My circadia ain’t got no rhythm.

I woke up at 11:30 after going to bed at five in the morning. The day was glorious but I spent three hours finishing off some code. A bit after two I made my way to Casa Verde to see Skip the floating house builder and his sidekick Jeff at my favorite venue, Casa Verde.

I showed Skip a bunch of pictures of floating houses on the web and made some radical design changes, opting for widening the boat, making the “front” the port side, sliding a bunch of rooms around and adding an acre or two of glass. Skip took it in stride. Jeff and I discussed some other business opportunities and I helped him set up a Gmail account and showed him how to suck his contacts and mail out the detested yahoo mail he has been using.

We looked at four boats extending from Casa Verde to Stephen’s house, none were operative and lamented our inability to fulfill our destiny in these beautiful waters of the Caribbean. Ok, I’m three weeks away from my first boat here, I can hang on.

Walter showed up, then sweet Nikelda and we just generally hung out, cruised the town in the mobile mural, his tiny little red van, went down to the park to see the $40,000 palapa under construction at a cost of $180,000 (it’s no better in banana’s country than it is in the states), sat in front of the park and greeted the locals and interacted with the tourists.

More emails and then some music and some highly overpriced fish tacos at Casa Verde. My fish tacos are far better and are not stretched out with rice and beans. The bill for the three of us came to $21 for the tacos alone. Between them all there was maybe $0.60 worth of fish and it wasn’t even high quality fish. Time for me to start entertaining more at home.

The band played, more locals joined us, we shot the shit and I headed home early to get some work done.

Another day of activity on the house and the floating house tomorrow, then a quick four day break to meet up with some dear old friends in Fortuna, Costa Rica.

My real estate agent recommended the guy who installed the solar power system for inspection of same on the house I have under contract.

I was a bit reluctant to have someone grade his own paper, so to speak, but my primary concern is an evaluation of the batteries, which are four years old. At a replacement cost of four thousand dollars this is not an incidental expense. I posted a request for suggestions in a local yahoo group for residents and was immediately told that the best guy for the job is the guy recommended by my real estate agent.

The man was in town yesterday, but has returned to David. I just got an email from him informing me that the cost of inspection is $150. For that he must travel four hours from David to Almirante, catch a five dollar water taxi to Isla Colon and a $10 water taxi to the house. The same time and expenses are associated with the return trip.

I should be getting the contract from my attorney in Panama City tomorrow along with reviews and all associated documents. Her fees are $2,000.

The seller of the corporations that hold the houses have to pay a 5% transfer fee on the corporation, irrespective of the actual gain or loss on the property in question.

It’s different down here.

Early this morning the rain was pouring, nearing six I was still banging away at code finishing off a highly productive night. I awoke after noon to a slew of emails and started tending to business.

My dear friend Walter also a real estate agent a reader of this blog and all round hell of a nice guy has advised me to ensure the following

Walter Kawano has advised that I request the following:

Make sure all corporation fees are up to date

That the corporations transfer to me free of debt and liability the following permits and plans up date

• the building permits
• the occupation permit
• the approved house plans
• the approved electric plans
• the approved sanitary and plumbing plans approved
• and related documents

Verification the corporations have no penalties to be paid to the ministry of finances.

Furthermore he has corrected me and told me that foreigners are allowed to own titled property in Panama, it is land sold with Right of Possession that requires ownership through a corporation, but more on that later.

I tried to contact the company that installed the solar power system. My real estate agent, the listing agent for this property gave me their contact information. I sent off an email and it bounced within a minute.

The floating home builder sent me some ideas on how to break up the external lines on the floating house.

The earnest money wiring went through successfully so I wired another chunk of change. Tomorrow I shall transfer the balance of the earnest money due. Messages were exchanged between my Panama City attorney and my real estate broker. I’ve located a septic system inspector and have been given the name of the man who installed the solar power system; he should be qualified to check out the batteries, but I don’t know if I want him to review the balance of his own work.

In Panama foreigners are not allowed to own real estate. The work around is the property is owned by a corporation and corporations may be owned by foreigners. There is a $300 a year fee for filing returns per corporation. As this house is built over two lots, it is held in two corporations, which I want to merge. Half the house is on one lot, the other half is on the other lot. There was no way anybody could have built on either lot, this is built on a crest of a hill that divides the two. The original developer is a bit of a weasel and was advertising cheap lots knowing full well that no one could use one.

