 disc into my Windows Vista PC while booted into Vista, as the instructions stated. When Windows 7 Setup asked me where I wanted to install the OS, I saw my first show-stopping error message: “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.” Binging this message brings up about 212,000 results. The error recurred even after I deleted my existing Windows Vista partition and tried to create another one. It turns out I had to boot into BIOS setup, change the boot order to make my hard disk second only to the CD/DVD drive, and return to Windows 7 Setup. (Note how this error message says nothing about changing one’s boot order.)

After continuing the installation, my product key wasn’t accepted. I re-entered it many times but in all cases, I wasn’t allowed to continue. In true Microsoft style, despite the lack of messaging indicating I could do so, I clicked “Next” to skip the product key step entirely.

The initial installation of Windows 7 looked and worked much like Vista with the added experience of completely broken video playback. After more Binging I found that I had to install a new video driver — from Intel’s site, not from Windows Update — to get video playback working again.

The problems with activation continued. Microsoft has a support site called Microsoft Answers, modeled after Yahoo! Answers, on which there are legions of questions concerning product keys not being accepted. The simple explanation is that Microsoft thinks I did a full install with an upgrade product, so my upgrade product key is not sufficient. Their official response to many of these questions: install your old OS and then upgrade again using a very specific set of steps. Well, my PC didn’t come with recovery CDs, only a recovery partition, and the only way to access that recovery partition is to burn CDs before wiping out the Windows installation that came with the PC! Sony will helpfully sell me a set of recovery discs for $48, almost what I paid for this Windows 7 upgrade.

There’s an interesting article called Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media by Windows übermensch Paul Thurrott. I didn’t try it because it seemed like a hack that Microsoft could eventually retaliate against, forcing people to activate again to receive Windows 7 Service Pack 1, for example. Imagine my surprise when a representative from Microsoft, using Easy Assist, used exactly this procedure to let me activate Windows 7 using my upgrade product key. I explicitly asked the rep whether he was doing this because I erased my old Windows partition during the install process, and he said yes with a defeated, “this is my 50th call about this today” tone to his voice.

Microsoft has finally allowed me to use the software that I paid for, and all it took was a wasted Saturday afternoon reading forums and 40 minutes on the phone. I can understand their reason for imposing activation on corporations with multiple licenses, but Microsoft’s lack of trust in their own end-user customers is really inappropriate. At this point I don’t care how great Windows 8 will be. If I have to go through that activation pain again, I’m sitting that next version out.

More recently, I’ve seen an even uglier side to this perverse flavor of democracy: because I put my phone number down right next to my candidate of choice, the local Democratic Party has decided to sell my information to all sorts of other organizations. I was okay when the party called me a dozen times on Election Day to get out the vote, but now I’m getting robocalls from “independent” organizations.

Here’s one robocall from “Qualified Leadership for Seattle,” a nebulous organization backed by four unions and local real estate überdeveloper Vulcan, Inc. Here’s another. Thanks to GrandCentral, which is now called “Google Voice,” for letting me record these telemarketing calls. I’ve received two other telemarketing calls on my Google Voice number, one of which is from “Qualified Leadership from Seattle,” in the last week. I’ve only given this number to take-out food places that expect a local phone number, to my landlord so that my intercom works, and to the Washington State Democratic Party.

Seattle, like King County and nearly all other counties in Washington, now votes entirely by mail, in private. Unsatisfied with letting neighbors fight each other for political superiority, the Washington State Democratic Party is now selling its voter information to shadowy organizations to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about leading Mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, a T-Mobile executive. It’s unclear whether these organizations want voters to re-elect Mayor Greg Nickels, a man who believed Seattle ought not to clear snow from its streets in any effective way, or whether they want novelty environmentalist candidate Mike McGinn to win. All I get is negative rhetoric, and it’s my own fault for receiving the calls. There is no opt-out offered by the recordings I receive.

