Cox Crow

How to play audio/qcp files?

LazyWeb, don't fail me now! Fuck LazyWeb.

Q: What plays audio/qcp files?

A: An audio/qcp file is a Qualcomm PureVoice audio file. Qualcomm provides a PureVoice converter to turn the format into a WAV file, which can be played by pretty much anything.

The sound quality is awful, but what do you expect from a phone? jwz discusses using the converter to move sounds to your phone. You can attach a voice memo to an SMS message to get it off of your phone, but not if you make the audio first.

4:38:27 PM # Google It!

The Demand for Housing

What you want is not often what you can afford and what is available. I want to visit the moon, but I don't think that will happen soon enough. When we were looking for our house, the search took most of the Spring of 1999. The housing stock available was either too small, too expensive, in a neighborhood we didn't like, too heavily taxed, or just plan ugly.

CoolTown Studios discusses what the citizenry wants in a home. Survey says, they want to walk. Fannie Mae says a great neighborhood is more important than a great house. The market says that demand is so high that people buy anything they can get their hands on. There is not enough supply, and new homes are built large and far away. Or, as a commenter at Brad DeLong's writes,

Fact: the US population is growing by an estimated 3 million plus annually. In 8 boom states, growth is over 2% a year.

Fact: most of that growth is concentrated in a few dozen cities.

Fact: the only place to build in these high-growth regions is out in the boonies.

Fact: gas is getting more expensive by the day, commute times are skyrocketing, and everyone wants to live near scarce public transport (but no one wants "them" to build new stations or lines near existing housing stock).

Result: inner suburbs of big cities, especially those handful of places with good public transport, walkable streets, safety, amenities AND good schools are golden. Prices there will never go down, but the rate of increase will slow to the single digits, maybe even (shocker) below 5% in the near future.

Those are some numbers I'd like to validate before placing a bet.

3:46:50 PM # Google It!
categories: Place

Mortgage Blog

From the I-have-an-online-column-but-that's-not-trendy-enough Department we find that Holden Lewis, of Bankrate.com, writes Mortage Matters, which, in the course of providing helpful news and information about the mortgage market, somehow forgets to provide item-level URIs so I can pass the news on to my cronies. And bankrate engages in the odious practice of wrapping out-bound hyperlinks in bankrate frames.

However, there are two interesting pieces of note. First,

Economist Brad DeLong has a friend who is buying a house outside Manhattan. In his weblog, DeLong has one bit of advice: Get a fixed-rate mortgage, regardless of what Alan Greenspan says. (The Fed chief said a couple of months ago that more home buyers should consider adjustable-rate mortgages.)

In the comments responding to DeLong's posting is a passage that should be engraved in stone. Reader K Harris writes, "Are you considering an ARM because you can't afford the fixed-rate mortgage? Buy a cheaper house."

And secondly,

BUBBLE?: Who will suffer when the housing bubble pops? Not publicly held home builders, writes Daniel Gross in Slate. The nation's big home builders have learned lessons from the past and aren't building vast tracts of speculative housing. Instead, they start building when a buyer signs on the dotted line. So if a housing bubble pops, they won't be forced to sell tens of thousands of spec houses at reduced prices.

Why do I care about this bubble? Because we're putting our house on the market.

12:46:10 PM # Google It!