Author: Joey deVilla

A little more on the ongoing saga of the sale of the lovely house that I rent.

I have only a layperson’s knowledge of the general principles behind real estate, but I do know the Rule of Proximity: the value of the properties beside yours affect the value of your property. In the case of Big Trouble in Little China (better known as my house), our immediate neighbours have decent houses, but as you progress east or west on my street, the houses become more and more dilapidated, going downhill from “student ghetto house” to “crazy old lady with all the cats”-type shacks with garbage in the front yard.

When the real estate agent called me yesterday to let me know about yet another showing, she told me that there would be a large open house tomorrow with a phalanx of agents. She said this was because they’d adjusted the price.

I assumed that they’d adjusted the price downwards, as the general consensus among all the recent home-buyers I’d met was that the current asking price for Big Trouble in Little China — CDN$679,000 (for my non-Canadian friends, that’s US$504,552 or 431,801 Euros) was mildly insane, given the current market, which has been described as “soft”.

However, when I met up with Deenster and Lisa last night, Lisa told me she had inside dirt on my house. Deenster and Lisa’s mom is a real estate agent, and apparently, there’s some kind of buzz going about my house. The price has been adjusted upwards to CDN$750,000 (USD$557,766 or 477,046 Euros).

Clearly the real estate industry has found some kind of drug that makes homebuyers tractable. My guess is that it is absorbed through the skin and that it is administered by putting a light coat of it onto house brochures.

When this Internet-and-computers fad blows over, I may have to see how I look in one of those Century 21 blazers.

[Update January 28, 2005]: Welcome, BoingBoing

readers! I’d love to show you Virtual Bubble Wrap online, but I’ve since taken

the page on which it lived down and put it somewhere yet. It will have

a home soon, promise!

Windows users can download a standalone version from this entry.

---

Once a year, just to keep this lovely piece of absolutely useless

software alive in the collective mind of the ‘Net, I point everyone to Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Yes, there are many other versions of Virtual Bubble Wrap, but the version created by Mackerel Interactive Multimedia

way back in 1993 is still the best (the original version was part of a

floppy disk-based presentation). I like to think that my Shockwave

adaptation, coded up during a severe hangover the day after my birthday

party in 1995, is a close second.

One reason I was inspired to post this particular entry is that Brendyn Alexander’s trying his hand as developing multimedia apps in Director. Good on ya, Brendyn, and welcome to the club!

Recommended Reading

Burying the Fish. A Cory Doctorow piece about Mackerel that was commisioned for but never made it into WIred. I think it’s the very first time he’d acted as my unofficial press agent — here’s the relevant snippet:

The

next-generation Mackerelites are a mixed bag. There isn’t a one of them

that isn’t hip and downtown as all get-out — walking into the old

Mackerel office was like stepping into some weird Hollywood vision of

sexy young geeks in great clothes, firing Nerf darts at each other and

disappearing into the overflowing kitchen for company-sponsored Shiatsu

massage from a geek therapist who logged in regularily to the company

BBS.

They came from all walks of life. Joey DeVilla, the only production

grunt with a background in computer science, was seven years into a

four-year CS degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, was

DJing one night at a campus bar, and running a hunk of video wallpaper

that included screen captures from the Mackerel Stack, recently

downloaded from a BBS. One of the dancers caught him in the DJ booth

and mentioned that he knew the guys in Toronto who built the thing. The

next morning, Joey packed his things and hopped a train to Toronto, and

demanded that Ollie hire him.