Paul Kedrosky was talking about this today as well so I’m going to blame him for what happened…
I needed to sweat tonight. My legs were sore but felt like they had more to give. I set out to make up for the poor workout I had yesterday.
So I biked to the track and ended up punishing my legs. Realized I was in the zone when I pulled myself away after 50 sprints up 42 stairs (no walking). Easily the best workout I’ve had in a year. Never heard no in my head, all GO.
I ended with a couple laps around the track to cool down as a rain shower started.
My ride home was euphoric. My head was filled with the bass a podcaster’s baritone voice. I was in my own world from the exercised-induced high. Suddenly, I was jarred back to reality as my wheel slid on a wet railroad track, locked between the track and the road, and snapped the bike end-over-end.
When I found myself sliding headfirst down a hill, the first thing I realized was how long it’s been since I fell off a bike. I estimated about 8 years. The second thought I had was how ineffective my palms were at slowing my slide on wet pavement.
I ended up alright with just a few bumps, minor scrapes, and bruised ego.
As I examined the bike and my body for problems I had my third realization: I had just experienced a personal Black Swan.
Humorous email coming from a now-former employee at a failing company:
From: XXXXXXX, XXXXX (Employee)
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 9:38 AM
To: XXXXXXX, XXXXXX (Manager)
Cc: XXX, XXXX (Manger’s Manager)
Subject:
XXXXXX, I felt compelled to come in this AM and let you know that as of our conversation on Monday I resign. You made several remarks that helped make this decision 1.You stated " I would think at your age you would want to stay home and enjoy you new house." And you referred to my "age" several times stating don’t take this wrong But.2. Plus you said that if I was not as passionate at SEM as yellow pages I should resign. 3. You said you liked me as a person this makes me question if you like me as an employee. You certainly have made it clear over the last year that you probably don’t. For the last week I have been in such a stress state with the SEM and the move that I went to XXX my shop steward and told him I should resign. He advised me to take a week off and think about it, of which I did. I told you I needed time off because I was tired , you compared me to your children being lazy and going to their room and playing games and sleeping not doing house work well I’m not your child and you need to know I don’t care to be treated like one. I am taking 2 personal days for May 13 and 14, 2 choice days for May 15 and16 I will have a doctors slip. He could’nt get mme in till today. Then Monday May 19 will be my 2 week notice and I will take my 2 weeks vacation. Thank You XXXXXX XXXXXXX
R.H. Donnelly is done and the employees are feeling it.
And don’t be fooled by that recent move upwards. This thing is going to zero. Phonebooks will expire with the boomers who use them.
The following charts stops at December 2007’s $83.48 price per barrel. With oil hovering around the $125 mark, we are at an all-time high.
[from a comment here]
Where do you fall on this chart of US Income Distribution for 2005?
Note that this chart excludes incomes over $250K/year which amounts to < 2%. Hat-tip to a new favorite VisualizingEconomics.
I have a feeling that most people that view these data are (relatively) rich indeed. Why? Because statistically speaking, you’re educated, and educated folks find themselves in the tail of the income distribution:
[via WikiPedia]
Interesting that the professional degree holders earn more than their PhD counterparts. If you are going back to school, aim for your desired capital, cultural or fiscal, appropriately.
Finally, as if you weren’t awash with news on the failing US economic position, here’s further chart porn on the Average US Household Income 1913-2006. Note the sliding-boards that result from the 1973 and 1979 oil embargos. Scary, considering.
[thanks again to the fine folks at VE]
These charts were all made in one way or another with publicly available data US Income data found here.
I’ve been working on a Java framework to develop Twitter services recently and have found the API and Twitter’s reliability to be a real problem.
The strict API limitation of 70 requests per hour (~ 1 API request per minute) is highly restrictive. Especially when you are placed in Twitter-jail for exceeding the limit in a given hour. Forget about making API calls while Twhil is open. That’s the quickest way to bring development to a halt.
That’s frustrating.
What’s surprising is the large number of errors I’m receiving from Twitter on simple requests.
Over the last 7 hours and 30 minutes I have made ~1 request per minute for the replies to the findasong account (findasong is a Twitter service: in an @reply to @findasong include lyrics, a title, artist — whatever you have — it will try to find your song).
Of the 439 requests made during this time, 74 returned an exception. 30 of the 74 erroneous requests were from the API limitation outlined above (indicated by a 400 HTTP response code). So 44 valid requests that went to Twitter returned unfulfilled.
This means, from my sample set:
- 409 request (439 reqs - 30 invalid reqs) should have been successfully processed.
- 30 of those 409 requests were unsuccessful.
- Or … approximately 7.3% of my API requests were unsuccessfully fulfilled.
Imagine 7.3% of your phone calls being dropped. Or 7.3 % of your sent mail being lost. The rate of unsuccessful requests must move toward 0% if Twitter is to cross the chasm, let alone grow.
This gives me an idea how I can further use my framework — I’ll track how Twitter reliability changes overtime. More on that in a bit.
Anyway, great things come from shaky beginnings. Pierre Omidyar recalls similar reliablity issues with eBay:
For most of 1997 I was mainly trying to keep ebay.com site from crashing every day. In re to @ev.
Just voicing my annoyances. Carry on.
