Designing better futures

TypePad & SixApart have become Evil, so I am moving on

Hi folks,  ever lose the data on your hard drive and have that, "Oh nooooo!" feeling.  Well TypePad, my blog providing service delivers that same feeling.  Over the last 4 years, I have written and created hundreds of posts with images, files and multi-media.  My blog is now here.

My blog is pure unabashed digital narcissism with typos and bad grammar thrown in at no extra charge.  Well I have decided to move my blog to Wordpress as it lets me keep and control my data.  As it stands now my old images and files are mostly trapped within TypePad and SixAparts servers.  I can pay a few hundred bucks to have someone extract and install them for me elsewhere, but I don't think that is worthwhile at this point.  So SixApart via TypePad, will extract another $50 from me.

SixApart, the company that offers TypePad, doesn't offer a full data export of your TypePad blog.  This is most likely a half assed strategy at client retention.  It worked, I am retained and renewing for another year, with my new blog pointing to your servers to pull out my old images. 

My only hope is that a few people considering TypePad as new customers will avoid it like the plague. Typepad and SixApart represent the old world of keeping control of users data with a, "we can get away with it, so why not." mentality which I can in no way support.

Keeping customers by locking them in is evil.  You will find that if you have to do that to protect your business, you don't really have a business, you are milking a dead cash cow, good luck with that folks.

To the folks at TypePad: a few years ago I met your management's Sr. team Andrew Anker and have followed Anil Dash's blog.  Mena Trott seems smart and cool. You seemed like real nice folks, but have become evil, so I am out of here.  I have run a software firm and was responsible for 30 people and know it is hard but if you can't do the right thing, you should probably be doing something else for living.

For those wishing to follow Designing Better Futures go here www.gogerty.com  RSS FEED where I will be posting new typos and fresh grammatical horrors in a more open environment.

Miniature faking. Making the real less so.

 
In our hyper real 1080p-3D 50mega pixel quest for reality, we assume that things are more accurate with more resolution etc.  Laser TV is going to produce 90% of the colors the human eye percieves, your best technology today delivers about 30%. 

However reality can sometimes by too garish and gory so it gets edited, distorted or disappears.  Here is an interesting technique that makes the real world look safer and under control.  Fascinating stuff with a technique called Tilt-shifting and Miniature faking.  check out the video.  More images and video at Twisted Sifter. 

The video below combined with Lo-Fi  deep house music in the background just makes sense.   Aesthetics in the 17th-20th century vacillated between the romanticized naturalism of an idylic countryside and the modern urban focus on humanities progress. 

Perhaps the future aesthetics pendulum will swing between ultra-hi res composed purity vs. the gritty complex authenticity of nature.  No change really, just new mediums delivering old messages.  Miniature faking seems somewhere inbetween :)  Recommended full screen viewing and check out MockMoons other work, very talented

miniature city 2 - featuring vividblaze - from mockmoon on Vimeo.

Latest details on residential Manhattan Real Estate. Uh oh!

 
 
I will let the pictures do the talking, fiscal reality meets physical realty.  My opinions on why this is happening and how much farther it could go.

Price declines 10-18%, Sales Declines of $+6 billion, listing discounts increasing to greater than +10%, average days on the market increasing over 175 days, you get the picture and with Job losses increasing from 6-10% the median income catchment area is declining, so the justifiable value (median income/media value ratio) has even more pressure on it. 

 The neighborhood details are in the Prudential report, and remember the numbers may be goosed to be positive considering the source.   Download Manhattan_10YR_2009

 

 
 

Does my Sr. compensation ratio look big in this....

Anthropomorphizing things is an innate human trait.  Here is a comic from the Abstruse Goose comic site.  If you liked math and science in school, you will probably enjoy Abstruse goose.

Lifestyle Arbitrage of the day $5 million in New York vs. France

The average townhouse in New York is now $5m.  Example to the left.

Here is a chateau in the Loire Valley in France for $5m, sounds like a fixer upper, but maybe a good project to hide out with during the recession. 

Description: built in 1897 for a French Viscount by the architect Albert Thomas (1847-1907). Located in the most wooded part of the Loire Valley called the Sologne, 120 miles from Paris by motorway A10/A71.

