Local Land Deals

Posted on August 28, 2013 by RegenAxe

Vancouverborg and Cormorants Down Bound on Lake Superior

I’m going to spill my guts here and then regret it tomorrow, because then I won’t have anything left to say. The photo is unrelated to the rest of this post, but it still looks nice. We know now what we will be doing this holiday weekend, dog sitting. Jack, the neighbor’s white furred, blue eyed, part pit bull will be under our care due to a kennel snafu. As partial payment to our good deed, we learned some juicy neighborhood gossip.

A couple of weeks ago, the day I flew out to Seattle also happened to be the day that was Anne’s first day of school this year. She was fluttering about nervously, as one would expect anyone to do on their first day of school. She was going to be working the Special School District. We then both noticed that the property kiddy corner to our back property line had a new lawn ornament in its backyard. It was a huge yellow ‘steam shovel’. Sorry for the anachronism, Mike. How they managed to park it back there, with only the narrowest of driveways to traverse remains a mystery to me. There was no mystery about its intended purpose though. It was there to tear down that now condemned house.

The story of this property is a long and sad one. In the almost thirty years that we have lived in our house, I have only seen the woman that owned this property once. It was in the predawn hours of a near summer solstice morning. I was launching on one of my early AM bike rides when I saw the owner walking along side her house. I probably should be thankful that that was the extent of my involvement with her. My numerous neighbors that over the years have shared a property line with me and her have many stories to tell of their involvements. There are two items to illustrate: the windows have always had tinfoil covering them and the son once used a chainsaw that he transported on a Metro bus, to mow down a neighbor’s fence.

The city first condemned the property and then foreclosed on it. The now vacant lot went up for public auction this week. It turns out that both the neighbors who share a property line with me and this now vacant lot ended up bidding against each other. The neighbors beside us, who we will be dog sitting for lost. The new neighbor behind us is a SLU student and according to her father, likes to party. Her father owns both properties now.

Working for the Weekend

Posted on February 7, 2013 by RegenAxe

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high
There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream,
Really do come true.
Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

I had a minor breakthrough at work today. A week ago, I had requested some computer files be transferred from Point A to Point B. The fact that points A and B are only fifty yards apart shouldn’t diminish the importance of this effort in your mind. The important thing here is that I bent the bureaucracy at work to my will. Yesterday, a week to the day after I had requested the file transfer, they showed up at Point B and I set to work.

In the intervening week though, doubt had crept into my mind. Had I selected the correct files? Had I rounded up all of the files that I would need? The possibility for failure loomed large in mind, while I twiddled my thumbs, waiting for the wheels of industry to finally turn. Failure meant revisiting this transfer process again, waiting another week and all the while trying to dodge my boss, who’s most common refrain these days has been, “Do you have any data for me yet?” He can be most annoying in this way.

I ran a test case with my newly reacquired computer files. The results were close, but not quite the same as the results that I was looking for. I selected a few different files and tried again. This time things matched up perfectly. I now have a baseline case, upon which I shall proceed to build an edifice of data. As any data architect will tell you, you cannot build until you have a good foundation. Now I can tell my boss, “Yes sir, I do have some data for you now.”

I saw the pictured rainbow on my way into work. Anne saw it too; she was already on the playground at school. I didn’t find any pot of gold after I made it to work. I shouldn’t have expected to, because pay-day is not until next week.

iPhonology

Posted on January 25, 2012 by RegenAxe

A prostitute solicits a young man, “For fifty dollars, I’ll let you talk to me about your iPhone.

Apple’s stock rose over 6%, to almost $450, a record high, after it reported its most recent earnings. CNN was putting a target price on Apple of $666, or the number of the devil. No one who knows me, would call me an Apple-phile, but I do love my iPhone. This dichotomy, love the product, but hate the company, would present difficulties for some, but not me. I am prepared to condemn Apple, all of its products, even the iPhone, just not my instance of this device.

Let me first dispense with the rest of Apple’s product line. I’m a PC and I am proud of it, the Mac and its ilk are just overpriced versions of the same product. All of Apple’s innovations were actually stolen from Xerox, which was too stupid to squash the upstart Apple. Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 Macintosh commercial was great, but it fingered the wrong villain. He should have implicated Apple, today’s Big Brother. Let’s segue now to Apple, via the iPhone.

