LJ meta

A friend asked me about LJ last night. She commented that she's missing out on the grapevine by not reading it.

In thinking about it, though, I don't think that's really true. She said, for instance, that she wouldn't have known about the power surge taking out a bunch of our electronics if she hadn't been talking to an LJ friend, but that's not true. It's just that I hadn't seen her since then; I would have told her tonight if it hasn't come up otherwise, but this wasn't important enough to send email about.

Email is push technology. It's not as "push" as a phone call, but it's much more active than posting in an LJ, which is "pull". If you want to read it you do; if you don't; you don't have to. With email (I mean the personal sort, not mailing lists and spam), there is an expectation of a reply and perhaps a dialogue. Email says "you should read this"; LJ posts say "feel free to read this". It's a big difference.

There are some things that I'm posting on LJ that would have otherwise rated email. Some of my religious stuff would have gone out to select people in email (though written differently). Some of it still does, actually. I definitely would have sent out email to selected friends with the "where should I buy a computer?" question. There are probably others. The last joke I posted here I also sent via email to some people.

I do sometimes wish that my LJ friends wouldn't say "I saw that in your LJ" in front of non-LJ friends, because it probably makes them feel excluded. Oddly, saying "I saw your post on rec.arts.comics about X" doesn't cause quite the same reaction; I wonder if it's just that LJ doesn't have the penetration that Usenet has -- or had back when such a statement from me would have actually been accurate.

property taxes

Our property-tax appeal is Thursday. We were assessed for about 15% over what we paid for the house in late 1999, and we've made no significant improvements (bookcases don't affect property values). I don't know if an appeal based on sales price will work, though. (The house had been on the market for several months, so I don't think we got a special deal. It was a fair price.)

Some of the information they give for our house is just plain wrong, and we'll get them to correct that. We do not have central air; in fact, the central-air people laughed at us and said it's not possible. They also think our house was built in 1920; we were told 1910 and we have a survey dated 1913 that shows our house. The main effect here might be to throw off the so-called comparable properties, all of which were built between 1920 and 1930 and most of which are strange in some way. Near as I can tell, the legitimate comparables approximately support our sale price but not our assessed value. But with everybody in the neighborhood (or so it seems) appealing, it's hard to know what the real numbers are going to turn out to be.

Well, all we can do is present our data and hope for sanity.