My new landlord is a real estate guy. He says that Silicon Valley's market has now turned from a sellers' market into a buyer's market. All without interest rates going up. Can we be at the top of a ridiculous real estate bubble that's about to pop? First we need to see what happens when interest rates start going up. That probably won't be for another quarter since the market is on its way back down.

Well, I guess the market is sensing just what I'm seeing here in my job. Sales are soft. The economy isn't strong. Are we going to hit a "double dip" recession? I guess I'm lucky I didn't buy any stock yet. Bob Brinker.com says we're getting closer to a "Mother of All Buying Opportunities" to get back in the market (ie, close to the bottom).

Anyway, Silicon Valley's housing market is very overheated. Prices for a 3 bath/1 bedroom, 1000-square-foot, old house in a median neighborhood are well over $400,000 and that's plain ridiculous for a market that is seeing stock-market lows. It'll be interesting to see how far down prices go. I imagine they could drop 15% if interest rates go up. In the meantime, though, my landlord says that there's a lot of inventory on the market right now and the pricing pressure is on its way down. That's a good thing for anyone who wants to stay in the valley and hasn't bought a house yet. Yes, I'm in that group.

Thanks to everyone who gave me font feedback over the weekend. I'll definitely be tweaking my templates more this week. I'm seeing the DIV troubles too, in IE6. On my high-resolution screen, if I mouse over the links over on the right, the bottom part of my page disappears. Very strange but I am reading up on the issue and it seems that other people are running into display troubles with IE6 and DIVS too.

Hey, Microsoft named me an IE6 Most Valuable Professional for another year. Cool. I guess I should report these bugs. For code that validates, you'd think IE6 (I have the service pack 1 version loaded) should do better. Guess we'll have to wait to get standards compliance. Sigh.

On the other hand, the DIVs are weird and can be made simpler. I see some sites that do some really nice stuff without nesting DIVs like my site is currently doing. I'll fix these issues soon. In the meantime, you might have to click refresh to see my content.

What else is happening? Oh, I see Jon Udell says that Microsoft isn't strong in the weblog world. I agree, but it's not as dire as he makes it out to be. There are at least a dozen .NET Weblogs now. My Windows XP Weblog doesn't show up in the search he did (although I haven't been keeping that up to date since there are far better places to learn tips for XP lately).

I hate the name "blogs" though, which might be why I don't show up there.

By the way, I do see lots of Microsoft participation in .NET-oriented newsgroups and mailing lists and appreciate that John is one of the people forcing his employees to stay engaged with Microsoft's customers. Imagine if every employee were forced to get involved with Microsoft's customers in some way?