Greg In The Desert

• jfleck at inkstain » What a Housing Bubble Looks Like – Here’s what a housing bubble looks like. Housing prices. Red is Arizona, green is Nevada, blue is us here in New Mexico. The three states track together since the 1970s (off to the left of what’s displayed in this graph). Prices in Arizona and Nevada shoot up beginning around 2004, then collapse pretty dramatically. Click through for larger image. Data from St. Louis Fed.
• Little Tikes Cozy Coupe Tops U.S. Car Sales – Auto – FOXNews.com – The Cozy Coupe sold 457,000 units in 2008, topping the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. In the '90s, it outsold both the Accord and Ford Taurus.
• Lightyear Sunken Bath Episode 6 – Storage from Nothing – Most Arizona houses are slab on grade. This means that changing plumbing is challenging or expensive. Slab on Grade houses are laid out, and the plumbing, both waste and supply lines are buried in the ground before the slab is poured. You see some interesting bottom plates here. On the remodeling end, this means that you either get creative or you get to spend really large amounts of money time and noise to move things around. (Nothing screams remodeling to the neighbors like someone with a concrete slab saw in your bathroom.)
• The Official Site of Rio Rancho, NM – June 20th: Hazardous Waste – Saturday, June 20, 2009 Keep Rio Rancho Beautiful will hold a Pharmaceutical Take Back and Household Hazardous Waste Collection from 9am to 2pm at at the Santa Ana Star Event Center upper west parking lot. This event is for Rio Rancho Residents only, please remember to bring proof of residency, such as a drivers license with Rio Rancho address!
• Oprah responds to Newsweek cover story | TV, movie and music news | Current Affairs | EW.com – In a statement today, Oprah Winfrey responded to a Newsweek cover story which suggested that some of the non-traditional medical advice advocated on her show poses a danger to her legions of viewers
• Final release of Safari 4 tweaks interface from beta version | E-mail and Internet | MacUser | Macworld – The most controversial new feature of Safari 4 was the placement of tabs on the top of the Safari browser window instead of below the bookmarks bar. At first, I was against this new UI quirk, but the more I used the Safari 4 Beta the more I liked the placement of the tabs on top of the window. Sadly, in the shipping version of Safari 4 tabs have returned to their traditional place
• Wild horses victims of recession, too – The Denver Post – Wild horses are feeling the effects of recession, as federal authorities find fewer horse owners willing to take on extra animals.
  At a wild horse auction run by the Bureau of Land Management in Eagle Saturday, only 10 of 39 horses were adopted. Most went for the minimum bid of $125.
• McCullough-Price House – This 1938 Pueblo Revival style home was donated to the City by the Price-Propstra family, renovated and opened to the public in 2007. It is home to the Chandler Visitors Center and includes gallery, office and meeting spaces, plus a catering kitchen. The facility can be rented for intimate weddings and receptions, luncheons and banquets, meetings and seminars.
• Chandler cuts access to historic ‘38 home – Doors will be locked at Chandler's historic McCullough-Price House after June 30.

  The move comes two years after the city spent $850,000 to renovate the 1938 pueblo revival-style home near Chandler Fashion Center to open it to the public as a visitors center and museum.

  The building at 300 S. Chandler Village Drive will remain available for special events, tours and private-party rentals, city officials said. It didn't attract enough visitors to justify 40-hour-a-week staffing in tough economic times.

• Review: NeatDesk and NeatWorks for Mac | Unclutterer – A few weeks ago, the Neat company sent me their new NeatDesk for Mac scanner and its NeatWorks software to review. I have been a Fujitsu ScanSnap loyalist for the past two years, so I wasn’t super excited about doing the NeatDesk review. In fact, I tested one of their mobile scanners a year ago and was so disappointed with it that I didn’t even post the review to the site (why clutter up your time with an awful review?).

  To my surprise, however, I liked the NeatDesk for Mac. Specifically, I really liked the NeatWorks software. (If you buy the scanner, the software comes with it. The software also sells as a stand-alone product.)

