If you’ve ever tried to make a graphic parody of something, you know that using the right font can mean the difference between a something that works and something that doesn’t. When I wanted to do a parody of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, I spent some time googling before finding a font identification tool called “What the Font?”.

Basically, you take a screenshot of a couple of words from the font you’re trying to identify and upload the picture to What The Font. Within seconds, it suggests several fonts that it thinks are close matches.

There are two drawbacks to the system:

Yesterday, in How To Choose The Best Free Virus Protection, I talked about a method to evaluate free virus scan products by comparing the commercial versions to the free versions. I know that only the geekiest of you got through the whole thing, and the rest fell asleep at the halfway point because I failed to mention anything about chicken monkey donkey porn. For those who simply want a recommendation for a good, free virus scanner, I applied yesterday’s method to 5 of the free virus scanners to find out if they really are recommendable.

5. ClamWin

Despite a badly stripped down UI, Clamwin has a cool factor because it’s one of the few (if not the only) open source virus scanners out there. Unfortunately, the detection rates are lower than other available free products, and the product lacks an on-access component. Without an on-access scanner, this program is only able to clean your PC after it has become infected, and really offers no protection against virus threats.

Rating: Not recommended

I used to run a virus protection system for a large multinational corporation, so every once and a while someone will ask me for advice on what the best free antivirus program is. Corporations have no problem spending the money for reliable virus protection because they need immediate support and someone to blame when something goes wrong. For the home user, the question tends to be more along the lines of “What virus protection program can you recommend, and can I get it for free?”

For the personal user, virus protection has gone from a software purchase to a protection racket, with consumers paying between $40 and $80 per year to have adequate virus protection on their PC’s. Once those consumers stop subscribing, they no longer get updates and their virus protection becomes ineffective in a matter of days. Don’t get me wrong. $40 a year is a small amount to ask for all the research and testing goes into keeping PC’s protected against the latest threats, but for a lot of people, a recurring $40 payment is a lot of dough.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get something that works as well as a commercial product, and get it for free? Well, you can. There are several products on the market that offer virus protection for no cost, but they vary widely in the amount of protection they offer. If you’re not a security expert, how do you pick the product that gives you the best protection? You don’t need to be a computer wizard to find the answer, but you do need to know who to look to for accurate information.

If you’re going to retire your old PC, it’s only natural that you’d want to delete all of your personal data from it. Most people will search out what personal files they can, and delete them with a simple push of the delete key. Unfortunately, when you delete a file in Windows, the operating system only removes the reference from the master file table, leaving the actual data on the drive.

If your PC were a book and your files were chapter 9, Windows delete is like removing chapter 9 from the index, but leaving the pages in tact. The data may not look like it’s there to the average user, but until you write over that space, anyone with a free file recovery tool and access to your PC has a chance of recovering your files. That’s why if you’re going to retire a PC, the best thing that you can do is to completely scrub your hard drives by overwriting every last block with multiple passes of random data. Governments, corporations, and paranoid geeks have done this for years, and in this age of identity theft, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t either.

Don’t start sweating now. You don’t have to have a room full of mainframes or know anything about Star Trek to scrub your drives clean. With a free piece of open source software and the short set of instructions below, you can ensure that your private data will be banished to the land of wind and ghosts, which is way beyond the reach of anyone without a clean forensics lab and some incredibly skilled data recovery personnel.

If you’ve ever wanted a fake Polaroid for your site, but never had an easy way to make one, I may have come up with a simple solution for you. I put together a template that you can import into your favorite art program (like the GIMP) and lay on top of your favorite picture to make it look like it was taken with an old Polaroid camera. The template conforms to the size of an actual Polaroid and will work with pictures that are scaled to 314 pixels tall by 302 pixels wide. No shaking required.

If you’re ready to get started, download the Free Polaroid Template to your PC by right clicking and selecting Save Link As.

For people who need a little bit of guidance, instructions on how to make a Polaroid with this template in GIMP are included below.

Enjoy!

The Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine is a really great (and really free) drum sequencer that was made for Linux and ported to Windows. It’s easy to get used to and comes pre-loaded with a couple of drum kits (including the Roland TR-808 for all you b-boys and b-girls), but you’ll eventually want to add more kits to support your beat making needs.

