…you find something incredibly hilarious on Youtube:
Archive for January, 2010
Today I have 9 am class, which is relatively earlier for my schedule. I try and set an alarm as close to that as I can and still make it to class on time. So, this morning I launched out the door wearing my glasses, which has become an irregular event for me. For those of you that wear glasses, you understand the loss of peripheral vision that results from looking through the two pieces of glass resting on the bridge of your nose and your ears. While you can see outside the rims of your glasses, it is nearly impossible to simultaneously focus through both lenses at once. I believe this holds whether you are near-sighted or far-sighted.
After class, on my way to the library I was scrolling through my iPod looking for a song to play when I completely missed a step in front of me. Usually, I don’t I try and avoid using this blog to try and write on deep life issues. That just is not my forte. I can’t help but think about how the lenses that we use to navigate through our lives help us see and prevent us from seeing other things at the same time. Without my glasses, I would have an interesting time getting around London. But with them, my gaze focused on one object, I missed out on something else going on.
And hitting that step hurt.
“London School of Economics.
They accepted me. Now I have some thinking to do.”
I wrote this post in February of 2009, almost a year ago. It never got published though.
The decision to go to LSE was tough and I’m not entirely sure path this decision is leading me down. I guess we shall see.
I decided to publish this post now because of the novelty and insight from hindsight. The choice I made is now obvious and it is interesting how it dominoes into other challenges and new choices.
While the title may be more or less true depending on the reader, the results of a particularly interesting election have hit the papers this morning. Scott Brown, a Republican from the state of Massachusetts, has defeated his opponent Martha Coakley.
I returned Sunday morning from a trip to Amsterdam with 2 of my flatmates and 5 other people from my residence hall. We rented a dorm-style room with 8 beds in it for 3 nights at a very affordable rate. Considering we were about 10 minutes from the main train station, the location gave us great access to the city.
We arrived Thursday night via London
Last spring, I made a recommendation about a service called Raptr. At the time, I thought it was an interesting way to combine social media with online gaming. I have not been doing much gaming recently, so the usefulness of the application was immediately reduced to near zero.
I think that we will see a continued integration of these two spheres of technology and social activities, but I’m not sure what form that will take. Services already often let you know whether your friends are playing when you are about to play. The question is whether knowing that your friend is playing via Twitter or Facebook, for instance, will that encourage people to turn on their console and make that connection.
Furthermore, there is a question about the capacity of social media applications to handle something like this. Currently, they don’t support that – instead posts take the form of micro-blogging or short status updates.
In the end, Raptr just took up resources on my computer and added very little.
Conclusion: Wait…I’m sure Microsoft and Sony will pull this off well through strong dashboard integration.
Every autumn in Minnesota, road construction crews scurry to finish projects before winter sets in for the next couple of months. I think every metropolitan area feels plagued by a yearly plague of frustrating road construction. America has the most extensive highway network and cold climates make that especially difficult to maintain.
A desire to improve something is part of the human condition though, regardless of some of the time it can waste in the process. This is the frustration everyone feels as they wait for a formerly 4 lane highway to be controlled by a construction worker flagging people through 1 lane. I have wanted to update my blog for some time now. I haven’t found the time. More accurately, I have not been willing to accept the cost of the time involved and the time wasted by blog improvement.
In the past couple of weeks, I have abandoned that sentiment and started working on it slowly. Now, I’m
I have several posts incubating right now…although I’m not sure exactly why. So, my glorious return to blogging will come through a tried and true set of topics that have frequently made the pages of this blog – politics/economics.
If you have a minute and some interest in what the result of the financial crisis will be in terms of reforming financial regulation, then take a look at this article. In all honesty, it is a bit lengthy and will take you more than a minute, but it is worth the read. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chosen it for this post.
