Tip of the day

December 27th, 2009

Lifehacker.com gives the advice that you should enable those who find your missing camera to find you. While the solution offered (including a set of photos of yourself showing messages on a whiteboard) might be over the top for most of us there should be no reason not to have a single text-file on your internal camera memory with your contact information.

http://lifehacker.com/5433329/get-your-camera-returned-with-a-great-photo-message

Playground

September 24th, 2009

Expect this site to act as a virtual playground with frequent changes until we are through doing some experimenting on which wordpress theme to use on oekonomi.no

Update 20/10-09: It seems the current theme om oekonomi.no is perfect in every way so we’re sticking to it ;)

Upgrade

September 6th, 2009

Has just completed my first wordpress upgrade and it went mostly smoothly.

The only real obstacle was using the WP-phpMyAdmin plugin to do a database backup, this has been failing to load ever since it worked the first few times doing backups of http://www.oekonomi.no/ and http://oekonomi.no/ordliste/. Since there is not much content at this site* I took my chances just doing an export of the content before upgrading. The upgrade seems ok and now there is an automatic upgrade option, which is probably a good idea. I’m guessing quite a few people have found themselves deleting the wrong folders using ftp to replace old files, as well as losing their settings in wp-config.php.

(*) It never was meant to, neither, this is more of a playground and test-site.

As for new features and improvements I’m not sure yet. Just browsing through the wp-admin I don’t see many changes apart from a whole new layout and some minor additions. Under the hood is another chapter, one I’m not qualified to decipher :)

14 Reasons Not to Invest in Car Manufacturers

March 7th, 2009

http://www.businessinsider.com/unsold-cars-around-the-world-2009-2

(From The Business Insider via Consumerist.com)

On Truthfulness

February 15th, 2009

One is reminded of the story of the Italian anarchist who on trying in immigrate in the 1920s when asked to answer the question:

“Do you advocate the overthrow of United States by force or violence?”

Circled “force”.

Comment from “Joe Smith” on the Freakonomics-blog

Picture of the Year?

January 18th, 2009

I just finished “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon. The book is real good, detective stories is not normally my cup of tea (with a few exceptions) but this one resonates with me. It has a counter-factual history backdrop, but presented in a very subtle manner and leaves one thinking there should be some sort of appendix.

Also it’s dark and hence the title of this post. It’s silly but I can best describe the book as a “film noir” and it didn’t take long before I started thinking someone should make a movie based on the book. At this point I checked IMDB and guess what? The Coen-brothers are writing and directing the picture, scheduled for theatres in 2010. Excellent story, brilliant directors – sound like a recipe for a great movie.

Bad News on a Sunday Night

January 18th, 2009

Time: 19.59 Location: On the airport express bus

Text: The flight is delayed, expected departure 21:40

and then again

Time:  21.03 Location: At the airport

Text:  The flight is delayed, expected departure 22:20

“Kitchen essentials, and items you can pass by”

October 18th, 2008

I need a bigger kitchen…

Update (24/5-09):

It seems I’m not alone

Winning Streak

September 21st, 2008

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Jeannette Rankin (1880 – 1973)

(From www.quotationspage.com)

Two Books

September 21st, 2008

I buy books on impulse, often following a recommendation. My last two reads were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig), a favourite among readers of Lifehacker.com and The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), recommended by the Economist a while back. A couple similarities between the two are striking, though they are (at least nominally) in different genres:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) is fast becoming a classic, preaching Quality through interchanging present and past tense. It’s written like fiction but seems to be based partly on the author’s experiences.

The Black Swan is the former trader explaining in a cock-sure fashion how stupid you are (to some extent maybe even being right). On the cover it says “part literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical trader”, mostly essay (in chapters) I’d say.

(1) Neither author is practising philosophy but yet their both entire books are filled with philosophic reference and content. Greeks are both heroes and villains in either book.

(2) Everyone is wrong, according to the authors. Well, not everyone but the vast majority of those that are experts in the respective subjects, while the rest of mankind is merely mislead. There is also a solution, namely to stop listening to those that are wrong (i.e. the experts).

(3) To achieve what they are getting at rhetorically, both authors are willing to show their opponents in a very non-flattering way. Taleb does this without shame, interpreting what others mean like the devil reading the bible. Pirsig is less mean but I still don’t quite believe the portray of people at University of Chicago.

So – did the reading of two similar books result from my sources of recommendation, mere chance or a third option? I’d say chance, only it seems that The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart) that I’m halfway through run along the same lines. Also:

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Robert R. Coveyou

(From www.quotationspage.com)