TimesToCome

The yearly art festival was this weekend. The weather was nice but too chilly for a bike ride so we wandered over. The Junior League ran out of tickets and made everyone wait till they ran and grabbed more tickets from somewhere.

We saw tons of photos and paintings of doors and windows. It must be the ‘in’ thing in art this year? There were a few interesting artists among the 500 or so who had booths at the show.

It all began on Friday October 13th 1307.

The Knights Templar were recognized by The Church in 1128. They were organized after the crusade of 1096 to guard and protect European pilgrims who traveled to visit Jerusalem after its conquest.

They became one of the best trained, disciplined and equipped of the fighting units. Easily recognized by their red cross on a white mantle uniforms they became Europe’s favorite charity. As the crusades lost ground the Knights Templar fell from favor. Rumors started and mistrust built.

Pope Clement V, under pressure from a broke King Philip of France, conspired to steal the Knights riches. On Sept. 14th secret instructions were sent across Europe. The letters were not to be opened on pain of death until Oct. 12th. The letters contained instructions for an early morning surprise raid on all bases of the Knights Templar.
On Friday the 13th 1307 in early morning raids every base of the Knights Templar was raided and almost all of the knights were rounded up, tortured and put to death inquisition style. Missing are the money, extensive books, some ships and knights. Many believe some future generations of the Knights continue today.

This unexpected, huge round up, of one of Medieval Europe’s most powerful fighting forces shocked the citizens so much that today we still consider Friday the 13th to be a day to be wary.

Every one knows Google It’s tough to beat Google’s search results.

But Yahoo has a nice new search engine it is testing. You get the usual results along with wiki, you tube, flickr and other results all together in an easy to use format. This one might put Yahoo back in the competition.

If you are having trouble finding something also try:

Look Smart

Vivisimo

dmoz

Snap

Gigablast

There are many more search engines out there, but it’s hard to find ones that are better than the above listed search engines for general searches.

Going up or going down?

Depends mostly on where you live, I suspect. Housing tends to boom then bust in small micro areas, yet over the long period and over a large area it barely keeps up with inflation. Pieter Fransz studied home prices in Amsterdam from 1625 – current times. The return over the long haul was .2% year. But while a home took 350 years to double in price the first time, it took only 22 years to double the second time. In the aftermath of the plague and tulip bulb market crash the house dropped 36% in value.

In Japan speculation drove prices up to highs of 140K/sqft at the height of the boom in 1989. By 2004 price drops of as much as 90% had set in. Real estate crashes happen over months and years as prices stay flat rather than rise with inflation. Sometimes, as in Japan and the 1987 crash in New England bring actual price drops.

Real estate crashes are sometimes triggered by natural disasters, economic disasters or price to income getting too far out. House price to yearly income should be less than 3.5. So if the average salary in a place is 50k per year, the average house price needs to be 175k or less. This assumes 30 year mortgages at 7%.

Housing booms occur when economic conditions improve increasing migration into an area, when local wealth increases; when interest rates drop and when loans become easier to obtain. Booms in general occur when it becomes easier to invest in something or when government regulation is not in place or is loosened.

More information:
From Dutch history, a real estate lesson

The Housing Bubble

It’s not quite Jane Jettson’s lifestyle but we are getting closer. Home cleaning now seems to consist mostly of pushing buttons and moving things.

I move the dirty dishes into the dishwasher push some buttons, then I move them back to the cabinets when they are done. I move the dirty laundry to the washer push some buttons, then the dryer push some buttons, then back to the closets. I take the ironing to the cleaners, then back to the house. I move clutter from all over the house back to its respective home. I push the buttons on the robots and dump them when they are full.

If they’d just find a way to build a robot to take care of the bathrooms and dusting I’d be all set.

I love my floor robots, I can’t say enough good about them. I use the Roombas on the rugs and the Scoobas on the tile floors. I’m guessing they says me a few hours every week. You don’t have to worry about payroll taxes and green cards either.

Now that I’ve used the Sage Pet model for a while I can say it does do better at picking up pet hair. But unlike the others it is suicidal. The others stay away from the stairs, the Sage model gets hung up on the top stair a fair bit and managed to pitch itself down the stairs this week. It did survive unscathed.

iRobot Roomba 4210 Discovery Floorvac Robotic Vacuum, White

iRobot Roomba Intelligent Floorvac Robotic Vacuum, Red

iRobot Roomba 4230 Remote Scheduler Robotic Vacuum

iRobot Roomba 4105 Intelligent Floorvac Robotic Vacuum, Sage

iRobot Scooba Floor Washing Robotic Hard Surface Cleaner