Month: September 2015

Oh, the stock market and emotion

Carl Setzer

Was just reading a lending market update which included a note about the puzzling behavior of the stock market last week. Faced with a number of positive economic indicators, the market sold off pretty heavily. Well, with my time at Fortune 500s, I’ve seen this before. I learned a long-time ago that Wall Street, the stock-markets and prices of such things is driven, on a day-to-day basis primarily by emotion. This also feeds into the quarter by quarter mentality of most stock valuation. Time and time again, in most markets, it’s those with long-term views and understanding that do well. This is true in real estate as well. If you can shift your view out 5, 10, 20 years in the future, you can escape the  variability of these emotionally based fluctuations.

More people need to learn the beauty of bullet points and the glorious application of brevity.

Carl Setzer

So, just got another 10 page email “summarizing” updates made to one of the websites I work out of. This is just insane. Only geeks like me read that much “summary”. Well, folks like me and attorneys. I think more people need to learn the beauty of bullet points and the glorious application of brevity. Really. Clear, concise communications are, really, a beautiful thing. If nothing else, they respect their audience’s time. But, more to the point, they also respect intelligence. Reading through voluminous text is wearying.

Anyway, bullet point the updates then link to supplementals.

 

Site Updates

Carl Setzer

I wasn’t very happy with the layout and design of this site lately. After spending some time perusing the mind-blowing array of themes (it’s one of the things I love about the WordPress ecosystem: the huge number of options available), I opted for this new one: Catch Responsive. Looks cleaner and more elegant, to me at least.

Anyway, it took me some time and thoughtful planning, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Capitalist Based Issues with Tech Tools

Carl Setzer

I hate, hate, hate feeling beholden to one entity. That feeling of helplessness; ugh! When it comes to tech tools for the business world, Microsoft and Adobe created great tools. However we’re stuck with whatever price they want charge. Take a look at the current shift to a subscription model.  Anyway, I feel a need to find alternatives. I like the thought of open source as well. Software built free of the constrains of corporate agenda. Or, more specifically, the agenda of ONE specific company. Competition is a key element for capitalism to be successful. Breaking free from proprietary technologies is important. Then we’re paying for superior quality and/or innovation, not just to maintain access to our files.

Open-source has some challenges. Many of the tools are hardly “plug-and-play”, and pretty much inaccessible to the average user. Compiling code is outside the skill-set of many users, even power-users. If the goal is to facilitate wholesale adoption, these issues must be dealt with.

So I’ve been building out a list of open-based tools. I’ve tried to find ones that are ready to go for the average user (come as a .exe that you can install like any software you’d buy at Costco or Office Depot/Max/Staples). Hopefully, we can slowly build a suite of affordable yet innovative tools, creating a more accessible marketplace. An ambitious goal, perhaps.

 

The Lovely Town Of Sultan

Carl Setzer

Good ol’ Sultan, butted up against the edge of the Cascades. I spent many a summer’s day/night up by Spada Lake and making a general nuisance of myself in the Sultan Basin.  Fortunately, my friends and I were able to avoid annoying too many folks and that the selfie hadn’t been invented yet.

This little town off of Highway 2 came up in conversation yesterday. A friend was showing properties out there and was wondering “how the market was doing there?”. Well, I decided to take a dive.

Well, there are fewer properties on the market now than there were a year ago (40 in 2014 vs 34 in 2015).  But that’s only part of the story. Around this time in 2014, there was a little less than 4 months of inventory, now there about 2. Properties are selling faster, much faster. Perhaps the biggest piece, though, is the median sales price, which has risen from $172,500 last year to $229,950; a 33% increase. This for a small town of 4,750 about 40 miles north east of Seattle.

So, my friends, the market is good.

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HOV to HNWI Lanes

Carl Setzer

I have misgivings about shifting 405’s HOV lanes to the premium priced lanes. I’ve taken to calling them HNWI (High Net Worth Individual) lanes. Maybe it just offends my democratic (please note the lower case “d”) values. But the purpose of the lanes was to encourage more carpooling. Is this change acknowledging failure of this idea? Or just a drive to increase the state coffers? Yes, this has activated my cynicism system.

Actually, as I think through it, perhaps this is an effective new direction. Those with High Occupancy Vehicles still get to ride in these lanes for free. Maybe this will encourage more combining of forces. Maybe. Anyway, Seattle’s high density traffic issues are only going to grow. We need to get more people out of their cars unless we want to emulate Los Angeles. For me, there’s a resounding “no thanks”. Personally, I wish we’d embraced the original Sound Transit plan, with its aggressive rail system. But we couldn’t get past the price tag. And here we are. Here we are.

Driving Past Naked People – An Update On A Weekend

Carl Setzer

My weekend was quite calm for a change. Spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the house and watching movies. Finally got to see Age of Ultron (on the Apple TV).

Sunday was the most eventful. Went to pick up one of my son’s friends, with the plan to then head to the Edmonds Car Show.  As he wasn’t feeling up to going out, and then starting to rain, my son and I opted to just drive home and chillax (as the kids say).  On our way home, I chose to drive through Woodway and, right about here,  there was a middle-aged fellow jogging down the street dressed with only a few leaves held carefully over his nether regions.

Such causes me to wonder about stories. How does someone end up in a state of undress, in public, running down the street in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in the region? One does wonder. And what might the exchange have been when he got to chat with Edmond’s finest (two cars passed me heading in his direction).

Otherwise, a quiet and calm weekend in Edmonds by the Bay. Bummed I missed the Car Show, and could’ve passed on the “other” show, but it’s a great little town.

Lynnwood Traffic Work – 68th by Edmonds Community College

Carl Setzer
City of Lynnwood Logo

If you’ve been anywhere near the community college, you’ve seen the massive re-do of the traffic flow. I’m so glad to see the nasty bottle-neck that was 68th & 208th taken care of. I think the roundabout at 204th & 68th, with the new intersection at 204th & highway 99, will really help with the traffic flow of the area. The whole project is nearly complete, so the worst of the disruption should be past.

Time Stand Still, Rush and Earworm Songs

Carl Setzer

Rush’s Time Stand Still has been on earworm for me all day. Not complaining, to be clear; love the song. Perhaps my subconscious grabs ahold of it as my son moves into Middle School; capturing a bit of my zeitgeist? Eh…

Their musicality deeply resonates with me. When I studied bass, Geddy Lee’s skills blew my mind. As I learned drums, Peart’s drumming amazed me. And this song had the amazing Aimee Mann singing the back-up vocals. A major score, musically, that only a group with Rush’s stature could’ve pulled off. {Bias acknowledgement: Ms. Mann was a major musician crush of mine.}

I loved this song from when it first hit the airwaves. This time of my life was one of great musical and artistic expansion. Rush made it’s way into my life around the same time as the B-52s, Tangerine Dream and the Rocky Horror soundtrack. Yeah, I’d heard of Rush before, but I hadn’t broke free of the cliquish confines of early youth. Thus, I didn’t “like” them. But I came to love them as my awareness expanded.

This this musical expansion and awareness came through many of my friends, mainly from the Cascades drum corps. When I marched drum-line, we offered a faux-prayer to Neil Peart: “oh Neil, who dwealth in Canada, let us not sucketh”. Or something like that. The 80s drum-line idolized Neil, like the horn-line idolized Maynard Ferguson.  Oh, the memories! Makes me want to command “Time, Stand Still…”