The builder of the floating houses has not responded to emails or telephone calls today, something to balance out the smoothness of this transaction.

Today marks the second anniversary of my great adventure of wandering. I celebrated by putting down earnest money on a house.

I’ll have one property that I can rent out and use for business meetings and another that I can live in when the spirit moves me and rent out went wanderlust sets in.

Too much world to sit in one spot all the time.

Chase Bank

After a week of trying to get my cell phone number registered on Chase’s online banking site I called their online customer support phone number. None of the options in the multi-level option menu applied so I just chose one at random.

I was then prompted to enter my debit card number and PIN on an unsecured phone line. DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) decoders are readily available and anyone with any sense of tone could figure out what I was typing. Nice security!

I finally reached someone in the online banking department who asked me a list of questions, which I was told all came from public databases. Not sure how this provides any security.

Which of the following residential addresses are you associated with?

Which of the following companies have you been associated with?

What is Mark’s month of birth?

And so on.

Eventually I was given a PIN to enable online banking. I entered the PIN and walked my way through the setup and hungup.

When I tried to enter a wire transfer there was no option to do so. I tried to enter setup again and received the message that I needed to enter an authorization code. I clicked “Already have an authorization code?” and was informed that none had been issued.

I called support again and explained my situation and was given an authorization code without any verification that I am who I claimed to be.

Then I had to setup a payee, which required YAFP (Yet Another F**king PIN). As I hadn’t hung up I received that PIN. It rejected the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) code that I entered even though it was valid. The woman on the phone told me to append ‘X’ until it was ten characters long even though that information was not on the web page. WTF?

The asked for the Billing Account, which in fact is the source of funds account in addition to the account to be debited for the transaction with no option to choose my money market account as the source of funds.

Eventually I got a scheduled wire request to go through. Now let’s see how long it takes. I’ve been asked to make the payments in amounts of less than $10k a day so they don’t get held up.

Burglar

In the middle of this process my landlord, Bernd knocked on the door and advised me that last night at two o’clock in the morning some kids had stacked up milk crates and hopped a fence to gain access to this property but were heard by another tenant and scurried off.

Air Gun

Last night I ordered an 1,100 foot per second .177 caliber spring air rifle which is supposed to be very accurate. Hopefully it won’t be held up at customs too long, you can buy the things over the counter at the pharmacy here, not a high quality one like this, but similar power.

I doubt I’ll have many rats to shoot at the new house. There is are some big snakes, a boa constrictor and a big indigo. The are only good for a couple of rats a week apiece so they could readily keep up with a small population.

Floating House

Yesterday I met with Skip, the builder of the floating house and we spent an hour at Casa Verde laying out the floor plans. It was far more productive than exchanging emails. Then I had a three dimensional walk through on the house. Right now it looks like a giant box with two decks on each end but once we nail down the floor plan we’ll work on the external aesthetics.

I am trying to wire some earnest money for the house, but I’m not set up for online wire transfers with Chase Bank. Last week I changed my cell phone number on their site and was notified that it takes up to five business days for it to post. Welcome to the 20th Century Chase, that’s a week.

Yesterday I went to the ATM to get money to pay my rent, called my landlord from the taxi (it was raining) and asked him to come over and pick up the money. That was the last I saw of my phone, it must have slipped out of my cargo pants pocket. Can’t wait to get my new fanny pack that I ordered from Amazon a couple of weeks ago.

I walked down to the pharmacy, which sells everything from drugs to pellet rifles and paint and bought another cell phone, $35. When you go through cell phones the way I do, you go with the cheap ones, then sent out a bunch of emails to get the phone numbers for my friends that I had lost and to notify them of my new number.

Several messages were exchanged with the guy who is designing my floating house, we will be meeting tomorrow.

I registered an internet domain for a software product I will be announcing later this year and worked on the code. I figured it was about time to do a full backup of my hundreds of gigabytes of code and databases and did so, using a fast tool, it ran for only twenty minutes. Tomorrow I shall store the backup disk off site.

Rainy day in paradise. Another unsatisfactory nights sleep, damn ribs.

This morning the weather is perfect.

Skip and I exchanged quite a few emails and a couple of phone calls. “Make the bedrooms bigger, pull out the bathroom flush with the bedroom walls. Put in a spiral stair case. Make the deck 40′. No, make it 30′.

