Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

Privatization at the United Nations

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

Apparently the UN is thinking of privatizing part of its general assembly. The US has put some pressure on the UN to clean up its act and to make the General Assembly more efficient or it will withhold 50% of its annual dues (which come to a whopping total of 22% of the UNs annual dues, at least 16% more than its closest contributor).

Privatize? Why don’t we just disolve the UN and instead use the money to help Katrina victims? Or better yet, let’s disolve the UN and move the money to someplace useful, like beefing up some of the proposed budget cuts for this year?

After all, do we really want to keep an organization around that was the purported brainchild of a KGB agent? I think not. Let’s get rid of it once and for all.

Resurrection Stan

Friday, December 30th, 2005

My hard-drives have been dropping like flies. After over a month of not wanting to deal with the problem, my systems are up and running again…. way to go me!

I was able to successfully restore my wonderful webserver, among other odds and ends, and only lost little things (like /etc/hosts & /etc/aliases) here and there.

Now, if I could only do that with the hosed 300GB Windoze hard-drive I have…thanks, Maxtor, for being big pricks who can’t even format a drive properly to ensure data integrity. Guess I get what I deserve by relying on a hard-drive vendor to format a windows drive.

Good thing the majority of the 300GB drive was game & game data, which is easily recoverable. Alas, I’ll have to start Doom III all over again if I am to try to win :o(

Oh, and thanks to my genius, not only was my webserver intact, but IHS didn’t have to be reinstalled/reconfigured…I just mounted the drive, ran apachectl start and away it went! I love *nix!

Diamond’s are a Girl’s Best Friend

Monday, November 21st, 2005

Walmart has apparently started selling $10,000 yellow 1.75ct diamonds on its website….

And, sure enough, right there along with the $520 Keepsake Majestic 7/8-carat diamond ring (”was $600″); the $229 Keepsake Tapestry ¼-carat diamond, 14-karat yellow-gold ring; and the $13.12 sterling silver cubic zirconia ring (”was $17.97″) you can find the 1¾-carat, fancy-yellow-grade diamond, 18-karat white gold ring (”IGI Certified”) for $9,988. Wal-Mart will not say how many of those beauties it has sold.

Huh…wonder if yellow is coming back. The irony is, the yellow is really an imperfection in the diamond itself…I personally wouldn’t want to look at a diamond and think someone had pee’d on it…. I prefer clean, clear white diamonds myself.

The point is, who would buy anything this expen$ive from Walmart, of all places?! Did that smiley face go through the jewelry store and mark down the 1.75ct fancy-yellow diamonds?! At least its not as nice as it could be…for this price (from Walmart), I’d expect at least an SI1…

Total Carat Weight: 1-3/4 Carat T.W.*
Center Stone : 1 Radiant cut yellow diamond at 1-1/2 carats
Color : H-I(for white diamonds)
Clarity : Natural Yellow diamond SI2, white diamond I1…

Denzel Washington…Philanthropist to the Red States

Monday, November 21st, 2005

So there’s an email going around that says Denzel Washington donated enough money to build a new Fisher House when he traveled to Brooke Army Medical Center. Well, I had to look it up on Snopes, and it turns out its somewhat true, but he didn’t donate that much money. Either way, Denzel has always been one of my favorites (He’s the Sidney Poitier of our generation).

Kudos Denzel, keep up the good work. Why is it that really good actors never give their opinions about how the government is running its business, but mediocre or has-beens (and even never-will-bes) like to spew their opinions as if we give a rat’s a$$?! :o)

The email’s main premise is that this wasn’t advertised in any newspapers. Of course, it did happen in 2004…

Morality of Money

Monday, October 17th, 2005

I was chatting with Matt today at Quincy’s, and asked him what his view on Currency Trading was, as Matt tends to have unique perspectives. He was definitely opposed to it and likened it to stealing. I was slightly surprised by his take on this. I then asked him what he thought of playing cards, specifically Texas Hold’em, and his view was different, depending on whether there were large sums of money involved versus small sums of money.

The question put forth is this: Is currency trading morally acceptable? Or is it more like Matt’s position, that of stealing? An economic purist might say that currency trading isn’t very good for society because it doesn’t produce any good or service [utility], and, in this regard is much like gambling.
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