CJC.org

We’ll need to formally talk to an accountant about this (we’ll wait until after April 15, so they’ll be less busy), but the basic gist of the capital gains exemption for selling the apartment goes like this:

For capital gains purposes, the sale of the single 2BR/2BA will be considered a sale of something bought in two parts, one with a five-year ownership, the other with a 1-year (give or take, depending on the closing date) ownership. The analogy to the sale of, say, IBM stock bought in two lots is not a bad one; these are co-op shares ultimately. A full exemption would apply to the older apartment. A partial exemption would apply to the new one: we’re getting an exemption because of an unexpected job relocation, and the amount of the exemption would be prorated from the full exemption over the 1-year holding period, as opposed to 2-year period for the full exemption.

From an math/Excel spreadsheet standpoint, it’s easier to assume that both parts of the apartment are exempt, calculate how much of an exemption applies to each part (using the number of coop shares, which is the most obvious and most easily defensible choice) and then calculate the prorated exemption on the new apartment based on the Excel datetime calculation functions (YEARFRAC).

If I close on July 14, 2004 (1 year from the previous closing date) and sell the apartment for the price the Corcoran guy said it’s probably priced at, I’ll pay about $4,000 in capital gains taxes. If I sell for about $50,000 less than the estimated price, then there should be no capital gains taxes. A 1-week difference in the selling date changes the prorated amount by around $400, so a 1-month delay in closing will save me about $1600 in taxes (albeit at the cost of paying mortgage interest and building maintenance for that month, so it’s actually not worth waiting). These calculations don’t take into account the cost of renovations and any another exemption that might come from the local stamp, filing, etc., taxes that are paid on real estate sales.

Here’s a summary on the possible cases where the exemptions would still partially apply, even though we haven’t lived in the apartment for the required two years. Of course, this is all necessary because the New York City housing market is all nuts, and I have significant capital gains on the new apartment.

Since Grace is going into anesthesia, I’ve been doing a little bit of reading on the subject. The history is fairly interesting: the field has been happy accidents, virtuous cycles and technical change from the outside world.

The first departure point is a popular history book, Ether Day, about the men — a collection of physicians and swindlers — who discovered that there are substances that will make patients unconscious, allowing simple surgeries. Prior to the discovery of these substances — nitrous oxide and ether, both of whom were used as what we would call recreational drugs in the early 1800s — surgery was a ghastly affair, where the patient would have to be strapped down to a chair while the surgeon operated as quickly as possible. Some patient prefered death from their affliction or through suicide rather than go through surgery. Surgeons also didn’t have that much to do, since the pool of patients that had treatable afflictions and who would be willing to have surgery was not particularly large; the book notes that the operating arena (and there were always spectators, because surgeries were rare) at Mass General was only used once or twice a week.

The discovery and demonstration of nitrous oxide and ether by a pair of huckster dentists changed all that: surgery became more tolerable, even with the five or ten minutes of unconsciousness provided by the initial dose of ether. Once the first anesthesizing agents were discovered, doctors tried to find other ones (e.g., chloroform), and more effective means of delivery existing agents (chemical soaked rags gave way to pressurized gas canisters and closed circuit rebreathing systems). This was a process of decades, as surgeons figured out what they could and could not do, and how to make what was currently impossible into something routine. Surgeries became more complicated, with longer durations, as patients could be made unconscious for longer periods. (Beyond anesthesia, discoveries about antiseptics and blood typing were necessary for surgery to develop.)

Anesthesiology became its own speciality in the 1940s and 1950s when thoracic surgery became complicated enough to require the patient to be paralyzed and not simply made unconscious with a single simple agent like ether. This required a specialist to maintain the patients vital functions — breathing — under paralysis, and to mix the cocktail of drugs for the paralysis as well as unconsciousness and amnesia. Once delegated to an assistant of the surgeon, the tasks for anesthesia could no longer be performed by a non-specialist.

