Just a Librarian

Test

This is a test of embedding video.

posted by Thomas @ 11:16 AM 0 comments

What a difference a year makes....

These are pictures of my son. He was born 8 weeks early and spent the first 49 days of his life at the Mississippi Baptist Hospital NICU. The first pic is at 5 days old. The second at 1 year and 1 week. The third is a week later on Easter Sunday. Its been a hell of a year.

posted by Thomas @ 10:34 PM 0 comments

timeline video

another blogger posted the idea... find a video from when you were 18 and another 18 years before that... for me that means the year I was born so here they are:

1971 - Janis Joplin - Me and Bobby McGee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FMhnl0__Vo
1989 - Phil Collins - Another Day In Paradise http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftlYLcEW_I4

I could have chosen Milli Vanilli or Debbie Gibson from the 80's or the Osmonds from the 70's but it just wasn't in me....

posted by Thomas @ 10:30 AM 0 comments

Fun with live maps

I have another fun one from live maps. This is what happens when different zoom levels are from different years!


Vanishing Walmart (and others)

posted by Thomas @ 10:05 AM 0 comments

Train links

I have been playing with live maps lately. I found a couple interesting train pictures from here in Jackson. The first is a function of the way the pictures are made in passes. The same train shows up in the pictures twice. The second is a derailment in the local yard that just happened to get caught on film. Enjoy.

Same Train

Derailment

posted by Thomas @ 12:05 PM 0 comments

Eyes are starting to open.....

A new study was released today by ACORN. The Jackson Metro area ranks as #4 on their list of cities with high foreclosure exposure. Setting aside their racial analysis, there is another conclusion that can be drawn from their report: the housing market in this area is out of sorts. One of the reasons for the sheer volume of dangerous loans is the fact that housing prices have outstripped incomes in this area for a while. Very few affordable houses are on the market if you compare the price against the average incomes for the area. This forces people to make bad choices. You can either live in a substandard house in a bad part of town, or you can take out risky financing and hope you can cover the cost to provide a good life for your family. It is a fairly obvious choice for most people, even though the end result is your family may wind up on the streets when the nice house is foreclosed.

I got lucky and found a good house in my price range in a decent neighborhood. We made the offer when the house had been on the market for 7 days. Houses here that are actually priced at their value disappear in a week, maybe two. The houses that have been on the market for any length of time either have problems, or are badly overpriced. Either way there is no value for money in those houses. Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky. Some people have no choice but to buy overpriced houses because that is what is available here for the most part. This holds true in both the new market and the resale market. These houses are the ones being creatively financed. (FWIW I got a 30 year fixed conventional loan, and wouldn't have considered any of the other options.)

You should read the report as it sheds light on a big problem in this country (and quite frankly their racial argument is convincing as well).

posted by Thomas @ 3:54 PM 0 comments

A breath of fresh air

OK.. I know this is old news but I just heard it yesterday. Finally there is an official who is not toeing the party line when it comes to global warming. NASA administrator Michael Griffin may just be my new hero (ok not really). But it is refreshing to hear a discussion of global climate change which includes my position that while it may be occurring, and humans may even have something to do with the rate of change, that change is actually a normal process that we neither started nor can we stop. I have no problem with the notion that we need to do certain things like reduce emissions and plant more trees. I do have a problem with shutting down our economy and our lives to try to stop something that probably can't be stopped.

posted by Thomas @ 9:06 AM 1 comments

New Game Plan

OK, I am horrible at blogging. But I have decided to change how I approach this activity. Things related to my personal life are moving to MySpace. This space will mainly be my obscure rantings about the evils of the world, and I am going to try to get back involved with Mississippi Law Blog. Maybe knowing where I want to say things will help me actually say them....

posted by Thomas @ 2:25 AM 0 comments