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Thursday, March 10, 2011

Best Interest Rate Home Loans Online

In a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's piece about competitive insurance quotes, what do I find on-line but mortgage services like this one Five Star Mortgages in the US that help people find the lowest cost mortgages. They proudly proclaim "We Specialize in low rate lending across the united states. Lowest Interest rates online!" and go on to say "Our professionals specialize in helping people just like you find the right type of mortgage loan to suit their needs. In addition, our goal is always to find the right program and the right lender to help you save money on your home purchase." In other words they are like an on-line version of Mike Perro with no need to go into the office and with the ability to go through the process at your own pace. Anything like this here? The best I could find was a spreadsheet-like display of current bank mortgage rates, sorted alphabetically.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

On a roll

I seem to be on a roll tonight. I had a good day at work documenting a part of our development process ... normally, like most developers, I can't stand doing documentation but this was developer documentation and partially involved writing some skeleton code to improve the way we develop.

The evening started off badly though, after cycling home I got straight off the bike to go for a 6km walk in practice for the Round the Bays this Sunday. I got about a kilometre down the road when the heavens opened. I sheltered under a shop awning until it eased to light rain and then walked briskly home arriving more than a little damp.

Competitive Quotes Car Insurance

There's obviously a lot of margin in car insurance. You only need to look at how much AA Insurance and Tower have spent on their recent TV ads, or if that doesn't convince you go over to clixGalore and have a look at the affiliate scheme offers by major insurance companies, you can see the offers without having an account or logging in. One (I won't name them) are currently on the front page and offering 12% commission.

Monday, March 07, 2011

The Rat Is Back

Sometime around 1995 I started using "Kiore", the Maori word for "Rat" as my nickname for on-line bridge. It became my off-line nickname as well then my ISP email address and in 2000 I registered Kiore.com to get the email address I wanted. The url of this blog comes from the same source, the original name for the blog was My name/Kiore.

Starting a few months before I created the Muffins blog I had Kiore.com set up on my PC at home as a simple php-Nuke CMS that was mostly a blog as an experiment, I eventually exposed it (dynamic IP and all) to the public internet so I could demo it to friends. Eventually it migrated to the same storage as I later set the muffins blog on. Like a rat crossing the motorway, disaster befell it a couple of times, like the muffins site it had to be restored and rebuilt, eventually becoming a Drupal site before dieing badly early in 2007 leading to the, I won't say "abandonment" as I always intended to restore, but failure to actually restore. I still used the domain name, but only for mail until yesterday.

Revision 3 - R3: b2evolution server

After a not very fortunate attempt to set up the b2evolution blog software a few weeks back that was cut short by the 9:37 event, I had another go during the week. As always with these things it took quite a while to get it right. When I did I blew it away & started afresh.

The b2evolution software has multiple domain support built in, but based on what I learned from my experiments, it is clear that the first domain has special properties and I didn't really want my other domains relying on a real domain name, so as this is my third b2evolution install and I was informally referring to it as "R3" I deployed r3.co.nz and the site is now officially  "R3 (Revision 3)".

The earthquake caused substantial damage - Treasury NZ

I love the understatement and the New Zealand Treasury has issued this pearler of one in its latest economic indicators report. To be fair, the report's target audience includes people who are overseas and may have had minimal exposure to the direct information on the earthquake we've had here. The treasury is tasked with providing a best estimate of the amount of damage caused, and without even a reliable deathtoll it must be almost impossible to come up with a financial cost, still they try and only give themselves a 33% confidence level:
"It is still too early to estimate with confidence the financial cost of the damage caused by the February earthquake, but it is likely to be [...] we estimate the combined financial cost of the two earthquakes at around NZ$15 billion. There is considerable uncertainty associated with this estimate (and its components) which is best described as a working assumption rounded to the nearest $5 billion."
Repairs could take over four years They later say
"it is unlikely that all this work will be completed within our four-year forecast period. Except for important infrastructure, this recovery will mainly occur from 2012 onwards because of the planning required and the extent of the damage."
It's worth remembering this. In Bob Parker's famous words, "Christchurch is currently munted" but it will be rebuilt eventually. Full Report