Today, the stock market slid 778 points; the single greatest drop in the market ever, points-wise. In all, its a 7% drop in the market (Black Monday tallied at 22% drop in the market, the day WWI broke out tallied just short of 25%).
Just felt like I needed to record that in my blog. I leave you with a quote by G.W.:
This economy of ours is on a solid foundation, but we can’t take economic growth for granted.
As I was driving to work today, I got the best idea for a political cartoon. Stay with me on this one till the end:
Imagine a 3 or 4 guys standing together arm-in-arm like something out of a cheesy high-school teeny-bopper movie dressed in business suits. They are walking down a street titled “Main Street” and have pins on that say things like: Bear Stearns, Congress, Lehman Brothers, AIG, etc. They have cash stacks falling out of each and every pocket they have with enormous grins on their faces. At the lower of the picture is a tattered homeless man smoking a cigarette and sitting on the sidewalk. He has a pin on his shirt that reads: “Middle Class” and holds a sign out that reads: “Will work for housing”. It would be critical that he is looking up at the business men but they are paying no attention to him.
I think this will pretty accurately describe the situation going on in our country right now. If someone out there comes across this and is an artist, please share your interpretation of this with me and I will host it here, link to a site of your choosing, and give you credit for the drawing. I can’t draw for shit otherwise I would do it.
So I’ve wanted a laptop for some time now. Like most things I want, I didn’t want to actually buy it so I have been putting it off for about a year now. This year at school I am taking some security classes that are in an airgapped room. The catch is that you can get the school’s wifi in the room if you bring your own equipment (and promise not to plug it in to the room’s network on pain of failure of all classes that use the security lab).
A few weeks ago I picked up a $1200 HP. I was planning on using it as my full time computer as it was more powerful (I thought) than my existing machine (c2d, 4gb, 9600m gt). Well apparently I failed at reading reviews/benchmarks or they lied to me, as the 9600m gt barely outperformed my 7900gs (17 points on 3dmark06). On top of that I was having some strange issues with the sound and the “media buttons” (which are really like a touchpad of some sort) acting oddly. Since HP offers full money back guarantees (and pays return shipping, and shipping to me was free) back to HP it went, quite painlessly. Even though I wasn’t sold on their product, their return policy is pretty damn nice.
About a week ago, a buddy linked me to a slickdeals post about the Acer Extensa 4420-5963. $399 at Best Buy.
Big news at CNN today is the announcement of a “several hundred billion dollar” bank bailout that will “attempt” to get financial institutions back on their feet. If you have been living under a rock for the past two years, the story is: banks were giving out sub-prime loans to people for housing purchases. These people defaulted on their loans in mass leaving the banks with property that wasn’t worth the loan and out the money. This spurred a lack of confidence in investors who would not continue to support the loans forcing the banks to stop giving loans. If the bank isn’t giving out loans, people aren’t buying homes. When people aren’t buying homes, our economy (apparently) tanks.
In response to this, there is plans being put down that will attempt to “bail out” the banks by having the government absorb some or all of the debts of these banks: amounting in hundreds of billions of dollars (apparently).
This is bad… here’s why:
The web is a big place, a scary place, and a malicious place. Beyond that, its a cesspool of information about anyone, anything, and any place. Information about you is just a Google away, and there is all kinds of stuff you didn’t even know was there. If your name ever appeared in the news, or your schools newspaper, or your neighbor wrote a nasty rant about you on a forum… it’s all there and people can find it.
Maybe some of these things are out of your control. If someone posts your name on a website, in a lot of cases there isn’t much you can do about it. However, save yourself with aspects that are in your control. I’ll bet that 8 out of 10 people are members of some kind of social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, etc) and have some form of personal information on there. A small percentage of those people have A LOT of information on there (their hobbies, their friends, their job, their websites, their pictures, their videos… everything).
For the percentage of people willing to share it all, go nuts, but make sure you only share it with people you WANT to share it with.
I was perusing Facebook this morning while at work. I don’t normally get involved with Facebook, but I decided to throw myself into a group for those that enjoy WoW just to pay homage to an activity that takes quite a bit of my time up from week to week. I punched “World of Warcraft” into the group search, and surprisingly there are MANY groups with the focus of hating on WoW.
Some such groups include: “If this group gets to 100,000 my boyfriend will quit WoW” and “RIT students who aren’t World of Warcraft Nerds”. This makes me beg the question: what about WoW makes you hate it so much?