Bay Area Entries
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
I’m back in the Bay Area for work, and out of curiosity I thought I’d check in on the housing market here. After updating my super-secret source of housing sales, I tried something new; charting price paid for square foot by county. This was on a tip from Mark Mansour, a fellow recent Melbourne homebuyer; although it’s not perfect, valuing just by land size is a simple, frank and easy-to-calculate assessment of price. Here are the results; I filtered...
Sunday, 24 December 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, and Charlie and I have been on the ground in Melbourne for a week. So far, we’ve got a new mobile phone (sweet), checked in with his school, and looked at a lot of apartments, trying to find somewhere to live for a few months while we house-hunt. Not quite as fast as I’d like, but not too shabby. Meanwhile, most of our possessions are about two months behind us, somewhere between San Francisco and Singapore....
Wednesday, 15 November 2006
In a nutshell: After a lot of angst, back-and-forth, and false starts, we’re moving back to Melbourne next month, seven years and a few days after we arrived in San Francisco. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows us well, although many of our Australian friends have expressed that they won’t really believe it until we step off the plane. The Long Story In late 1999, Anitra and I were living in Australia, and I was working for Merrill Lynch...
Monday, 16 October 2006
I’ve been playing with sales data for houses in the Bay area for a while, and have always wanted to come up with an index of same-home sales — reputed to be one of the more accurate ways to do an index, because you’re not having to compensate for differences in intrinsic value between different houses. I’m kind of stuck on that*, but in the meantime, the Flipperdex is a list of same-house sales in the Bay area, sorted...
Thursday, 25 August 2005
It seems that the debate has switched from if there’s a housing bubble to when and where it will pop. “Americans pay for their houses with money they borrowed from the Chinese.” — Paul Krugman...
Sunday, 1 May 2005
In the interest of equal time, two quotes attributed to Keynes; If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. P.S. That’s not to say he’d plop down a cool million for a 1,300 square foot two-bedder....
Saturday, 5 March 2005
Carlos sent me an interesting summary page about the Bay area housing bubble. I wish there were more links substantiating the assertions there (a few ring false), but it is thought-provoking. I happen to have a bit more specific data; namely, the sales figures for houses in the Bay area over the past few years. I’m interested in the affordability of a 3-bedroom house (or condo, or apartment) in San Mateo county, and this is what a little Python scripting...
Monday, 31 May 2004
Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ “There Goes the Neighborhood” captures what many have been saying for a while now; it’s a bubble, a bubble, a bubble....
Friday, 6 February 2004
Caltrain has proposed a set of schedules that re-introduce weekend services and tweak a number of trains’ timings and stops, to enable “bullet” service. These changes are honest attempts to improve service; after all, faster is better, right? The problem is that Caltrain is confusing the purpose of a public transport system with a regional transport system. The new schedules favour fast trains between San Jose and San Francisco, with few stops. To effect that, as well as improve other...
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
What a steal. If you live near San Francisco, or are visiting this month, make sure you check out Dine About Town — three-course, chef-selected prix fixe menus at over a hundred restaurants, $19.95 for lunch, $29.95 for dinner, all through January. When else can you get a meal somewhere like Boulevard, Bix, Betelnut or Bacar so cheaply (and that’s just the B’s on my list)? Reservations required; just don’t steal my seat… (The SF Visitor and Convention Bureau has...
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
Anitra is trying to beat a head of traffic that's built up behind an accident upstream; was able to check on the excellent SF Bay area real-time traffic map. I used one of these when I first moved to the Bay area, but it went away; Google found us another one. (When I checked the computer post-first-coffee today, the screen was glitching strangely; uh-oh. Looked like a hardware problem. Sync filesystems to the server (gotta love Unison), reboot. Hasn’t reappeared....
Friday, 12 December 2003
The other day, I bought a copy of an extremely nifty piece of software, Virtual PC. It didn’t come with an OS, but that’s OK, because I have a copy of WinXP Pro on a box that I’m not using, so I can move it over to the mac (after appropriate decommissioning, etc.). Upon booting into XP and doing “Windows Update,” I get something like 16 “critical updates.” Fine; I knew that this was coming. Problem is, I then get...
Thursday, 28 August 2003
As previously noted, I often pass San Francisco figure Frank Chu on the way to and from work. This morning, I noticed something new - there's a professionally-printed ad on the back of his sign, for a crepe place, with the tagline "best crepes in the 12 galaxies." Are we getting so ad-saturated that companies' next logical move is to sponsor the local nutter? Also, Kevin Burton links to a related, highly SF-specific joke....
Friday, 16 May 2003
Hmm. Passed the 12 Galaxies guy on the way home from work today. Usually, he's very polite and keeps to himself. This time, he was yelling at passers by and waving his sign at him. Violently. Hope he's OK......
