Sara’s Weekly Update #12

Welcome to my newsletter! I write down my thoughts & opinions on the topics I read/watch in the last week. My topics of interests are wide, please feel free to skip to the topic you like.

Fed hikes rates by a quarter percentage point

There was a little doubt if the Fed would increase the rate as banks were having liquidity issues, but the Fed went ahead & increased 0.25% to fight the inflation. But from their tone, they are going to slow down in further rate increases. Hope they will give some breathers for the next few cycles.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/22/fed-rate-hike-decision-march-2023.html 

Nvidia GTC

Nvidia’s GTC event happened this week, and Jensen covered how accelerated computing is helping in various domains & scientific research. Here’s the highlight from the keynote.

Jensen had a fireside chat with Sutskever (cofounder of openai), it was interesting to see how they started training Deep Learning models using GPU for the first time & how that changed the whole industry. Also he went deep into how ChatGPT works.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/03/22/sutskever-openai-gtc/ 

Personal Update

I covered why we moved to Dallas, Texas last week - https://sara.iblog.dev/i/108089963/personal-update. This week I will continue on with the story.

Why the Lakewood community?

By looking at the nearby Indian stores we were able to find the Indian communities in the area. And one of the Dallas realtors gave me a good overview on the Dallas highways & where one should buy homes. He suggested getting homes closer to the DNT (Dallas North Tollway), & gave overview on Preston, Coit & Custer roads. Based on that we started looking at the communities near highway 380 & DNT junction. My wife registered her email & phone with all the builders in & around that area, and we made around 400 phone calls. We were just increasing our luck surface area. It was Spring of 2021, peak of the housing market. Luckily (based on some of our effort too) we got a call back from only one builder Shaddock and said they have availability in one of their communities, which is not in our ideal area of interest, but just little outside, so we said yes to it.

Our realtor in Dallas got in touch with the salesperson of that community and in the next few days we came to know that the same sales person is handling one other community too and he has one opening in that community as someone backed out at the last minute. We got a call from our realtor on Friday afternoon about this, and we got in with a zoom call with the builders salesperson that evening itself. I haven’t heard about this community before, but the location is in our area of interest. So I booked a flight for the next morning and came to Dallas and drove around the community and nearby areas. I stayed at my friend's place & took one of his cars as rental cars were scarce that time. I was able to find the flight ticket & couldn’t get a rental car that time, I have never imagined that scenario before. 

Anyways, this community is closer to our friends place and had an option to pick a lot from some of the lots they had. And decided the floor plan that suits us, picked the options on Saturday afternoon and signed the contract on Sunday. I usually don’t like to rush, but I realised this fast market & had to act fast, and so we did. That's how we ended in the Lakewood community. More than we finding the place, the place found us 🙂