Boise

The Idaho Statesman ran a story yesterday asking suggesting the housing sales numbers might indicate a bottoming out of the market. There are several problems with this sort of story. From start to finish the story bears a strong resemblance to the blogs about Boise real estate which have been trumpeting the return of a healthy market for at least as many months as the market has been in a spiral.

Though it wasn't in blog form I remember being told nearly nine months ago by an agent how prices had "recovered" and sellers were getting asking price and higher for their places. The message then was that we needed to act quickly and buy now. Oddly those same houses, still on the market, are now priced lower than they were last winter. In the last month Boise has been struck by the loss of several hundred jobs. Although some of those jobs will actually be cut over the next few months it is still a blow to confidence in consumer's minds. Yet the article in the paper would have you believe that a 3% decrease in available housing is a significant indicator of a bottom in the market.

An Apple store is so very desperately needed in Boise. Please Apple if you're listening don't leave us stuck between long drives and our unsatisfactory local choices. Sure we have Boise Mac Life which looks like a great store. When you look a little deeper, though, the advice has been suspect (should one really wait six months to start using Leopard?), the prices are inflated (the "cash discount" price is the list price and the list price shown is higher) and the service leaves us wanting.

Earlier this week we returned home and the MacBook hard drive promptly died. When it came back today it had the wrong OS on it -- a problem I've never encountered with Apple's service directly. Sure it had a nice embroidered Marware keyboard cover, but the time I'm left looking at that waiting to reinstall the operating system on a blank disk just so I can then do the file recovery is making me not like it so much. (Though I sense there are some Drupal keyboard covers in the offing).