Rio Vista, California is a small, 7,300-head town located in California’s East Bay. With one store, two gas stations, and more windmills than residents, it’s the picture of what’s left of small town America in Northern California.

This is what the recession looks like. One dozen completed model homes; in their prime, worth more than half a million dollars each. Hundreds of empty lots, placed neatly in a grid composed of still-black, unblemished streets, clean sidewalks, and ornate street lamps. At its center, a roundabout adorned by a large tower with a mysteriously padlocked door.

Shea bought this property in 2005. They graded the land, paved the roads, and installed the utilities. The promise of hundreds of new homes–and the resulting sales tax and local business–provided the small town with some hope of growth. The housing market was booming. People would climb over themselves to live here.

Then, in 2007, the market crashed. And so did the construction.

Six years later, not much has changed. The windows are boarded now, to prevent looting. Looking through the upper-story windows, these houses were nearly complete. Temporary metal bannisters adorn newly-carpeted stairs and freshly painted walls.

The city of Rio Vista still patrols this neighborhood to prevent vandalism, even though the promised sales and property tax revenue will never come. A lone sentry also stands guard, in the form of a surveillance camera.

Interestingly, these houses are mostly untouched. With a little love and a fresh coat of paint, they look like they could, one day, be livable again.

All of the details are here–the trim, the window screens. These houses were mere days from being livable.

These homes were even landscaped, though it’s been long left to die.

A single open window on one of the houses is a source of intrigue. Maybe someone has made a home of these abandoned houses.

As Hearth and Home at Liberty went, so did much of the country. What was once a promising view into what was to come has become a reminder of the seemingly naive optimism towards the future that we possessed. Hundreds of luxury houses in a nowhere-town seems laughable now, but for a time, it was what we had become to expect.

If you build it, they will come is long gone.

For more pictures of Hearth and Home at Liberty, check out my Flickr set.

I’ve purchased a new camera recently and have picked up photography as a hobby. My photographic efforts will be dispatched to Through the Looking Lens, my new photoblog, so as to not clutter the content here. Be sure to check it out.

Photo by jayneandd

Often times, the hardest part about completing goals is defining them in the first place.

I’m not referring to often empty goals like New Years resolutions or “be a millionaire by the end of next month.” Instead, I’m thinking of tangible, reachable goals–goals that drive you in a particular direction and offer you an eventual sense of completion when you reach them.

In my work as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com, we tackle this problem frequently. Though our work entails much more than simply this, a lot of our job is working to empty the constant fire hose of support requests. We’re never going to “finish” answering these tickets–how do we feel like we’re getting somewhere?

The answer here is simple: we define our own finish line. Let’s do 300 tickets today, or empty this queue, or complete this side project. Though the fire hose will never end, our progress is now visible. We feel like we’re getting somewhere.

I recently completed my first puzzle (or, more accurately, watched my girlfriend complete my first puzzle). Working on it, I realized that this is probably the first tangible project I’ve completed in a long time. In my work with Automattic, my clients, and my own startup, we often get so caught up in what we need to do that we don’t realize what we’ve done–what we’ve finished.

Without feeling like we’re getting somewhere, we’ll get burned out. It happens to everyone–even the best.

Spend some of your free time this weekend defining some goals for yourself. Reflect on what you do on a day to day basis–what feels like it’s never being completed–and define a concrete, reasonable goal.

When you’ve completed it, set another. You may not stop the firehose, but you can make it feel like something much more manageable.

I recently started tracking my browsing habits. The results were far from shocking, but they were eye-opening.

Much of my casual (non-work) computing time is spent idly circling between a small variety of websites, checking for new content, with occasional trips to Gmail interspersed when new email arrives.

This cycle typically repeats faster than the content on the involved websites change, resulting in a large amount of unnecessary refreshing and wasted time.

After asking a few friends, it appears that this method of absentmindedly browsing the Internet is common. It’s obvious that browsing the Internet this way is inefficient and a waste of time (ignoring that browsing the Internet constantly isn’t the best use of time ). Let’s do something about it!

Everything in One Place
My first inclination is that the first way to combat this inefficiency is to put the information together. Efforts like iGoogle and Netvibes (and even My Yahoo! of old) were a step in the right direction, but they lacked one key element: customization. Every information source was treated like (and often provided as) an RSS feed. The dashboard served only as a portal to access the content; it did nothing to help consume it.

A Customized Experience
It follows, then, that the “perfect” online dashboard would provide a customized experience for each and every information source that it served. One could reply to or even draft Gmail messages, read and up vote reddit content directly inline, browse and like photos on instagram, and browse Facebook, all within the confines of the dashboard. This could be accomplished through creative uses of each service’s APIs, web scraping, etc. With the exception of services like Twitter that are now attempting to funnel their traffic through one (their own) source, nearly any online source would lend well to this.

The difficulty here would come from the amount of time it would take to create an experience for each and every information source. This service would lend well to a third-party API where interested developers could create sources for their own content. A commercial marketplace might even be viable here, though it would take some effort to convince users to pay to browse content (though this has been successful on other platforms, like iOS).

Photo by matryosha

I’m guilty.

For me, like many, the Internet has always been a means through which one can consume information. A quick check on Facebook, a flick through Twitter, a longer stint on Reddit or Hacker News. With all of the information at our fingertips, we have no choice but to consume it quickly, lest our efforts become like drinking at a fire hydrant.

Outside of software development projects and forum posts, I can count on one hand how many things I’ve created to share with the world at large. Truthfully, that’s a real shame. Each and every one of us is presented with an opportunity that no individual in the history of existence has had before. The opportunity to reach millions with our words and images, thoughts and actions are unparalleled, yet so many choose instead to passively consume while letting others take this spotlight.

I’ve resolved to seize this opportunity. It’s a simple notion: write what you think, photograph what you see, or play the song you sing in your head. Then share it.

If you want to become a producer, too, but don’t know where to start, there’s hope. My awesome colleagues at Automattic run the The Daily Post, where you can find some daily motivation.

What are we waiting for?