September 2008 – Page 3 – Gavinsblog.com

Builders' loan plan to lure buyers

RTE reports that builders are offering interest free loans to lure buyers. They must be getting desperate.

A simpler way to lure buyers would be to drop the over-inflated prices. The advantage of these loan offers is that it gets buyers in at the current property price now, rather than at a lower price later.

I think anyone who falls for this latest ploy by builders is crazy.

That is unless the Government try to prop up the property market in the forthcoming budget. Depending on the measures introduced, it may have the effect of stalling property price declines. I feel though that any effort to interfere in the market will only have a short-term effect, and more like prices will continue to fall.

Palin's speech in Wordle

Twitter testing

I’ve been playing with Twitter for the past few days. It’s certainly an interesting tool, and one that I have been enjoying.

You can follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/gavinsblog

Wordle in newspapers

Well the Irish Examiner, after much pitching by me, was brave enough to implement wordle usage. I reckon it might be the first Irish paper to use it.

I think it is effective. It draws the readers eyes in, and gives a sense of what the speech itself contains. What do people think? Is it something that could be used more in other contexts?

Tools of the trade?

I have assembled some of the tools I will be testing over the coming months. Here they are:

Well, except the MacBook Pro, which has been the best laptop I have ever had, and is now over one year old. Besides it is an EeePC 901 (12Gb solid state, 8GB SD, 1.6Ghz Atom, webcam, mic, Windows XP), a Canon 20D (extra battery pack/grip, 4GB CF), and a Flip Ultra.

The Flip Ultra has been interesting. The testing has shown that the mic is incredibly receptive, and the video quality is higher than I expected. I uploaded test footage to my YouTube account and it did degrade slightly, but it was still perfectly watchable.

I am taking a leaf out of the book of Jeff Jarvis, Michael Rosenblum and Howard Owens. Is this the kit all journalists should have? Maybe, maybe not. The DSLR is clunky, a point and shoot might be better. Better yet might be a new Nikon D90, which is a DSLR and a HD video recorder.

But for now I will make do with what I have, and see how effective they are as tools of the trade. Georgia should provide an interesting test bed if nothing else.

Gustav from space

I took a screen grab of the satellite images of Gustav as it nears the Louisiana coast. Man it’s huge. If you use Google Earth’s measurement tool, it is about 1,000km by 900km in size. The green is the radar signal.

In this picture I measured the circumference of the main part of the storm, it came at over 3,000km.

On this picture you can see the distance between the two red marks, it’s almost 1,000km.

And here it is without the labels…

Hi Stumbleupon..

I seem to be getting deluged with people visiting from StumbleUpon… I’m not sure why though?

Welcome to the blog and feel free to browse around. 🙂