Eric's Tumble Log
In today’s news, Lifehacker takes a break from “Remembering to breath can increase your chances of living” level posts to something halfway useful.
In my experience, this is accurate. Several years ago, I had a job that was causing me a lot of stress. Combined with some personal challenges I was facing, I felt like my life was in a death spiral. I had a cold during that period that lasted for 8 weeks. My immune system was in the toilet. Once that situation changed, the stress went away and so did most of the health challenges.
Textbooks must be one hell of a cash cow. Most people I know with children in college curse the price of textbooks.
A company is trying to produce an open alternative to the expensive textbooks, and is being sued by three of the major textbook publishers.
Isn’t this monopolistic practice? I remember a few years ago reading about somebody trying to sue the RIAA for monopoly practices. I wonder if it went anywhere?
I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of blogs. For all the great information I get from them, I also get a lot of pitches from Gold Merchants.
It used to sound good, although I never felt like I had the money to buy gold.
Then a few years ago, I heard Dave Ramsey point out that there is no evidence during any economic collapse of people running around with gold.
John T. Reed has researched more than 2000 years of financial crises, and he can’t find evidence either. In this link, he describes a book and silent film about post WWI Austria’s hyperinflation, and exactly how effective gold would have been there.
I do not recommend buying gold either, based on my own research (which includes John T. Reed’s book “How To Protect Your Life Savings From Hyperinflation and Depression”. It would be a far better strategy to simply convert the money you have now into the goods you will need to survive between 1-3 years of economic calamities.
I’ve done at least two different case studies for classes on the FBI’s attempt to put together a unified case management system. So far, all they’ve managed to do is screw up contracts, waste money, and provide lots of fodder for case studies in IT and project management classes. After having to complete two separate projects on this colossal failure, I’m actually pulling for the FBI to finish it and put it behind them.
Wow. Thanks to SMS and one click purchasing, the Obamessiah campaign (and I’m sure others will follow) are going to be sending text messages to past donors with the option to one click donate. These will be going out during key emotional moments. Damn. I doubt this will provide any incentive to play down showmanship in the campaign.
I’m sure if you’ve ever read a contemporary success book or attended a motivational rally, you’ve heard of the study of the Yale class of 1953. The story goes that a survey showed only 3% of the class had written goals. Years later, the class was followed up with and it was discovered that the 3% with written goals had more personal wealth than the other 97% combined. The moral of the story: written goals bring you more money.
Except it never happened. Someone made up the story, and all the big name gurus have been crediting each other as the source. I remember hearing this at a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) thing I went to in the 90’s.
FaceB00k is attempting to trademark the word “book”. That’s why I started using 00 instead of oo. The implications of this are, if you want to register a trademark with the word “book” in it, you must pay FaceB00k for the use of it. Seriously.
We need to shut down the U.S. Patent and Trademark offices and come up with some reasonable guidelines. We’re not even playing by the basic “don’t be a dick” rule anymore.
Is it too late to trademark “New Jersey”, so I can sue the state, the lottery, the DMV, the school systems, the water company, etc for use of my registered name? That’s what this is coming to.
In a world where 90+ year old women in diapers and wheelchairs going home to DIE have to be strip searched to get on a plane, and toddlers likewise molested, TSA (Thousands Standing Around) has finally figured out the solution: bribery. That’s right, for only $100, you are no longer a security threat. I guess terrorists, like pizza delivery drivers, carry less than $20 on their person.
Microsoft has some kind of twisted campaign to promote Internet Exploder. While I have seen some good improvements in IE, MS needs another strategy. IE gets a HUGE update about every two years, while Firefox and Chrome get buttloads of minor updates on a much shorter release cycle. Whenever IE gets a huge update, to me, it already feels like it’s still behind the others.
