Finally… after almost a month, I no longer have a terrible cold, sinus infection, bronchitis, nor cough. Hurray.

Unfortunately, my monitor isn’t feeling so well:

This is my personal monitor which I use at work (it can convert into a TV). Strangely, often times when I hard power it off (I have a motion sensor controlled surge protector), and then wake it back up, it crashes picking up the DVI signal from my dell.

Yes it crashes.

In this picture there should be a green power indicator next to the power button (the bar shaped button). But it’s not on, and yet the monitor is on. Sheesh.

Also, I’ve had a hell of a time correcting the color on it when it does work. Argh.

Oh well, can’t have everything I suppose.

I think this claim by Buca di Beppo is a bit exaggerated.

Running Out of Bubbles - New York Times

That’s why it’s so ominous to see signs that America’s housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble.

Some analysts still insist that housing prices aren’t out of line. But someone will always come up with reasons why seemingly absurd asset prices make sense. Remember “Dow 36,000″? Robert Shiller, who argued against such rationalizations and correctly called the stock bubble in his book “Irrational Exuberance,” has added an ominous analysis of the housing market to the new edition, and says the housing bubble “may be the biggest bubble in U.S. history”

One of my friends has said that ‘there’s no bigger sign that there’s a bubble than the fact that Dennis is thinking of buying real estate’

Great. Just great.

They’re phasing out the Subway Sub Club due to fraud? Good grief!

So a few weeks back, I posted a picture of what a smashing Friday afternoon looks like at one of the student hotspots at The Johns Hopkins Universty. You can check it out here.

If you recall, the photos showed that there was NO ONE outside! Well, I just found this photo on my phone, and it shows what some of the students were doing. Let’s take a look:

Of course! That’s what Hopkins students are doing. They’re at the library, with their laptops, playing arcade-style video games. Duh!

The County of Santa Clara - Finding Affordable Housing

Low-income is defined as 80% of the area median income. Housing and Urban Development has established median income to be $96,000 for a family of four, or $64,937.50 per person. The income limits are $33,600 (50% of median income) for very low-income and $20,150 (30% of median income) for extremely low-income.

So just to restate:

Median = $96,000 for a family of 4, and $64,937.50 for one.

Low income = $76,800 for a family of 4, and $51,950 for one.

Remember that the next time you think about moving to Silicon Valley for its “high paying” jobs.

I’m a pretty wary person. An Internet-saavy guy. Someone who is pretty well versed in all the phishing and identity theft schemes out in the wild.

So you can imagine the smirk when I took a glance at this e-mail that arrived at my inbox today:

HAH! Yeah right! Just another phishing attempt… right? I mean… come on - $xxx spent at google? Riiiight.

Until I noticed that it really did have the last 6 digits of my credit card. Hm. That’s hitting a bit close to home.

And then I scrolled down further to see the URL - suspecting that the tooltip would say “http://americanexpress.somewhereevil.ru” But instead, it really did have the right URL.

Hm. Well now this is getting pretty peculiar. I bet the toll free number is a secret ploy to have me ‘prove’ my identity, only so they can use my SSN, mother’s maiden name, and childhood imaginary friend to completely clone my identity. So I do a search on that phone number.

And it shows up on AmericanExpress.com.

Uh. Oh.

Ms Singh at American Express asks me if I made that charge (uh, no) and tells me they are going to cancel my card and issue me a new number. Effective. Now.

{sigh}

Great. This happened to me in 2002 as well. I got off a plane from Massachusetts and got a letter the next day telling me that I had made a number of suspicious charges in a mall in Pennsylvania. About $4k was spent at Victoria Secrets, a hotel, Bloomingdales, and pottery barn. While I was in-flight no less.

So that means that later this week, I’ll have to spend another 1241298414 hours telling all the vendors I deal with that I have a new credit card, and blah blah blah.

What fun.

If you read this blog, could you please please please link to it?

Here’s an HTML snippet for you to copy and paste to your page:

<a href="http://www.decheung.com">Dennis T Cheung</a>

Thanks.