Directly inspired by the grandeur of Versailles , the chateau overlooks the Sologne forests and its private park of 41 hectares (103 acres) in the French style. There is a 1 mile driveway, courtyard, terraced parterres and a formal basin with monumental statues. Excellent privacy and structural condition.
There is about 36,000 square feet of living space, partially renovated, habitable and decorated. Very high ceilings and huge spaces: hall of 1,700 square feet with monumental staircase, great drawing room of 1,800 square feet…etc

Symmetrical outbuildings with stables, orangery, chapel, gate house and further potential. Incredibly prestigious palace, now listed as Historic Monument (Grade 2). more pictures here

 Here is a guidebook on the chateaux lifestyle.
 

 

Source: For those shopping for Chateaux across europe.

Buy now before those pesky euro's and dollars get deflated away.

Reality hacking with Comedy at Ikea

Commercial space is designed for dedicated functions and proscribed roles and behavior codes as consumer or commercial actor (greeter/barista/ guard etc.).  Starbucks recognized the need for a social space and focused on making a comfortable 3rd place away from work and home.  Here is a Comedy shot on location secretly inside IKEA, it is called IKEA Heights.  It is funny because we have all been in IKEA and identify with bits of the physical narrative.  It is also funny, because it misuses the designed role of the shared social space, treating IKEA like a giant dollhouse/movie set. 

With the commercial property bubble bursting ever faster, creating uses for commercial spaces is needed more than ever and of course a sense of humor helps.

Ikea Heights - Episode 7 from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

Chanos on China & Krugman on Asia 1994 & USSR 1960

Arguably the world's most successful and well known short seller, Jim Chanos has some strong opinions on China's urban real estate bubble.  Regardless of your opinion on the matter, his debate and argument is worthwhile watching in regards to macro China.  In regards to China, I have deep concerns and am nervous about the global ramifications of a half awakened giant stumbling.

This video has poor audio and lasts an hour but provides insight into the thought process of short specialists thinking processes, a useful bit of education.

98% of the time the average Western person can ignore sovereign debt and the Chinese economies.  That may not be true in the near future. 

In the video Chanos says the best essay he has ever read on emerging markets is by Paul Krugman written in 1994 before the Thai Bahtulism etc. unfolded in 1997.  Regardless of your opinion on Krugman, his thoughts in this "The myth of Asia's Miracle, a fable" are worth weighing in the current context.  The opening of Krugman's paper:

Once upon a time, Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies. Although those economies were still substantially poorer and smaller than those of the West, the speed with which they had transformed themselves from peasant societies into industrial powerhouses, their continuing ability to achieve growth rates several times higher than the advanced nations, and their increasing ability to challenge or even surpass American and European technology in certain areas seemed to call into question the dominance not only of Western power but of Western ideology. The leaders of those nations did not share our faith in free markets or unlimited civil liberties. They asserted with increasing self-confidence that their system was superior: societies that accepted strong, even authoritarian governments and were willing to limit individual liberties in the interest of the common good, take charge of their economies, and sacrifice short-run consumer interests for the sake of long-run growth would eventually outperform the increasingly chaotic societies of the West. And a growing minority of Western intellectuals agreed.

The gap between Western and Eastern economic performance eventually became a political issue. The Democrats recaptured the White House under the leadership of a young, energetic new president who pledged to "get the country moving again--a pledge that, to him and his closest advisers, meant accelerating America's economic growth to meet the Eastern challenge.

The time, of course, was the early 1960s. The dynamic young president was John F. Kennedy. The technological feats that so alarmed the West were the launch of Sputnik and the early Soviet lead in space. And the rapidly growing Eastern economies were those of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.....read more

information is life: healthcare 2.0

I have a fraternity brother who is slowly losing his children to a rare neurodegenerative disease called Battens syndrome.  He and his wife are watching their 5 year old son fade before there eyes.  One of their twin daughters will go through the same process.  They are doing everything they can. 

If you know someone in such a situation here is a video explaining an amazing example of open source software for collaboration to discover better therapies and solutions.  This is insight into open medicine that lets everyone help is a fascinating example of well thought out design, information sharing and participation that may improve many lives.

 Imagine what will happen in the very near future when geneology sites with millions of people's profiles (see here) potentially start allowing the uploading and cross posting of raw DNA data while other build tools to study phenotypic expressions of genetic potentials.

The technology is here now and the cost points and pieces are all falling into place.  Open genomic posting and analysis in 3-5 years (800-1,200 days) will be an incredibly impactful business.