And, with increasing technical complexity, the advent of the information age played a role in the development of anesthesiology. The main points are the development of computer controlled or assisted anesthetic delivery and patient monitoring. Both delivery and monitoring go hand-in-hand, as modern systems have computers that run pharmacology models for the patients under anesthesia, introducing sufficient but not excessive quantities of drugs to do what the anesthesiologist wants. The monitoring technology developed for anesthesia has also spread throughout the hospital, in particular the pulse oximeter, which can monitor blood oxygenation non-invasively. Computers have also taken on the more general task of managing patient information (this applies to all aspects of health care, obviously) as well as providing simulation training for anesthesiologists (and simulation allows replayable scenarios, which allow best practices to be discovered and propagated). The field has improved patient safety over the decades as technical change works its way through the system.

Dr. Cottrell, the chair of the King’s County anesthesia department, has a useful book, Under the Mask, on anesthesia for the lay person about to undergo surgery.

Cleveland Clinic actually has a handy relocation guide for incoming residents, listing out the various neighborhoods to live in, what shopping and services are in the area, and so on. It’s very handy.

The theory will be to rent an apartment at the beginning. I really can’t imagine myself plunging into the intricacies of lawn care, leaf removal from the gutters, and shoveling lake effect snow from the driveway if we get a house immediately. We’ll transition into suburban life later. In the meantime, the rent for a 2BR/2BA apartment in a luxury Cleveland hi-rise is around $1100/month. A 3BR is generally under $1500/month. After the Darwinian world of New York City real estate, I feel like we’re some sort of superorganism about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Arcadia. A ground floor studio in Park Slope is $1300/month. After selling the apartment here, I can afford to bum around for a few months while I figure out what to do there.

ApartmentRatings.com has been helpful in the search, at least for weeding out undesirable sites. We’re going to look seriously at the Statler Arms, which is closer to Downtown and will mean a reverse commute for Grace to get to the hospital. There’s also a number of similar places in Cleveland Heights or Mayfield, a bit further out. We’ll fly out in mid-April to take a look around, and will be prepared to sign for a place at that time, though we may need a May trip, also. Grace probably starts in mid-June, and the initial move will just be with the Civic; we’ll pick up some basic furniture at the local Wal-Mart until I bring everything else in the big move later this year.

Banking is one thing that has to be taken care of. The campus has a number of ATMs, though the main one is from Key Bank and they no longer offer free checking. One of the other banks mentioned in the CCF package is National City, which apparently has a “Switch” program that helps people migrate their other accounts to them. Plus, you get a free fleece blanket. I think Grace will move her New York account over at the beginning. I’ll probably keep my accounts, since I don’t see an obvious reason to do more than open up a free checking account at National for ATM access, and then occassionally write checks to move some money from the old accounts as needed.

We’ve ordered a Rand McNally map from Amazon. We’ll get a city guide once we hit a bookstore there for the April trip. Remarkably, there are few resources for Cleveland in New York bookstores. We’ll have to set up a formal checklist of stuff to take care of.

Slate has a photographic tour and discussion about Manhattan apartment buildings through history. The main points are that the majority of recently built buildings aren’t particularly interesting — just brick-clad boxes with right-angled walls — compared to a lot of the older buildings, such as the Ansonia with the fairy-tale turrets. A few modern buildings seem to be reviving interesting architecture, though, such as the Perry Street buildings.

The article is for a national audience, so the great divide of NYC real estate — pre-war versus post-war — is simultaneously refered to only obliquely yet permeates the whole piece. Basically, pre-war construction methods allowed interesting architectural touches because the marginal costs of adding niceties in the trim were small compared to the cost of the building, whereas modern methods have made the trim relatively costly compared to putting up the building, so turrets and bay windows are eschewed. The size of pre-war girders also made high ceilings an emergent property of the construction. So, for run-of-the-mill residential buildings, you have what are basically rectangular boxes of reinforced concrete clad in glass or brick. Even the new Trump construction on Riverside Blvd is essentially slabs of concrete clad in glass, though there are some touches like bay windows and irregularly shaped rooms, as well as the Donald’s signature (somewhat tacky) luxury touches inside the building. The assumption is that people will be more pleased to have granite countertops, high-end appliances and concierages rather than architecturally interesting buildings and common spaces. It’s possibly not a bad assumption, but the hallways still have the feeling of a somewhat drab hotel.

