"Year-to-year, new-home sales were 41% lower than the level in December 2006.'There is no sign of a bottom in any of these data,' said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. 'We think the downside for activity and prices remains considerable.'"
"The classic American midlife crisis has found a new outlet: garage-band rock ’n’ roll. Baby boomers across the country — mostly middle-aged dads who never quite outgrew an obsession with the music of their youth — are cranking up their amps and living their rock ’n’ roll fantasies."
Then the first tower fell. OK now it's serious... I started walking uptown. I knew the tunnels and bridges would be closed but hoped the ferry would be running. So I'm walking.... and walking because most roads are closed and the subways were shutdown. Seems I wasn't the only one with this idea, the longer I walked the more people seem to join me along the way. Where was the Pied Piper? There was an eerie unusual calm. Some stores even setup tables out front and poured cups of water for people passing by. There are some people that are still staring past us, downtown, frozen, as if waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Then I hear someone scream... I turn around and there the second tower is crumbling straight down. Like when you're watching one of those controlled explosions you see on TV all the time it just slipped down into a cloud of smoke. The spooky thing was that as it slipped down a part of the super structure seemed to stand up... like the bones of a fish... almost like the flesh falling away from a skeleton.
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Photo By RAY STUBBLEBINE/REUTERS - September 11, 2001 |
"at least 8000 people were in the general session audience and he expected nearly 10,000 to 15,000 people in the halls throughout the next few days."
When we started exploring frameworks years ago, we had big hopes for them. We thought the way to create software was to build high-level, domain-specific frameworks, and then you just customize them and reuse all the design that is codified into them. That was the reuse nirvana. Since then, I've gotten a little more realistic, because I have learned that it's hard to create highly reusable frameworks. They become complex, hard to learn, and even harder to maintain. I was on both the framework consumer and the framework producer side, and it can be hard from either perspective....patterns offer reuse in a way that is less risky than frameworks. Building a framework is high risk and a significant investment. Patterns allow you to reuse design ideas and concepts independent of concrete code.The first thing I did was scrap the framework and rework the architecture with the team using well worn patterns where appropriate. This has definitely helped us to improve the situation and get back on track for delivery of the product.