And that’s where the fun ends. Nearly every time I tried to add a new drum kit, Hydrogen would crash with the following error:

Microsoft visual C++ Runtime Library

Assertion Failed
Program: hydrogen.exe
File: instrument.cpp
Line 122
Expression pDrumkitInfo

When I create graphics for the web, I find that the lossless nature of PNG compression creates the best looking image files. Unfortunately, the trade off of having distortion-free images is a much larger file size than you’d have with nearly identical JPEGs.

However, in those cases where even a small amount of JPEG compression leaves distortions in my images, I opt for the lossless compression of PNG files, so that the images will look exactly the way I want them to. To offset the larger file size, I use an excellent (and free) command-line utility called PNGOut to reduce the PNG files another 10-15%.

Today, I wanted to see how PNGOut stacked up against its peers, so I exported one of my old Finetune Friday posters from Inkscape and ran it through three different PNG compression utilities. Even though I tried some of the more advanced options of the other utilities, PNGOut still provided twice the reduction of its closest competitor.

Orginal PNG File
218k

Lossless Compression
PNGCrush: 212k – 2.8% reduction
Optipng: 206k – 5.5% reduction
PNGOut: 195k – 10.6% reduction

Lossy Compression (For Comparison)
JPEG (no compression): 128k – 41.3% difference
JPEG (5% compression): 71k – 67.4% difference

PNGOut Download:

If you’re going to use PNG, I highly recommend using PNGOut.

If you’re looking to create professional looking graphics and don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on programs like Adobe Illustrator or Correl Draw, I highly recommend a a free, open source vector graphics editor called Inkscape.

Thanks to some generous folks sharing their Inkscape tips and tricks, you can now create better looking graphics with less of a learning curve than ever before. I’ve picked over 45 of the best tutorials and guides (spanning from basic to advanced) to get you creating crisp vector graphics like the pros.

Enjoy!

The snow is falling, and whether you’re looking to update your blog, make cards, send invitations, or simply leave yourself little notes around the house, there is no need to use that same old boring font. Grab one of these free, winter-themed fonts to make your Winter creations pop.

Considering an architect can cost up to $250 an hour, having professional renovation plans drawn up can get expensive fast. While there is no replacement for a professional when determining your final plans, creating a 3D model of your renovation can save you some cash by presenting the architect a general idea of what you’re looking for.

Google Sketchup is a free 3D modeling program that I’ve been using for a couple of weeks to do just that. It allows me plan the renovations to scale and then walk around the house as if I were in it, giving me a better idea of where what works on paper and what works in the real world coincide. I did this once with a kitchen renovation, and it worked out extremely well.

In my short time working with the product, I’ve compiled a number of tips and resources to help minimize your frustration and get you up to speed faster with your own project.

As someone who spent a decade running a very successful virus protection scheme for a very large multi-national corporation, I’ve probably forgotten more antivirus information (thankfully) than most people will ever need to know. That said, I can tell you that despite the cost, McAfee provides some of the best and easiest to use antivirus solutions on the market for both professional and home use.

I’m a huge fan of free, but to get a solution that includes firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and rootkit protection for Windows, you typically need to either pony up the cash for an integrated solution from a big vendor like McAfee, or cobble together your own solution using multiple free products that only do part of the job.

Halloween is bearing down on us fast, and I know you’re going to need some ultra-scary fonts for all that Halloween art. Here are 66 frighteningly free Halloween fonts broken down into categories to help you execute your monstrous masterpieces this season.

Scary Band Fonts

1. Cannibal Corpse (band)
2. Cramps
3. Danzing
4. Amped for Evil (Dystempa)
5. Misfits
6. Samdan (Samhain)
7. Slayer

Scary Movie Fonts

8. 28 Days Later
9. Ben Witch Project (Blair Witch Project)
10. Bewitched
11. Burton’s Nightmare (Nightmare Before Christmas)
Continue Reading…

What is Fragmentation?

If you’re a Windows user, a common cause of PC slowdowns is file fragmentation. If you don’t know what file fragmentation is, consider this example:

If you imagine that your hard drive is a bookcase, and that you are the Windows operating system, then a file would be a single book. In that scenario, creating a file would simply be placing a new book on a shelf.

Now, image that three months have passed, and your shelves are nearly full. You just bought a gigantic dictionary and none of the shelves has enough room for it.

Here’s a question: If a song costs you about $.83 to buy on CD, and $.99 from iTunes, how can you justify buying only a fraction of a song as a ringtone for $3 a pop? If your cell phone is capable of playing MP3 ringtones, it makes sense to replace that boring default ringtone with a snippet from your favorite song, but there’s no way that you should have to pay $3 to do it.

