March was a very busy month, with Maggie’s Birthday and plenty of game-playing, erector set building, paper folding and microscope gazing. Please enjoy the photos in this month’s gallery.

Our son Joey loves paper crafts, everything from origami to paper airplanes. He’s at the point where he can follow instructions better the either of his parents (or at least me!) and is creating his own complex designs. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with paper airplanes. I taught him about pitch, yaw and roll, and how different control surfaces create planes with different flight characteristics. He’s created many designs, with different folds and cuts, and often writes down instructions to build them and documents his test flights. Recently, he brought this wonderful Jet Fighter design to me.

Here are a couple of extra shots of the Jet Fighter:

Here is an example of his documenting flight tests of a number of plane designs. The spiral describes whether roll was present and the arrows represent pitch.

We went a little crazy this month with art supplies, so in this month’s album you’ll find plenty of pictures of the kids (and Sarah) taking the art world by storm.

I’ve put up the gallery of family photos taken this month. There were a lot of cold days, but we got out when we could. (Check out the Saucer Sledding photos.) Here are the photos from this month.

Last week, our family’s Playstation 3 console’s blu-ray drive died. At first it stopped playing blu-ray discs, and we chalked it up to a scratched Netflix movie. (Do people play frisbee with these things?) Then it stopped playing DVDs and games. Things were seriously wrong.

We were left feeling a bit stranded. We bought the PS3 about nine months or so ago and we’d become dependent. After spending a little quality time on-line with Sony’s web site, I was able to report the problem and request service under warranty. I was worried that it wouldn’t be covered or that something would happen, but they have handled the problem wonderfully:

• By immediately sending us return shipping materials, which arrived this Monday.
• By prepaying for UPS Next Day Air service which allowed us to ship the broken unit out Wednesday and have it arrive at Sony’s Laredo Texas service center Thursday morning.
• By replacing our Playstation and sending it out today, Friday.

I am impressed. Now, ideally, I would have liked the machine not to have died and, ideally, I would want a new machine as opposed to the remanufactured one I’m bound to get, but the world is not a perfect place, right?

Perfection aside, I hope to have it in my hands early next week. Now let’s hope I can get all my purchased content from the Playstation Network up and working. That will be the real litmus test for superlative customer support.

As a result of some comments on my Facebook profile, I decided to look at the numbers behind Madison’s real estate market since 1990. Is there a bubble? I decided to look at the OFHEO’s House Price Calculator and use it to gather some data based on these assumptions:

• Use the Madison WI MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) – a census region including the city of Madison and three surrounding counties with a population of arround 550,000.
• Start with a home price of $100,000 in 1990.
• Record prices taken during the first quarter of every year from 1990 to 2008, as well as the most recent data point from the third quarter of 2008.

Here is the data charted with the red data series (axis on left) recording the house price and the blue data series (right axis) showing the Year-over-Year change in price (click on map for full-sized version):

It doesn’t look to me like much of a bubble formed, especially if you compare Madison with other areas of the country. Home prices averaged single digit percentage gains annually with the exception of 1995 and 2005. Gains slowed between 2005 and 2008, but were still positive. The final two data points, Q1 and Q3 2008, show a 2.5% loss. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues into Q4 2008.

Update (1/28/2009)

My wife asked me what a graph of a market with a bubble would look like compared to the one above. I decided to generate the same graph, with the same assumptions, except this time I used the data from the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottdale AZ MSA. I would characterize the price increase between 2004 to 2006 as a bubble. Notice the decrease from Q1 to Q3 2008, the last two data points. The house has lost almost $40K in value, a 12.6% drop in just six months. The bubble is deflating. Here is the graph (Click for full-sized version):

Sarah took the kids out today to play on the piles of snow around our apartment complex. The kids each have a new saucer for sledding that we picked up at the grocery store. Here is the album.

A large collection of photos from December 2008, including Joey’s sixth birthday and Christmas. And don’t forget the record-breaking amount of snow. Here is the album.

The photos from this month are a mixed bag, there’s some snow, of course, plus Thanksgiving and some high jinx with the new webcam. Here are the photos.

October is an interesting month weather-wise in Wisconsin. One day it’s warm and summer-like and several days later you find yourself in a snow shower. Here are some photos we took this past month.