Don't Quit Your Day Job…

Last year I emailed Len Penzo about doing a “paper vs. plastic?” post for one of his “Letters, I Get Letters” articles. Len, as you know, is a plastics guy at heart, but he loved the idea so he sent me something awesome – his band’s CD, “In Retrospect”. You see, Len is more than an awesome blogger, his talents run much deeper. He was in a band, The Relics, which released an album on Blind Dog Records back in 1995. He also had an awesome haircut, which I have evidence of in the article!

A couple of weeks back, we here at DQYDJ tried to get some Bay Area street cred with our screed on how Bay Area house prices make more sense than one might think (please read that article if you are genuinely interested in our model). After being informed by the readers on the Bay Area home site Burbed that our definition of the Inner Bay Area (the ‘Real Bay Area’) was too large, we’re back for another pass. Thanks to Burbed’s super-intelligent head editor Madhaus and a huge amount of comments we’re back with two calculators we’re titling “The Burbed and DQYDJ Real Bay Area Calculators!”. Since all Bay Areans hope for 7.2% annual home value returns (check it – doubling every ten years!), we hope everyone will enjoy this little demonstration of the absurd amounts of wealth that the place we call home generates.

Carnivals we entered, articles we liked, and for the first time, our entry to the Yakezie Challenge.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

Another week, more featured articles and links.

We’re on a roll recently, we cleaned up the front page of the site – let us know if you like the changes and our Twitter follower count is now up to six! (0 to 6 in a week is an infinite percentage increase.)

The San Francisco Bay Area, generally agreed to include the nine California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma, is one of the wealthiest regions in the United States. From its powerhouse engineering and business schools to the Venture Capital firms in Menlo Park and Palo Alto; from the financial buildings in San Francisco to the tech firms in Silicon Valley, the region has an immense capacity for generating wealth (and a history of massive booms and devastating busts).

There is a part of the Bay Area, which I’ll call the Inner Bay (although I know it is sometimes called the “Real Bay Area”) which has an especially concentrated amount of wealth. That wealth is reflected in home prices which are among the top in the nation. In the Inner Bay, consisting of Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara County, it’s not unheard of for houses around 1,000 square feet to sell for close to a million dollars (or more, in places like Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos and Palo Alto).

Don’t Quit Your Day Job… is now on Twitter, check us out by clicking this link or the slick icon in the subscribe section. Special thanks to Bret at Hope to Prosper for being our first follower! For the record, the first user DQYDJ followed is Nelson at Financial Uproar. Congratulations, or whatever superlative normally goes with Twitter accomplishments. To the rest of our readers, there is still time to grab one of the other milestone spots like 1,000th reader – or 10th…

Weeks and links for the week – including an editor’s pick.

What, am I crazy? Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts is probably a doubtful start for the rest of the 2011 season, and perhaps has made his last start of his Colts career (The Colts would owe Manning $28 million if they exercised his contract for another year at the end of 2011 – crazy to think about). He is also due to make at a minimum $23.4 million this year – $20 million as a signing bonus for his new contract and $3.4 million in guaranteed salary. Luckily I left myself an out – the problem with painting every sports contract with the “overpaid” brush is there is an army of athletes who will never touch the salaries which make us do a double take. As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, “Let us accustom ourselves, then, not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen.”This article requires a special shout-out to Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar who planted the seed – sorry I waited until the third week of NCAA football to write this!

My ironic suggestion for cognitive dissonance in two New York Times articles was hosted in yesterday’s Best of the Web Today (print edition today) – a daily column on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Page.