Building a school for your kid

My son's current school is K-8. It has a project to expand to K-12 starting in the 2014-2015 school year. I just had a meeting with the principal to be and suffice it to say there is jumping up and down good news. The only down side is it is under embargo for the next few weeks. Still, it is a happy day.

Happy Morning

For the first time in, well, too long, I'm on the good side of 300 pounds.

Today is a good day.

Submitted citizenintelligence.org to dmoz

I love the Open Directory Project because pretty much every directory that matters will grab data loads from it. Why wouldn't they? It's free directory data. So whenever I need to register something I put it up there knowing that the domain will get known relatively quickly without me having to do a lot of work.

Sent some questions off to the FRB

Stephen Green's Math am Hard post got me to thinking so I popped off a few questions to the Federal Reserve Board to get details about what exactly is happening to the mortgage backed securities that are held on the books of the FRB.

Here's what I asked:

Goal: 

Working out what happens inside the mortgage backed securities that the FRB holds. Specifically, does anything material change when a mortgage that was bundled into an MBS is paid off via a refinance (same provider or different provider) or just a full pay out? 

1st Round Questions:

How many actual mortgages underly the MBS assets held on the books of the FRB? If this is not ordinarily tracked, that is an acceptable answer. 

If a mortgage is paid off in full and the property left unmortgaged (let's say someone wins the lottery and just pays it in full), what happens to the cash from that payoff? Do future revenues from the MBS get reduced? Are other mortgages bought to replace the lost revenue of interest payments? 

If a mortgage is paid off by a refinance, is there anything different that happens? Does the new mortgage roll into the same MBS?

Do refinance payoffs make the underlying MBS a better asset or a worse asset to be holding from the FRB's point of view? What makes it better or worse? 

Ancillary:

I would like contact information for specialist in the field that I can directly work with. 

Going mobile

Just loaded the blogger app on my iPad and I wanted to test it out. This is the resulting post.

www.citizenintelligence.org

I've been working on the idea of updating citizen oversight of the government so that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time and by most regular people. It's been an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for years. I don't care if you're right left or straight up the middle politically, democratic oversight has not entered the 21st century and most people would agree that it's fundamentally broken in a number of different ways.

What's new is that I put up a small web site to start to explain what I'm doing and hopefully serve as a recruiting tool.

Apologies, but this is turning into a diet blog, at least part time

For any of you friends, acquaintances and enemies who actually meet me in the flesh, you already know I am something of a fat fellow. Or as one of the bloggers who I read might put it I'm quite jolly.

No more.

I'm tired of this. I'm resigning from the jolly community and will be tendering my resignation pound by pound through this blog. In between will be interspersed my regular occasional notes on my personal life but for those who hate these things, this is my warning. This is turning into a diet blog because my diet just jumped the queue to fairly high up on my priority list.

One way or another, the fat is going.