Astrogirl

My level of disgust with the Washington Post has reached a new high.

Generally, I find their technology and business writing to be hostile to my employer. I don’t usually find it to be completely untrue, but it does always put the company in the worst light possible. AOL certainly did get up to [...]

I found this to be particularly humorous excerpt from Prudent Bear’s daily market wrap:

“I don’t have a choice but to invest,” the 51-year-old said. “If I don’t, I won’t be able to retire. I’m not necessarily perfectly at peace with it, but I feel like I don’t have any choice but to be in the [...]

I think that part of the strategy for Iraq has always been to draw the Al Queda people out of Saudi Arabia, where we can get at them. Thus, I particularly agree with this bit of an OpEd at the New York Post:

>On the contrary. We’ve taken the War Against Terror to our enemies. [...]

On the Wall Street Journal’s front page right now, I found this:

Palestinians vowed to round up those behind a Hamas suicide bombing that killed at least 20 people, including five Americans, and Abbas moved to sever all ties with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Don’t they do this every week now? Who *seriously* thinks there’s a [...]

If you’ve watched the performance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the last five years or so, you’ve seen a shooting star. They really look too good to be true, and now that interest rates are going up, it turns out that they are. The going story is that they are inadequately [...]

Stephen Roach’s twice-weekly column has some interesting things to say about productivity:

It all boils down to the essence of productivity enhancement — whether efficiency gains are driven by synergies between human capital and technological innovation or by hard-nosed cost-cutting.  The former is “good productivity” — the stuff of rising prosperity and lasting improvements in a [...]

The Economic Policy Institute points out that the drop in the unemployment rate for July rings hollow:

The fall in unemployment was largely driven by a drop of 556,000 in the labor force, and thus is not indicative of an improvement in the labor market (employment actually fell in the survey from which the unemployment rate [...]

I was doing some recreational programming recently, all related to spam filtering.

Tino requested that I take in a number of texts (meaning text files of actual books, 12 of them) and figure out which letter pairs never occur in natural language. I did that, and while checking my work, I found “yx” from the [...]

Late this afternoon, I got two emails from CBS Marketwatch. While this is a normal event in my mailbox, their subjects were quite irregular.

At 4:15pm, this appeared: “EBay tops Q2 goals, raises outlook, sets 2-for-1 split.” Then, 45 minutes later, I got this: “After The Bell Report: EBay tumbles on second-quarter growth, outlook.”

The [...]

…something about the bugs, but Tino beat me to it. I encourage you to have a look at this picture. It’s really something.

I haven’t seen any swarming on the windows tonight, trying valiantly to get to the precious, precous light, but I’ve also heard a lot of thunder.