mad_ddog
Monday, May 28, 2007
NYTimes - The Real Owner of All Those Planes |
When Steven Udvar-Hazy was a teenager in New York City, he would often head after school to Idlewild Airport, as Kennedy International was known then, to watch planes take off and land. |
CNN - Biting gnats bug people, kill chickens in Midwest |
Kyle Winkelmann has learned in the past two weeks that if he's going to get into the cab of his tractor, he had better do it in a hurry. |
ZDNet blogs - Retailers haven’t learned from TJX - still running WEP |
Many big name retailers still using WEP. Sad. Just stay away or use cash only. |
Toronto Star - Dwight Wilson, 106: WWI veteran |
Then there was one left. A private funeral with military honours is being arranged for World WarI veteran Dwight Wilson, who died at Sunnybrook hospital yesterday at 106. |
NY Times - Mr. Right, It Turns Out, Does Not Take Classes |
AFTER more than two years of disheartening online dating, Charlotte Kullen resolved to spend less time pursuing men and more time pursuing her hobbies. She plunged into tennis, running, sailing, horseback riding, fitness boot camp and scuba diving classes, assuming that somewhere between the situps and the strapping on of fins she might meet some eligible prospects. |
Globe and Mail - At the heart of BMO's crisis, a 'smart and cautious' trader |
A story about some of the people behind a >$600M loss at Bank of Montreal. The way former colleagues see it, David Lee is the sort of guy any bank would love to hire: intelligent, hard-working, loyal and - a rarity in the brutally competitive trading world - downright modest. Another article from NY News, Losses at Optionable customer mount: Kevin P. Cassidy resigned as chief executive last Saturday after the New York Mercantile Exchange pulled its representative from Optionable's board. Records show that in 1993 Cassidy was sentenced by a federal judge in White Plains to six months in prison for income tax evasion. In 1997, he was sentenced to 30 months by a judge in Florida for credit card fraud. |
NYTimes - Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist |
Sick bastards who perpetrate this scheme should be shot into space. The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files. |
NYTimes - Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages |
Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight. |
Toronto Star - Hydro pay packages unplugged |
Due for release in the coming days is an eagerly awaited report on executive salaries at the government-owned electricity companies. It could cause big trouble for the Liberal government. |
Globe and Mail - Burnout Buster |
Related to the article about fear of failure - the stress of failure or less than stellar success is bad for one's health. Not long ago, seeking out a shrink after a bad deal or a few rough days on the market would have been tantamount to a hockey goon crying to mommy after a poke check. But e-mail, BlackBerrys and a flattening world of international commerce have placed new pressures on high-fliers. Work stress is no longer a 9-to-5 affliction. Today, the strain verges on trauma. |
CNet - Electricity crisis hobbles an India eager to ascend |
India is in denial about its lack of energy resources and infrastructure. I don't see how it can compete effectively with China with this handicap. This being India, a country of more than one billion people, the scale is staggering. In just one case, Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company, maintains five giant generators, along with a nearly 5,300-gallon tank of diesel fuel underground, as if it were a gasoline station. |
WSJ - Managers Struggle to Locate Cheap Stocks |
Just last week, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index came close to topping its record closing level of seven years ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has set numerous records this year and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index has been at its highest levels in six years. |
Toronto Star - Did Pakistani gang steal captives' kidneys? |
The urban legend comes to life. Pakistani police have arrested nine people, four of them doctors, for abducting people, drugging them and stealing their kidneys for transplant operations, police said today. |
WSJ - Fewer Firms Offer Big Dividend Payouts |
The old-style companies/industries still pay out dividends, it's the new tech companies that are so stingy, thinking they are still a growth company. Some strategists and institutional investors believe that corporations fail to recognize that dividends are increasingly popular with individual investors, and that ample payouts can be just as good -- or even better -- for stock prices than big buybacks. |
Washington Post - How the Pentagon Got Its Shape |
