dennisjudd.com

Somebody asked my wife about this recently so I thought I’d document this for anyone else curious. Short answer is yes. Keep reading for the long answer.

Back around 2008 or so I called up our township assessor’s office for our county and spoke to a really nice lady about challenging their appraisal of what our house was worth. I did this mostly because at the time I had been following the housing bubble (since it burst in 2006) and I knew their numbers were BS. I promptly did nothing after that because I foolishly though that since they based their prices off a three year average they would drop without need for any effort on my part.

I was so wrong.

Flash forward to 2010. We decided to refi our 30 year fixed mortgage because the rates were a full point lower (5.875 to 4.625) and to do that we had to get our house appraised to ensure we weren’t under water on our mortgage. The appraised value was 25k less than what we paid for it in 2005 but we weren’t underwater so our refi went though without a hitch and all as well. Flash forward to December of that year and we get our yearly “Property Assessment Notice” from the county and sure as shit it went up again. This time it was a full 50k higher than what our recent home appraisal said for our refi. I know they say it’s an average but in a market like this I don’t how they can say that with a straight face when all it does is go up. So I came to the conclusion that they figure they can keep milking us suckers and only have to worry about the people that complain. In other words they’re never going to magically tell you to stop giving them money.

So once again I called up my county’s assessor’s office and this time they directed me to an online PDF to download and fill out….which I did. For some unknown reason I had to fill it out and mail in quadruplicate copies….but other than that all the info I needed to fill it out was included in the home appraisal we had done for the refi (mostly info on comp’s in the area). After I mailed it in I got a confirmation for a “Notice of Hearing” for my complaint form and all I did was show up on that day, wait 10 minutes then get lead to a room full of 4 people with calculators. I sat while they looked at the forms I had mailed in and pretty much after 5 minutes of tapping on their calculators they agreed with me. That was it. No big hoopla or anything really, they just said “yup, your house is worth 50k less than we’ve been saying”.

So flash forward and I get an official Notice of Final Decision on 3/28/11 and nothing else until last month where we got back a check from our mortgage company for $1,100 due to the escrow account having to much in it.

Oh and the best part. We just got our 2011 Property assessment and they dropped our house’s value again…another 4k. So it might be true that the prices are equalizing but I just don’t believe they would have dropped it 54k unless I challenged it.

So if you want to do something you usually only have a fixed window of time (ours was 30 days) after the Property Assessments are mailed out. You also need to pop for a home appraisal. That’s it.

Complete and total unnecessary escalation of the issue by use of needless force. If I was an officer of the law I would be ashamed of myself after seeing this mockery.

About two months ago I spent my early Saturday morning hunched anxiously in front of our kitchen iMac drinking a giant cup of coffee and constantly moving through the 10 tabs I had open refreshing HP’s small business website trying to desperately get a 16gb Touchpad for $99.

I had tripped across the news a little later than most in the /geek section of Fark.com the night before and to this day I’m still not sure how I managed to get one but I did. Well….got one two months later at least. True to their word it arrived on 10/23 and after crossing my fingers to make sure it turned on I’ve been playing with it every since.

This is pretty much just going to be me rambling about thoughts on it.

Physical Aspects. This is a 10″ tablet that got slashed from $499 to $99 or something like that. The screen looks great and is a good size. I will say that due to it’s size it’s also heavy. If you plan on using this to read on the john or whatever you’ll be using two hands. Also as most people have already commented the screen is a fingerprint magnet. On my unit there’s also this annoying “flex” on the back where you can make the shell move and hear the adhesive try to stick to it. I can’t tell if that’s due to mine being one of the last made or if they’re all like that. Honestly with a case on I don’t care. Speaking of cases I picked up and aside from having to flex the power button by pushing it with my finger I’ve been really happy with it. You need a case with this guy. I don’t do screen protectors though so I have no opinion on that.

The home button is a little small in my opinion. I like the way Apple does it by using a circle but I guess HP felt they had to be different and made theirs more oval than anything. My volume buttons also jiggle a bit…but again it’s in a case so I don’t care or notice now. The only other port on the device is at the bottom for charging and connecting to a usb port on your computer. There is no SD card…but again I don’t really care about that, some people seem to but it doesn’t bother me much. When you plug it into your computer it just acts like a giant flash drive anyways.

WebOS. So HP had their own OS called WebOS and for all intents and purposes it’s really slick. Out of the box the first thing I did was updated it to 3.0.4 (from 3.0.2) and gave it a go. It uses a system called “cards” where when you press the home button everything that is running shrinks down into little 3×5 cards you can shuffle through using sweeping motions with your hands.

Over all it’s very polished. If all you want to do is read some websites and maybe check your Facebook there’s no need to do anything more at this point. However if you want to get as much as you can out of this tablet then pretty much the first things you do are turn off a ton off debugging and bump that CPU up to 1.5ghz (from the under clocked 1.2ghz it comes set at). If you want to tweak it here is a link to the guide I used. Running WebOS I had no problems with Facebook (although the app is a little weird, it lets you add a second account but doesn’t let you log out of the first one), Pandora’s App, Skype works (although the camera is for shyt on this thing…almost as bad as my iPod Touch 4). I didn’t setup bluetooh at all but WiFi worked just fine and the range is excellent. The web browser supports flash but it’s limited. For example the Zynga games on Facebook (cafeworld, etc) crash.

TL;DR it’s a cool tablet and WebOS is a pretty slick polished experience. Everyday users will love it and it’ll meet 90% of your needs probably.

Now if you have no interest on stuffing Android on it you can stop reading here. Cause the rest of my discussion will be about that.

I did a lot of reading about people getting Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread on their touchpad. The reasons are really more for power users who want the ability to access the google market for apps (and Amazon apps too) and also do fancier things with it. To be blunt installing Android on the tablet is cake using this video’s directions.

I was really worried about bricking the system but it turned out to be super simple to do. Plus when you are booting the Touchpad up you can always choose to go back to WebOS (I’ve been hopping between them as I work out bugs) so there’s no risk. In essence you are dual booting OS’s.

So after following that video to install the second Alpha release of CM7 I pretty much booted up the Touchpad and sat there going “now what?” Turns out that CM7 can’t include the google market place so you have to go find that and install it. Here’s the simple steps on how to do it.

Ok so we have CM7 installed and Google Marketplace installed. How do we look? Well for an Alpha release CM7 is really great but it does have some bugs:
-Wifi vanishes after sleep mode occasionally
-No Flash support (although a new Firefox in a few months should fix that)
-Sleep of Death. Touchpad will go to sleep and not wake up (I seem to have worked around it by increasing the CPU ).
-Random reboots while in sleep mode and then the live wallpaper is suddenly glitchy and needs to be re-applied.

It took a few days but I find myself hopping into WebOS less and less. Google Market place has a huge offering and I was able to install all my apps from Amazon as well. Plants Vs. Zombies is a blast on a 10″ tablet I was also able to do one other really cool thing. I downloaded an app from the google marketplace and can now reach my FreeNAS via a program called ES File Explorer. I tried to make CifsManager work but had no luck at all. Oh yeah and don’t forget to re-over clock for the new OS to 1.5ghz oh and explore live wallpapers…I’ve become a live wallpaper whore.