The Daytona 500

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I’ll admit that the NASCAR drivers are talented. Not athletically gifted as other professional athletes, but they still must be talented since there is so little difference among the cars yet some people are always near the top. I’m sure attending the Daytona 500 would be exciting. However, I wasn’t even aware that the Daytona 500 was going on until I turned on SportsCenter and heard about the winner and the winning team. Anyway, I read an article entitled, “Daytona: There’s nothing better … nothing.” It’s completely real and not written in jest. It almost reads like an article from The Onion!

The Daytona 500 is my favorite sports event of the year. It’s better than the Super Bowl, better than the World Series, and better than any seven-game series in the NHL or NBA.

I like it better than those because the winner gets to be just as elated as the champion of those other events … and then the season keeps going. Beginnings are always better than endings.
The Daytona 500 is my favorite sports event of the year because the happiest I have ever seen anybody in my entire life was Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the moments after he won in 2004. He jumped out of his car and into the arms of his crew, which had stormed to him from pit road. The look on his face of elation and the exuberant way he hugged the neck of the first man who got to him represent unbridled joy. Someone will get to feel that way today.

“You do anything in the world just to get in the Daytona 500,” Junior says. “It’s an incredible feeling. There’s no way to describe it. It’s impossible to answer the question on what it’s like to win the Daytona 500.”

The Daytona 500 is my favorite sports event of the year because I could go to every single one and still learn something new about racing at the next one.
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I am a tennis ball. Highlight me!!

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Click here.

Using CSS3, one is able to “hide” an image in selectable text. Can’t think of the use of this besides the initial experience… Source: Image Appears When Text Is Highlighted

Thanks to David H-W (Extrajection) for the Creative Commons licensed use of his tennis ball on Flickr.

(Oh yeah… I can only guarantee that this works in Firefox and Safari and possibly the latest Opera.)

Rogue French Investor

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This sounds like the making of an exciting stock market movie (if there could be such a thing.)

By Friday, January 18, Jérôme Kerviel, a junior suit in the banking world, was on the hook for €50 billion – the equivalent of about half of all the gold and currency reserves held by France. The sum also exceeded the entire value of the bank at which he worked.

The 31-year-old trader at Société Générale, one of France’s most prestigious institutions, had secretly set up a series of deals that were going horribly wrong. So wrong that they threatened the survival of the bank and the health of global financial markets.

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The directors faced a stark choice. They could let Kerviel’s trades – essentially bets that the market would rise – run in the hope of markets recovering. But that risked even greater losses if shares continued to fall. Or they could close the positions and take the hit.

It was no choice really. The potential losses if shares continued downwards could destroy the bank. “I did my duty and decided to unwind these positions,” said Daniel Bouton, the chairman. The bank later accepted a lifeline from two big American banks to escape the financial black hole.

The timing could not have been worse. Fears of recession and the debt crisis had sent shivers through the stock markets. On Monday morning the Asian markets were already falling by the time trading started in Paris. Soc Gen was a forced seller in plummeting markets – during that day leading shares in London collapsed 5.5% and in Paris 6.8%. This only compounded Soc Gen’s losses.

By the time it had managed to close out all Kerviel’s positions, the bank was down almost €5 billion. And Kerviel was being blamed for fuelling a stock market nosedive that spurred the American Federal Reserve into the biggest cut in interest rates for 25 years. He was described by the governor of the Bank of France as “a genius of fraud”.

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Comments by Cooper…

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jerryleecooper, that is. Mr. Cooper is a frequent poster and proponent of Microsoft Vista on the ZDNet forums. He has quite a cult following for his often hilarious comments regarding Linux. I’ll be posting some of these ZDNet forum comments below. They for personal, noncommercial use and are used with permission from CNET Networks, Inc., Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

Other jerryleecooper sites: The Return of JerryLeeCooper, JerryLeeCooper Fan Site

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On the topic of “Why Linux will not displace Windows”

that wont work without THEFT of intellectual property

Linux looks very interesting, even if some of the screen colours and menu options appear to be a little out of the ordinary.

But you are missing a vital point, a point which takes some experience and depth of knowledge in the field of computers. You see, when a computer boots up, it needs to load various drivers and then load various services. This happens long before the operating system and other applications are available.

Linux is a marvellous operating system in its own right, and even comes in several different flavours. However, as good as these flavours are, they first need Microsoft Windows to load the services prior to use.

In Linux, the open office might be the default for editing your wordfiles, and you might prefer ubuntu brown over the grassy knoll of the windows desktop, but mark my words young man – without the windows drivers sitting below the visible surface, allowing the linus to talk to the hardware, it is without worth.

And so, by choosing your linux as an alternative to windows on the desktop, you still need a windows licence to run this operating system through the windows drivers to talk to the hardware. Linux is only a code, it cannot perform the low level function.

My point being, young man, that unless you intend to pirate and steal the Windows drivers and services, how is using the linux going to save money ? Well ? It seems that no linux fan can ever provide a straight answer to that question !

May as well just stay legal, run the Windows drivers, and run Office on the desktop instead of the linus.

^^^^^^^^^^^
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The Untold iPhone Story

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It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.

Continue reading on Wired: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

This article is very detailed and is a great read. I just wish I could afford one. Oh well, the iPhone will just be that much better when I get out of school and start making some money.

Project Implicit

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It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.
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The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose — to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Check out the demonstration. There’s a huge variety of tests and each test only takes 5-10 minutes.

Upgrading from Vista to XP

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I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Follow the link to read more of the very funny satirical review of the latest Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows XP.

Federer vs. Sampras

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For the tennis fans out there (and those needing to relax from studying): Tennis Channel video of the 3 matches

Also, a great interview with Sampras talking about the experience.

Results: “Federer had prevailed 6-4, 6-3 in Seoul and 7-6 (6), 7-6 (5) in Kuala Lumpur before Sampras captured the last clash 7-6 (8), 6-4 in Macau.” The details are in the interview above.