I am not sure if women experience midlife crisis but I know several men who have experienced or are still in the middle of a midlife crisis. I have a theory that every 20 years, men need a big change. Usually, there is a big change in 20s, people are moving out of their parents’ homes, going to college or starting their careers. And when people turn 60, they are getting ready to retire. Downsize their homes. ...
We just recently bought a beautiful single-family home. Before this, we lived in a townhouse. And before the townhouse, I had lived in apartments. Buying a townhouse was a big step, but buying a single-family home is a whole new beast. First, buying a house is probably a sound financial decision. There are plenty of articles and research that shows people who own homes are financially better off. But very few people talk about negatives of homeownership. And I think because of the lack of that information, a lot of people make incorrect decisions and end up regretting their home purchase. I did. I had huge buyer’s remorse the day we moved into our new home. I am still getting over it. ...
There is a saying that we overestimate how much we can do in days but underestimate how much we can achieve in years. Nothing makes a father as proud and happy as his children. My biggest guiding principle for my long term goals is to provide Ayden and Zayn with an environment where they can grow to be happy and successful. Also, it is important to realize that I cannot make anyone happy or successful. The only thing I can do is create an environment for them to grow in. ...
Just the other day, I happened to skim a blog post, “My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span.” It struck a chord, and I realized that I’m in the same boat. It’s been ages since I’ve properly read a book. Even when I have audiobooks on, I’m doing something else and hardly ever genuinely enjoy them. I’ve got this habit too, of kicking off loads of projects and then ditching them once it’s time to roll up my sleeves and do the detailed work. Setting up a new project is a rush, but finishing something? That’s a snooze fest. ...
Calculating rough ROI on rentals is easy: For example, let’s say one buys a $500,000 single-family home and rents it out for $3000 per month. Since it is an investment property, they will need to make at least a 20% down payment. On $400,000 loan, their monthly payment would be about $2750 at 3.25% interest rate, with $10,000 in property taxes per year and $2000 yearly insurance. ($36,000 - $33,000) / $100,000 = 0.03 or 3% return. ...
I was debating between PS5 and Quest 2 (Affiliate link), and yes it is like comparing apples and oranges, but in the end Quest 2 won. I will likely buy PS5 at some point though. But before I buy PS5, I need a new TV with 4K and HDR. It seems pointless to play PS5 on 1080p TV from early 2010s. Quest 2 is not my first experience with Virtual Reality. I tried PSVR about 2-3 years ago but the mess of wires really turned me off with the idea of VR. When I found out that Quest 2 is completely wireless, I got interested in it again. I was not very excited about needing Facebook account to use it though. ...
I moved all my blogs back to Hugo. I have gone back and forth between Wordpress and Hugo several times. WordPress makes it really easy to write and publish content. On this domain, I was using WordPress as a bookmarking service. With PressThis plugin, I was able to use a bookmarklet and publish a new post from any page on the web. But that plugin has not been updated in a while and it seems with every new WordPress release something would break. A few times, I was able to hack it to keep going. But lately, I cannot keep up with it. I will have to figure out a better way to bookmark but for now, I didn’t want to deal with WordPress. And easy bookmarking was the only reason why I was using WordPress. ...
This year I crossed off one of my bucket list items: I got my Open Water Diver certification. I had done scuba diving before in Honolulu. It is among my top 3 best experiences. Ever since that vacation, I had been wanting to get into diving more seriously. But since we live in land-locked Dallas, I didn’t think it was possible or worth it. Then this year in February I saw a Groupon from International Scuba, and I decided to just go for it. I think the Groupon was for $250, but then there was fine print which said we needed to buy our own mask, fins, snorkel, and boots. I bought all this gear from International Scuba as they offered free gear rental for checkout dives. But this added about an additional $200. ...
I have had this domain since 2003. Originally, I wanted to make video games and Chaosplay was supposed to be a video games studio. But then it was mostly a blog. I blogged about video games and programming. A bit about personal life. Eventually my focus was on photography, so I blogged about photography. When we became parents, I was blogging about parenting. I wasn’t a consistent blogger. I stopped blogging many times. Also several times I wiped old posts and restarted blog with clean slate. ...