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January2007
buyer’s market
January 29, 2007
Just in case you had any doubt at all that this is a buyer's market, the Census Bureau released statistics today that indicate that the percentage of homes standing vacant and for sale is the highest it has ever been. (Since 1960, when reporting started, anyway.)
Via Mike Larson, who has a nice chart posted for those who would like to see it visually represented.
EDIT: more on this from Dean Baker, via Angry Bear kagayaki sushi
January 26, 2007
This is too cool! I don't know how long this place has been in business - I don't think it's been too long - but I bet you didn't know that Ann Arbor has a conveyor belt sushi place!
We took the boys over there tonight. It's at Ellsworth and Carpenter, in the mall with Rider's Hobby and Lai Lai (kitty corner from Lowe's). The conveyor is big fun, with colorful plates holding a decent variety of yummy bites. The sushi on the conveyor is all cooked sushi, but you can order raw maki & nigiri if you wish.
We stuck to the conveyor and had some good eel ...
google trips, and falls
January 24, 2007
Now, I like Google. I use their web search, I use Picasa, I even use Google Desktop. But they just broke one of the things I use them for the most - image search.
When I'm searching for an image, I need to know what the pixel dimensions are. A 50 x 50 image just isn't going to cut it if I need to drop it into a newsletter or other print piece. Up until a day or two ago, the dimension information appeared just below the thumbnail picture and it was easy to scan the results page for image size so I didn't have to bother with images that would be useless to me.
Now, in some ...
this is gonna hurt
January 22, 2007 Pfizer. Gone, before the end of 2008. 2100 jobs lost. And that's just the top level numbers.
This news is just so bad, on so many levels. Pfizer has said it will transfer a large portion of the jobs, so we have families moving out of the area. When they try to sell their homes, it's only going to add to the glut of homes on the market here and force prices even further downward.
The schools will be losing students, and thus funding. Support businesses - cafes, restaurants, cleaners, etc. - will lose business as all those high-paying jobs evaporate. Local non-profits will be hit hard, too - over at ArborUpdate, JulieW estimates that ...
update from here
January 16, 2007
Today is a "snow" day. I use quotes because there is little snow on the ground and the roads are clear and for the most part, are even dry. Thank you A2 School Board for your paranoid fantasies about the risks of the world at large to our children, otherwise known as Perfectly Precious Bunnykins in this land of helicopter parenting. Too bad the board doesn't weigh the economic impact on parents (and thus families) when it gets all paranoid about the safety of the PPB and closes school and keeps parents out of work.
Apparently, you'll be able to buy paczki at Starbucks this year. Oh joy, fat bombs to go with your burned coffee.
On ...
michigan is amazing
January 12, 2007
Hey cool - I got tapped for 'Picture of the Day' over at the Michigan is Amazing blog. Go me! happy anniversary, baby
January 10, 2007
The repositories of marital tradition indicate that our third anniversary is the leather anniversary. I looked in the list and couldn't find the latex anniversary. Shame, really.
Three years, eh? It doesn't really seem that long ago, although looking at the pictures, the little ones sure do look little.
It was cold that day, even colder than it is today. The house is warm, though, as are hands and hearts and cups of tea and mince pies and cozy blankets and Big Sur and Sedona and all the other things we've had together in the past 36 months. Happy anniversary, baby. I love you. letter to the editor
January 8, 2007 Dear Editor of the Ann Arbor Business Review,
In the Jan 4 edition, in the 'In Our Opinion' column on President Ford's leadership, you say that an 'overwhelming majority' of Americans believe Ford's decision to pardon Nixon was the correct one. You then back that up with an ABC poll stating that 'one in six Americans think it was the right thing to do.' One in six hardly seems to be a majority, at least in the mathematics I was taught.
At first I thought it might have been a typo (perhaps only one in six thought it was wrong), but I decided to look up the poll to check it for myself. The widely-cited 2002 ABC News ...
yui grids with navigation bar
January 6, 2007 I've been fiddling around with the YUI Grids CSS system available from the Yahoo! Interface Library. It's pretty neat - a lightweight system to layout web pages in grids. It's quite flexible, but it doesn't cover putting a horizontal navigation area at the top of the viewed page, but after the content in the source (taking it out of the document flow, so to speak).
So I worked out a simple layout that adds an absolutely positioned div to the YUI layout. It's meant to be a guide or starting point for others looking to solve a similar issue. I've used the 750px width, for example; but it should be obvious how to adjust my code ...
being
This is Laura Fisher's blog, coming to you from Ann Arbor, Michigan. You might know me as mitten and you can find me in many online communities under that name. Comments are welcome here, or you can write to me more privately via the contact form.
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the wolverinesThey may be the alma mater, but oh man - what were they thinking spending $4 million dollars for this coach? so they could look like they sent the JV team out?
twittering
@jweise It's not a Christmas tree; it means that's the last piece of iron going up on the building. It's tradition. http://bit.ly/Sn5n 3 hrs ago
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