Our real estate agent in L.A. (a long-time friend) says the house we sold there on Jan. 28 2007, based on current comparables, would now be going for 15-20% less - a quite steep decline in just 3 1/2 months.

He’s a savvy broker/investor in the San Fernando Valley who been at it for twenty five years and says looks like we got out at just the right moment. Or maybe it was the last possible good moment.

Right after we sold is when the subprime debacle hit…

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Tony Blair resigns today.

Stop the War UK will be sponsoring the opening festivities today at Downing Street.

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MetaEfficient has the details and a video on the spectacular solar tower in Spain. It’s already producing enough power for 6,000 homes and may be able to do ten times that soon.

Spain also mandates that new homes have solar powered hot water and non residential buildings must have at least some solar power. Wow, a government that gets it.

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Blog Herald has an excellent piece on how to choose a strong password, with lots of references and links. Good stuff.

Passwords of at least eight characters using mixed case are considered strong. While password cracking programs can try thousands of passwords per second, they need the encrypted file the password is in to do so. So, if it’s, say, a bank account password, that file will be on the bank’s highly protected servers and not available to run a crack against. But a bank account password should be extremely strong anyway, and not like any other password you use.

Most passwords are gotten via phishing or because the person did something silly like having all their passwords in a text file on a laptop, and the laptop got stolen. Also, important passwords should never be saved by your browser, because anyone with access to that computer may be able to access the sites.

I use the open source PasswordSafe to store passwords. It was originally developed by security expert Bruce Schneier at Counterpane Lab, is easy to use, highly portable across computers, and secure.

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