I’ve written to the Washington State Democratic Party requesting a halt to the phone calls. I’ve also sent recordings of the calls to Shaun Dakin, an anti-robocall activist who requested them of me via Twitter, who has circulated them more widely. Dakin runs the unofficial National Political Do Not Contact Registry (NPDNC), which aims to block political calls in the way the National Do Not Call Registry blocks non-political telemarketing calls. The NPDNC Registry has gathered little support so far, but I hope it becomes more useful as the backlash against robocalls accelerates.

Because they come from political organizations, these robocalls are still legal even though I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry. These slimy, shadowy callers are really making me think twice about caucusing again in Washington in 2012. Why exactly am I supposed to give up my phone number to vote?

The game worked incredibly smoothly considering I was playing with as many as 95,000 other people in the US and Canada simultaneously. The basic gameplay is much like the now-cancelled TV show: one player (“The One”) must answer trivia questions correctly. A mob of 100 opponents answers the same questions. Miss one question and you’re out. The One must eliminate all 100 of his opponents to win the top prize, which in the Xbox Live version is 10,000 Microsoft Points (or $125 worth of credit on the Xbox Live Marketplace).

I’ve played several other on-line trivia games that put you against every other player, such as ABC’s short-lived “Enhanced TV” concept for Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? almost 10 years ago. What I really like about 1 vs. 100 is that the same model from the TV series works very well for on-line play. Those not in the main game get to play along in the audience, answering questions to try and replace those eliminated from the mob and to eventually become The One. Besides the live game, which lasts for 2 hours, there is also an “extended play” option which just involves answering questions for 30 minutes at a time. Playing extended play matches is said to improve players’ chances of making it into the live game.

The live shows are hosted by Chris Cashman, who does a very good job of keeping the show lively, although his participation is limited to short bits between games and during “stat breaks.” I feel like the experience would be better if Chris actually hosted the main game, talking to The One over Xbox Live voice chat just like Bob Saget advised the One on the televised show. Game shows are easily adapted to video game consoles but in so doing they usually lose the human factor that makes the TV versions so compelling. Chris reads off shout-outs and questions from the Xbox Live on-line comunity but he doesn’t interact with any of the live players in the context of the game.

I’m hoping that 1 vs. 100 draws other game titles to Xbox Live for live, prime-time play. The beta has been a great experience so far and I’m looking forward to playing it again soon.

I got my tickets earlier this year after putting in a request with CoSport, the “Official Hospitality Services Provider for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.” CoSport has done TicketMaster one better: they charge ridiculous handling fees without wasting those fees on frivolities like web servers. Nevertheless, I got tickets to two hockey prelims and to two curling prelims. It was easy to book trains from Seattle to Vancouver: even in business class, which I had to try, it’s only about $120 round-trip with no Olympic price-gouging.

The real toughie in going up to Vancouver: lodging. VANOC, the Vancouver Olympic Committee, has placed holds on 20,000 of the roughly 24,000 hotel rooms in the city. CoSport offered me a decent-looking hotel at $725 USD a night. I laughed at the offer and sauntered over to hotels.ca, which shortly within the 331-day booking window offered hotels for between $800 CAD and $4,500 CAD a night — and these were two-star hotels far from the city center.

From there I decided to get creative. Recent startup AirBnB made headlines by letting people rent out rooms or apartments to attendees of Obama’s inauguration, but their pickings are slim in Vancouver. The Zen Zone immediately rejected my offer to rent for $100 USD per night during the Olympics. The Funky BOAT is normally just $60 USD per night, but now it’s asking $500 USD to live on a boat in the middle of February.

Canadians are legendary for politeness, but homeowners have loonies in their eyes now. Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO) lists dozens of places in Vancouver. Here’s a partial rate card for one in-city condominium on VRBO:

• Sep 15–Dec 18 .. $175/night .. $1000/wk .. $3200/mo .. (3 night minimum)
• Dec 19–Jan 04 .. $250/night .. $1500/wk .. (5 night min)
• 2010 Olympics (Feb 12–28, 2010).. $900/nt .. $5500/wk .. (14 nt min)

That’s $11,000 CAD you’d have to put up, at least, to be downtown for most of the Olympics. Other downtown properties are similarly crazy: Lux Suites will happily charge you as much as $24,500 for a month’s accommodation. That $800 CAD airport motel looked pretty good all of a sudden.

