earlier today Jim Home pointed me to upcoming.org, a public events server. i'd heard of it before but hadn't motivated to look at it. i guess the universe finally decided it was the appropriate time, because just yesterday the site got a bunch of new features that really make it exciting, such as tagging, a REST-style API, and reminders via email and SMS.

i've subscribed iCal to "my upcoming events" at upcoming, refreshing it hourly, and i've subscribed to several of the metros' RSS feeds (San Francisco, SF Bay Area, SF East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley). when a new event is posted, i see it in NetNewsWire. if i want to go to it, i hit the right arrow and it opens upcoming. i mark that i'm going to the event, and within an hour, it's in iCal. very very cool stuff.

Jon Udell had some comments about upcoming a week or so ago. the service does seem to be sparsely populated in certain areas, but i'm lucky that SF itself is booming. and if each of my friends entered one event a month, it would be bursting at the seams. and i'd be able to subscribe to "my friends' events" in iCal or RSS as well, which would give us that big group calendar we've wanted for so long.

i was just saying a couple days ago that i wish SFist would follow Gothamist's lead and publish comprehensive show listings every week (or at least more often than they do now). i bet an integration with upcoming.org using its API would make such a thing much more likely.

dear Internet: little of note has happened since i last checked in with you. tonight i finished a really long book and forgot to go see a rock show. also i had a brownie sundae at Fentons. yum.

the last several weeks have really flown by. i had forgotten how drastically my life changes when i have a fulfilling job. i work very intense 50 hr weeks and am too beat in the evenings to party like i do when i'm unemployed. i barely have the energy even to go out to movies anymore. and with my personal trainer destroying me every Wed and Fri afternoon (chick had me do 80 squat reps in 3 mins yesterday), i am often too sore to do anything other than lay around and read or watch Tivo. i've even lost all motivation to work on Warhorn. i know from experience that sooner or later i will adjust and become productive again, but for right now i'm a big blob just taking up space. i'm pretty ok with that.

oh, one interesting thing: as i mentioned recently, every time i am in a room with Mitch Kapor he is talking about del.icio.us and Flickr. so this week i finally got around to checking them out. Flickr is cute and all, but i don't really do the photo thing, so i only spent a few minutes with it. del.icio.us on the other hand is pretty awesome, and i found a great use for it right off the bat. i regularly read around a hundred RSS feeds on three different computers. with sync features still to come in NetNewsWire, it's hard to switch between those machines and remember which URLs i want to save to read in detail later. each machine usually has a bunch of different links saved on the desktop. but now i use Foxylicious to post them to del.icio.us and tag them with "unread". i always have a tab open to my unread tag page, so i can quickly select something to read while i'm waiting for code to compile. nice! tho since my dual 1.8ghz G5 showed up, code compiles pretty much at the speed of light, so now i have to explicitly set aside time to read, heh.

work has been keeping me awfully busy lately. i have been skipping meals and not checking in with friends. that's what happens when i get lucky with a super interesting project (for those keeping score, i am integrating Spring, Acegi Security, and Jackrabbit to create a secure calendar and sharing server). the world rushes by whilst i geek. i ordered a dual Power Mac G5 and a 23" HP dual input display for the home office earlier this week, so i predict i won't be coming up for air for some time, not without some help at least. reach out, my friends, and make me be social!

several people at work are heading off to PyCon next week. Mitch talked at yesterday's staff meeting about some of the interesting stuff at ETech. apparently they talked a lot about del.icio.us and Flickr, neither of which i've used yet, tho both are making people shake wildly and foam at the mouth. anyway, it all makes me fondly recall the late 90s when i was on the conference circuit, getting drunk with the modperl guys and struggling vainly to keep up in the perlguts and perlthreads sessions. OSAF will send me to one or two conferences this year - in fact i think i'm going to be on a CalDAV panel at OSCon in August. what are the best cons for Java web guys?

golly, if i needed any more reason to stop thinking about buying in SF, here it is.

update: i asked a friend who's a loan broker for comments on this essay. here's what he had to say:

Interesting read, but I see many major flaws.

The drop in sales was compared between December and January. This Patrick guy compared sales from this past summer to January to paint an even bleaker picture. Home sales are slowest in the winter months. That has been true in the real estate market forever. What he failed to note was that this January was still the 7th best January in terms of sales for all of recorded US history.