The Slate article talks about existing buildings, so it missed the recent New York Times article on Santiago Calatrava’s proposal for 80 South Street, which is fundamentally a dozen suburban-sized houses stacked on top of each other. This is interesting design, and may signal a revival of great high-end architecture in a city with too many glass and brick boxes.

Grace matched at The Cleveland Clinic for the four-year anesthesiology program.

She starts in June. I’ll join her after unwinding the things that have to be unwound here, probably towards the end of the year or early next year. The main uncertainty is how to unwind the apartment without incurring capital gains taxes, but a friend of a friend of Grace’s works at Corcoran, and he’s looking into how the IRS would treat this (is the 2nd apartment just a large capital improvement of the original apartment?). Interestingly, the inventory of 2BR/2BA units on the Upper West Side is startingly thin right now, so this year wouldn’t be the worst year to sell.

Server hosting has to be taken care of, though there’s a few dedicated hosting facilities out there for around $50/month. Need root access to set up my mail server, etc.

I’ll probably have to find an aikido dojo, and maybe some judo. If it’s aikido, I’ll get to be the white belt wearing a hakama at the other end of the line, if the dojo uses the hakama to indicate whether one can breakfall or not.

A bit of silliness: I have to see if I can get Vonage to take my current phone number and make it a VoIP one, so I can take it with me to Ohio. 212! 212!

And, of course, there’s my job, which has to be well documented, handed over, and so on.

Here are some Match Day photos. The first two are of King’s County and SUNY Downstate (I missed taking pictures of the union protests earlier, when they apparently deployed every giant inflatable rat in the city outside the King’s County Clarkson Avenue entrances). The rest are in the auditorium, waiting for the white envelopes.

The banner is from this site, courtesy of a link from BoingBoing.net. New Yorkers had black ribbons after 9/11, but somehow this token had morphed into red-white-and-blue ribbons by the end of the month, which I’ve always thought of as slightly tacky, but, then, I live in New York, where the quality of shock was perhaps different.

And being in New York City, whose veins and arteries are the subway lines, there’s a particular sympathy and dread about Madrid 11-Mar. The Moscow subway bombing of last month should have evoked similar impressions, but Madrid hits closer to home, at least for me. (Though, somehow, the local news teasers for WNBC last night didn’t mention Madrid at all, but chittered on about some suspected burglers in Westchester. And I’m under the impression that the Today show, for example, glossed over the whole thing in 15 seconds.) Phil Carter has perhaps the best statement about this atrocity:

It’s becoming more clear by the day that the “war on terrorism” is really much larger than what even America conceives of it. Liberal society, broadly defined, is at war with the forces of terror which seek to undermine the global civil society that prizes such things as liberty, equality, interdependence, free trade, self-determination, human rights, education, and science. (This is essentially Paul Berman’s thesis from his brilliant book Terror and Liberalism) At times, the values of liberal society clash with each other, such as the clash between free trade and human rights. But ultimately, I believe our liberal (small “l”) society to be far better than the alternative, and to be the ideal that we all must strive for. Terrorism seeks to undermine this global order through fear and violence; it seeks to destroy liberal society in order to replace it with a far different vision of the world.

Whether you are Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, French or American, you are a target. We have all been victims of this terrorism in the last decade; we will continue to be targeted in the next. Our challenge is to face attacks such as the one today in Spain and to confront them with the appropriate tools of law, statecraft and war. But we must do more. We must also beat this enemy with our ideas. It is not America, capitalism or democracy per se that terrorism seeks to destroy — it is global civil society itself. To prevent that, we must make global civil society as strong and resolute as possible, and to make it good enough that it will ultimately beat the terrorist ideology in the marketplace of ideas. That is the challenge. The key terrain in the war on terrorism is not a mountain, cave, or even a place. Instead, this war’s key terrain is the mind of every global citizen, and it is that key terrain that we must seize with ideas in order to win the global war on terrorism.