Fortunately, just outside of downtown is Kitsilano, a nice residential neighborhood just a bus ride from the venues. I found a few places on VRBO for $275 to $400 a night and snapped one up on the low end. (I tried using the less expensive properties to negotiate lower rates on the other ones, but during the Olympics the property owners have every right to tell me to piss off, eh.)

I have event tickets, train tickets, an apartment, and some valuable (!) American money to spend while there. All that’s left is for my traveling companion to get her passport!

Presenting I Can Has Roethlisberger?, a new site blending the LOLcat phenomenon with 2008 AFC Champion Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Thanks to Deanna for the idea, to “OhHim” for the photos, and Tumblr for the easy publishing apparatus.

Go Steelers!

Belmont Avenue from Union Street, December 18, 2008.

When I moved from Pittsburgh to Seattle in mid-2006, Seattleites told me not to worry about snow since Seattle never gets any. They were half-right: Seattle does get snow, but nobody worries about it. Seattle has had snow for the last two weeks and only 40-degree temperatures can stop it from paralyzing this city.

Seattle’s Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Commissioner Ron Sims must believe firmly that we never get snow. How else would you explain that Metro buses have been running at 50% of capacity, often 1-2 hours late, during the peak shopping and travel season of the year? I’m just glad that Sims has been posting updates using Twitter since Metro’s own web site was forced off-line earlier in the snow crisis due to excessive traffic.

What really frustrates me about Seattle’s snow response is that we could plow and salt, but the city actively avoids salting the roads. Despite uncountable accidents and closures, despite the fact that buses are crashing over highway retaining walls, despite emergency vehicles not getting where they need to be, we avoid salt. Why? The salmon might not spawn next summer if the salt runs off into their water routes. There’s no evidence for this, and downtown Seattle isn’t exactly a hotbed for salmon spawning activity, but this city has been so paralyzed that there hasn’t been any time for rational thought.

I wrote to County Executive Sims asking whether King County would start using salt on roads. He responded that “[o]ther jurisdictions in King County are using salt and/or deicer.” He’s not responsible for Seattle proper.

Greg Nickels really summed up the willful ignorance of his city’s attitude on weather. When asked how Seattle responded to snow, he said, “I would give our response so far a ‘B.’” Come on. Even FEMA isn’t that bad.

My friend Andrea and her dog Nema found a great studio earlier this year in a building at 1707 Boylston Avenue on Capitol Hill. Just weeks into her 12-month lease, she was informed that her building would be converted to condominiums. To make a long story short, Andrea had to move to a different building and absorb a 20% jump in rent from a landlord who would only offer a 6-month lease.

Condo developers can make even numbers pretentious. Seattle already had Three19 and Fifteen Twenty-One, so Andrea’s old building was rechristened “Seventeen07.” The developers put on a fresh coat of paint, replaced the appliances with new brand-name models, replaced the fixtures in the bathrooms, and put in brand-new “renewable” floors made of cork (it’s not cheap; it’s renewable). The basement has a small rec room consisting of a “yoga studio” (a medium-sized mat), two exercise machines, a couch, and two flat-screen TVs positioned such that it’s pretty difficult to see either one from any comfortable position. (The couch is too close to its TV and the exercise machines actually face away from their TV.) There’s also no wall between the two areas so those wanting to play Wii games on the couch will have to deal with the noise of the exercise bike behind them. The whole thing seems like the pretentious marketers ran out of money partway through equipping the place with “amenities.”

Only a few units at Seventeen07 sold at their original asking prices, so the developers switched from a glossy prestige marketing strategy to a desperate close-out marketing strategy. Sixteen of the 36 units are now being auctioned off with prices starting at about half of the original asking prices. The most telling change, though, is the signage. No longer are units priced “from $179,950′s.” Now a bold, larger sign intones, “Minimum Bids from $95,000.”

March 29, 2008	October 4, 2008