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helicopterr
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Name: Jaun
Location: New York City, New York, United States
Gender: Male
Interests: poaching giant pandas
Expertise: everything
Occupation: game developer
Industry: Computers (Software)
Message: message me
Member Since:
2/15/2003
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| The boy decided to break up with the girl. Her shocking past was too much for him. It changed him. He lived a nightmare of images and videos translated from lurid stories. It has to end. The girl was furious, and hurt, because despite and perhaps because of all her experiences, she realized that he was the only boy she truly loved. He was going to be her last boyfriend. The very last. She was ready to have his baby, to wear the ring. When he left her room, she said - "You are truly ruthless. You have taken everything from me - my body and my heart have both became yours." He replied. "What I have taken from you will eventually be returned to you. But what you have taken from me, I will never get back." "What did I ever take from you? Money? Time? Friends?" "My innocence" He replied. "How I wish I still have my innocence." | | |
| The 700 billion bailout. The billion by itself takes us to the realm of Bentleys, downtown penthouses and other things the super wealthy enjoys. An additional 699 of those billions makes an amount that is surreal and abstract. What does one do with 700 billion USD? Having such an amount is almost an ironic reversal of being stuck in poverty - 700 billion seems like an amount thats impossible to spend off in one lifetime. Almost. The combination of the collapse of the US housing bubble and the subsequent plummeting of thousands of derivatives based on the said housing bubble has led to one of, if not the worst, financial crisis in US history. Unlike stocks or bonds, derivative instruments by their very nature employs leverage and are often very heavily leveraged, sometimes tracking 10 to 20 times the value of the underlying instrument. The collapse of the housing bubble, as well as the ensuing widespread coverage about it in the media, not only causes said derivatives to plummet in price, but tremendously reduced the market for such instruments as well as their underlying, resulting in instituition being stuck with toxic paper that they are unable to get rid of. This situation, as well as the perceived unwillingness of some institutions to "fess up" and write down their losses from these instruments, has led to aggressive shorting of financial firms, resulting in the sale of Bear Sterns and Merril Lynch as well as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.
The fundamental assumption of the bailout is that the US. housing market as a whole is still healthy even though defaults has rose a percentage or two. Consequently, most of the "toxic" paper out there are actually pretty safe, albeit being highly leveraged. Consequently, the 700 billion check for US tax payers is more of a worst case scenario than a fixed price that must be paid to fix the financial crisis. This past week congress has been going back and forth debating about whether to pass the bill for this safety reserve to buy distressed mortgage debt and other toxic paper that has no market anymore. The problem here for the legislators is that the media has already painted this bill as a "bailout" and not as a cushion to restore confidence and maintain reasonable prices on the instruments to be bought.
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| Nike seemed to have hit a gold mine with the Nike + sensor accessory for the Ipod nano. This sensor, which is being widely advertised as being very accurate with no need to calibration, fits into the bottom of a Nike shoe while another piece that interfaces with the sensor plugs into the Ipod nano, thus allowing the Ipod to act like a data recorder for the sensor. The problem is, it only works with the Ipod Nanos, so for people without an Ipod or the wrong line of Ipod, they are sadly out of luck. Until a while ago. Nike has introduced a Sportband accessory for the sensor that records running data from the sensor and plugs in directly to the USB port of a computer, allowing said data to be uploaded onto the Nike + website.
I thought : "What a brilliant idea from Nike! Another way to get consumers to hand over large wads of cash using bright colors. the internets connection and 19th century technology." In fact, the idea of letting people record their miles online, issue challenges to other peope with email addresses and a variety of other ego boosting features had me thinking that this idea might have way too brilliant. It almost felt like a 6-year old kid who can do graduate school level quantum physics - you just know he is probably severely deficient in some other areas. In the case of the Nike Sportband, it is the issue with the display screen. Now, if this was 15 or even 10 years ago, what I am about to bring up seems rather demanding stuff. But its 2008, if cellphones are in color and touch sensitive, then why does the Nike Sportband lack even back illumination for its display screen? The concept is baffling - do they expect that runners only run during the day ? Because the fact that I cannot even see the running data being displayed on the display screen severely calls into question as to what sort of research the product designers went through to draw the conlclusion that " yep, absolutely no need to make it back illuminated...."
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| Sitting in our tour bus and having talked with the co-worker sitting beside me for a while, I sit back to catch up on the "Rambo" movie playing on the mini-tvs. Suddenly, my body feels the suddenly changing momentum of braking and my vision switched from the movie to the sight of the bus veering right in an attempt to avoid a bus in front of us that has suddenly stopped. Time seemed to slow down as I felt our bus slowing inching past the bus in front. The timing of the turn was off and given the seeminly low velocity at which our bus was moving, I felt it was not going to be more than a little nick between corners. The left corner of our bus touched the right rear of the bus in front. And everything just exploded. The front windshield of our bus was instantenous shattered and completely gone. The momentum of our bus was only now apparent - it pushed the still slowing front bus about 45 degrees counter clockwise and that bus accelerated and headed straight for a left road side ditch about 100 feet. And went down. Our bus, on the otherhand, continued to go right towards the other end of the road railing. It nudged and then crushed a mini-van that got between the bus and the right road railing. Had it not been for that road railing, our bus would have gone down the ditch on the right about 80 feet down and landed nose down as well. As soon as things came to a stop, we begin to move out of the bus immediately. Still trying to focus on the task at hand of gettingo out, someboddy yelled "I smell gas" "Gas is leaking!" and everyone simply jumped out of the bus without taking their luggauge or belonging. | | |
| Annoying thing happened on the subway today. A dude probably in his late fifties was trying to pick up a woman probably in her late 40s. Normally this would have escaped my attention, as I am usually too busy trying to fall asleep to notice. However, in this instance, I was sitting next to this gentlemen and he kept talking and gesturing with his hands and in the process elbowing me. This happened a few times and as he was trying to face the lady, who was sitting next to him, his back was almost facing me and his elbows just kept coming at me. I actually had my umbrella with me, but I really could not find a decent way to use it to drive a wedge in between.
Forced to stay awake on the subway, out of boredom I decided to observe what he was talking about. He was talking about restaurants, but even without looking at the body language of the woman, it was pretty obvious he was not getting through. And then he ran out of things to say and started looking at his newspaper to find something to read. So he started reading her the newspaper in his hand, first he talked about the Russian-Georgia thing, and then it was the Olympics. When those didn't work, he started reading the sports section.
Thankfully, he got off two stations before my stop, either out of embarrassment or time. So at least I was able to enjoy my subway seat for those two stops. I wished that lady had wore earphones that day....
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