It is an opinion piece from the FT that goes through some of the political reasons why this bill will be ‘too weak to succeed’ in regulating banks that have become ‘too big to fail’. It seems at best we will have a continuation of the Q1 2009 status quo with a few new acronyms reminding us that there are some new regulatory agencies. The rest of the changes, it seems, took place last winter. These weren’t fundamental changes to regulation, instead we now see a few less bank names in the newspaper because they have either gone out of business or merged.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not some vehement anti-Wall Street person. I thought the Wall Street/Main Street distinction that plagued the last election was slightly ridiculous. The point is, and I think this is one that I make frequently, government regulation and institutions shape the world that we live in for the better and the worse.
This is true for the incentives that tax schemes create, regulation of the health insurance industry, and of financial markets and institutions. I found this point in the FT article particularly interesting:
Nor is anyone talking seriously about using antitrust laws to break up the biggest banks – the traditional tonic for any capitalist entity that is “too big to fail”. Five giant Wall Street banks now dominate US finance. If it was in the public’s interest to break up giant oil companies and railroads a century ago, and the mammoth telephone company AT&T, it is not unreasonable to break up the almost infinitely extensive tangles of Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. No one has offered a clear reason why giant banks are important to the US economy. Logic and experience suggests the reverse.
If, as taxpayers, we are guaranteeing trillions of dollars of bank assets and the viability of something as fickle as a company, we should consider what we are getting into and whether there is a better way to organize that industry.
I’m not an expert on this subject, but I wonder if people who are experts (or even lawmakers) are considering the alternatives. This is just one idea that popped up on the computer screen of a twenty-something student. Where is the debate? I guess…it is not surprising that one ‘pet’ bill is being ushered through, while everyone tries to make their ends meet. I suppose, as the 2008 election showed us, voters want politicians to speak economics and business, but not so much that they lose their average Joe likeability.
Okay, here we go.
Wow…It has been a while. I’m not sure why the blogging stopped. But it did and it’s time to move on. I have about a week left of my break between Michaelmas and Lent Term. A lot has gone on over break alone, to briefly recap: Dan’s Visit, Rome, Zurich, Monica’s Visit, and Barcelona. Coming up this week (as of the original writing, these trips have since passed) is Brussels, Tallinn, and Helsinki. The following week includes the first week of Lent Term (LT) classes and a trip to Amsterdam. Perhaps I planned too much for these two months.
Time has gone by fast though and I certainly feel the finite nature of the time that I have in London. A couple of months down and overall, I’m not entirely sure what to think. Surely, one is supposed to be impressed by a city with the reputation and history of London. I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I am unimpressed or that I am unsatisfied with living in London. Neither of those would be true, nor do I anticipate will become the case over this next year. As my travels may indicate, I am certainly enjoying the adventure of living abroad, although there are many things and people that I miss from home.
While Dan was visiting, we were talking about skiing. It has been a sort of fantasy of mine for a while to live in a ski town (yes, I love the sport that much). I mentioned that if I could live anywhere, I think that it would be Whistler, BC. He replied succinctly, “you can live anywhere.” For a 20-something, the question of where you will or want to make your home is a fairly significant question.
This question is complicated by a myriad of issues including family, friends, career, citizenship, and language to name a few.
I plan on writing some more about where I have travelled and what it seems like each place revealed about itself and what the future may hold for me.
With all of this frolicking through Europe complete, I can’t more strongly recommend the website TripIt. You can log in using your Google Account, which makes life easier, one less login to remember. It makes travelling so much easier by creating itineraries for you based on booking confirmation emails. So I just forward an email from, let’s say Delta or Holiday Inn to plans@tripit.com and it automatically puts my flight times in, check in time at the hotel, and directions to the hotel along with maps of the surrounding area from Google Maps. Moreover, it has links to check flight status and check in for the flight right on the site.
It also acts as a great log for your trips. The last feature I’ll mention is the ability to easily give other travellers access and the ability to edit the trip.
Okay, another post down…I think I could get used to doing this again.
“This post was originally created and titled on September 25, 2009.”
It was then edited again in October…Now, for some reason WP is taking all of my posts and erasing everything, but the first line.
So this nice little post that I wrote to start blogging again was erased besides what you see in quotes above.
Well, here it is…I’m back.
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