Houses As An Investment

I've owned a home for over 7 years now, and I've come to realize a hard truth. Your home, and mine, is not an investment. By investment I mean money that is put away with the purpose of earning profitable returns. (Thanks wiki!)

On the surface it appears that owning a home does net you a profit. You buy it for a certain price, and then years later you sell it for more. Unfortunately, that simplistic view leaves out two important factors.

1) Maintenance costs. How much money did you spend to put a new roof on your house? How much was that fence? The new water heater? Replacing the carpet? The blinds? How much of your 'profit' was bled away after years of home ownership?

Still think you're ahead? Look behind door number 2:

2) Inflation creates the illusion of wealth. A Yale economist laid out this graph of home prices over the last 100 years. He kindly removed the effects of inflation so we can more clearly see the value of our homes.



Outside of the latest housing boom and current bust, home prices have stayed just about the same. If you bought a home in the 60's, you can expect it to be worth just about exactly the same price.

Your home is inflation protection, and little else. Or course, you get to live in it, so there are some perks.

Fail Blog 2009

Yay! It's a look at the best Fails of last year!



I feel like this should be mandatory viewing for junior high kids.

See all those stupid things? Someone has already done them, and they hurt themselves. Learn from the idiots.

I'm a Firestarter, Twisted Firestarter

Oh man, I know what I'm getting for next year's men's gift exchange. Check this thing out.

It's a hairdryer on steroids.

Basically it solves 2 of the 3 necessary things for fire. It blows life giving oxygen, and it heats that oxygen to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit! You have to supply the wood.

You might say that this takes the fun out of building a fire, but I say it allows us to burn more stuff.

Interview Questions

A friend linked me to this entertaining list of the latest 'interview questions'. It reminded me of way back when I was in school. Microsoft was the big bad culmination of programming skill, and all the interview questions that were passed around came from them.

This set is from the current king of the hill, Google. While Microsoft's questions tended to be very technically oriented and not really worth posting, this assortment of questions are a bit more abstract.

And here they are,

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? Answer
   
2. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? Answer
3. In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? Answer
4. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Answer
5. Why are manhole covers round? Answer
6. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco. Answer
7. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap? Answer
8. Explain the significance of "dead beef". Answer
9. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened? Answer
10. You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number? Answer
11. You're the captain of a pirate ship and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive? Answer
12. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings? Answer
13. You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process. Answer
14. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew. Answer
15. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel, and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? Answer

What Linemen Do Best

Zebrie Sanders made one of those mistakes that will forever be mentioned at family gatherings. I imagine there won't be a week that goes by that he doesn't hear about this on the practice field.

Playing as an offensive lineman for Florida State, Zebrie didn't hear the snap count during a play in the 3rd quarter against Florida. In fact, most of the line missed it. The rest of the line tried to recover the broken play, but not Zebrie. He decided that the snap just hadn't happened yet, and waited for it.

Twilight

Twilight is a pretty controversial conversation topic on the internet, but Kevin Smith once again cuts straight through to the heart of the matter.

Tree House Security

Why isn't this product sold at every Wal-Mart! It needs some look and feel changes, but modern plastic molding will fix that.



What is it?

It's a secret knock door lock. That's right. It's a specialized motor you place over your dead bolt. It listens to the knock on the door, and unlocks the dead bolt if it's the correct knock!



Brilliant!

Do you think they could make one that opens the garage when I bang on it?