• Two hospital projects stalled as Rio Rancho’s growth projections slip – New Mexico Business Weekly: – The announcements in May 2008 seemed to promise an embarrassment of riches – Rio Rancho would go from no hospitals to two by the end of 2010.

  Then the credit crisis froze the bond market, and by the end of the year, Presbyterian Healthcare Services’ plans were on hold. And today, although the joint hospital project of Legacy Hospital Partners Inc., of Plano, Texas, and the University of New Mexico Medical Group Inc. is not officially on hold, Legacy’s CEO is acknowledging a new reality.

• Lost in Space | Articles | Features | Fortean Times UK – What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.
• Mooning leads to mistrial in Willcox murder case – A Cochise County judge has declared a mistrial in a murder case because the defendant's brother dropped his pants, gestured and made threatening comments in the presence of jurors.
• Fish may actually feel pain and react to it much like humans | Science Blog – Fish don't make noises or contort their faces to show that it hurts when hooks are pulled from their mouths, but a Purdue University researcher believes they feel that pain all the same.
• The 50 Worst Cars of All Time – The 50 Worst Cars of All Time – TIME – On the 50th anniversary of the Ford Edsel, TIME and Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive critic and syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, look at the greatest lemons of the automotive industry
• Sony’s GPS-CS3K: Your Geotagging Best Friend… Mini-Review : Akihabara News .com – The Sony GPS-CS3K GPS tracker has a tiny display that operates in three modes: displays current coordinates in big letters, exact coordinates (not rounded values) in small letters, and the current date/time. It might take a few minutes to complete the initial positioning during the first boot after not using the device for some time.
  If the device loses a satellite it usually takes only a few seconds to re-calculate its position. The device can be placed in a pocket without any problems, it doesn't need a direct visual connection to a satellite.
• Above And Beyond: T-Mobile Provides iPhone Support Despite Not Offering iPhone – When a system update caused service failures and bugs in T-Mobile customers' unlocked iPhones, the users emailed T-Mobile to alert them to the issue. Even though T-Mobile doesn't offer the iPhone, they fixed the bugs and gave the users a service credit for the inconvenience.
• Narrow Side Yard Makeover! — Eden Makers Blog – I nominate “side yards” as some of the most under-exploited areas in the landscape! What a shame, especially when every square foot of real estate is valuable, even in a down economy. Small, narrow yards can be perplexing to some homeowners who don’t know which plants and trees work in a constricted space.
• Garden Center at the Pueblo of Santa Ana – The Santa Ana Garden Center is your source for native and xeric perennials, shrubs and trees. Our plants are the natural choice for landscaping. They have evolved over centuries to survive in our unique and varied climate and are suited for low water, poor soil and high altitudes. They can be used for rock gardens, windbreaks, natural hedges, barriers or erosion control. Other uses include wildlife habitat, food and medicine, or simply to enjoy.
• The Official Site of Rio Rancho, NM – Water Watch Program – The City of Rio Rancho participates in the Albuquerque metropolitan area WaterWatch Program. This program is part of the daily weathercast on all local news stations from April 1st through September 30th. The Water Conservation Office promotes the daily watering guide by following the day’s recommended ColorDrop (see below) as well as its own seasonal watering guide.

I’ve seen a new ski lift in the plans for the last few years at the Santa Fe Ski area. I wonder if this means that they actually built it over the summer. I look forward to a new lift but I believe in the rights of Native Americans. I don’t really know what the right answer is here.

The pueblo filed suit in August against the U.S. Forest Service, which had approved the expansion of the ski area. The ski company, which was not named as a defendant, recently intervened in the case.The pueblo contends the new lift will give skiers access to the tribe’s holiest shrines and locations, places where members conduct rituals and ceremonies that are necessary for the pueblo’s survival. Skiers presence in the area increases the risk that important shrines will be tampered with or destroyed the lawsuit says.

This week’s Photo Friday is “Complexity“. When leaving Cochiti Lake, we missed the turn off and ended up going thorough the pueblo. From the looks of it, this is the highest level of Complexity you get in this town. By the way, the old guy on the couch isn’t flipping me off.