A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I had a thought last night which left me with more questions than answers:

The S&P 500 index rebalances semi-anually, and I think tonight is the night it happens.

When the list of what makes up the S&P 500 re-shuffles, the equities that dramatically underperformed the rest of the index will be removed. Now, let’s say a single industry did more poorly than the rest.

The result then is that the sector that underperformed will be correspondingly underrepresented in the S&P.

Given that financials took a dump in 2008 even worse than the rest of the world, they’re going to be pulled out of the S&P in larger measure, right?

Ok. So what is that going to do to the index at large, and what is THAT in turn going to do with reporting on the market?

The performance of the financial industry is going to be increasingly factored out.

Unfortunately I don’t have much in the way of predictions based on this. But I don’t think that financial equities are going to match the rest of the market, so what we’ll end up with is an index that’s a much more accurate representation of what’s going on, which is the point anyway.

I dunno. Just babbling. I’m still rolling this around in my head a bit. But I think there’s something here.

It's Funny Because They Aren't Gay
Jacked Guido #1: We goin tanning tonight?
Jacked Guido #2: I gotta get my eyebrows done first. (looks into a compact)

–Bowling Green

Overheard by: Victor J D.
via Overheard in New York, Dec 21, 2008

Sure.

Sure they aren’t.

I figured out several of the things that were sucking the life out of the battery on my newest toy. I had auto-sync set to a pretty retarded polling frequency for email, contacts, etc. So it was hitting the network every 5 minutes or so.

When I cut that nonsense out the battery life stretched out to something quite reasonable.

w00t!

Just got back from my whirlwind Ulster County, Poconos, Jersey tour of the last 5 days.

A couple things:

- The battery life on the google phone sucks ass.

Ok, just the one. I’m going to go play stupid video games and let my brain shut off the cares of the world for a while.

This is where I’d order a garlic & pepperoni pizza from My Little Pizza. But frankly the thought of eating something makes me want to …err… anti-eat.

Hope y’all had a Merry Christmas.

Alright you crazy kids. I’m heading out for my yearly nomadic Christmas pilgrimage. Posting will be lite, if indeed there will be any at all. I’ll probably be back at the console on Friday or at latest Saturday.

Merry Christmas o/

New Christmas Present for Mikey :-)

Just like I said I was gonna.

I’m seriously considering getting myself a G1 for Christmas.

Looking on eBay, the iPhones still seem to fetch quite a chunk of change.  It may be that they could pay for the whole thing.

I’m trying to build some custom playlists with tracks I’m downloading from amazon.  iTunes is locking up for minutes at a time for every track I ask it politely to import.

They’re all on my local disk (not on my media server across the otherwise unoccupied network.) It should be a simple straightforward QUICK operation.  But iTunes is just being ass.

I wonder if Songbird can handle it.

Doin’ my Christmas shopping (thank you amazon) and listening to Pandora.com when on came a tune I’d never heard before by a new favorite artist of mine.

Keb Mo

He’s just it.

The tune is “Whole ‘Notha Thang”

I like ‘em when they whispa

but I love ‘em when they scream

…

Only one thing make me

throw my money away

and that’s a little TLC

and a little T and A.

It’s so good.  Only a couple clues in the lyrics give away that it wasn’t written 60 years ago.

I think there’s gonna be some Keb Mo in my stocking this year.  Shit, I been good.

woohoo! There’s some! It’s definitely coming down! Divine Dandruff!

w00t!

Yay!

Happy Dance!

I had to watch this through four times.

(h/t Paul Ibrahim)

AP’s article on the environmental emergency

…2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming…

How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe this shit?

When it’s warm it’s because of global warming.  But when it’s cold it’s because global warming is worse!

Ya know, I’ve got a bunch of aunts and uncles with whom I spent decades arguing about theology.  When push came to shove and layer after layer of rhetoric was peeled away they said “because I have faith.”

I used to think that was the be all and end all of willful stupidity. And there are a few reasons I no longer do (subject of another post.)

But this!  This is worse.  This is worse because the adherents to this hogwash pretend to believe that they have more grounding in fact and information than my Biblically inclined relatives. At least they declare “this is where reason ends and feeling begins” and they can draw that line as clear as day, regardless of what I think about what may or may not lay on the other side of it.

But the cultural deconstructionist climate worshipers lack any such discrimination.  Instead they kick back words like “consensus” because they were told about a consensus.  They don’t know “the science” itself but they’ll tell you all about how it’s fact.

I’ve even heard, from more than one person, the following statement:  “Well… I may not know the facts, but I know I’m right.”

No.  You don’t.  You don’t have the faintest fucking idea whether or not you (read: the people you’ve entrusted to tell you what to think) are right.

There are enough good simple reasons to reduce our environmental impact, look for alternative energies, reduce, reuse and recycle.

Don’t start believing in magic because you just look like a goddamn fool.  And a group of people believing the same thing doesn’t make it any closer to being right.  Just look at the last election you didn’t agree with.

Any WordPress users out there have any success with the ScribeFire FireFox blog authoring plugin?  It’s a cute little posting app that I enjoyed a bit back in the MovableType days of UCCU.  But it doesn’t seem to want to work against WP.

When it does a test login the error message seems to indicate that ScribeFire is attempting an http get request when a post is the only thing supported by xml-rpc.  I dunno. That seems pretty off.  I s’pose I should try farting around against my local WP instance (which I’d forgotten existed, frankly.)

Lemme know if you’ve got any ideas

Every once in a while I remember that I forgot.

I’ve been sitting here writing code this afternoon (hence all the posting. What? Writers have the cleanest closets. Programmers have the most frequently updated blogs.)

As I’ve mentioned I have all the Buddha Bar cds arranged in chronological order as one huge honkin playlist, and that’s what I listen to. So it’s 10 2-cd sets. I’ve been cranking all weekend on this stuff so I’m up to BB VIII and I’d forgotten that some of my favorite tunes of all time are on BB VIII - 1.

Most notably is Panjabi Hit Squad’s “Hasdi Hasdi”. I have to shut down everything I’m doing while listening to it (never once) and can’t wipe the smile off my face for the duration.

I don’t have anything else of theirs, though I s’pose I oughta go hunt them down.

I glanced at the playlist and realized there are a few more good ones coming.

Buddha Bar 8 is definitely one of the ones worth picking up.

Now I don’t follow this crap. If I want to go look a pictures of gorgeous women I’ll do a google image search for Nigella Lawson and be done with it. But apparently the Indian candidate in the miss world competition Parvathy Omanakuttan thinks she was gypped:

“Miss World Jury was unfair”

“I have performed better than others in the personality and question-answer round. This is not just that. All those who watched it yesterday felt like that. I feel the jury’s decision was unfair”

Sweety c’mere… listen…. the sentence fragment “I have performed better than others in the personality…” stop there. You’re done. Instafail. Uttering those words means you didn’t.

And while you’re pondering that missy? Eat a fucking cheeseburger.

Remember the Google Motto?

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

’cause they don’t.

Because for all I know a bizarre virus could’ve wiped everybody out 36 hours ago and I’d have absolutely no idea.

Hell, I could be the last person on Earth.

How the crap would I know?

UPDATE: Yep. they’re there. rude and obstructing as ever. But I’ve got my garlic and pepperoni pizza (well… half of it anyway *urp*) so I’m just gonna sit here bein’ happy.