At Last

At last, we got the house. After so much anticipation, anxiety, disappointment, joy, and heartache, the Winchester home is ours. The loan is approved, and we are getting the keys today. It's enough to make me think of Etta's song...

You smile, you smile
And then the spell was cast
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine at last...

It's easy to sing songs now, but the obstacles were difficult to overcome and lessons learned are valuable.

To start, we were cheated by Bank Of America. Amy Woo (aka Sr. Loan Agent, aka Wicked Witch of the West) charged us a non-refundable $200.00 application fee. She is so greedy that she did not even have the courtesy to tell us that the application fee could be waived if we applied online. Obviously, she was only looking to pocket some cash or bonus from the transaction...

Bank Of America in Alhambra, CA has the worst customer service. They only want to attract and bait customers like me (and you). They do very little to help you. And they certainly don't help you save money. Go to Washington Mutual or Citibank instead. It can't be any worse...

In order to secure a home loan, I went to a loan broker, Elaine from Sunwest Funding (they don't have a web site :( Being raised by my parents to save money, going to a broker would have been unthinkable. But I am actually pleased with the results... Their service goes above and way beyond what a bank will do. Let's just be blunt here: banks don't really give a crap about you...

Elaine and her team actually help their customers! It's no joke. The application fee is about $400.00 but only if they can secure your loan. They will tell you exactly what you need to do, what docs you need to provide, and if something does not seem right, they will help you fix it. They actually help you! I cannot stress that enough. Banks, on the other hand, seem to think that ordinary folks like you and me know everything about the loan process... She even helped us save some money and find ways to increase our credit score by providing counsel on money management. You'll never get that from a bank...

If I were to compare the bank and the broker, it's like day and night. Here are a few reasons:

The bank will not call you. You're not worth the phone call.
The broker will call you, and at your convenience.

The bank will not give you status updates.
The broker will call you to let you know if everything is Ok or if there is a problem.

The bank will wait until the last day to ask for documents that you do not have.
The broker will ask for all relevant documents from the very start.

The bank will say the stupidest things...
Bank: "You only gave us 10 canceled checks. We need 12 (from the last 12 months)"
Me: "I only have 10 because I paid the last 2 in cash"
Bank: "Well... I still need 12 canceled checks from the last 12 months"

Bank: "I need you to sign your signature with your middle initial"
Me: "But I've never signed with my middle initial. If a signature has my middle initial, then it's not my signature"
Bank: "But I need your signature with your middle initial"

Bank: "Yes, 10% down payment is acceptable"
(One month later)
Bank: "You need 20% or the underwriter will not approve it"

Now a quick shoutout for Sunwest Funding, Elaine, and Yoko:

Sunwest Funding Inc
923 E Valley Blvd
San Gabriel, CA 91776
626-280-6666

And Sieu, the realtor who made it happen:

Treeline Realty
9168 Las Tunas Dr
Temple City, CA 91780
626-248-3615

Maxima Enim, Patientia Virtus

Just something for my wife to know... in due time...

Winchester Short Sale

We're going to get the house! Our offer on the short sale was finally accepted After 2 months of waiting and more waiting and not hearing anything. The waiting and not knowing is the worst part...

We both had doubts if we were ever going to hear from them. We were so doubtful that we entertained the notion of looking at other properties. Out of many that are listed, we actually looked at only a handful. Here are some worthy of mention or notoriety...

• There is a brand new 2-story SFR on Montana St. in Monrovia, but it is near a freeway underpass and a railroad track. I don't like freeway underpasses... vagrants urinate there!
• There is a brand new 2-story SFR on Monro Vista Ave. in Monrovia, but it is in an industrial area and the neighborhood looks scary.
• There is a SFR on Electric Ave. in Alhambra, but it was a fixer-upper The neighborhood is in the desirable northern part of Alhambra (near the South Pasadena border). But my wife saw inside the property and said it is filthy and a tattooed wanabee gangster lives there...
• There is a SFR on Vega St. in Alhambra, but it was also a fixer-upper. I was surprised to hear my wife say that she was serious about getting the property even though it was going to be a lot of work: new floors, new kitchen, new baths, etc. At least$50K worth of upgrades and repairs. I think she wanted it simply to deny her hated enemy who was also looking at it at the same time...
  
• There is a nice SFR up a hill on Orange Grove Ave. in Alhambra with a view overlooking Cal State LA. A nice old lady lives there. The property is nice, but it is priced above our range.
  
• There is a SFR somewhere on Gleason St. in Monterey Park, but it needs to be razed The house had fallen into disrepair and the inside was completely ruined. The paint was peeling and the floor was warped due to water damage. The entire house smelled musty...
• There is a really nice SFR on Holly Oak Dr. in Monterey Park. It is in a quiet neighborhood and has a good-sized lot. Unfortunately, it already had multiple offers! It's hard for me to imagine that buyers would get into a bidding war especially when this is a buyer's market...

Soon we will enter escrow. This was the best news I've heard in a long, long time.

Career Changes

So the IT world is saturated with wanabee's and everything is outsourced. The new frontier is now virtualization and VoIP. I've been looking at some ads and it seems kernel developers are still in demand. It's time to get my kernel kung-fu working! Wataaaa!!

IT Duties

It's now 1:29AM, Jan 12, 2008. Approximately 48 hours ago, I was running a RAID resync on the main file server for the company. It was late and the process was going to take about 250 minutes (~4 hours). That's a long time to wait, so I decided to go home. I returned 8 hours later to find the entire system unusable. I panicked. This is the first time that I truly panicked... I tried my best to get it working, but it seemed futile. The system stopped working and I was s.o.l. From what I gather, the RAID was already in degraded mode, hence the need to resync... but before the resync could finish, another drive failed, so the whole RAID set was gone. RAID5 only allows for 1 failed disk. 2 failed disks is catastrophic!

In the 28 hours that followed, I have never been up that long! The trip to Italy was 23, and even then I got to sleep on the plane... I brought up a new server using CentOS, installed all necessary daemons, restored backups, and copied anything else that was needed. It was a marathon of file transfers totaling about 350GB! After 28 hours of non-stop file transfering, configuring, and tweaking, the system seemed ready for use. It had to be, the company could not afford any more downtime... People were back to using the system, and I got to go home to sleep.

As I look back on this episode, I get the feeling that the days of scrambling will be no more. No doubt management will now pay premium to have high-availability (or even clustered!) systems. The days of free rides are over. It saddens me a bit that the skills I posses will now be passed over in favor of outsourced solutions. My days as help-desk / tech support / network engineer / system admin / programmer / systems analyst seems numbered... Only time will tell.

But in the mean time, I can prepare myself by learning new skills. I have to adapt to changes that are taking place. Hmm... now, where is that Cal State catalog?...