Condo conversions

This article in the UT is worth a read: Condo conversions in county cooling off. They claim there is a glut of conversions on the market, but that everything will be peachy in 18 months. Really though, the issue is price. These guys bought high, and now have to sell high. Some have reduced prices a bit, others are turning into car salesmen:

On Third, a conversion project in Hillcrest, is offering $5,000 toward closing costs and up to $20,000 in mortgage interest. Ridgecrest in University Heights offered a $25,000 rebate at closing for a limited time. At Ridgestone in El Cajon, buyers could receive a free plasma TV and $2,500 toward closing costs.

In addition, most converters now pay commissions to real estate agents who bring them buyers, with at least one developer offering as much as 4 percent and airline tickets to Hawaii.

…Buyers are catching on. Evan Bennett and his girlfriend, April Allen, didn’t think they could afford to buy until they learned of an incentive program at a conversion project in North Park.

Bennett, a chef, and Allen, a real estate agent, bought a 600-square-foot unit on Florida Street. They received a $15,000 rebate on the $295,000 unit. Allen also got a commission on the sale. The couple put the rebate and commission into a bank account, with plans to use that money toward their mortgage payments for the next several months.

“Our mortgage payment is double what our rental payment was,” Bennett said. Drawing on the bank account “extends our ability to pay $1,200 a month, which was our rent, for almost 18 months. So our payments, our bills, are not going up at all.”

Am I the only one concerned about that ‘deal’? In order for a couple to ‘afford’ the 600sqf condo payment of $2400/month, the developers gave them $15,000 cash, and a commission (3-5%? Roughly 12k?). The couple then uses this money for half of their payment for 18 months. This sounds unsustainable, and very desperate. For both parties.

Dia de los Muertos

(All photos for this entry are posted here)

(The following is information I’ve picked up from various sources, so feel free to set me straight)

Dia de los Muertos is one of the more famous and widely practiced Mexican holidays. This ritual remembrance and celebration of the dead is said to be 3,000 years old, but was moved and mixed with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day by the Spanish to give it a church link. As I understand it, November first is All Saints’ Day, which is to remember children that have died. The second is All Saints’ Day, and is for everyone else. The celebration of the holiday tends of be quite different depending on the region. In Northern Mexico and the US, it tends to be a more private, with altars of loved ones in your home.

Anna and I visited the Sherman Heights Community Center on the first of the month to check out some of the traditional altars that were on display to the public. It was my first time in the center (I have only ever seen it from the road) and I was quite impressed with the building. It seems like a really great resource for the neighborhood. The altars were quite varied. Some were intimate, others very orate. Most focused on family members (for four years after death). But a few focused on other issues like lead in children’s candy, or the murdered women and girls of Ciudad Juarez. All of the altars had ofrendas of some sort – favorite foods or drinks, flowers, sugar skulls, photos, etc. We talked to the people at the center and bought some pan de muerto. I wish we could have stayed a bit longer, they were going to have some traditional dancers bless the altars.

We also checked out Chicano Park, as I had heard they were going to have similar events. But the park was fairly empty. Too early, or too late?

Discovery

Some folks claim to have found a Bosnian stairs-like pyramid, about 12,000 years old. Photos of the research here.

Scientific sleuth cracks code to $54,000 treasure

Ants in the Amazon rain forest labor to keep their territory free by using formic acid as a herbicide.

The remains of a massive Gold Rush-era sailing ship dating to the early 1800s have been discovered at the site of a large construction project in downtown San Francisco.

MIT professor sacked for fabricating data, investigations into other papers about immune response.

Golden Hill Block Party

(All photos for this entry are posted here)

Pete, Paul, Mark, Anna and I wandered down to 21st street on Saturday night to check out the Golden Hill Block Party. It featured The Adored, Fifty on their heels, and Jezebel, with a DJ in-between bands. I wasn’t familiar with any of the bands, but the new-wave-punky sound was fun and easy to get into – they all put on good shows. I don’t have a clue who put it the block party on, but they did a great job. They had the street blocked off, a stage & lights, hell they even had two porta-poties. All for free. Can’t beat that. Thanks to whoever you are! (Sophie & Scott)

Update: They also put on a great show at Sessions Fest at Golden Hill Park

The Long Now’s Orrery

The Long Now Orrery, photo by Jacob Appelbaum

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but finally got around to it after reading at Boing Boing that the Long Now project unveiled their prototype, the Orrery clock. Jacob Appelbaum has some great photos of the event.

What is all this fuss over a clock? Discover has a lot of good info about The Long Now project.

While nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth’s axis.

Made of stone and steel, it is more sculpture than machine. And, like all fine timepieces, it is outrageously expensive. No one will reveal even an approximate price tag, but a multibillionaire financed its construction, and it seems likely that shallower pockets would not have sufficed.

Still, any description of the clock must begin and end with that ridiculous projected working life, that insane, heroic, incomprehensible span of time during which it is expected to serenely tick.

Ten thousand years.

The span of time from the invention of agriculture to the present. Twice as long as the Great Pyramid of Giza has stood. Four hundred human generations…

I find the whole thing amazing. Thinking about humans in this sort of timeline is really unheard of in our culture. They plan to put the clock into a man made cave near Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. The area is dry, remote, stable, and surrounded by bristlecone pines. Rather appropriate, I think.

There are just so many things about this clock that I find great. The clock is mechanical, and thus will not be a black box to an outsider. It uses the solar system to show the time, something that is easily understood to all people. It has solar synchronization: A sunbeam striking a precisely angled lens at noon triggers a reset by heating, expanding, and buckling a captive band of metal. They plan to make the clock charismatic, and easy to interact with – to even require attention from people. There are also plans to include a library of sorts to the project. This will include things like the Rosetta Project (publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages) and the Long Server (pervasive server and email infrastructure, open source Timeline tools, and file format conversion).

The project is massive, and threatens to become a Library of Alexandria for the future. I love it.