Here’s how you can create a ringtone from one of your MP3s for free.

Do you use still use four different IM clients to chat with your friends on various services like AIM, Yahoo!, or Google Talk? You know there’s no need for that, right? If you’re willing to give up some of the advanced features in favor of an all in one client, you can simplify your chatting life.

I went through hundreds of clients to sift out what I thought were the best multi-protocol IM clients out there. My requirements were:

• It must be free (as in beer).
• It must run on Windows.
• It cannot be a beta.
• It must be actively developed.
• It must support at least five major protocols.
• It must support encryption.
• It must support basic features like graphical smilies, message logging, themes and file transfer.
• It must not require registration to use.

Originally, the last requirement wasn’t on the list, but as I went through more and more clients, being asked to sign up for yet another online account started getting on my nerves. The goal was to consolidate my accounts, not add more. Once this requirement was added, my list was cut down to only three clients: Trillian, Miranda, and Pidgin.

Trillian

Cost: Free
License: Proprietary
Supported O/S: Windows
Basic Protocols (5): AIM, ICQ, Windows Live (MSN), Yahoo!, IRC,
Extra Protocols: None

Trillian may not support as many protocols as its open source counterparts, but it’s the only client to support voice chat. It also has the slickest interface of the group and supports spell checking natively. It was the clear winner in the group in terms of memory usage, using a scant 5.6 MB when idle, compared with Pidgin’s 22 MB and Miranda’s 7.5 MB. In use the software performed exactly as expected with no major hiccups. There were a couple of minor drawbacks, though. Because of its profit based nature, Trillian attempts to bundle toolbars from the Weather Channel and Ask.com during the installation. The options are easily unchecked to avoid the installs, provided the user is paying attention. It also left remnants behind in both the file tree and the registry when uninstalled. These are worth noting, but are relatively small drawbacks for solid performance and the lowest memory usage of the group.

Website: http://www.ceruleanstudios.com
Download: Trillian Basic or Trillian Portable

Miranda

Cost: Free
License: GPL
Supported O/S: Windows
Basic Protocols (6): AIM, ICQ, Windows Live (MSN), Yahoo!, IRC, XMPP (Google Talk, Jabber, etc.)
Extra Protocols: Tlen, LAN (NetSend, WinPopup, Novell Netware NCP, BattleNet, Vypress Chat, Quick Chat, and Walla Chat), OTR, QQ, Gadu-Gadu, Lotus Sametime, Bonjour

Miranda supports all six of the major IM clients, and is second only to Pidgin in terms of number of extra protocols supported. It’s the most stylistically challenged of the group out of the box, but with so many themes available, it’s an easily correctable issue. The strong point of Miranda is that it’s extremely quick to install and use. It is by far the fastest of the group, despite its middle of the road memory footprint. I have used the product happily for years at a time, but finally traded it in for Pidgin. The major drawback of Miranda is that the database that it uses seems to corrupt every once and a while, causing the user to have to rebuild the database. It’s such an issue that a shortcut to the Database Repair Tool is placed on the start menu with the application during installation. My database has corrupted on several occasions in the past, and even though it’s a one click fix with no data loss, it’s more of a hassle than having no issues at all.

Website: http://www.miranda-im.org
Downloads: Miranda or Miranda Portable

Pidgin

Cost: Free
License: GPL
Supported O/S: Windows, Linux, BSD, Unix
Basic Protocols (6): AIM, ICQ, Windows Live (MSN), Yahoo!, IRC, XMPP (Google Talk, Jabber, etc.)
Extra Protocols: SILC, Zephyr, XFire, OTR (with plugin), Blizzard Battle-Net Chat (with plugin), QQ, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Sametime (with plugin)

You may never have heard of Pidgin, but it has years of development behind it. The application formerly known as GAIM was recently renamed to Pidgin as part of a settlement with AOL, who thought that “GAIM” and “AIM” were named a little too closely to be distinguishable. New name, same code. The interface for Pidgin is not as slick as Trillian’s, but not as angular as Miranda’s, making it the least obtrusive for me as far as style. It’s installed with spell checking, and supports more protocols and operating systems than either of its competitors. It’s covered under the GPL license, which should warm the hearts of most nerds, but doesn’t support voice chat or webcams.

