The most relevant data I’ve been able to locate is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. It is calculated by comparing the selling price of homes in a given metro area in a given month against previous selling prices for the same property. There are lots of other numbers you could track (housing starts, current inventory levels, asking prices, etc.), but this is where the rubber meets the road. It reflects what prices homes are actually fetching in a given area at a given time.

Home prices have a natural seasonality in Boston, rising in the spring and falling in the fall, so I’ve been focusing on year-on-year changes. I designed this plot to make it easy to compare this change. Each year is a line. If you cut the plot out of the page and glued the left to the right edge, the cylinder would be a continuous line changing color at the start of each year.

The most interesting events for me are when the lines cross. They represent points in time where house prices are the same from one year to the next. That happened in Boston in April 2006, as the market began to cool. For nearly four years after that, the average home in Boston was worth less than it was a year before. This free fall came to an end in December 2009, when finally the lines crossed again and the market held its value.

January’s numbers came in today and again the year-on-year values are in the black. The index is down compared to December, though. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we may be at the beginning of the recovery.

Crossposted to Flickr and Facebook, and Twitter.

As luck would have it, he was chosen at random to go to Contestant’s Row, where it was not his ability to price outdoor space heaters, but his savy game play (going for the classic "$1!" bet) which won him the round.

Up on stage, his mastery of Cliff Hangers earned him a washer dryer set, along with shipping anywhere in the continental United States. They are on their way to his parents’ house right now, who will enjoy them until he moves into a bigger place.

The hosts Todd Newton and David Ruprecht, who both did a wonderful job, stuck around to have a drink at the bar with us after the show.

By the way, if you want to make friends in Las Vegas, walk around with your Price Is Right name tag and have a good story about your cousin winning a washer/dryer set.

More photos on Flickr.

Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price set by Amazon EC2, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot Instance capacity.

–How Spot Instances Work

For batch processing, this new system allows you to trade urgency/throughput for cost. If you have some non-time-sensitive computing, you can wait until demand is down an the cost is low.

The price started climbing after they announced the service, but is still only about $.50 per hour. The regular On-Demand Instances price is $1.20 per hour. As more people use this service, I expect the average price to rise and to start to show daily, weekly, and yearly cycles.

Amanda Palmer liked American Repertory Theater’s "Sleep No More" so much, she announced a performance at the bar within the venue

I highly recommend Sleep No More Don’t think of it as a play with a plot, or a puzzle to be solved, but a series of surreal experiences. Being able to see Amanda Palmer perform in the cabaret within the space was wonderful bonus. By the end of the show, there were only about 50 of us left in the lounge, a now-rare intimate performance for her.

To top it off, my friend Rusty Scott happens to be in the house band and shared the keys with Amanda over the course of the night. And he had a flask of scotch to share with me, making the night complete.

crossposted to Flickr, Facebook

They’ve purchased a mountaintop in Nevada to house the clock. Stuart Brand described their progress in this 2004 TED talk. Last spring they issued a a call for guides. I answered.

About 40 of us spent the weekend in Nevada, becoming familiar with the mountain and making infrastructure improvements to the base camp. We also spent a lot of time getting to know one another. This self-selected group was an interesting bunch. Over the campfire one night, Stuart called us the clock’s first docents.

They’re holding an unconference about long-term thinking in June, and I’ll be back to help.

click to view all my photos from the trip

You can only pick one username, and once chosen, it is permanent. This is a lot of pressure.

I think I’m going to go with my full name, “matthew.simoneau” and not the “matthewsim” I use on all other websites, and even in the URL my personal blog. In addition to keeping with my usage elsewhere, the shorter version is quicker to type (especially on my tiny iPhone keyboard), and makes it unnecessary for others to navigate all the vowels in my last name when typing it in. But facebook has always been a real-name culture, and is used for both personal and professional reasons. And I don’t want some other jerk to take it and show up as the “first hit” when someone typed in my real name.

To dot or not to dot? The dot in “matthew.simoneau” definitely helps with clarity, though you could probably write it as “MatthewSimoneau” and it would still work (they haven’t made any statements if they’re going to be case sensitive, case-insensitive, or case-preserving). It would probably move me up in the search engine rankings for “simoneau”, since the word is standing alone. To my eye though, the dot in the URL is about as cool as a hyphen in your domain name. But based on the screenshots, it seems that they’re suggesting the dots as the preferred standard. I’ll probably go with the dots. I hope they make the usernames period-insensitive like Gmail. That is, “MatthewSimoneau” would map to the same ID as “Matthew.Simoneau”. Or at least, as soon as one is registered, block the other and all other variations. I can’t find any info on this.

They are going to distribute them Friday night at midnight on a first-come-first-served basis. See you there!

It isn’t perfect, but they’re making great progress. You can try it yourself on their test Wiki. It’s built on the open source FCKeditor, but they’ve taught it to emit Wiki markup instead of HTML. Impressively, you can toggle between WYSIWYG and Wiki markup while editing. Efforts to build a rich editor has been stymied for years by MediaWiki’s complicated markup, which includes templates and other “active” elements. They’ve taken the reasonable strategy of focusing on the 5% of markup that’s used 95% of the time and just isolating and preserving markup it can’t yet handle.

Wikia uses a project on Google Code to manage their source, building on top of the standard MediaWiki codebase. The rich editor is mostly implemented as a MediaWiki extension, but requires changes to some core files as well. It is easy and legal to migrate Wikia’s changes back into MediaWiki’s codebase, and surely someone in the community will do this as the editor approaches production quality. It won’t be long before we see it on Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered Wikis.

“Positive people we are.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, we won’t get many more like these.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, well we waited long enough.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, outside! I’m inside.”

No, I haven’t taken up building miniature models of Tuscan towns. This is a digitally processed version of a photo I took in Siena on vacation 2006. Is it convincing?

Enthusiasts have been playing around with tilt-shift miniature faking for a while, but the website TiltShiftMaker makes the process easy as pie.

This year I’ll be on a cruise, but it would be fun to organize a TED Boston in 2010. I could get together 10 interesting people, take a couple days off from work, watch the conference together, and chat about it.