Maybe in 10 years I can afford a place

Good news! Home prices in my area of San Francisco dropped over the year.


District 3
Sep-06 Sep-07
Number of Sales
18 11
Median Selling Price
719,500 688,000
Average DOM
29 35


These are for condos but what the heck.

Magic Flying Paper

I am extremely jealous of people who have cool or unique side talents. Take my friend John Collins. Not only does he have a regular day job he is one of the best paper airplane designers in the country having written a few books on the subject. He recently held court with kids and adults at the Exploratorium.

He turned what he did in the 4th grade into a profitable and fun hobby. All I got out of the fourth grade was a binder filled with stickers.

His designs are amazing, even if some are too darn tough to fold.

Heating up

There is a big tah-do over swiching your old incandescent light bulbs to those new CFL ones. PG&E is giving them away, there are messages everywhere about how much energy they save, and Al Gore probably has one in his pocket at the ready. I too got caught up in the frenzy buying a three pak for only 99-cents a while back. Now though I am not so sure those CFL's are really a-okay.

Those new CFL's are toxic, containing mercury. You break one and you have a toxic clean-up situation on your hands. Sure it is a tiny amout of that nasty stuff but tiny amounts of the quicksilver can add up. You can not dispose of them in an easy way. You have to find a certified CFL disposal center. And dispose of these I will when LED lighting gets cheaper. LED is going to light up your world.

Here in San Francisco and elsewhere there was this big push to turn off your lights for an hour to save energy, showing all how much we can save. Forget turning off your lights for an hour, try stop driving your car less than a mile to do something. Or stop driving at all.

What will be next? A day without flushing the toilet? I am sure some Jimmy Carteresque ideas are already floating around to show us little ways to save energy when nobody addresses the big problem.

Craig Strikes Again

Craigslist has revolutionized the way people sell things to each other. Many believe Craigslist is one of the main reasons causing the downfall of newspapers because they used to make huge profits off of classified ads, not anymore.

http://www.donorschoose.org/homepage/main.html?zone=402

Here is Craig's newest venture, which I feel is brilliant. I am more than cautious giving to charity organizations because a large portion of your donation goes to operating costs and not really helping the cause you care so much about. Here, you can forget the middle person and donate directly to somebody who needs it.

For example, you can do a search for any state, and say find a teacher who is looking to purchase material for class. You can donate directly to that teacher. Now, with anything somebody might try to take advantage of this so you always have to be carefull. But this is darn cool.

Mountain High

There is nothing like a wet one after a race. Here I am with Omar, who finished right behind me, after the Tahoe Half-Marathon. One of these days I will feel confident enough to run the full at the Tahoe altitude.

Chill Out

Global Warming. Too often the debate over global warming and how to solve or control it turns into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we're headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it's all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up.

I came across this well writen article in the Washington Post out of Copenhagen. Finally, an argument about global warming I can relate to. Brilliant.