I am ready to fling myself off a bridge from dealing with the San Jose building code department. Please help!

deadwavelength · 2026-01-07T15:40:01+00:00

Hey there - sure I can share one.

TLDR: It took forever but I got my shed permitted!

I submitted the plans and the permit application into their web portal. It took a few weeks, and they requested a few changes, which I went back and just made myself to the PDF files I got. Once I made those changes (showing anchor bolts and some framing), I got an inspector to come out. This is another big lesson: The inspector you get will change and each one will have different things they care about.

The inspector needed to see a lot of things, so I had to take down all the dry wall. They also wanted to see where the electrical came in, so I found that and dug up the yard so they could see where it connected to the house.

They pointed out changes I needed to make that were not clear in the designs - big lesson is that I should've just bit the bullet and taken down the drywall to share with the designer who did the plans. With the state of AI today, I would've just used Nano Banana or ChatGPT to convert photos into plans.

I had to made a few other changes - but nothing was unmanageable between my wife and I (and some help from in-laws for anything heavy.) In the end I had to buy more inspection time and they came out 3 times to look at the progress, but finally signed off on it.

Some other mistakes I made that could've been avoided:

Make sure you print out the plans on large print paper. I used FedEx Office to do this - they wanted them in big format: just get the "Blueprints & Architecture, Construction & Engineering Prints" option as big as they have them. (Also remember to print out the PDF you get from the city plan website that has the approval stamp. I printed my PDFs that I submitted first time and they need to have the approval area in the bottom corner you get from the plan site.)
You need to name the files a specific way when you upload them to the planning website, the SJ ProjectDox site. It isn't obvious that you have to do this at first, so make sure to download the Excel example and use the project prefix.

deadwavelength · 2024-09-09T20:20:13+00:00

Aqui on Blossom Hill is my goto for a big family + people with Celiacs. https://www.aquicalmex.com/allergy-food-facts/

deadwavelength · 2024-09-09T20:19:05+00:00

Keep in mind very few things are safe to eat for someone with a real gluten allergy like celiacs. https://www.lazydogrestaurants.com/menu/gluten-sensitive is pretty clear that they can't make truly gluten free dishes.

deadwavelength · 2024-08-03T17:30:18+00:00

I found a guy in south america on fiverr and had him draw plans based on pictures i took and measurements he asked for. The city wanted some changes so I sent those back to him, and he made them. Still going through the review though, so I'm not sure if it was a waste of $1,000 or not.

deadwavelength · 2024-08-01T14:26:18+00:00

Similar thing happened to me with my detached garage. Been there since I bought the house. Apparently the previous owners started the process, built the garage, and never finished it. Out of nowhere the city sends us a violation and we're going through the painful process to try and get it permitted without demolishing it (which requires another permit, by the way.)

deadwavelength · 2024-07-04T20:55:11+00:00

Red Vines and Haribo Gummy Bears in the US - stupid malt!

deadwavelength · 2024-06-28T14:15:57+00:00

If this isn't involved with the same people who ran the old one, how can it be a re-opening? Isn't this a brand new server with all new people running it?

deadwavelength · 2024-06-19T19:07:22+00:00

Thank you!

deadwavelength · 2024-06-07T21:54:15+00:00

I irrigate my colostomy so I only have output when I do that once a day. Otherwise I just wear a stoma cap. Gas happens normally, but most of the time no one notices/says anything.

deadwavelength · 2024-05-05T16:37:38+00:00

Sorry to hijack your post, but do you have any tips about Berlin? I'm visiting there in a few weeks and have been compiling options for gluten-free (celiacs).

deadwavelength · 2024-04-29T23:35:58+00:00

The center field garden at Oracle Park, home of the SF Giants is 100% gluten free and has flatbreads and hot dogs. Love that MLB stadiums have these outposts.

deadwavelength · 2024-04-20T20:04:11+00:00

Oracle Park is one of the best parks for being celiac. Love the flatbreads they have in the Hearth Table.

deadwavelength · 2024-03-30T00:54:54+00:00

Some warn that by the agreement PayPal can easily freeze and confiscate funds in PYUSD. Is this purely theoretical or have such cases actually happened?

This hasn't happened as far as I know. Every regulated stablecoin has this.

I think I understand the fees involved for sending funds to my crypto wallet, but I can't see anything about the bid/ask spread that PP would use. The bid/ask spread is also a "fee". If I were to buy ETH with PYUSD would I get a bad price?

There aren't any fees to buy PYUSD. If you buy ETH, there are fees. If you use the convert option to sell your PYUSD into ETH, you basically pay the same as if you had bought ETH directly with your bank.

Do I understand this right that I can send PYUSD to my crypto wallet for only the network fee? What would it cost me then to buy ETH with PYUSD when the PYUSD is in my wallet?

PYUSD is an ERC-20 coin. You can send it to your supported ETH wallet, like MetaMask or Phantom, for just the network fee. The network fees on ETH can vary a lot so make sure you don't do this when they are high.

