“A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”
— P.J. O’Rourke
Author: cosmo
02/07/2009
I set a new work record this week: I worked for 34 different clients in five days. It’s good to be busy, I suppose…
02/05/2009
When it’s 11:00 at night and you’ve been working for 10+ hours, and all of a sudden there’s some kind of weird power spike that shuts off all electrical devices in the room (computer, monitors, network switch, printer, stereo), it’s probably a sign that you should stop working.
02/04/2009
A brief moment of Star Wars humor.
02/04/2009
Nine hundred billion dollars.
Last year we heard promises that the unimaginably large $750 billion federal bailout would kick our economy into shape and get credit flowing again and unlock the world’s markets. It hasn’t even been six months and now Congress is putting the “finishing touches” on another $900 billion. Will this one save the world?
I doubt it.
02/03/2009
Geek alert:
On Friday February 13 2009 at 04:31:30pm MST the Unix timestamp will be 1234567890.
That’s the number of seconds since the Unix epoch began (January 1 1970). I also used SSE (seconds since epoch) in all of my orbital analysis work back when I was a rocket scientist. Cool.
01/30/2009
I was working late the other night with a client who was doing a web site switchover, and managed to come up with a clever solution to his problem. He sent me an e-mail:
Nice one. Thanks Jeff.
I bet you know how to solve a Rubik’s cube too.
And of course I had to admit that yes, in fact I do know how to solve one. Then he threw down the gauntlet.
When I was a kid, I could get about 2/3 of the way through one of the algorithms, but then I would just get lost. So when I stumbled on the cube on someone’s desk a few weeks back, my determination was reignited. I’m no speed demon, but I’ve got the sequence down. Takes me about 4 minutes right now.
Complete with photo!
So I dug around my closet a bit and unearthed the Cube that I had when I was a teenager (junior high, maybe?). I scrambled it a bit:
And then I went to work. It took a few practice runs to remember all of the moves, and then I had Laralee time me as I went for speed.
1:30. Oh yeah, the old man still has it.
01/30/2009
Mmm…. spam.
These must be the happiest people I’ve ever seen to find out they owe more than ten grand on their taxes.
01/28/2009
Ha, new logos from our favorite financial institutions…
01/28/2009
It looks like banking and financial CEO’s really took a hit on their bonuses in 2008. Apparently they dropped 44% from 2007, to a paltry $18.4 billion. It sure must be rough to be a bank CEO.