Bargain Bin STDs

10:15 Elz: maybe she got herpes
10:15 Me: lol
10:16 Me: ’tis better to give than to receive.
10:16 Elz: yewwwwwwwwwwwww
10:16 Elz: I want none of that!
10:16 Elz: Mister!!!!!
10:16 Me: It’s the thought that counts.
10:16 Elz: yeah…well….you can’t take it back
10:17 Me: It’s like getting something someone bought on clearance?
10:17 Me: Herpes == the clearance rack of sex
10:17 Elz: lol

Seriously?

In the O RLY department we have this job posting on Craigslist.

Among the responsibilities are developing systems that will meet the company’s needs and participate in business meetings to identify and understand the company’s goals and objectives in order to develop a system that will meet the company’s current and future business needs.

So, you’re saying, I can’t sit around all day and code on my mega-ultra-awesome Tetris implementation but I have to develop to satisfy the company’s needs? Whoa…my head is asploded.

Nitroeconomics Explains Derivatives Crash

This essay dovetails quite nicely with what I’ve been thinking w/r/t the current economic climate. The bizarre discounting of risk, the flood of money without anything concrete behind it. I got seriously interested in growth investment in the early/middle 90s but all the historical measures indicators like P/E ratio no longer seemed to apply. The algorithm I was learning could not effectively separate speculative from organic stock value. I stopped playing because I didn’t understand the rules. Since then I’ve watched the bubble shift across the economy into real estate and now in to commodities. There’s all this extra paper wealth and no extra physical wealth to back it up.

I don’t know if this is indicative of my own social climbing or of a broader societal trend, but when I was a wee lad only my crazy aunt and uncle had anything to do with any kind of securities investment. Saving for retirement meant socking away in a savings account and working for a pension. Seems that now everyone around me has some kind of 401(k)/IRA/blahblahblah with significant amounts of money introduced into the market. Myself included. Like there’s so much money available these days that businesses don’t know what to do with it. Instead of R&D or creating capital assets it seems all this money is tied up in illusory logic puzzles. I can see how it would be easier to juggle money than come up with and commit to a good use to put it behind.

I know the financial world has passed me by—it was never more than an interesting diversion, but what I do know leads me to believe that maybe the financial world shouldn’t have passed so far beyond me so rapidly after all.

Anyway, IANAE…just an ex-accounting student who ended up graduating with a degree in philosophy.

Nattering on a bit further. I originally wrote this as a post to Metafilter on this thread. In another instance of what is becoming a trend, I decided not to post it there. It is kind of speculative. It is light on facts. It is narrative. And these things are increasingly not appreciated there. Instead of introducing the idea and suffering the snark from the masses I just spend fifteen minutes crafting the damn thing and then hit the preview button. I read it a few times and then just close the browser tab. Mefi really is a lot less like the kaffeeklatsch it used to be.

The Beating Path

Yesterday was a banner day on the employment front…

meh.

So I spent all afternoon cleaning up after the behavior of an ostensibly professional member of the staff who, for whatever reason, decided it would be a good day to pull a psychobilly freakout on one of the more valuable members of my crew. This person gets old. Real fast. And no one at this fine institution does anything about it. Whatever it is she’s been drinking, I want some of that because if I could go around unhinged all day at work I would. So much easier. How the hell does she get away with it?

So today will prove to be exciting. In at 0700 for desk hours. More desk hours from 1200 – 1800. Likely more desk hours from 2100 – 2400. That’s 10 hours at the desk + 4 hours for actual work today. The sucktitude of this job escalates daily. The commitment I have to finishing the redesign project before seeking greener pastures is inversely related in a 1:1 ratio. The Auntship has been circulating tempting offers in my direction. It’s only a matter of time before one breeches the barrier.

On the other side, Elz is still fighting the chest cold which produces frequent and painful-sounding coughing. Sleep is difficult to come by. We do enjoy the new TV though. I never really thought much of HDTV but the difference truly is amazing. Seriously. And I hate TV.

Well, there is contract work to churn out and then actual work to be seen to. It’s a partial rant but I’m engaging in self-censorship because this URL is intimately tied to my professional existence. I’d start a blog elsewhere but I already have problems keeping this one going…

I Can Has Rezearch Papar?

There was a time back in the early 90’s when I’d sneak over to ESPN’s chat forum while I should have been typing a paper at the computer lab. The pure, unadulterated crapflood that I experienced there was fun because it was so diametrically opposed to the task before me. I never thought much about what was essentially a diversion. It certainly never felt like the beginnings of a cultural paradigm shift.

Yet the Web, and by extension the Internet, have become the subject of authentic and semi-authentic academic research. This is an example of the latter. Good in parts but overly simplistic (whether by virtue of expedience or experience is unclear) when taken as a whole. It does a nice job of relating what a meme is and how it describes vast swaths of Internet culture.

As for myself, I never really enjoyed LOLCATZ. In fact I still have no great appreciated of it. Yet ever since the LOLCATZ invasion of Metafilter I have occasionally dropped a “I CAN HAZ” in conversation. That isn’t to say that I find memes vulgar or puerile. As anyone who has been around me will attest, I plumbed the depths of All Your Base and O RLY.

Anyway, I digress. Enjoy the essay.