So Much For “New Hotness”

Nothing busts up a morning quite like discovering that your less-than-six-months-old Melitta coffeemaker has given up the ghost.

I suppose that’s what you get when you buy discontinued merchandise from Woot!, but the other stuff I’ve gotten there hasn’t had problems, so maybe it’s just bad luck.

I had some vague plans of heading over to a car dealership and starting the long process of looking for a new car, but instead a trip to buy a new coffeemaker is definitely in order. Yes, the coffeemaker has a warrantee, but I don’t want to wait several weeks to get it repaired. I want a coffeemaker now.

Is The Subprime Mortgage Market Screwed?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a real estate expert. But when browsing through the online WSJ today, I was struck by some of the data in their article about the ‘subprime’ mortgage market. Here’s a few tidbits:

– At least 20 subprime mortgage lending companies have either closed, been sold, and/or filed for bankruptcy.
– Almost 1.2 million foreclosure filings were reported in 2006, a 42% increase from 2005. That is a rate of one per every 92 US households.
– “Creative” subprime loans (such as interest-only and no-doc aka ‘liar’ loans) accounted for 47% of total loans issued in 2006. At the start of the decade, these types of loans were less than 2% of total mortgage loans.

As I said, I’m not an expert, but none of that looks like particularly good news to me. Even Ben Bernanke is starting to mention it as a possible concern.

One thing does make me wonder, though — this article seems to be treating the market as if each of these mortgages were acquired by individual households. Yet it’s also true that this recent real estate boom included a lot of speculation, and at least some of that speculation was financed via these same exotic subprime mortgages. (Casey Serin is a good example; he used a number of different subprime mortgages to unsuccessfully speculate on at least 6 properties). So — my question is — is the impact really going to be as broad as this article suggests, or will it be more localized?

I have no desire at all to ride out another recession so soon after that last one, so my hope is that things don’t turn out as badly as they could. Whether I’m indulging in wishful thinking or not … well, we’ll see.

Upgrade In Progress

The back-end upgrade from MT 2.64 to MT 3.34 went almost shockingly well. Nothing seems broken, all my old entries & comments are still here, and (what I was most worried about) my templates are all still working.

So far, so good. I’ll have to wait and see how the new comment spam system works as compared to my trusty old MT-Blacklist installation.

The next stage …. the front end. I’ll be playing around with my Rome travelogue to see how the new StyleCatcher plugin works as far as skinning the site goes. If I can’t get it to work & look good over there, I may leave things as-is here. It will depend on how much hacking I need to do to the CSS and templates to make my ancient, customized templates work properly.

UPDATE: 1:56PM
As I suspected, those old templates are causing trouble. I had to completely overwrite them to get StyleCatcher to work. As of now, a new template is up and running on the Rome blog, and I’m going to try to figure out how to add some of the old stuff back in.

UPDATE 2:30PM
I got Sitemeter back on the Rome blog but have not have the nerve to do any more significant hacking. Taking a break for a while. It’s a really lovely day and I don’t want to spend it all indoors.

UPDATE 6:25PM
The Rome blog’s in decent shape now. Once I got the hang of the template widget module system, getting some customization into the sidebar wasn’t tough at all. I tried a couple of different skins but for now I’m using a very basic one (Vicksburg Desert) that’s not too different in look and tone from my old one.

UPDATE: 8:30PM
I’ve widget-ized and updated the templates for the main site. And for good measure, I installed a 3rd party plug-in called “Promote This!” to add some social bookmarking links to my entries. I’m thoroughly impressed by how easy it’s all been — easy being a relative term, of course. What’s easy for a moderate geek like me would be pretty damn difficult for a non-techie, but then, that’s what Blogger and TypePad are for.

It’s a little weird not seeing my trusty old templates anymore, but now that I’ve got the version 3.x templates installed, I can skin to my heart’s content. Probably tomorrow, though. I think that’s enough work for one day.

Utterly Stupid Quote of the Day

I’m sure Echinde or some of the other, better bloggers than I out there will have a field day with this:

[Author Laura Session Stepp] writes a letter to mothers and daughters, in which she warns the girls: “Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn’t want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?”

I’ve only got two things to say in response.

First off, it’s outrageously sexist to suggest that an unmarried woman’s body is the property of her future husband, and that sexual activity before marriage devalues her assets. What rock has the author been hiding under?

Next, is that really the best argument she can come up with for why adolescents should delay sexual activity? If so, that’s pretty pathetic.

Kathy Dobie, the Washington Post’s reviewer of this book, had a good response:

It seems strange to have to state the obvious all over again: … one’s sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself.

It’s certainly not seen that way for men. A man who’s had a lot of sex partners is seen as sophisticated (James Bond, anyone?). A woman who’s had a lot of sex partners, on the other hand, is all too often seen as a slut.

And books like this one don’t help matters any.

UPDATE 3:10PM
As expected, Echinde has weighed in. Score 1 for my predictive ability. 🙂

TGIF

It’s been a long, busy week. Today was a gorgeous, warm, springlike day, though, which was a very nice way to wrap the week up.

And this is some very welcome news too:

The U.S. House of Representatives denounced President George W. Bush’s Iraq troop buildup on Friday in a symbolic challenge to his unpopular war strategy that is expected to lead to a mighty struggle over financing the extra troops.

The Democratic-led House voted 246-182 for a resolution that voices support for U.S. forces but opposes the Republican president’s decision to send 21,500 more troops to bolster security in Baghdad and violent Anbar province.

[snip]

The resolution passed with support of all but two of the House’s 233 Democrats and 17 of its 201 Republicans, many worried about their political fate should they stick with Bush. Polls say most Americans oppose adding troops in Iraq.

That’s a very nice way to start the weekend.

In other news, I am going to take advantage of the three-day weekend upcoming to try upgrading the blog to a more recent version of Movable Type. Three+ years on version 2.6x is long enough. With luck, all will go well and I’ll finally get some new features and a new look to the blog.

One possible outcome is that I utterly hose the site and get stuck starting from scratch, althought I dearly hope that’s not the case. Either way, if you stop by over the weekend and things look a little odd, that’s probably why.