Bruce Henderson on January 22nd, 2008

Today is a perfect day to share some facts on the up side of finance. As is usually the case, even in an ugly market not everything is always all bad. For example we are once again to going take a look at Hardtack data on price per square foot. This time we review the [...]

Continue reading about Housing – Price Increases Year Over Year

Bruce Henderson on January 21st, 2008

Asia markets are picking up again heavily on the down side, with the India down almost 10% at the moment. The Euros are predicting a start at last -3% down from yesterday’s bloodbath. At the moment the Dow futures are off 500 or so points, meaning at open it will be down 500 points immediately [...]

Continue reading about Shaping Up As A Tough Day In The Markets

Bruce Henderson on January 21st, 2008

Well, so much for containment! It seems that the banks in China were no smarter than the rest of the world, and became investors in the funny money structured investments backed up by questionable loans. From CNN Money: China’s banks feel subprime heat BEIJING (AP) — Shares in China’s banks fell sharply Monday after news [...]

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Bruce Henderson on January 21st, 2008

While the US took MLK day off in the markets, the other parts of the world traded into uncertainty and doubt. As a result all world indexes ended sharply lower: % Today % YTD FTSE 100 (UK) -5.48% -13.61% DAX (Germany) -6.83% -15.49% Nikkei (Japan) -5.49% -14.36% HANG SENG (China) -7.41% -13.22% Why is this [...]

Continue reading about World Markets Take A Pounding – The Beginning Of The Correction?

bfwebster on January 21st, 2008

Having seen and reviewed “I Am Legend” (2007) last month, and having re-read the original novella by Richard Matheson, I thought I’d watch the two earlier movies based on that same novella: “The Last Man on Earth” (1964) with Vincent Price, and “The Omega Man” (1971) with Charlton Heston. I now have a much, much [...]

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bfwebster on January 19th, 2008

Some 18 months ago, I wrote about the Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD format battle and suggested that both formats were a dead-end, and that the real next-generation video media would be based on solid-state storage (e.g., flash RAM). I predicted this was quite a few years away, though. What I forgot is that there’s another optical [...]

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bfwebster on January 15th, 2008

[Thanks to the incoming links, particularly from io9 and Ace of Spades HQ, two of my favorite blogs; as the saying goes, feel free to look around (and to hit the tipjar over in the right column). Also, the first section of this review is spoiler-free; all the spoilers are in a white-text section at [...]

Continue reading about “Cloverfield”: A brief review (w/spoilers at the end)

bfwebster on January 15th, 2008

…but this video of outtakes while anchoring in New Hampshire makes her downright likable: Doesn’t mean that I’m going to start watching CBS Evening News, though. I haven’t watched network evening news since David Brinkley retired or thereabouts. Hat tip to Suitably Flip. ..bruce w..

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Bruce Henderson on January 14th, 2008

As most of the readers here know, my team has been working with new technology to extract, refine and exploit information that is all around us. We have named that technology Boomerang and one example of it is an application called Hardtack. We are approaching the 1 year anniversary of full scale data gathering with [...]

Continue reading about Housing Price Decline – California Cities

bfwebster on January 14th, 2008

When a science fiction author postulates some bizarre astronomical or planetary configuration, hordes of fans (and not a few scientists) will tsk-tsk, saying that such a system could never possibly exist. And then there’s this: A quartet of stars has been discovered in an intimate cosmic dance, swirling around each other within a region about [...]

Continue reading about Stranger than fiction