House prices in the U.S. from 1890 until 2005, plotted as a roller coaster that you ride from a first person perspective. Here is the data source. Hold on to your hats.

Also check out these two posts from Decius about the current state of the housing market.

Real Estate Roller Coaster

It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Every so often I see articles on changing work environments like this come up. I am very happy to see experiments like this happening in the corporate workplace.

Reading this made me think of the place where Decius and I worked "before all hell broke lose"... We both managed trans-continental teams. Our direct reports were in the states, but all the people we had to coordinate projects with were sprinkled across several Asian countries. Every country's management handled it's own staff, but we drove most project goals. It was all stress, frequent flier miles, and a clock that never stopped.

In the states, the engineering staff showed up around 10am-11am. We'd show up at the office, address any immediate concerns for a few hours, and do lunch. Lunch was a strategy session with food. Most of my average day in the states was working with the product development group. The phone conferences with the Asian offices started around 6:30pm. Getting out of the office was always hard, and we always aimed to get out around 9pm, because food became hard to come by in SF after 10pm. At that point, work quasi-resumed at home in the form of phone calls and poking at laptops. Decius had this worse than I did. His phone rang off the hook with technical problems overseas that couldn't wait. I tended to just sit on the couch poking out lists and responding to emails. The workday didn't really end, it just phased itself out slowly.

Overseas, my average day started at 8am. I'd roll out of bed, as my prearranged breakfast arrived, and start parsing in and hammering out emails. Almost all my collaboration with the US would happen before I left the hotel. Sometime around 10pm, I'd shower and head off to the office with the day's objectives lined out. The overseas offices shut off like a switch around 6pm. Completely different work culture. After 6pm, most of our time was spent with sales and professional services folks. Half social, half work. I'd get back to the hotel, late, and start on the morning email barrage for about an hour or two before passing out. I liked my wake-up period to be spent proof reading, eating, and hitting numerous send buttons.

In short, the vast... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Smashing The Clock

MemeStreams user terratogen has posted up some thoughts about the Arby's logo on his other blog.

I hate Arby's. I've only eaten there twice, and both times I've gotten food poisoning. First time I thought it was a fluke..

frottage. | The Arby's Logo...

Tabjab is a powerful way to keep track of the interpersonal debts that often arise between friends, roommates, and coworkers. You can use Tabjab to send out bills for dinner debts, bar tabs, rent, utilities, entertainment, or any other expense that people share. These bills are delivered via email, and they are easy to consolidate when it comes time to pay.

My roommate and I have been working on this website since late last year. We've been keeping it under wraps but we decided this weekend to formally make it available. When your friends or roommates owe you money you can input it into Tabjab. Tabjab will keep track of it, send emails out, and calculate reciprical debts. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Socially aware accounting tools. Miniature ventures. Group finance. Et cetera...

There are many ways of looking at a project like this, beyond the obvious. All of them have been given significant thought. All of them require far more action than we can current finance...

In any trade or craft, one reaches situations where they must ask: "Where do we go from here?"

In the age where commerce has met the network, the answer is very 2.0.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you TabJab, and we request your comments...

My new project: TabJab

Contracts are being canceled, deals are drying up, prices are starting to drop. The psychology is shifting even as thousands of new homes and condos join the for-sale listings each day - so the downward pressure will only get worse.

Speculators who bought overpriced condos in hope of a quick killing are going to get hosed.

No one is going to be able to say they didn't see this coming.

Welcome to the dead zone

Lucision is dedicated to providing GSA standards based back office systems for casinos that provide a stable back end for financial and marketing operations. We aim to provide casinos with the ability to make lucid decisions. Our casino reporting systems give casino operators clear visualization of the trends in the data they need to see to make decisions that maximize the profitability of their operation.

This company is run by MemeStreams user Jello. I've looked over their recent business plan, and it appears they have a solid market for the applications they are building. I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors.

Lucision - Back office financial and marketing for casinos

What is Google Finance?
Google Finance is an early beta product that offers a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data.

How is Google Finance different from existing financial websites?
Google Finance offers an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies. Further, Google Finance also offers a broad range of company news and information in order to deliver more relevant, unbiased results in a clean, uncluttered user interface.

Google Finance

So begins the postcrash push, when all of this investment begins to pay off. Broadband Internet use in the United States jumped from 6% in June 2000 to more than 30% in 2003. Today, more than half of us have access to broadband at home or work. (Most of us, significantly, signed up for it after the dotcom crash.) Now, instead of engaging in theoretical thumb sucking about "what broadband will mean," we're doing something with it. And unlike the 1990s, when experiments failed because entrepreneurs misunderstood the Internet's usefulness, or because it simply wasn't ready, we're working with a known quantity. It took 30 years for electricity to have a serious impact on the U.S. economy, after all, but by 1930, virtually every home had juice and it was driving refrigerators, toasters, lamps, radios, and other appliances. As Henry Blodget put it, our exuberance, irrational or otherwise, builds industries.

I think the collective group here on Memestreams has been saying this for oh, about 5 years now.

Technology: Boom, Bust, and Beyond

1) Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.
2) More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.
3) Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4) Poverty is on the rise.
5) Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.

Short and to the point.

via the Economic Policy Institute.

What's wrong with the economy?

The bulk of this article is about Steve Jobs, Pixar, and Disney. When followed up with this, its and odd mix:

"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!

"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.

"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.

"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.

Its only truly useful if you can directly engage the people involved in the discussions being monitored. There is the model of watching and the model of interaction. Ideas evolve and are tested through dialog. The strength, rigidness, and degree of development of ideas is only truly tested when they are put to the test. Hence, when viewing something being monitored, you don't know if its people blowing steam, or if you have encountered a developed ideology of any strength. All these things can be effected and steered. The traditional intelligence agencies seem to have had trouble doing that without having it backfire.

Hrm.. Who do we know who has been working on that kinda stuff? Where do I apply to be the Steve Jobs of public focused open source intelligence tools? Is that position open? I'm not a sociopath either...

Cringely NSA Spying addendum