More Mexico pictures

My wife and I: 8 days in Mexico

Why does our Heritage Minister hate us?

Satellite Radio Crashes

Who owns who in autodom?

For my brother:

Ford (Ford, Lincoln, Mercury)

• 100% Jaguar
• 100% Land Rover
• 100% Aston Martin
• 100% Volvo
• 33.4% Mazda

Daimler Chrysler (Maybach, Mercedes-Benz, Smart)

• 100% Chrysler (Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep)
• 20% Mitsubishi

General Motors (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, Pontiac, Saturn)

• 100% Opel/Vauxhall
• 100% Saab
• 100% Holden
• 42.1% GM Daewoo
• 20% Fuji/Subaru
• 20% Suzuki
• 9% Isuzu

Renault

• 99.3% Dacia
• 70.1% Samsung Motor
• 44.4% Nissan

Toyota (Lexus, Will, Toyota)

• 100% Scion
• 51.2% Daihatsu

Fiat Spa

• 100% Fiat (Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Lancia)
• 100% Maserati
• 56% Ferrari

VW (Bently, Bugatti, Seat, Skoda, VW)

• 99.1% Audi
  • 100% Lamborghini

Honda (Acura, Honda) BMW (BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce) Porsche Autovaz (Lada) This list isn't complete, I left out some Asian brands that aren't sold here (yet). Source: Automobile magazine

Viva Mexico

Just got back from Mexico. More pictures and stories coming soon... 

More US housing bubble fun

The Manic Housing Circus* starts falling apart when there aren't enough new buyers paying the inflated price. It will hit the hotter markets first. This article: Region's home sales signal softer market

Industry experts say a combination of factors drives up the inventory, including "greedy" and unmotivated sellers shooting for the moon in terms of price, as well as a growing number of more motivated investors eager to cash out here to reinvest in cheaper housing markets such as Idaho and Texas.

has a great graphic: * Manic Housing Circus is ©2005 Tom Kenny

Condos in Calgary

For my brother: Tom sent me some forum threads you might find interesting if you're looking at a condo in Downtown Calgary

• This discussion thread started about 2 years ago when a lot of what's currently under construction was just being proposed. The guys on here definitely have a "anti suburb/ pro housing for the masses" attitude, but its an interesting read none the less.
• People hating Pointe of View: Sinking downtown condos, More hate
• Finally, check out this blog on the Vancouver housing market. There's some good theory buried in there on true real-estate worth. Maybe it could save you $100k in depreciation some day
. For further research you can look into the volumes of information on the US housing bubble.

Name those movies

What's the movie? The stills are here.

As a fan of the Apollo program I say YAH!

The Moon Landings Were NOT Faked Scientist Jim Scotti goes point by point through the typical arguments and photographs from the "Moon Landings Were Faked" crowd.

This is perhaps the favorite argument of the TMLWF crowd. "There are no stars to be seen in any of the NASA Moon photographs." It is also one of the most easily countered arguments. The lunar photographs show no stars in them because they were exposed for the daylight lit lunar scenes! This badly underexposes any stars in the sky. Try setting up a manual camera (the autoexposure cameras won't easily allow you to do this) for a typical daylight exposure - use the "sunny 16" rule where you set the f-stop of your camera to f/16 and then set the exposure length to the recipricol of the ASA film speed - if you use ASA 100 film, use 1/100 of a second (or 1/125 which is more typically available). Then take a picture of the sky at night. To be sure you're simulating the lunar situation, be sure to light up a foreground object with full daytime lighting so that the printing process will be sure to expose that part of the image properly and not super stretch the dark sky. You won't find a star image there either.

The price of money

Here's another nice piece re: the US housing bubble: The Real Estate Bubble Pops Here

So the bubble gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Prices go only one way. It ends when everyone's in the game, when there are no more buyers, or when the price of money shoots up, as it might with this $2.50/gallon gasoline.

Is Christopher Walken running for US President in 2008?

Oh I hope it's true.

US Housing Bubble

A few of us at the office like talking about the market, and the hot topic lately here is the housing bubble in the US. Like the Internet bubble and many other bubbles before that, we have a situation of artificially high prices and expectations that's feeding on itself to get worse and worse.

• Housing demand and prices are rising
• Loans are getting larger and easier to get
• The US government runs on the theory that rising house prices are the basis of a robust economy
• And, as with all bubbles, nobody wants to get left out

"I have done appraisals for loan officers, and when the number didn't come in with what they wanted, I got fired and they found someone who would do it," he continued. "Very often, I was asked to do an appraisal and then got called back two or three weeks later. They would tell me I needed to raise the value $30,000 or $40,000. Then the loan would be bigger, but they could care less if the borrower had little chance of paying it back."

• The Big Fix Called The Housing Bubble
• Bursting the housing bubble
• Wall Street's Fate Caught Up With Housing
• Fannies Maes' Problems Weigh On Shareholders
• Pulte's Practices In Las Vegas Revisited
• Wikipedia: Real estate bubble, US property bubble

Parking rates in North America

• Web summary
• Full PDF report

Median per month (reserved)

1. Toronto $460
2. Montreal $361
3. Calgary $303
4. Ottawa $225
5. Victoria $225
6. Vancouver $213
7. Edmonton $170
8. Halifax $145
9. Regina $128
10. Saskatoon $101

Awesome picture

Self portrait

Bad Microsoft web design

I like Microsoft hardware. They make really good mice, and in the past made really good keyboards. However, the Microsoft hardware website has the worst country selection I've ever encountered.

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When you go to http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/ it comes up with a page asking you to select your country. Many websites do this when the products differ from region to region. Putting aside the issue of forcing this choice at all, let's focus on the interface they provide to make the choice. It's awful.

1. All this room on the page to put links, but instead they put the options in a drop-down selector. A list of links would be easy to scan and a simple click would take me on my way. Instead I have to click to open the list, find my country (maybe scroll), click it, then click the "Go" button.
2. The list isn't sorted in any way. How about at least alphabetical? How about at least keeping different language sites for the same country together?
3. Most of the prime real estate on the page is occupied by a map of the world. You can't click on your country, it's only purpose seems to be to highlight the continent of your selected country. Useless, especially since the countries each have their own site (except Canada).

My quick re-design:

One of those great moments in life

I have one faithful reader of this blog, and I know he'll appreciate my small Sunday experience... It's about the hottest day of the summer. You've been working outside all day and it's just starting to a cool a bit. You sit on your deck, just you and your dog, and crack an ice cold beer. It may only be a few minutes, but it feels like time has stopped. The only sound is the warm breeze.