I found this amusing. Windows XP just won’t die. The folks at Lenovo will be discontinuing preloads of the OS May 20, but will still offer a DVD "downgrade" for those smart enough to avoid Vista.
My only question is when are we going to see downgrade DVDs of Vista? Sooner than the 7 year span of market success XP has seen, no doubt.
Why does the Google Reader team use two terms for the same option?
Have a look at the screenshot below. On the left, the "Show: updated - all" menu tells Reader to only show folders containing unread items. Any folder with already-viewed content is hidden. Displayed on the right are entries from the selected folder: b. The menu circled is "Show: 10 new items - all items." Toggle this guy to show all or unread content in the current folder.
Why is the language different? Are these not the same option, just in a different context? This slight difference makes me think every time and that’s annoying considering how much I rely on Reader.
This isn’t the first difference I’ve noticed in Google products. Schizophrenia exists between Google Reader and Gmail as well, where categorical attribution is "tagging" in Reader and "labeling" in Gmail.
Why not use the same terms and help me be a dumb user? Whatever you do, don’t make me think.
I was putting a book on the shelf this morning and began flipping through another only to find a Zimbabwe 20 dollar bill that I apparently used as a bookmark.
Back and center on the colorful bill are the words:
I promise to pay the bearer on demand twenty dollars for the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe
Wait. Doesn’t the twenty dollar bill represent 20 dollars? It says on the bill Zimbabwe 20, so how can someone be paid 20 dollars if not by this bill? What happens if you knock on the door of the Treasury and demand your 20 dollars?
With fiat money, a different note promising the exact same thing:
Even the government can’t define money. Some years ago,a Mr. A.F. Davis mailed a ten-dollar Federal Reserve Note to the Treasury Department. In his letter of transmittal, he called attention to the inscription on the bill which said that it was redeemable in "lawful money," and then requested that such money be sent to him. In reply, the Treasury merely sent two five-dollar bills from a different printing series bearing a similar promise to pay. Mr. Davis responded:
Dear Sir:
Receipt is hereby acknowledged of two $5.00 United States notes, which we interpret from your letter are to be considered as lawful money. Are we to infer from this that the Federal Reserve notes are not lawful money?
I am enclosing one of the $5.00 notes which you sent me. I note that it states on the face, "The United States of America will pay to the bearer on demand five dollars." I am hereby demanding five dollars.
One week later, Mr. Davis received the following reply from Acting Treasurer, M.E. Slindee:
Dear Mr. Davis,
Receipt is acknowledged of your letter of December 23rd, transmitting once $5. [sic] United States Note with demand for payment of five dollars. You are advised that the term "lawful money" has not been defined in federal legislation…. The term "lawful currency" no longer has such special significance. The $5. United States Note received with your letter of December 23rd is returned herewith.
At least in the US, we don’t kid ourselves anymore:
The phrases "…will pay the the bearer on demand" and "… is redeemable in lawful money" were deleted from our currency altogether in 1964.
[p136, The Creature from Jekyll Island]
A Nielsen study finds that 4 dollar gas would mean a hefty shift in consumer’s discretionary budgets:
Dramatic fluctuations in gas prices are disrupting U.S. consumer spending and expected to continue, leaving consumers with less money to spend at retail, entertainment and dining out, according to a new study by The Nielsen Company. Nielsen’s research shows that in 2007, the gas share of consumers’ weekly spending ranged from 12 to 16 percent. As gas prices continue to rise, Nielsen expects consumers’ gas share of their weekly spend to rise to 19 percent…
“With gas prices expected to hit $4 per gallon this year, consumers will be spending nearly a fifth of their household budget on gas,” said Todd Hale, senior vice president, Consumer & Shopper Insights, Nielsen Consumer Panel Services. “That kind of increase has a direct impact on what they can afford to spend and is something retailers will need to address.”
The Big Picture had two recent images that relate:
Pretty sobering stuff.
I realized while adding my Amazon.com library to FriendFeed that I should share the mash-up I made to display the books on the right side. Even if you don’t care about the technologies — Wordpress, syndication, and mash-ups — you should at least read on to learn how the Internet is plugable.
The only advertising on this site is the Dead Trees feed on the right; this is a list of the book titles I have recently read and liked enough to pass along. I link them as an affiliate of Amazon.com.
Amazon.com won’t give me a feed of my books to do something like this, so I had to make my own.
So
I signed up for a Google Books account. Here I simply keep a library of the titles I want to include. Google gives me this library as a feed (thank you).
Then I wrote a Yahoo Pipe to create a feed from the Google Books data adding in Amazon.com affiliate links where appropriate. The Yahoo Pipe is publicly available here. Be sure to bring your Google Books Export RSS feed URL, RSS feed URL, and Amazon.com affiliate ID to play along.
The last thing required was to install the KB Advanced RSS Widget. The Widget has a syntax to dictate the appearance of a feed’s data. Here is what I’m using right now to get the list on this page:
<li><center><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="^link$"><img src="^guid$" alt="^title$" title="^title$" height="80"></a><br /><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="^link$" title="^title$">^title$</a><br />^author$</center></li>
With those pieces talking to each other, all around the Internet, I only have to add a book to my Google Books account to have it automagically appear — Amazon.com link and all — on igudo.
Why couldn’t Amazon.com do the feed legwork for me?