As usual, WindsOfChange.net has a good roundup of what’s known at this time.

Addendum: Aznar’s Conservative Party has been voted out. This is disappointing, because, even if this electoral defeat had more to do with domestic political clumsiness on the part of the government — continuing to blame ETA even when it became more apparent that this was an Al Qaeda attack — the terror masters will still draw the conclusion that they toppled a democratic government through the use of catestrophic terrorism. We may see this tactic repeated before other European elections; the United States is also clearly not immune in late October this year. Would a raising of the terror alert level be perceived by Democrats as election-eve fear mongering by an Administration some of them consider as evil as Al Qaeda? Instapundit has a discussion on this.

Outside of the gnashing of teeth being displayed at Instapundit posting, it should be noted that the Spanish government’s support of American efforts in Iraq (note that Al Qaeda cares not a whiff about Iraq, beyond the positive in the toppling of a secular tyrant, and as a recruiting tool (though, conversely, the US Army gets a chance to kill the jihadis wholesale there)) should always have been regarded as fragile. Remember that 90% of the Spanish electorate opposed the war, and it would not have take much to revive this opposition. I tend to think that this is as much a failure of the Bush Administration to explain the war as anything else, be it undercurrents of anti-Americanism, a belief that appeasement is sufficient to deflect the anger of radical Islamists (despite Osama bin Laden’s mention of the loss of Andalusia in 1492 well before the war in Iraq, or, for that matter, the war in Afghanistan) or the international relations theory-speak of free riding American security efforts. Making so much of the case for war based on weapons of mass destruction has been a colossal error. Making the case that this was a war fought for liberal ends would have been far, far better. Or perhaps I’m misestimating how well believed this message would have been coming from the United States to Europe.

Oh, just to point out that attempts to bomb trains long predate the Iraq war, it should be noted that in 1997, a terrorist cell was broken up in Brooklyn. This cell plotted to bomb the Atlantic Avenue subway and LIRR station using five pipe bombs, possibly producing a catastrophy similar to what happened in Madrid. Clinton was still in office at the time, inspections were still ongoing in Iraq, and the Taliban had just declared an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan. That this plot did not come to pass was due to the luck of one of the conspirators having cold feet and telling the police.

Glory be to globalization for bringing Beard Papa to the Upper West Side. This is the first Manhattan store for a Japanese chain of cream puff shops, promising light and tasty cream puffs, the best in the world. It opened last week, but the line we saw over the weekend stretched several storefronts away, and we didn’t want to stand in line. The weather tonight, though, was cold and drizzling, and the line was short, so I bought a small bag for dessert tonight.

These really are wonderful cream puffs, not heavy at all. You can see them baking them as you wait in line, and one of the counter girls filled each pastry just before they’re packed into the bags for the customers. All the counter girls are Japanese, and there’s a certain sushi bar vibe when they collectively say “Thank you!!” in that sing-song Japanesed English, an almost note-for-note arigato. The store is supposed to have mango pudding and cheesecake sticks later on. I’m looking forward to the mango pudding.

Another interesting thing is what’s happening along St. Marks Place. There’s now a Japanese restaurant there — just one out of dozens — that’s the first to have all of its signs in Japanese, with minimal English. There’s also the new St. Mark’s Marketplace, which was just opening up this week, where the staff seemed to be composed entirely of young Japanese expats. Perhaps we’re seeing the birth of a Japanese district in New York, sort of like the Korean commerical district near Herald’s Square, but with St. Mark’s Place as its Main Street.

