spamguy

I’m dabbling with the idea of owning property. But this ain’t Detroit, where you can plop a dollar on a bank teller’s desk and call yourself a homeowner. (Mostly exaggerating.) This is Austin, where money is not used to buy property, just larger, sturdier cardboard boxes. Not only are property values exceedingly high, so are appreciation rates.

(Source)

10 to 20%! If a given area isn’t already too expensive for me to buy, it will be in 15 minutes.

The upside is it’s the only variable that makes property ownership even half sensible. The New York Times has an excellent widget to help visualise the rent vs. buy argument. Their default appreciation rate, 1%, makes any economic venture in Austin an instant failure. Jack it up to 20%, and the grey (rent) integrated area is engulfed by the tan (buy). With such polarised win or lose outcomes, is it any surprise we have so many homeless people and millionaires living in the same space?

At some point in my Internet travels, Firefox 3 stopped acting the way browsers have worked for 15 years. Normally if I punch cnn into the Address Bar, I get (surprise) cnn.com. These days, I’m getting a Google search for the keyword cnn instead, which is enormously unhelpful. It’s not obvious, but Firefox is performing a Google search in both cases. The difference is giving me the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ result versus the whole damn results page. After some research, I realise that I’m living in Bizarro World: no one but me has this problem, but everyone wants to have it intentionally as a feature.

In a bit of convoluted problem solving, I reverse engineered a solution to a problem I didn’t have to get a solution to a problem I did. By outlining the new steps here, hopefully I’ll save someone out there some trouble.

1. Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar. The application will try to coax you away; don’t let it. Continue on.
2. Find the parameter named keyword.URL in the list.
3. There’s no telling what the parameter’s value will be in specific cases, but chances are it’s set up to send you to a results page instead of ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’ To fix that, double-click on the value of keyword.URL and paste in http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= . It’s ugly, but it works.
4. Surf just like it’s Netscape 4.