Maison Fleury

I have been studying a new industry lately, it is called Home Automation or Domotics in Europe. It is really a fancy name to describe the age old problem of "why can't my mom operate my remote". Every self respecting geek has one day felt the urge to program his or her house. Home Automation in the field is lights, AV, AC, Security. Today it is a bit of an expensive hobby, even downright elitist in some cases, but the technology is rapidly democratizing, due to Wifi, Commodity software/hardware, the iPhone and the housing crisis. What started for me as an infatuation with the iPhone as a universal remote (I built a prototype on Linux with Appcelerator to command comcast) has evolved into a full blown affair with an open community that congregates over at www.openremote.org . The community is fun. Turns out HA is one of those things like sports, you can discuss it with pretty much anyone and they have thought about it. Those that want to participate in OpenRemote see t...

We are moving to Madrid in six days and I am excited. I like moving, I like not knowing exactly what is coming up. Growing up I moved a dozen times and my parents must have moved 20 times. There is this sense that you don't really know what your life is going to be like in a couple of weeks. I like figuring new things out. For me it is also the return to big city life in Europe. For Nathalie it is a couple of years outside of the country, living an urban life (we will be in the center of the Retiro), she has liked living in the center of Paris, and a welcomed break from the routine of Atlanta. For the kids it may be a unique opportunity to be immersed in both languages, French and Spanish. We are both tri-lingual, and would love for the kids to be as well. So we are now in the maelstrom of moving, with well, movers moving stuff and our place emptying up. We have gone through layers of memorabilia in the house. Taking strolls down memory lane as we went. There is a sense of a...

Via Yves Smith's, Evans Pritchard from the Telegraph outlines how, in a funny twist of fate, the american financial system depends on the good will of its past ideological enemies: china, russia and the petro-states. Basically the analysis goes like this: the subprime mortgage crisis is morphing into a credit crisis, that is threatening to reach the US Treasury level. We have a full-blown wage-price inflation in emerging economies, which combined with the continued slide of the dollar, would make US Treasuries less attractive to these foreign investors. Flight to safety be damned, the dollar and foreign inflation will give it the coup de grace. Problem is, a large chunk of that debt is usually funded from abroad. Roughly $1.5 trillion of Fannie and Freddie AAA-rated debt - as well as other US "government-sponsored enterprises" - is now in foreign hands. The great unknown is whether foreign patience will snap as losses mount and the dollar slides. Hiroshi Watana...

Another apocalyptic day just passed in the market and another one just like it is shaping tomorrow. "Terrifying day of trading" says John Authers of the FT and the coverage is that the bailing out of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, who insure half of the mortgages of the US, is not enough to calm the markets. From the FT The US Treasury’s plan to bolster the two mortgage giants with extra liquidity and the pledge to buy a stake if needed, announced on Sunday, helped to steady the nerves of bond investors who queued up to buy Freddie debt. But equity investors remained unsettled amid concerns that the two companies, which guarantee $5,300bn in mortgages – almost half the US home loans market – were still vulnerable. Fannie and Freddie shares saw early gains wiped out and ended 7.6 per cent and 8.4 per cent lower, respectively. The equity gets wiped out but the debt remains attractive because it is guaranteed by tax-payers. The spread is 200 bips and the risk is nil? I have a morb...

The most ignominious manifestation of the credit crisis has got to be this news tip from the FT (via Fintag). Bonus fears keep divorce lawyers busy Now that the bonuses are evaporating there is no reason for disgruntled wives to stick around they high strung financier husbands. no ticky, no laundry!

Oil and the cost of transport. A thought provoking article from the Telegraph (Via Yves Smith). Oil price shock means China is at risk of blowing up By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 2:00am BST 08/07/2008 Have your say Read comments The great oil shock of 2008 is bad enough for us. It poses a mortal threat to the whole economic strategy of emerging Asia. Oil price shock means China is at risk of blowing up An oil rig in China's Bohai Sea The manufacturing revolution of China and her satellites has been built on cheap transport over the past decade. At a stroke, the trade model looks obsolete. No surprise that Shanghai's bourse is down 56pc since October, one of the world's most spectacular bear markets in half a century. The bad news is that this adds inflationary pressures. China was a net exporter of cheap goods, and that is gone, the products are now expensive. The good news it that some of those jobs are coming back onshore in US and EU.

Post Script Two and a half glasses of champagne (Veuve Cliquot), one half bag of Milano cookies later... My surgery, a medically recommended procedure being related to the end-of-the-line as far as my (biologically) procreative life goes, offers in my choice of surgeon, a hilarious intersection in his clientele, divided between women like me with real medical conditions, and women whose procedures are purely elective and cosmetic. In my brief interaction with The Male Surgeon, whose tendency not listen to me and then interrupt me with pre-prepared answers that have little to do with anything I have said, has convinced me that, despite his superior anatomical knowledge of women, the only way he really likes dealing with them is completely knocked out under general anesthesia. Supposedly he's a wizard with trocars and laparoscope, which is more important than personality, under the circumstances. I was supposed to be partially conscious for part of the procedure, but "freaked ou...