Author: cosmo

Like everyone else, I’ve watched my stock portfolio get demolished the past few weeks. I kissed several years’ worth of retirement savings goodbye. But I suppose my losses pale in comparison to those felt by Bill Gates (who lost about $2.5 billion since September) and Larry Ellison (who dropped $1.6 billion). In fact, it’s Warren Buffett who has shown us how smart he is about investing, because he’s made $8 billion in the same period and now stands as the richest person in America.

Must be rough.

I started reading Seth Godin’s blog and found some good articles. In one that caught my eye he discusses how many people perceive “effort as a myth”, meaning we are always seeing examples of others who are extraordinarily lucky and thus have an easier life than us, or accomplish things we never think we will.

But he dispels that myth by talking about luck, and what he says is insightful:

I think this is true, and it inspires me to use more effort and less luck.

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

— Richard Feynman

I was poking around the internets tonight and found an interesting test. It’s intended to determine how well your eyes can distinguish colors. The test consists of arranging a four series of 25 randomly-ordered colored squares

into lines organized by hue.

According to the author of the article I was reading, this is quite difficult and in fact most people have mediocre “color vision”. I’m not sure if he was overstating the difficulty of the test or not, but after just a few minutes of rearranging the squares I was given a perfect score:

(No, I didn’t take the test over and over until I got it right. This was my first try.)

So I guess I have some kind of superhuman color vision or something.

It’s rare that I finish an entire book in a single sitting. But I just did: I picked up Ron Paul’s The Revolution and started reading it, and was so enthralled that I blew through all 180 pages in one shot.

My political views are very much in the Libertarian camp, with some mixings of Constitutionalism. I seldom find anyone with whom I agree completely in politics. Even Laralee and I have our differences, although luckily she’s not a staunch Republican or Democrat. But reading Ron Paul’s book, I found that I agree with him on nearly every level, in every point he makes and every example he cites. His book is powerful, and it should be recommended reading for anyone who is watching what our nation is becoming and doesn’t like it.

When pollsters have shown up at my door, or called me on the phone, these past few weeks to ask who I’m going to vote for in the November presidential election, it’s always fun to tell them “Ron Paul”. They’re flustered because he’s not one of the choices: there are only two choices, right? The black guy and the old guy?

And despite the fact that Ron has withdrawn from the presidential race, I’m going to vote for him anyway. I suspect I’ll be joined by a million others who supported him in his unusual– but very eye-opening– bid for the presidency last year. There are a lot of people who resonate with what he’s proposing, and quite honestly it’s been a long time since I’ve agreed so wholeheartedly with what a politician is spouting.

Read the book. Vote for him. Join the revolution.

Tom is always fond of posting song lyrics, and so I thought of him as I was listening to some Queensryche at work. “Spreading the Disease” just came up in my playlist, and the lyrics seem unusually apropos in the current political/economic environment:

I’ve landed a new client for Zing, and they’re asking me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This isn’t anything new or unusual– it happens fairly often when I start projects. What makes this one a bit different is that the client is a law firm. And they take their NDA quite seriously.

My favorite part of it is the clause discussing confidential business information and how I’m not supposed to disclose it to others. But rather than saying I just can’t disclose it “electronically”, they specify all of the ways I might do so:

Wow, that’s pretty comprehensive. To think they’re worried I might post their information on a BBS, or perhaps on a Gopher site somewhere. Hah! Those technologies are so 1990.

I’m on some kind of goofy retro computer game kick, where I’m figuring out how to install and play those silly computer games from my childhood. Back in the 80’s, when we had an Apple IIe, I was such a geek it was breathtaking to behold.

That’s me playing Brick Out, which was provided gratis with the Apple, probably to demonstrate its amazing low-resolution graphics capabilities. I later wrote my own version of the game, just to test my programming skills.

As time went on, I expanded my game library on the Apple. A perennial favorite was Night MIssion Pinball, which provided countless hours of entertainment for Dirk and me. So today I figured out how to get that classic game working on my Linux laptop.

Woo hoo! There’s nothing quite like four-color CGA graphics and 1-bit sound cards. But hey, that’s the kind of debris you’ll find on a trip down memory lane.

It’s child’s play to mock Bush’s complete lack of public speaking skills– he’s made so many inane gaffes in his various off-the-cuff speeches it makes one think no one could be such a poor wordsmith.

One would be wrong. Sarah Palin may be more vacuous and a worse speaker even than Bush. Take this transcript as an example, from her recent appearance on CBS with Katie Couric:

Holy. Cow.

Look out! It’s Putin, rearing his head into the air space!

It’s good to know that– at least at some level– Congress still listens to the people who elected them.

From a New York Times article today about the stalled bailout negotiations:

I was one of those constituents– I wrote to my Senators and told them the bailout was a lousy deal. I received a nice boilerplate e-mail response (“Thanks for your concern… I take all of these e-mail messages very seriously… yada yada”). Although I’m sure they didn’t actually read my message, I hope the sheer volume of people like me gave them a clue that they’re treading in dangerous territory.