One of the things I like about the Google news site is the fact that it's mostly an orderly aggregation of news from other outlets. Add to that the legendary Google search technology and one can find just about any news release about any item in any period. That is unless you search for a — Continue reading ยป
Google's Missing News
One of the things I like about the Google news site is the fact that it's mostly an orderly aggregation of news from other outlets. Add to that the legendary Google search technology and one can find just about any news release about any item in any period. That is unless you search for a — Continue reading ยป
Oil at $200 a Barrel
Seems like an insane prediction when oil is hovering around $34 a barrel, but it was only in July when crude reached $147 and we were paying $4.20 per gallon to fill up our cars. Back then plenty of pundits and analysts were predicting $200/barrel oil and $6/gallon gas and everyone seemed to accept that — Continue reading ยป
Ponzi Schemes
The bad news on Wall Street today was Madoff's Ponzi scheme. This old trick works by paying off previous investors with money from new investors, thereby garnering a false reputation of handsome profits as long as new money keeps arriving, as in the adage: robbing Peter to pay Paul. Of course the problem is that — Continue reading ยป
Showering Dilemma
What do you do when you come home at night, after a long day in the office and a 5-mile sweaty run and see your shower in this state? (It's being remodeled) You suck it up and go to bed sweaty and sticky. No sir, not me. It doesn't mater that it's almost winter time — Continue reading ยป
YouTube Outage
At my place of work we have a number of shadow Web servers that sometimes double as staging servers when we want to roll out new projects. The thing is that for any change, no matter how large or small, the proper approach is to install and inspect on test servers, followed by the staging — Continue reading ยป
GE, FDIC, and TLGP
For years the standard FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) protection for single accounts had been $100,000. This mostly covered bank accounts such as savings, checking, or CD (Certificate of Deposit) with FDIC member banks. With the recent global financial meltdown, the government sought to stanch the erosion of confidence in the banking system and raised — Continue reading ยป
News Robot Incompetence
I am a fan of Google Finance. There's a lot to like. Real-time stock quotes, nice charts and graphs and a clean design. But when it comes to breaking financial news, Google just doesn't cut it. Many sites use bots to collect and disseminate news, but in the rapidly changing financial world a news bot — Continue reading ยป