Yowza! Mega (belated) congratulations to fellow Webb Mafioso John Scalzi for winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
August 2006
Monthly Archive
Shout outs to Scalzi
Life’s great! How can I mess it up?
By applying to grad school of course…
Hell, in these days who doesn’t think about running away to grad school? It’s the A#1 double-plus-good refuge for intelligent social misfits and the self-ostracized. As a grad student you have full social permission to be one of those “oh, never mind him - he’s a grad student” guy.
To qualify, I only signed up to take the GRE. Call it an “exploratory foray” if you will, though I believe that the only people who use that phrase now are drug users, political candidates and the US Military. Helll, I’m not entirely sure that I even want to pursue it past the GRE stage as my dozen or so plus years as an IT Garbage Collector hasn’t yet made me want to stab myself. So far.
The object of all this hand-wringing is an urban planning degree. I love the field and it pays better than rock-and-roll.
The down side? Crushing amounts of anxiety, debt, and an uncertain future. A complete reverse-course for how I am now (in good spirits, debt free, and able to do my thing).
Since I can’t help but be Mr. Perversity, I scheduled myself to take the test on Friday the 13th (of October that is)
links for 2006-08-30
100 years of housing prices
Sometimes a picture has more than a thousand words, though only three are coming to mind right now…
The Yale economist Robert J. Shiller created an index of American housing prices going back to 1890. It is based on sale prices of standard existing houses, not new construction, to track the value of housing as an investment over time. It presents housing values in consistent terms over 116 years, factoring out the effects of inflation.
HFS indeed. That last bar covers the past ten years. Suddenly, I don’t feel bad at all about not owning a house, being in the market for a house, or worrying about a mortgage. That economic hard landing that economists are kicking around looks more and more like a mid-air explosion followed by a smoking crater in the ground.
Welcome to 2007, hope you survive.
links for 2006-08-29
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François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters site for Obscure Cities
A Pluto Observation
If people were as emotionally invested in the space program as they are with Pluto’s planetary status, we would have had a moonbase by now.
Just saying.
No disrespect to the Mi-Go. Though the whole place is likely to be incinerated anyway.
California’s Giant Relief Map
Much of the web has been wringing their hands over the giant relief map in China that someone stumbled across on Google Earth. It’s a cool map and yeah, there’s an element of mysteriousness to it but calling it “The Riddle of China’s Area 51″ is pretty overblown, even for the web.
Believe it or not, there’s a similar relief map sitting out in the desert just east of Joshua Tree. The concrete map was built in 1942 as a training aid for Patton’s army who were preparing for the invasion of North Africa and covered the entire training area from Indio out to the Arizona border. The training center was built pretty ad hoc and not much was left out there except for tank tracks and foundations, but the map endured for a while.
I’m not sure when this picture was taken (I got it from Larry Digera who put together a sky trail route for visiting pilots), but it should give you an idea of what it used to look like.
I was first there in 1983 and armed with an old copy of Desert magazine I was able to find the map, but the intervening forty years of exposure had weathered the old map into an unrecognizable series of funny-looking hummocks. It’s still there now - it’s inside the fenced-off area in the middle of this photo.
Rat Patrol
Like just about everyone else that doesn’t live in New York City, my first encounter with the Giant Inflatable Rat of Labor Unrest was on that episode of The Sopranos. I’ve seen a couple over the years and had always wondered what GIR’s creation story was like. Wonder no more…
“We’ve done cockroaches, skunks, bulldogs, even a corporate fat cat wearing a striped suit, smoking a cigar and choking a union worker,” said Mike O’Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights, the Plainfield, Ill. company that designed and sells the rat.
O’Connor designed the rabid pest back in 1990, when a Chicago union man called asking for something his members could picket with, suggesting a “dirty rat kind of thing.”The first rat O’Connor designed was “basically a cutesy rat, but he wanted something mean, with fangs. So I went back to the drawing board and made the rat how he looks today.”
Unions all over the country order the rats - and recently an order came in from Nova Scotia - but New York, New Jersey and other northeastern states are O’Connor’s biggest clients. Big Sky sells about 100 of the inflatable rodents every year.
Not surprisingly, there’s the ubiquitous Flickr group for rat sightings.
Now with extra Web 2.0 on the sidebar!
Another nice side-effect of switching blog software is tossing all the sidebar clutter that was fun to experiment around with for maybe fifteen minutes or so. Honestly, I was doing it for the JavaScript and PHP experience. No really!
Somewhere on there I ran across a blog entry big-upping BookMooch and of all the book-related networking sites out there, I kinda like this one. You get a point every time you give someone a book. You can keep a wish list, so you can auto-receive books when you have available points and when someone has a book you want.
I’ve got a stack of books that I’m not necessarily going to read again that the used book stores don’t really want to buy, and I’d rather give stuff away to someone who wants to read it.