Website: http://pidgin.im
Downloads: Pidgin or GAIM Portable

Conclusion: So Which Is Best?

All of the clients listed have portable versions that can be run from a thumb drive, allowing you to IM from places where you can’t (or shouldn’t) install software. These versions are also a good way to get a feel for a client without running a full install on your PC. While all three have their benefits and drawbacks, any of them is a solid way to handle your multi-protocol IM needs. The one you choose is largely a matter of which one feels right to you.

In a past post, I mentioned that I had started playing with Democracy player, which sparked a request for some tips on locating videos. For those not familiar with Democracy, it’s like an advanced feed reader for videos. With it, you subscribe to video sites like VideoBomb or DailyMotion, and it automatically downloads videos and shows for you. While it doesn’t include most regular network shows, it does include a channel guide, an integrated search bar, and a bittorrent client to locate independent content.

I have to admit that I use Democracy mostly to watch G4TV and viral videos, but I have to say that I’ve gotten very used to the TV-like way that I can watch a continuous stream of clips with a single click. Because all of the major networks are focussed on controlling their content through an array of individually aggravating and inflexible web-based players, I can’t be bothered to watch them online. Unfortunately, until the majors give up a little control and join this download party or the independents expand the number of high quality shows, Democracy won’t be replacing my DVR just yet.

My Current Democracy Channels

Democracy doesn’t currently have a way to import or export channels, so I had to compile this list manually. It might not look like much, but it’s a surprisingly large amount of content, which I can almost guarantee you’ll be tired of watching long before Democracy is tired of serving it up.

1Up
Attack of the Show (G4TV)
The Broken
Cerealized
The Daily Feed (G4TV)
The Daily Nut (G4TV)
DJ Battle TV
DLTV
Frestopia
GeekBrief TV
Lulu TV
Make Magazine
Robot Chicken
Strongbad E-mail
Telemusicvision
WASD
Top 10 Viral Videos
Video Bomb Front Page
XPlay (G4TV)

Further Channel Surfing

If you still need more content, there is a TON to sift through in the links below…

Atom Film’s Feed List
Bittorrent
DailyMotion
IFilm’s Feed List
Jeff Pulver’s Unbelievably Extensive Web TV List
Lifehacker’s List of TV on the Web
Light reading’s Top Video Sharing Sites
Peekvid

Happy surfing! (And if you find some good channels, throw them in the comments.)

Update:: Thanks to a comment from Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation (the folks that run Democracy), Democracy users can subscribe to my current channels above with a single click on the button below the “My Current Democracy Channels” list.

When I asked for a list of some of the free software that you use, some of you came through with some good suggestions. Because you’re not a 3 dollar whore in some back water boom-boom bar, I’m not just going to take what you’re giving and walk out. Not today, anyway.

Instead, I tried to compile a list of some of the free software that I find useful. As far as I know, everything listed below is freeware, has a relatively straight forward EULA, and hasn’t triggered any virus or spyware warnings in all the time that I’ve been using them. Most do not even require any form of registration to download.

Just leave the money on the nightstand…

ActivePerl
You cant run Perl without a Perl compiler. ActivePerl is the Perl compiler for the windows environment. I’ve been using it for years for various projects at work and home that saved countless hours of manual labor. Perl Newbies can get a lot of great help over at Perlmonks, where I used to frequent quite a bit.

Adaware & Spybot
I like McAfee’s spyware app, but not their retail price. For free, I use Adaware & Spybot for optimal protection against spyware. Both products are good, but in my experience, no spyware app gets rid of all strains. If you use these in conjunction, you stand a much better chance of staying clean. I’ve also heard good things about the Microsoft spyware app, but it’s beta, and in my experience, Microsoft + Beta = Kiss your machine goodbye.

AngryIP Scanner, NMap and Ethereal
AngryIP is a really simple port scanner, while NMAP and Ethereal can actually analyze traffic. With that added power comes added complexity, though. I think I prefer Ethereal to NMap just because it has a better graphical interface. As an admin, I feel dirty just admitting that.

ASpell & IESpell
I use both Aspell and IESpell on different machines, both of which work nicely for spell checking these blog posts. IESpell is slightly better because Aspell lacks an “Ignore All” button, which can be essential for correcting long posts like this one.

Audacity
This is a free audio editing tool that has put a good layer of dust on my 4 track. I wish I used it more, but sadly, there is little time or energy left by the end of the day.