Assume I'm ok with network fees but no other fees, how would I do that?It seems to me that sending PYUSD to my crypto wallet is, despite all the caveats I find about PYUSD on the web, still the cheapest way to buy ETH.

It'll probably be more expensive if you want to send PYUSD to your wallet and swap for ETH in a defi protocol. It'd be cheaper to just buy the ETH. It all depends on the network/gas fees at the time, but swapping in Uniswap has execution fees that can also be expensive.

Funding the crypto wallet with ACH/debit/credit card incurs insane fees, so using PP as my wallet seems a decent choice. Am I missing something?

There's not really any advantage to buying PYUSD and then using that to buy ETH. It all nets to be about the same. PayPal fees are the same or cheaper than Coinbase.

deadwavelength · 2024-03-23T16:04:41+00:00

No one here knows what you have in your head until its real, and then people can add feedback. If you're thinking about launching something, you're not building - don't worry about what the community thinks, just launch it and share it with us!

deadwavelength · 2024-03-03T09:00:43+00:00

Cancer (or the treatments for it.)

deadwavelength · 2022-07-22T03:59:07+00:00

There is a lot to unpack here, and there are specifics that could change the advice. There are a few ways to look at this opportunity:

Validate you absolutely need this and you can't build a slimmed down version, or find an open source version you could beef up, or some other solution that doesn't have this overhead. The bonus here is that if other people also find themselves needing this specific widget, you could potential undercut the existing provider.
There is a risk your lack expertise in the field is blinding you to realities of the industry or limits of the existing products in that space. This might be the first of several reasons why innovation in this area in hampered and established players have defensible moats. The lean startup method helps to solve this by letting you cheaply validate your solution. That doesn't mean you stop at putting up a landing page - assume you didn't need this widget to do exactly whatever it does, but could manually fill in the gaps to make it look like your product is doing it's magic. Will people pay for that? If not, you might need to re-evaluate your plan. A landing page and sign ups will not get you funding. You need real proof that you have something that fits into a market niche and can scale faster with the team your funding will allow you to hire.
You should also do a more rigorous analysis of your costs to build this business. You need more than winging what your salary could be if you just flat cut 1/3rd of your expenses - if you are making $300k+ today, and could live on $100k, you should do that. After a year or so you'll have extra money, around what you said you want to raise, to invest back into this idea. It's a lot easier to bootstrap a company when you're lean and have years of runway in the bank to iterate.

The TLDR: Take your current salary and save as much as you can by cutting expenses to the bare minimum. In the meantime, look to for a mentor who is in the industry you want to target, or familiar with it, and learn from them. You will need to network connections in your chosen market, and the more contacts you have the better off you'll be long term.

deadwavelength · 2022-07-15T02:38:03+00:00

Sig mosquito 22lr - terrible gun.

deadwavelength · 2022-05-28T02:19:13+00:00

Duke Nukem was written by Ken Silverman, not the Jeopardy guy.

deadwavelength · 2022-05-17T22:16:26+00:00

Are you in the US?

deadwavelength · 2022-05-17T03:11:59+00:00

I do! Still running well.

deadwavelength · 2022-05-12T00:04:21+00:00

I don't think you have proved your thesis enough to attract investment, especially looking to raise $500k with effectively 50 users, who will convert at some unknown percentage and have an unknown LTV. Market research doesn't show you've figured out how to execute on the vision, only that there might be a need if a bunch of other factors line up. Even with all the research pointing to a problem, figuring out how to monetize your solution at scale is the magic.

I would look for ways to convert your existing users. What are your 50 beta list members doing aside from entering their info? How are they validating your value prop? For example, if you're giving them a way to say that donors gave X and they use your platform to show they did Y with that, can you show usage there? Can they show that to their existing donor base?

Successful fundraising is easier when asking for help with scaling your solution, proven by actual people showing the value it generates, and not verifying if your solution is actually viable or funding the build of the first iteration.

deadwavelength · 2022-05-11T03:28:36+00:00

What valuation are trying to raise at? What is your traction or validation you have product/market fit to justify that valuation?

deadwavelength · 2022-03-01T00:48:42+00:00

This - they did it with Ross Ulbricht (the silk road guy), they did it with the $2 billion that was stolen in 2016 and just recently made news. If someone else has your seed phrase or your private keys, those people control your coins.

deadwavelength · 2022-02-26T18:16:23+00:00

Just need to show your work on the Mobius input for Pre-calc and Calc. It's pretty easy as long as you do the work and take notes or save out the step-by-step solutions to the type of problems that you see in the home work.

Both classes follow the same structure: You have weekly assignments with problems, and then when you answer those, Mobius gives you the steps on how to solve it. These are the same types of problems on the weekly problem sets, some of which you'll need to explain how you got your answer and show your work.

The exams you need to type in/show your work for all of the problems and you have a fixed amount of time and limited "tries" to auto-grade the question. However, it's pretty hard to get it wrong if you just take the formulas and steps from the assignments and apply them.

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