Drawings were sent promptly.

I have two foot square tiles on the floor of my apartment so visualizing the spaces is quite easy.

A good friend of mine, in Florida who owns a shitload of property in Bocas and has suffered through the building process repeatedly expressed some serious interest, but I think he’ll let me be the guinea pig. As he says, “there is no such thing as competition, only people offering alternatives.” The more, the merrier. During the low season, very few places are full and they are the low end backpacker type places. I have no interest in catering to people who want to pay $12.50 a day for a bed. There are surprisingly few choices for luxurious accommodations.

I am running out of time here, I am scheduled to leave in a few days for a week to visit some friends in Costa Rica. I’ll bring my netbook.

As my faithful readers know, I have signed a contract to buy a house on Isla Solarte, about a 15 minute boat ride from Bocas Town. It’s a beautiful two bedroom, two bath structure with a kitchen, dinette, a small living room and a large wrap around deck. The house is made entirely of Nispero a beautiful dense, very hard wood resistant to fungus and many types of termites. It lies 100 steps up a hill over looking the bay across which lies Red Frog Marina.

I have opted to supplement my income by providing housing over the clear, calm waters.

There are many world famous resorts in Bocas del Toro including Punta Caracol offering huts over the water for rates upwards of $500 a night, Tranquillo Bay at $2,655 a week in the high season for a cabina in the jungle. Au Natural provides huts and three meals a day for $175 per person.

I want to create first class accommodations over the water that anybody could come and enjoy no matter how finicky his or her spouse is. Luxurious accommodations with all the comforts of home in a tropical paradise. But building in Bocas is a proposition that will tax the most enduring of souls. There are over a dozen regulatory agencies that must be dealt with and builders are notoriously difficult to deal with. Work is parceled out for piers and docks, laying concrete, framing, electrical, plumbing, water catchment and solar panels.

My friend Stephen has been working on his house for two years and has nothing to show but a dock, some piers and some I beams that lay atop the piers. He has been trying for over a month to find someone to weld the I beams for him. I have neither the inclination or the patience to see such a project through.

Last night Stephen mentioned that there was somebody new in town that was building floating houses. I had to check this out. It wasn’t difficult to locate the company with a quick google search as they have no competition.

I sent off a couple of emails last night and quickly recieved a response. I called this morning and spoke with the owner of the company, Skip. We agreed to meet at Casa Verde at 2:30. I called the little cutie who runs the place, met her there at 1:30, bought her lunch and we chatted until Skip and his partner showed up.

My first question was readily answered. “How do your dwellings bypass all of the construction and impact rules and regulations?” “They are legally classified as boats.” Awesome! That makes them subject to a $150/year mooring fee and all of the other red tape no longer applies.

Skip has been building floating condominiums and restaurants for over 15 years in Mexico and Hawaii. We looked through his drawings and I told him that none of them were exactly what I was looking for and described the functionality I wanted for the penultimate over the water vacation home rental property in the province of Bocas del Toro without telling him an exact design. I’d rather he use his imagination to come up with some interesting alternatives that fulfill my requirements. We spoke for about an hour. We talked about a 60 by 20 foot deck with three stories. That’s a whole lot of room for a family of four or six. Lot’s of deck space, granite counter tops, french doors onto the ocean, air conditioning in the bedrooms. He said it could be ready in 120 days after we agree on the plans.

We walked down to Starfleet Scuba where a big floating restaurant, bar, scuba boat is under construction, rated for 150 passengers. With two sixty horse power motors the beast moves along at 10 mph in the calm waters of the the bay. I’d hate to dock the thing in the wind as it has a lot of sail area. I’d show you pictures, but my replacement cameras have not yet arrived. I’ll update this with pictures when I can get some.

The pontoons were corrugated, which on first look would seem to create a lot of drag, but even with what little I know of laminar flow, turbulence actually reduces friction.

Construction

• Welded heavy gauge hot dipped galvanized steel studs and joists

Features

Stay tuned for developments.

I couldn’t wire the earnest money as I have to talk to the bank to get online wires set up and adding my Panamanian phone number takes several days to process.

One thing I want to do is put some cabinas on the water. I was discussing that with a friend and he pointed out that somebody in Bocas is the only developer of floating homes.

I think this is pretty cool.