unled

Calamity Rob

You all know not to ever follow me right? You are are aware with my history of choosing check out lines at the grocery or security lines at the airport?

OK. Well it struck again with my choice of walks today. I said to KL, “Let’s go see Chelsea!” Fine, but the train that goes to Chelsea was JAMMED with people heading to the Chelsea FC v Southend United game. It was so bad we decided to get out at Embankment and walk to the West End.

We got out right in the middle of a pro-Palestine march. To divert we walked north towards Trafalgar Square. Directly into the center of the Palestinian demonstration. Ugh!

After that the day was fine. We walked a bit. Had some coffee. Caught a film even. Finally, it was time to catch the tube home. Apparently the Chelsea game had just ended.

Christmas Travels

I’ve been crazy out of touch lately, but it’s not like I’ve been sitting on my butt! Katherine and I left London on the Eurostar, through the channel tunnel (I HATE the word chunnel) to Brussels. We then drove from the Brussels train station through Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany to Cologne. From Cologne it was off to Frankfurt to spend a few days with Giancarlo and Emily (NYC friends who are now in Bologna, Italy). From Frankfurt it was a 5 hour drive to Berlin where we would take 4 hours worth of trains to get to Poznan, Poland. From the Poznan train station it was a short 90 minute drive to Agi’s (NYC friend again) parents’ place in Turzyn. Tomorrow we have to turn around and do the whole thing in reverse! Merry Christmas!

Nerd Alert

Just wrote a Drupal module that queries an LDAP database and returns results formatted for use with a jQuery autocomplete plugin. Nerdy goodness.

What Is My IP?

Sometimes I need to use my current IP address for web development. I don’t always keep tabs on what my IP is and it’s a bit of a pain to lookit up in the system preferences or command line. So I use whatismyip.com. But I never remember whether it’s whatismyip.com or whatsmyip.com. I almost ALWAYS go to whatsmyip.com first, which is just a parked domain with stupid ads. So annoying, but those assholes could easily plop the user’s IP down on there too AND probably add to their overall traffic anyway. Why am I smarter than everyone?

Peter Schiff

This is old news, but still pretty awesome.  A couple YEARS ago Peter Schiff, economist / financial dude, started talking about a future recession fueled by an over-leveraged economy.  He used terms that seemed alien a year ago but all too familiar now: toxic debt, credit crunch, etc.

[Video from this post was supposed to be here but Tumblr is…touched.]

Now even a broken clock is wrong twice a day, but it’s hard to imagine people’s sheer incredulity in Peter’s words.  They literally act as if he’s a crazy person that got into the set.  My favorite bit is when other analysts suggest buying stock in ‘steals’ such as: Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and WaMu.

Want some more Peter Schiff? He was also on NPR’s Planet Money podcast, here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/11/hear_peter_schiff_is_warning_y.html.