There hasn’t been a Japantown in Manhattan before, I think mainly because the majority of Japanese that came to New York over the past decades have been expatriate salarimen and their families. They’ve moved here because they work for Japanese multinationals, and have generally lived in the suburbs. They’ve come because of work they found at home, not because they wanted to find themselves abroad. The Japanese who have moved into the East Village in the past decade, on the other hand, tend to be younger, poorer and unattached. They’ve perhaps come to reinvent themselves, and the feeling of this place is entirely different from what was there before. In a sense, are they actually American, an echo of the immigrants that have always come here and called this place home?

ScienceBlog has a post up about a new, non-invasive test for cirrhosis. It’s basically a blood test, something that measures the ratio/quantities of blood sugars as fibrosis changes to cirrhosis. Currently, cirrhosis is diagnosed through biopsy, which, in my experience, involves an attending repeatedly showing a med student how to stick a hollow-point needle between the ribs while you try to hold yourself absolutely motionless. Note that cooperation of the patient in remaining motionless precludes anesthesia — though one can have Versed — and you have to lie on your side for a few hours afterwards in case the needle nicked something it shouldn’t have.

So, a blood test would be a wonderful thing. Progression can be tracked; big, hollow-point needles jabbing into internal organs would not be involved; costs are greatly reduced. We’ll have to keep an eye on this. The paper looks European, so there’s presumably no FDA approval for the test as of yet. Presumably, approval should happen relatively quickly, as this is a test and not a drug.

In the meantime, maybe I should start drinking coffee again.

This post is more so that I’ll be able to find the articles I just read. I can see myself a few months from now scrounging through Google because I sort of remember something relevant to a CVS-to-Subversion migration project, but not knowing exactly what it was. This blog post is to save that half hour on Google.

AskSlashdot has a post with a link to an O’Reilly piece on Subversion and how it compares to CVS.

Subversion just hit 1.0 and is designed to be a modern replacement for CVS. The SVN repository uses a Berkeley DB to hold the metadata for versioning, unlike CVS’s storing such information in the individual files themselves. This makes branching and tagging more efficient, as well as allowing atomic commits. There’s also an efficient binary diff, so binary files like our MS Word project spec files can be stored with less headache. SVN should have CVS-like commands, so the transition at the command line shouldn’t be that different from what the developers are used to.

In terms of what has to happen for us to start using SVN, we’ll need a Windows GUI, a web interface and conversion tools.

For the GUI, the ORA article mentions TortoiseSVN (Windows Explorer extensions) and Subclipse (Eclipse plugin). These have to be looked at. Tigris.org also is working on RapidSVN, a cross-platform GUI for SVN.

The web interface should be relatively trivial, as recent versions of ViewCVS has built in SVN functionality. Also, SVN promises to be WebDAV compatible, so any Apache with mod_dav module should be able to show the repository.

For migration, SVN apparently comes with cvs2svn, which is under development and may fail on CVS repositories with complicated branches. This link also mentions a few other things, as well as providing a link to general Subversion documentation, probably as a mirror to the main project site.

We’ll probably set up a test once 1.0.1 comes out.

I knew this sort of thing happened, but I think I got to experience the catching personally:

Early this afternoon, I noticed that I got a referral from Google with the search term “The fanciful conceit is that Shakespeare is going through a severe case of writer’s block”. This phrase yields one real hit: a review I wrote for Shakespeare In Love about five years ago. If you put quotes around the search string, my review is the sole use of that phrase in the googleverse.

I did a lookup on the IP address of the person doing the Googling, and found that it came from Bucks County Intermediate School Unit, in Pennsylvania. My best theory is that a teacher was googling intereresting phrases off of some student’s paper as a rough plagiarism check, and the kid just got caught. Why else would you search for such a turn of phrase if you hadn’t seen it before?

I didn’t see search referrals over the past month for “shakespeare”, but there’s a few sources from which the kid could have come to my review without hitting my web site. It was originally posted to the Usenet group rec.art.movies.reviews, so a search of newsgroups would have been sufficient. Also, going to the IMDB page for the movie will give you a link to the Usenet reviews more directly. Mine is the next to last submitted for the film. What’s surprising is that this IMDB page isn’t indexed in Google.