kahunaburger

Holy moly! I’m usually not good when it comes to dealing with the City, County, State, Government in general - something always seems to go wrong or I get the feeling that I’m running in circles like a gerbil.

Yesterday I posted an entry about some privacy concerns with the County’s new Property Tax lookup service. Turns out that all the information returned by the service is indeed public.

Somebody from the Santa Fe County (Domingo) read the story on my blog and was especially interested in the sentence where I say that my current (new) address does not resolve in the system. He left a message on the entry and provided a valid return-email-address. I contacted him afterwards and explained my situation: just moved, new subdivision, new home, etc.
A few hours later one of his friendly colleagues (Angie) contacts me out of the blue, following up to my email and stating that they had a different address from me in the system. And on top of that she provides some names/numbers where I should verify/correct the situation.

Some back and forth with another county employee (Paul) and I receive the plat that records my property as “3 Loma de la Vida”. Hmmm - that does not look right, because all my official documents say “6 Loma de la Vida”. I talked to the builder and he indeed has another plat that shows that the property address is the later one. Then about an hour ago, I get another call from the county (Mark), who confirms that I can keep the address that we’ve been using all along. Everything’s dandy and the county will make the necessary corrections on their end.

5 mins after hanging up, Mark calls again and says that the 911-address for my new home has not been updated and that it still points to the Tesuque property. He will file a request to get that changed as well.

Domingo, Paul, Angie, Mark - thanks to all four of you. That was a most pleasant experience! Enjoy your weekends (and vacation)!

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As reported in the online version of the Santa Fe New Mexican today (scroll down to ‘Property tax Web site improves’), the Santa Fe County has introduced a new service on their web site that allows you to look up appraisal and tax information online. Plug in a known street address and the system will return a heck of a lot of information for the property at that address. Not only do you get to know who the owner of the property is, you’ll also find out how big the lot is, what the value of the land is and what the value of the improvements are. I’m sure that’s all public information that you can get by going to the county offices. However I find it a bit daunting to make the search completely open. Say I want to burglarize a place here in town. I plug in all the street addresses on, let’s pick “Circle Drive” and pick the five ones with the highest value. Those are guaranteed to be interesting “targets”.

It’s also interesting that my new address is not listed in the system - guess that means that I don’t have to pay property taxes

Off to check if Richardson is up-to-date on his property taxes …

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The new home needs some earth-shaking sound as well. My old Denon AVR-3801 did a good job over the last few years and I never had any problems with it. When I disconnected the equipment in the old house and saw the 500 ft. of cables behind the receiver, I pledged to end that situation and upgrade the home theater receiver as well. I’m dreaming of HDMI-cables in and one HDMI-cable out - ahhh!

The last few days were spent on honing in on a new model. Denon has a good reputation and given my past experience, I was tempted to make the next one a Denon again. The most attractive model was the AVR-4806CI (pictured below). It had everything that I was looking for, especially the three HDMI inputs and the 1080p-supporting HDMI monitor output. The least attractive thing was it’s price (around $4K MSRP - ouch!).

So I continued to shop around and see if I could get something similar at a reduced price. This morning, while the little baby was still sleeping (around 5am), I cruised on the web and stumbled over Onkyo’s TX-SR805 (again pictured below). It’s in the brand-new category (released June 2007) and it packs a heck of a lot of features into the box without breaking the bank (MSRP seems to be below $1k). Granted, it misses some of the stuff the Denon above has (Internet Radio for example, but that is easily replaced by the existing Apple Airport Express setup), but overall the feature-set is pretty much on par. However, it does have one advantage over the Denon and that is support for HDMI v1.3a (as opposed to v1.1). Talking to some home theater experts in town, I hear that HDMI version mismatches causes some of the biggest headaches and given that 1.3a is much newer than 1.1, one can expect less problems in this area.

The Onkyo is on it’s way to my home and tomorrow morning the electrcians will show up to put up the wires for the surrond and surrond-back speakers. 7.1 - here I come.

Now I only need to find time to actually watch some movies …

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Place: parking lot close to the Cowgirl in Santa Fe
Time: today, 7:10pm
Temperature: 93 degrees
Scene: Little Pia climbs into car. Gets strapped into her seat. Immediately reaches for her belly-button with her right hand and puts her left thumb into her mouth. Daddy takes a seat in the drivers seat and starts the car. Pia in the background takes thumb out of her mouth and says: “What’s wrong with this freaking weather? My belly-button is all slippery!”

I kid you not - those were her words. 2 minutes later I stop laughing …

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This has got to be my favorite season here in Santa Fe: We start the day with a clear blue sky. By noon, there are some clouds over the Sangre de Christo mountains. Early afternoon those little clouds develop into some massive cloud-formations. And, if we are lucky, we get a late afternoon shower/thunderstorm. There are some thunderstorms predicted for today, but I’m not sure it’s actually going to happen.

During my lunch break I aimed the video camera at the mountains and let the thing roll for about an hour. I compressed the resulting video down to 1 min and you can see the result below. Not as impressive as it could have been, but still nice to see a static sky (at least to the human eye) to become alive.

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Yet another reminder that you should not drink and drive …

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… how many people are actually regular readers/visitors of kahunaburger.

Only now that I’ve been disconnected for a few days, I realized that I do have very regular visitors.

More than a dozen emails arrived over the last few days asking whether everything was ok or where the heck kahunaburger had gone. Thanks to all of you! And also thanks to those who checked, but did not bother to send an email.

Wow - I guess I have to be more careful with my wording from now on

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Temperatures have reached the nineties here officially. I’ve promised Pia that I would buy a kiddie pool after moving to the new house. And that’s what we did this morning.

Enjoying the new pool

We went to Target and got a small inflatable pool for her. When we returned at noon, we inflated it (couldn’t find the pump, so my lungs had to do all the work) and placed it next to the portal on the grass matts. Close to three hours she went in and out, giggled and really enjoyed herself (the water was pretty damn cold for my taste).

Enjoying the new pool

Enjoying the new pool

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How I wish Pia was 13 already: http://hacketyhack.net/. If your kids are 13+, download the thing and let them play with it! Can’t hurt - can it?

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When I called up the Qwest guys to switch over my connection, I also opted to receive an upgrade to my old, aging ActionTec DSL modem. That sucker was responsible for some extended down-time on kahunaburger (and other servers hosted from home) whenever we had power-surges. I ask the Qwest-rep to send the new modem (a 2Wire 2700 model) to my old PO-box address.

I went to the post office every day last week and every day I left without the modem.

On Saturday afternoon I receive a call from my friend Amy. Was surprised to hear from her. She asks why I sent some Qwest-equipment to their home-adress. I’m going “What?!?”. She says that she received a package two days earlier addressed to me with their home address on the package. I ask her for her home address and when she replies I burst out in laughter. Their home address happens to be very similar to mine (one word is different) and Qwest’s automated address-correction system seems to have corrected my unknown address for theirs. What a freaking coincidence. I’m glad it arrived with somebody I know instead of ending up with some random people, but I can’t believe the luck I had.

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