Nice story of how fast the govt can act when it has to. The original site for the Pentagon was an asymetrical 5-sided area. So the original design was 5-sided. When the site was moved due to aestethetic reasons, there wasn't time (original timeframe called for 1 year to build the Pentagon) to redesign the building. The War Department needed a new headquarters, Somervell said. The building he wanted to create was too big to fit in Washington and would have to go across the Potomac River in Arlington. It would be far larger than all the great structures of the city, including the U.S. Capitol. Somervell wanted a headquarters big enough to hold 40,000 people, with parking for 10,000 cars. It would contain 4 million square feet of office space -- almost twice as much as the Empire State Building. Yet it must be no more than four stories high -- a tall building would obstruct views of Washington and require too much steel, urgently needed for battleships and weapons. |
Lifehack - How fear of failure destroys success |
Nothing terribly new - just a reminder - don't be afraid to fail - or the appearance of failure, as long as you learn something from it. |
Monday, May 14, 2007
Yahoo Finance - Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind |
Getting rich also requires a certain amount of stubbornness and clarity of purpose. Consultant Joel Kurtzman, who evaluated 350 startups for his book Startups That Work, found that successful outlets usually have a team of two or three founders who share a common vision; the success rate for this model was a remarkable 50%. The odds for solo founders were more like the oft-quoted one in 10, in part because they often found themselves working at cross-purposes with hired guns who see things differently. |
NYTimes - Faster Fashion, Cheaper Chic |
A USA company to compete in the same space a Zara, H&M, and Mexx. |
NYTimes - Easy, Mr. Fix-It |
Painful stories from do-it-yourselfers. |
The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla |
Geez, these guys seem to pick the worst of the best available scripting languages - first TCL, then Perl. What's next? PHP? Perl is crap for anything large. There's a reason Bittorrent is written in Python and not Perl. And Perl 6 development is going to last longer than the x86 instruction set or until Duke Nukem Forever comes out. |
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Wired - Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health |
Modern humans are bacteria-killing machines. We assassinate microbes with hand soap, mouthwash and bathroom cleaners. It feels clean and right. |
Observer - Guardian.co.uk - Names really do make a difference |
Parents are being warned to think long and hard when choosing names for their babies as research has discovered that girls who are given very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely to study maths or physics after the age of 16, a remarkable study has found. |
MSNBC - Doctors Change the Way They Think About Death |
As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. |
NYTimes - From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine |
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in antifreeze. |
The Long Tail - The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles |
In the next issue of Wired we've got a great story about a woman who cyberstalked the lead singer of Linkin Park. She correctly guessed the password to his cellphone account. The rest was easy. She was a technician at a secure military facility, the Sandia National Labs. When eventually confronted, she explained that her job only took her half an hour a day. The rest was spare cycles. She used them to stalk the lead singer of Linkin Park. |
Globe and Mail - Warners cuts promo screenings over movie piracy worries |
I can't see this making a big dent in piracy. The internet is pretty fast. Frustrated with what they see as the world's biggest piracy nation, Warner Bros. Pictures announced this week an immediate ban on promotional and word-of-mouth screenings in Canada. |
WSJ - You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well |
...or maybe you need to do/say something that's worthy enough for Google to list your name on the first page. Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband's last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight. |
Friday, May 04, 2007
Toronto Star - Doan not to blame, official tells MPs |
Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson said yesterday it was not Canadian-born Shane Doan who insulted a francophone linesman in 2005 but a foreign-born player on the Phoenix Coyotes. In related news, Toronto Star - Doan scores three to lead Canada romp. |
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Toronto Star - Hockey captaincy row called 'embarrassing' |
I guess the Bloc Quebecois didn't have anything better to do than play keep-away with the ball. I can't believe these guys. Losers. The NHL calls the Shane Doan controversy "embarrassing" but Hockey Canada officials will appear before a parliamentary committee today to explain why he was named captain of Canada's team at the World Hockey Championships in Moscow. |