Geek House Hunting
28 July 2002, 10:53 AM

Yesterday my sweetie and I went hunting for a house to rent - geek style.

I'm getting so tired of living the apartment life. First there's the fact that I'm in the college-student heavy side of town, so it's never completely quiet. There's always cars and trucks zooming loudly up and down the street - even at 3 a.m. Then there's the neighbors and their stereos. Mind you, it's not usually loud - most of them know better than that - it's just that all I hear in my apartment is the headache-like dull rhythmic thump of their system's bass. It's maddening.

And my apartment neighbors often can care less about the immediate environment, leaving half-empty beer cans and bottles out on their patio, the stairs and the grass. Even when your immediate neighbors are neat and tidy, the college students that drive by at 3 a.m. might throw a bottle or two out the window, right into your parking lot. And I want to know that there will always BE a parking space rather than have to hunt for one. Especially when I'm coming back from a trip to the grocery or hardware store.

I could go on about the fact that I can't grow many veggies on a small patio, or that I want a place where I can get a dog, but suffice it to say that I'm ready to be mowing a yard and doing all the house-type stuff. We both are.

So we started looking at the classified ads for rental houses. We're not quite ready to buy, but that's what we're headed for eventually. For now, renting will be a short-term solution. Our hunting started out analog enough - just the newspaper and a pen. But we're geeks dontcha know. It quickly escalated from there.

First came the mapping software to plot out the location of all the ones we wanted to look at - type in an address and it'll find it anywhere in the United States. We set down little place markers for each one, until we had about ten places to go drive by and check out.

Then came the GPS. :-) We suction-cupped that to the windshield, connected it to the laptop and plugged all the power for both into the adapter we had plugged into the car's battery through the cigarette lighter. A little twiddling and soon we had the GPS tracking in the map program on the laptop. And off we went, using satellites, global positioning, computing power and sophisticated software to find a cute little house with a fenced yard in a quiet area.

Gotta love it.