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Tuesday, May 23, 2006

learning Bernanke

It's been a while Fed.Chair's seat's been handed down from Greenspan to Bernanke.

With a lot of personal items at hand, fixing kitchen, getting over cold, cheering for Sharks, and work, ..., etc., I've sort of watched Bernanke's movements from a far.

Afterall, he's been raising interest rates as expected so far, and not much else is new, in my radar.

Stock's been dipping low since late last week, and continued to yesterday, monday, and I walked around moping: if tech. and commodities are down because of soaring oil price, then why are energy sector, such as Chevron, down?
Stocks bounced rather handsomely today. Personally, the explanation for all these ups and downs are way beyond my speculations and knowledge.

I've asked naver.com in vain more about Bernanke, thinking naver.com may be number one search engine and portal in Korea, but what would it know about this less well-known chairman, who's not even a Korean.
Well, naver.com does know, and Bernanke's got an impressive working history. Oh, my... Shame on me.

I've got directed to all his publications, and teaching careers, and other stuffs.
Well, I'm even ordering two of his books from Amazon as we speak.

Would it teach me to know if Fed'll raise interest or not? Would it teach me which stocks perform better or not?
I doubt it.

But it'd certainly get me a few more vocab. and concepts, with examples of how economist analyze past and current economic situations. Maybe it'll also help me to make more informed judgement on this Greenspan-replacement that verdict is still out on.

yawn, I certainly need another coffee. Eh, 9:30am? it still feels like 6am to me...

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Tuesday, May 09, 2006

I lost shoes and Hannan/Smith lost stick

Usually monday's the day after sunday, when people return to windowless office after a golden weekend to recover from weekend fun.

With Sharks' domination on ice and win on sunday evening's game, and all other Cinco de Mayo celebration, not to mention beautiful weather to enjoy, there were much to recover from on monday, and I slumped all day. Sleepy with headache that didn't get cured by espresso nor gym workout, nor work itself, I dragged my tired feet, cranky all day long.

Then, there was 'monk fish stew with bean sprouts(A-goo-jjim)' dinner that was like super spicy, super hot, and super super a lot (ready to feed like 7 people?), that finally woke me up at 5:30pm.

With my belly about to burst, eager to get to sharks tank on time, we rushed off from downtown SJ parking lot on San Pedro street, when my left thong lost balance, I tipped toward left, then the strap on my shoe broke lose. *Agh*, not when I'm in a hurry to get some latte and get to sharks tank early enough to see any pre-game activities...

Quick thinking Davem dragged me to nearby Walgreen, about 2 blocks down, and I got $5.99 slipper for the night. Ouch! How did I wear this when I was kid? How do people wear this slipper with strap hurting in between toe so much?
Heh, we were both in a hurry to get to sharks tank to join the rest of sharks buddies, and to get a glimps of players before the game started, so whatelse to do but to disrobe Davem of his somewhat-wet(???) socks and use it as buffer between my poor hurting feet and new pair of slipper.

All that got made up in the game. It was just exploding, endless entertainment, with Joe finally scoring his first post-season goal, as well as seeing Ville continue with his wicked checks, and Kyle's flying butt check, which made him fly off the ice for a few split seconds.

Two funniest things were a) Sharks on penalty kill for 5-3, where both Hannan and Smitty's stick broke and Kyle & Toskala were only ones on ice with a full stick in hand. OMG! I don't know how did those guys, Scott Hannan, Mark Smith and Kyle McLaren, pulled that 40seconds. I dearly wished I had a camcorder to capture the moment. another silly/funny moment would be b) Oilers players were all off ice as 3rd period ended, and refs decided there's still 3 seconds remaining in the game, after Sharky came out with the flag, audiences did all the screaming, Sharks player ready to celebrate, and hardly any Oilers player were on ice. All the Oilers player had to be brought back to ice for 3 seconds face-off, to be sent back to the lockerroom. How silly.

Anyways, it was highly entertaining, and I'm sure many are sorry not to go to Edmonton to watch the game. A funny line I picked up: Oilers -> Soilers, heh maybe because they're farming country? Someone had wrote that on paper used for rally.

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Monday, May 08, 2006

things that used to work...

flickr on mac used to create a set for me as I do batch upload of photos from iPhoto. as of a few months ago, I've been waiting about a day or so and get irritated, stop the upload window, go to flickr website to create photo sets manually. it was super cool that there's batch upload, and that on top of it i could create photoset of uploaded photos. now that i'm spoiled with such feature, it not working is very annoying...

what happened? have no idea. my mac is same mac, and i didn't hear anything about flickr's software changing to disable such feature.

oh well...

on the same note, i've sort of given up on 'chage time & date' feature from blooger.com.
saw someone else complaining about it on one of my mailinglist. huhu, glad it's not just me, but still baffles me.
guess neither of us will get to the bottom of it, as there's not really a customer support for it.
it works on freebsd 4.x with mozilla 1.7x, but not on windows, mac or linux, with IE, safari, mozilla, ...
i can live with it for now.

hmm... what else is broken out there? must be plenty...

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blogging, blog spams, RSS and advertising online

Had to delete yet another annoying blog spam, advertising online diploma.
tsk, tsk...

I've been meaning to just use RSS feed to collect all the news from different publishers and blogs.

but, alas, then what about the click-rate on webpage/blogs?
that made me wonder. Many techie companies that offer RSS feed also offer advertisement banner display as well. so how do they plan to generate revenue?

well, i guess business folks at those company have ways to get around it?

that's way above and beyond me!

nonetheless, i'm curious.