“NPR’s “This American Life” recently showcased, Mike Daisy and his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. Check it out. Mr. Daisy, a self-professed Apple-phile, learned of an iPhone that was sold with photographs on it, taken in its factory, in China. These pictures led him on an odyssey, to China. Exercising his own brand of investigative journalism, he uncovered many examples of labor abuse, child labor, blacklisting and unsafe working conditions, to name a few of the offenses that he cataloged.

Daisy’s similarities to Michael Moore, both physically and in journalistic temperament I found unmistakable. The second half of the “This American Life” show does some fact-checking that shows that Apple has corrected many of these abuses. This went only part way to assuage the guilt of an iPhone owner, such as myself.

A Conversation with Siri

Piling on with Apple’s sins, there is its recent debacle, when it attempted to market the iPhone in China. Riots ensued and all sales were soon suspended. Those iPhones were retailed for $800, four times what I have paid for any iPhone. All this in the country of its manufacture.

I have lambasted Apple, but what about its customers? Just like Latin American drug kingpins couldn’t survive without their American drug users, neither could Apple survive without its sycophants. You, the American Apple customer are just as guilty as Apple is of unfair labor practices, etc.

Then there are the injuries that iPhone owners perpetrate upon the rest of society. Case in point, was the recent, much publicized incident at a performance of the NY Philharmonic Symphony. The iPhone’s marimba ringtone went off in the middle of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Sure other cell phone users have disrupted a myriad of other performances, but have any of those phone users been dressed down in public, by the conductor?

I want to come clean with you, the reader now. I am a Microsoft Secret Ninja (MSN). I report directly to Mr. Gates and have been working to combat the international Apple conspiracy for many years now. An Apple a day, keeps the doctor away? Don’t believe it, it is all propaganda. They can have my PC, when they sieze it from my cold dead hands, and about my iPhone? I’ll have to text you on that one.

Putting on the Bear Suit

Posted on February 11, 2011 by RegenAxe

Think back to that dark time, only two years ago, during the winter of 2008. President Obama had just been inaugurated and the accompanying pomp and circumstance offered only a brief respite from the drumbeat of bad economic news that had become our fare. The housing market had crashed and record foreclosures ensued. Many people had lost their jobs already and many more would lose their jobs in the intervening years, this cycle begat even more home losses. All of the markets were down; the Dow had dipped below 8,000. This was the Great Recession at its nadir or was it? If the Great Recession were to follow the prescription laid out by the Great Depression then that dip was not the end of our economy’s downward ride, but only the pause before the storm.

In the last two years the housing market has not recovered. Likewise, neither has the job market show much new life and the Democrats took a “shellacking” in last year’s midterm elections. The one bright star in the financial picture has been the stock markets. The Dow has led the charge and has risen by 50%, to 12,000. If blame is to be applied to a president for events on his watch, then so should credit. A 50% rise in stock prices is not too bad for a socialist. 😉

If the Great Recession does aspire to become the Great Depression II then most economists, just don’t see it happening, but then they didn’t see it in the first place either. It is much easier to study a threat that has shown its danger than it is to observe the unknown one. One is sure to be more careful about a dog that has already bit them than a dog that one not seen. I think that the record of the last two years speaks to this. A near-term catastrophe has been averted, even if much pain has not. The economy is moving forward, if even with a limp.

So where do we go from here? Improvement in the job market is expected, even if it doesn’t come soon. The housing market will take longer. Fortunately, for me, I have a job and a house and I’m not expecting to lose either of them soon. Two winters ago, I wished that I had put on the bear suit though. It would have protected my portfolio. In the intervening years I have benefited from going bare, not wearing the suit and remaining in the equity markets.

There is an old adage about the stock market, “Sell in May and go away.” It speaks to the traditional summer doldrums that plague the markets. The problem with this adage is that it requires putting the bear suit on in the middle of the summer. This sounds too hot and scratchy a proposition for me. I could move up to Canada, where it is cooler, but what then if I meet a real bear. Any of my lukewarm bearish “feelings” would falter quickly when faced with a real bear’s charge. I think instead, I’ll just rebalance my profits and then visit the zoo.

This post’s tasty eye candy is of course courtesy of Chris. Chris also gave me the tittle for this post. Checkout his photography page on RegenAxe.