CDex
I rip all my CD’s to MP3′s with CDEX. It’s certainly not the best or the prettiest, but I’ve been using it since the beginning of time, so that’s what I use.

Comcast McAfee VirusScan / Personal Firewall
Although I’m partial to the enterprise version of VirusScan, Comcast provides the retail versions of McAfee VirusScan and McAfee personal firewall to all of their customers for free. When you look at the $40 /year subscription fees of the major virus scanners and the slightly sub par performance of the free scanners like Avast and AVG (they do work, though), this is a no brainer for the Comcast customer. They also have a privacy service for those of you who want to keep your kids off of certain sites. I don’t need that though. Gooooo Porno. See the comcast site for details.

Disk investigator & PC Inspector
When you delete a file in Windows, you aren’t really deleting it off the drive. You’re merely deleting the entry in the MFT (that’s master file table to you non-geeky types). If you think of your hard drive as a book, the MFT is the index. When you tell Windows to delete a file, it merely erases the file entry from the MFT, leaving the actual file on the disk. It’s like erasing chapter 13 from a book’s index, and claiming that it’s deleted, while never actually tearing out the pages in Chapter 13. Both of these tools help you to recover those files by examining the book rather than relying on the index. I don’t prefer one over the other, and I have both loaded just in case.

DVD Decrypter
I saw a 320 Gb hard drive for $117 the other day. If a movie takes up about 4 Gb of space, you could fit 80 movies on that drive, allowing you to watch them all on demand without ever leaving your couch. DVD Decrypter is the program that will copy those DVD’s to the drive to get you started.

Eraser
So, what if you don’t want people to find out what you’ve deleted? Well, then you need to act like the Department of Justice and use an erasing tool. This tool will overwrite the sectors that you delete files from with random data. You can specify the number of times that it overwrites the data to lessen the chances that anyone will be able to recover it. Remember that additional writes take more time and wear down your hard drive more, so use this only for things that you need to get rid of like dossiers, personal information, or your midget donkey porn collection. If you use the McAfee Privacy service, it includes an eraser, and you don’t need this.

LEDHead
Remember that hand-held football game with the red dots and all the beeping that your parents paid $25 for back in ’82? Yup, me too. I played the shit out of that thing when my Dad wasn’t using it. This is the software version of all of those LED games in one executable. There’s basketball, no passing football, passing football, baseball, and a ton more that I don’t care about.

Mediamonkey
I need to manage a LOT of MP3′s and Mediamonkey is the best way that I have found to manage them. It supports TONS of ways to manage your music, and has more options than I’m going to even begin talking about here. It even supports looking up album covers from Amazon.

Mixmeister BPM Analyzer
Technically a DJ tool, I use this on every MP3 I create. It can bulk analyze MP3s and add the Beats Per Minute to the ID3 tag automatically. This is useful if you’re not in the mood for a particular type of music, but would like to listen to songs that are a all the same speed. This is a no brainer for a music junkie.

MSIZap
Ever have a situation where a piece of software won’t install because the installation is under the impression that you have an incompatible piece of software installed? But, you really dont? Yea. It happens infrequently, but when it does, it SUCKS. This “last resort” tool from Microsoft will bomb out all pieces of a of a piece of software. Please use with caution. If you use it properly, this can be a life saver, but if not, you may want to lay down and die.

Notepad++
I needed a simple, free script editor that does context highlighting for coding. I used to use Code Genie, but I can’t seem to find that online anymore. I’m open to suggestion on this one, but this is the best I have for now.

OpenOffice
The only free office suite that I’m aware of for windows is OpenOffice, which I’ve used in the past, but have not jumped into yet. It seems to have everything that office has, and can write office-compatible documents (and databases), but the word on the street is that it’s become as bloated as Microsoft Office.

Opera
I still use IE, and I have no big grudge with it except that it doesn’t do tabbed browsing. Opera is now a free, ad-less browser that includes tabbed browsing, skinning, built in google search bar, a newsreader and a whole bunch of nice tweaks thrown in. Check out 30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover for some pretty neat starter tips.

PhotoPlus & DrawPlus from Serif
You have to register for these, but they are pretty darned good products. DrawPlus is not as powerful as PhotoShop, but it’s not as pricey, either. If you need photoshop power for free, you could use the Gimp, but I found the interface to be too cumbersome for me. DrawPlus is is powerful enough for me, but is intuitive enough that I didn’t have to spend six months learning an interface.