Also, regarding the drop in the Median price of homes, that is accounted more by the increase of less expensive homes rather than the drop in larger value homes.

However... San Francisco is still overpriced and will see a correction. There won't be a big pop like the dot com stock bubble, but SF and parts of the peninsula/south bay will take a hit in housing prices. However, certain places (like parts of Oakland) are still bargains. I don't recommend buying in SF unless you really want to.

The lack of sales will just mean that home prices will begin to taper off and not increase in value as much as it has in the past few years. Those that sell in such a market will lose money. Those that hold on to the property will recoup any possible loss and make money when values start to rise again in a few years (which it always will).

The guy who wrote this article seems somewhat embittered... some of the assertions he makes are flat out wrong. He states that the median house price in the Bay Area is $910,000. A quick google search will reveal that the current median value of homes as of 2005 is $556,000 (San Francisco's Median is $713,000) [SFGate]. Getting a simple fact like that wrong calls into question the rest of the numbers used in the article.

Like a great number of demagogues, this guy mixes some truth with a lot of lies to prove his point.

Bottom line, certain housing markets nationwide are overpriced and will probably see a correction. To say that this holds true for every location (or even the entire Bay Area) is just plain false.

Tim Bray recently blogged about moving his music collection from CD to hard disk. yeah, most of us have been talking about this for a while. i myself have ripped my entire 800+ cd collection twice already and, having lost both of the previous disks (one failed without backup and the other is still in Australia), am doing it again.

what's interesting about Tim's discussion is that, unlike most of us, he considers himself an audiophile. he presumably spends lots of money on expensive home stereo equipment to enjoy his hobby, and he doesn't want the playback technology cutting into the quality of sound. apparently the most worrisome part of the process is the digital-to-analog conversion, and he's done some research into the options at a range of prices, narrowing them down to the following three: 1) Mac Mini USB to external digital-analog converter (DAC) attached to stereo; 2) Airport Express to external DAC; 3) Squeezebox (which has a built-in DAC or can talk to an external one).

now, i've used both Squeezebox and Airport Express (AE in my living room, Squeezebox in my kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom), but i've never used a DAC. and hey, let's face it, i rip my cds at 192 kbps, so i'm not exactly going for audiophile quality. but if i felt like it i could pay Slim Devices $1k to rip them losslessly, and it's satisfying to know that i could reuse the same gear, potentially only having to add a high quality DAC, in order to get really great sound out of my expensive stereo and speakers. not that i'm going to. but i could if i wanted to. is my point. i guess.

remember the ridiculous larp video with the guy running around yelling "lightning bolt! lightning bolt! sleep!"? well, somebody replaced the audio track with Bon Jovi's "Blaze of Glory". the absurd-o-meter hits 11. i thought i was over being embarrassed by gamer antics, but i guess not.

update: somebody else did it better, with a slayer soundtrack and some awesome special effects as well. keep em coming!

check out this gorgeous tarot deck. also, the catchiest tune i have heard in months.

i spent all week reading about JCR and Jackrabbit for work. we were originally planning to build our calendar server on top of Slide, but as i've given more thought to the server architecture, JCR has become much more appealing. the biggest hurdle to using Jackrabbit is that i really want something Spring-based. the guys who formed the Acegi WebDAV project have a similar goal, and we're talking about whether it makes more sense to somehow add Spring and Acegi Security support to Jackrabbit or to build new WebDAV/CalDAV and JCR implementations.

i have also spent the week looking for apartments in San Francisco. my apt hunting experience has been quite different this time than ever before (i have moved a total of 7 times since leaving college in 1996). usually i have great apt karma and find an amazing place within the first week (sometimes even the first day). not so this go round. i've been hearing from others that the majority of places on the market are shit, and now i'm experiencing that for myself. i'm trying to be patient, but if i haven't found something in the next few months, i will probably just suck it up and stick it out in Rockridge til next spring. rent is cheap, the neighborhood is quiet and pretty, and i can save lots of dough by not paying SF rent. but it means i will have to continue driving back and forth across the bay bridge every day. so mind numbing!

march looks like it's going to be extremely boring... and i'm very happy about that.