Month: September 2004

Decline and Fall of Real Estate Industry

At the movies the other day, one of the preview/ads was for realtors in general, as in, the professional association of property promoters. It’s quite the field to be in. As the NYT notes, it’s getting more crowded by the day:

More than 350 people take the state real estate exam at 9:30 a.m. every Tuesday at 123 William Street in New York. According to the New York Department of State, 13,609 people took the sales license test between Jan. 1 and June 25, up from 9,680 for the corresponding period in 2002. There are so many newcomers in the field that another test time has been added to accommodate the overflow.

Too many sellers may mean that the service fees have to drop. As is, I’ve already decided that I’m going through ZipRealty or Isoldmyhouse.com if and when I buy. I mean, realtors have inherent ethical conflicts, plus you could really replace several hundred of them with a competent DBA and a half-dozen data-entry temps– if only the main association didn’t have such a lock on the damn database.

Misnomer

Rightists in and outside of the party claim Kerry is an “out of touch ultraliberal from Taxachussets.” Facts: Massachussets is actually about 26th in overall tax burden, right in the middle. Housing is expensive and that makes property taxes burdensome, but the fact is, “Taxachussets” is a big lie.

While we’re at it, have I mentioned that Dennis Hastert may be a pedophile cultist? We don’t know that he isn’t, anyway. He has never discussed membership in a child-molesting cult, nor has he disavowed the molestation of children and attendance of cult rituals involving human sacrifice and the Reverend Moon.

We can’t prove that he’s not a serial killer, but we do have very strong evidence that he is a lying sack of shit and that he is also the Speaker of the House. Oh, and he’s fat and ugly. So there.

(Why do people make fun of Michael Moore’s looks, anyway? I mean, he won’t win any beauty pageants, but he’s not exactly running in any either– he’s a filmmaker, not a model. His weight isn’t the issue.)

Application Development Ideas

The relatively simple perl script mencal is not a very useful application: it basically displays a text-based calendar and highlights several days each month. That’s OK, I guess, but it’s not what I would expect from a real app. A period can vary in date and duration, and your predictions may be more or less accurate, so it really needs more flexibility. Also a GUI display would make it easier to use. A good mensturation application would have the following features:

  • Integrate with Evolution for information display. Ideally implementation would be an EPlugin, but it could be a separate app that exported an icalendar file.
  • Display predicted and actual menstruation dates separately.
  • Improve its prediction algorithym as it is corrected by the user.
  • Display days of ovulation, estimated maximum and minimum fertility and other hormonal events. Display of these events should be customizable.
  • Export graphs of estimated hormone levels and fertility events.

I’d suggest that it be written in C# with Mono, like all the cool apps are these days. Besides, Evolution has great C# bindings.

That would be an app worth shipping!