On the Radar: Digg Dug Edition
* ??Chris Welch??: “Misconception: Renting is for Suckers”:http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers (”via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/25/renting-is-for-suckers/). Many of my friends are reaching that point in their lives where they’re considering buying a home. However it’s unfortunate that so many choose to buy over rent, especially in this expensive market, because many well-intentioned people are buying homes that are actually damaging their finances.
* ??Fresh Pursuits?? “Canvas”:http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.
* ??Michael Barrish??: “Hell Freezes Over”:http://lumino.us/weblog/hell_freezes_over. Revamped and redesigned, it uses haikus in place of business copy (I couldn’t bear to write business copy) and features a new weblog about making websites (you’re soaking in it).
Wondering what “Michael”:http://oblivio.com is up to, I find his new, angsty, neurotic web design company website. Brilliant work.
* I’ve really begun to dig “digg”:http://digg.com lately. As usual, I’m behind the curve (”digg just launched version 3 of their site”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22/digg-30-to-launch-monday-exclusive-screenshots-and-stats/), but I think I’m just one of those people that has to see something working well before I can grok it. For the uninitiated, digg is a news site that has its content submitted by users. I had initially dismissed it as another “mob rule by the masses” type app (you know, enhancing the “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogs), but it regularly produces some interesting results. Check it out, and “add me as a friend”:.http://www.digg.com/users/kwalker411.
* ??Granite Consulting??: “Late Binding in Microsoft Access”:http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/latebinding.htm. In essence: if you’re exporting to Microsoft Excel from Access programmatically, just use late binding.
* ??Joshua Porter??: “The MySpace problem”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem. Joshua gives some thought to what aspect of “design” MySpace really excels at. Hint: it’s not the graphical type. Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
* ??Jason Calacanis??: “The new publishing model”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/06/28/the-new-publishing-model-or-on-rafat-om-federated-media-ad/ (”via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/28/new-publishing-model/). Here is the new model: 1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change. 2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell you’re inventory)–now you’re making a living. 3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.
* YouTube: “Pirates of The Caribbean Ride”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ5eWBlApY (”via Mike”:http://overloadednoggin.com/2006/06/28/captain-jack-meets-captain-jack/). Johnny Depp meets an animatronic version of himself as Captain Jack on Disney’s new Pirates ride. Very cool.
* ??Lifehacker??: “Windows Vista Beta: A tour in screenshots”:http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vista-beta/windows-vista-beta-a-tour-in-screenshots-183883.php. Wow, not bad, Microsoft. I mean, after some five years of development, you’d hope that Vista wouldn’t be incredibly atrocious. There’s quite a bit of OS X influence in the finder here (nudge–hey Apple: time to get past “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal in “the finder”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/, by the way), and I’m glad they’re getting away from the “Fisher Price”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#User_interface_and_performance school of design.
* ??Angela Wu??: “So much rage”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/29/so-much-rage/. I’ll agree to this mission if I can be assured that your rage level (which was off the charts that unforgettable night which still haunts me) will stay at a reasonable level.
It’s true: I’m hosting Anglela’s website because she strong-armed me into it. Fear the rage.
* ??Jen Poley??: “1966 Plymouth Fury II”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/06/30/1966-plymouth-fury-ii/. What can I say? Jode and Nathan wanted a car to work on….we found this in Lincoln, and bought it. We hope to restore it, but if you can believe it, for now we are just really enjoying driving it around town.
I can just imagine how much Jode is enjoying this.
Update: if you loaded this page in the last hour or so and saw a bunch of garbage — yeah, that was me. I was trying to set up the “FlickrRSS”:eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ cache so this site would load a little faster. I think I got it working; the the site is loading a lot faster!
Categorized as Family, Friends, Geek, Business, Money, Culture, On the Radar
what? this is just bad advise.
first off, depending on where you live, it is often cheaper to own than to rent. He uses northern jersey as an example, i’m going to use west virginia.
When i rented i rented a 3 bedroom house, with a 3 car garage, with land and 2 nice decks that was a 10 minute walk to town for $900 a month.
You can get a nice piece of land and house for about $600 a month (in mortgage). I choose to go the modular home route and still rent land. I spend about $700 a month, still more than if I own my own land, something that i am regretting now.
ON top of that, you can use your home equity to pay off high interest loans (credit cards) with a much lower interest rate.
You also get a break on taxes, based on the interest you paid on your morgage. So the above, is simply not true. You don’t get all your interest back, but you do get a nice portion of it. Plus, when you consider that over all it is cheaper to own (per month), you are wasting less money.
anyway, i could go on for a while … but just about everything this guy is saying goes against what finacial advisors would tell you (and have told me).
Its like telling people, “Whatever you do, do not invest your money in something! its risky!” Well, of all the investments that are risky, owning property is just about the least risky investment there is.
Buy the house. In the long run it makes sense.
Hey! I blog about the “good ol’ boy cracker-crats of the Republican party,” al-Jazeera in America, and the cartoonist Nobel Prize this week and you want people to read about my ?! Hehehe.
Also it definitely doesn’t make sense to buy in New York.
(_hides under desk_)
The rage! _The *rage*!_
Mike, that\’s the thing. Chris is speaking to my area of the country, where $600/mo won\’t get a studio apartment in a sketchy part of Newark. New Jersey is a totally different market than WV.
That said, I think you\’re right: the sooner you can get into a house, the better. However, I recently saw an article saying that house prices in parts of NJ have plummeted 20%. Chris isn\’t warning about short-term risk, he\’s warning about having the housing market come back to reality and getting stuck holding the bag on a bad investment. Paying half-a-mil for a fixer-upper that\’s a 40-minute commute from everything is just insane. And, given the equally-insane mortgages my peers have taken (can you say negative amortization?!?!!11!!!one!!) I think a market correction is on the horizon.
That said, I would love to buy a house. But, short of packing up and moving to Nebraska — which I _have_ \”known people to do\”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/01/11/the-nebraska-equation/ — I think buying in an area like NJ is a risky play. Here\’s me \”a few weeks ago\”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/26/on-the-radar-3/:
I really can’t wait to see the movie Pirates of the Caribbean and the updated version of the attraction. It was the last attraction Walt actually worked on in the 60s before he passed away so I am hoping the new additions don’t ruin it. Looks like they did more than ok though.
Just don’t add Eddie Murphy to the Haunted Mansion is all I can say…
Ken – Have you used http://diggdot.us/ as a sub for Digg? It gives you Digg plus slashdot plus Del.icio.us plus reddit all on the same interface…. Much better.
But last week I migrated to the AWESOME new Google interface which allows me to grab all of my RSS feed crap onto one page. This is a killer app and you should give it a try…. As a side note… This desktop is connected to you login so it’s not cookie based and loads not matter what browser you’re using.