Picasa
Face the fact that the software that came with your digital camera is crap. Replace it with google’s picture management software that has a really nice interface, and a few basic editing features.

Process Explorer
Hailing from Sysinternals, this is like task manager on steroids. Most of the time, I use this to find out what process is hanging on to a .DLL that I want to delete.

PSTools
The Sysinternals PSTools suite is for executing files on remote machines, doing remote reboots, and other tasks that admins need to do from a command line.

Sync Toy
This is a Microsoft tool that helps to automatically keep two directories in sync. Think backups.

Thunderbird
I installed this mail client for my parents about a year ago because it is so good with spam filters. I installed it for the same reason, but I may switch to the Opera mail client in the future.

Trillian
It’s a single application that allows you to log into all the major chat services (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, etc) through one interface.

TweakUI
TweakUI gives you quick access to some of the tweakable settings in windows, but I only use it because it allows me to auto complete directories in DOS by using [TAB] key (like linux) and because it allows me to create search prefixes. A search prefix is like a shortcut. You can associate the word “GOOGLE” with a google search, or “CPAN” with a CPAN search so that you can simply type “google Jon Dyer” into the explorer bar, and it will query google for you by auto-filling “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jon+dyer”

Windiff
This is a microsoft utility that alows you to compare differences between two directories or files. You have to load the whole Platform SDK to get it, which is kind of a pain in the ass.

WordPress
I dove into WordPress after seeking add more features to this blog than Blogger had to offer. I looked at various tools including a few full-fledged content management suites before settling in on WordPress for it’s simplicity.

ZoneAlarm
Yes, XP has a built-in firewall, but it only protects you from someone trying to come in to your PC. If something already made it in and wants to call your information back to some server in Russia, the Microsoft firewall won’t even try to save you. You’d be surprised what is accessing the internet behind your back. Do yourself a favor and just disable the thing and load ZoneAlarm to help track both what is trying to get in to your PC, AND what is trying to get out. I have this installed on some machines and the McAfee firewall on others, and like them both equally.

The time I was supposed to spend finishing up my PC was spent with the PS2. So, before I finalize the PC, does anyone have any free software recommendations? Thunderbird, Opera, Perl, mediamonkey, audacity, trillian, VirusScan, Notepad++, cdex, dvd decrypter, Picasa, Adaware, Spybot, Disk investigator, PC Inspector, PSTools, Process Explorer, TweakUI, ASpell, Wink, a couple of firewalls, and some other apps are already on the list, but do you have any free software that you consider essential?

I’ll link and explain all the stuff that I use once my eyes can focus.

Picasa
Google bought a photo album tool called Picasa.  As the software that came with my digital camera sucks, I thought that I’d check it out.  I like it for its simplicity, although I did experience problems importing a couple of photos from my camera.  Also, the timeline function, while a neat idea, will not work with my piece of crap video card. 

The end is Nigh
I found this cartoon from the ACLU, and it made me want to re-up.  Then, the mood passed and I fell back into the role of the drone protecting the corporate hive.

worker bees can leave
even drones can fly away
the queen is their slave
-Jack

The Writers
Since no one I know really updates their blogs anymore, I have been on a tear to find new lives to peek into.  I put a couple that I’ve started reading daily onto the side bar, and I may add these two if I find that I keep up with them. 
 
The Sandal Wearing Adventurist and the Angel Headed Hipster

The Reader
Sometimes, I think that I can write.  And sometimes, I can.  When I read other people’s stuff, I think I’m delusional.  I think that I am not a needle in a haystack, but a merely a piece of hay.

The Lessons
When we made an offer on a house, the sellers were real pricks about signing the deal.  They made demand after demand and said that we weren’t to present a laundry list of corrections after the home inspection (as if I would waive that).  After we walked away from the deal due to the laundry list of items from the home inspection and the strange way the buyers had been acting, I was confused that the sellers were surprised that we didn’t negotiate with them.

Lesson 1: If you say that you will not negotiate and act like a hard ass, make sure the guy on the other side of the table won’t call your bluff.

Lesson 2: If you don’t lie well, make sure the guy on the other side of the table is not more thorough than you are.

Lesson 3: If you’re going to act like a prick and make people uncomfortable, don’t ask them to provide you with the results of a $400 inspection report for free after they walk away from the deal.  They might gently tell you to go fuck yourself.