MyATMPinIs1234

There's nothing like the hungover ferry ride to New Jersey in 16 degree weather to fix a non-existent problem.

I have to give a presentation in a half hour for which I am woefully unprepared. Here's to hoping for a "Frank the Tank" style zone-out. Of course, I'd much rather debate James Carville then give a speech on my topic.

Looks like they've collected the snow from lower Manhattan and piled it in a huge mountain outside of my office, presumably as a staging ground for dumping it in the East River. There is still a small part of me that wants to throw down my briefcase and climb the mountain. I can remember myself from 20 years ago and he would've definitely done it. Most likely he would've also taken large boulders of snow to create a fort from which he would exclude his younger brother. But that kid is long gone, replaced with an old dude who wouldn't know fun if it was dumped right at his feet by a Komatsu D31E-20.

Looks like Michael Moore is the newest winner of the Rosie O'Donnell award for throwing the biggest hissy fit about other citizens having guns all the while being personally protected by an armed bodyguard.

It's almost enough to make me not like the guy, despite the wonderful work he did during the last election.

Update: This appears to be not totally true, although I suspect Michael Moore either has an armed bodyguard, or should have one.

This weekend I heard a really nice toast, given by one of my friends during his girlfriend's birthday dinner. There were about 25 people in attendance.

"Roses are red, violets are blue. You have big tits, and I want to suck em."

In the future, I think it would be better to prepare your remarks before consuming two bottles of Korean firewater.

I think you can safely say I don't like Eliot Spitzer. Last year he sued some insurance companies, including Marsh & McLennan for "cheating customers" even though no customer ever complained, the issue was well known industry practice, and the customers were sophisticated corporations.

Since the lawsuit was filed, Marsh has replaced nearly all of its senior management, sworn off the lucrative contingent commissions, pared all but one management representative from its board and laid off 3,000 employees. Its shares, which fell more than 40% immediately after the filing, remain down 34% on the New York Stock Exchange (WSJ, today).

Nice work, asshole. Now Marsh is offering $600 million to settle the suit, but that's not good enough for Eliot. I wonder if he's glad 3000 people lost their jobs, and billions of dollars of market cap have vanished because he didn't think the fine print had a large enough font.

Anyway, I don't understand why these companies doesn't say, "We've suddenly become very interested in the next race for Governor. Last election cycle we donated about $100k to each party, but next time I think we're going to cut a check for $100 million to the Republicans."

This theory of mine dates back to the ludicrous persecution of Microsoft (who was in the process of getting its lunch eaten by a bunch of programmers working for free) by the Clinton Justice Department. I think Bill Gates should've just said he was going to write a $1 billion check to the RNC. Pocket change for him, and much less than he lost because of the litigation.

You often hear sentiments like this one, found in an article about the last reel tape manufacturer to go out of business (WSJ, today):

Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, prefers to record music on reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has overtaken the music industry. Purists like him think it confers a warmth and richness to recordings that a computer cannot.

Nice theory, but wrong. You see, Jeff, the continuous waveform that you prefer can be completely determined by a Discrete Fourier transform and stored digitally. We've known this since 1928 [1] and it was proven in 1949 [2]. And when you want to listen to it, big guy, you can use the Nyquist-Shannon interpolation formula to recover it to the exact original. Just make sure the sampling rate is at least twice the bandwidth and you're golden.

Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The band has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in recording its various albums. By splicing out and saving the final version of each song, he figures they can maintain the archive and also generate a supply of tapes that can be recycled for future recording sessions.

I know you are a musician and too cool to use computers, but that is ridiculous. It's not like we're asking you to do your liner notes in Powerpoint.

References:
[1] H. Nyquist, "Certain topics in telegraph transmission theory," Trans. AIEE, vol. 47, pp. 617-644, Apr. 1928.
[2] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the presence of noise," Proc. Institute of Radio Engineers, vol. 37, no.1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949.

Posting will be light today.

I have to admit, my New Year's exercise plan is not going very well. I've been lifting weights like crazy and haven't seen even the slightest results. Of course, the immigrant I'm paying to do the actual lifting is getting huge.

It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I prefer a comfortable margin of safety between my operating parameters and my design specifications. You will note that I have a relatively long mean time between failures.

This was on CNN's front page just now....

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan toured tsunami-ravaged areas of the Indonesian island of Sumatra today and said the destruction was the worst he had ever seen."You wonder where are the people? What has happened to them?" Annan said as he toured Aceh province.

No I don't wonder. I think I can make a solid conjecture as to where they might've gone, in light of recent news coverage from the region. If Bush said something like this, John Stewart would play the clip non-stop for a month while making an incredulous face.

Do you remember the scene in Trading Places where Louis is trying to pawn his watch?

Fifty bucks? No, no, no. This is a Rouchefoucauld. The finest water-resistant watch in the world. Singularly unique, sculptured in design, hand-crafted in Switzerland and water resistant to three atmospheres. This is *the* sports watch of the '80s. Six thousand, nine hundred and fifty five dollars retail! It tells time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverley Hills, London, Paris, Rome and Gstaad.

Every time I see this movie I think to myself that I have no fricken idea where Gstaad is. Based on the other cities in that list, it should be important enough to have heard of, at least. Well I'm sure I was the only one with this knowledge gap, but for anyone else interested, it's in Switzerland, the country in which the watch was hand crafted.

By the way, looking that up was the oldest thing on my "To Do" list, having been on it since 1983.

First there were Plasma TV's. But I didn't buy one because they were too expensive. Now they are almost affordable, but I can't buy one because they're about to be replaced with LCD TV's and what is cool now is going to look dated and foolish soon. Now I don't buy an LCD TV because they are too expensive. But by the time they are cheaper, something better will be on the horizon and I will refrain from buying an LCD also. Oh well, now that Jerry Orbach is dead there's not much to watch anyways.

Welcome to all the people who arrive at this site via the "Axe Body Spray Sucks" google search. You are probably looking for this.

As for some of the other searches that turned up this page, you people are disturbed. I'm not going to post the searches for fear of reinforcing my ranking, but how did I even show up for that search? I don't remember posting that many things about, to steal from JL, people who like to insert things in the terminal egress of others. Not that there's anything wrong with that act, per se, but you should see what some people are typing into search engines.