A Petty Blog

An anthropologist went to study a far-flung tropical island.  He found a guide with a canoe to take him upriver to the remote site where he would make his observations.  About noon on the second day of travel up the river they began to hear drums. The anthropologist asked his guide, “What are those drums?”

The guide turned to him and said, “Drums okay, but VERY BAD when they stop.”

As they traveled the drums grew louder and louder.  The anthropologist was nervous, but the guide merely repeated, “Drums okay. Drums not bad.  When drums stop, then very bad!”

Then the drums suddenly stopped.  Terrified, the anthropologist yelled to the guide: “The drums stopped!  What now?”

The guide crouched down, covered his head with his hands and said, “Guitar solo.”

via Mikey’s Funnies

Whether you love gold as an investment or an inflation hedge or not, here’s a hilarious (to some of us anyway) video about buying gold.
My favorite line: “You will have a cube of pretty metal that’s really big.”

Hat tip to Pop Economics: The reasons I don’t buy gold (Video!)

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There’s an old sea story in the Navy about a ship’s captain who inspected his sailors and afterward told the chief boatswain that his men smelled bad. The captain suggested perhaps it would help if the sailors would change underwear occasionally.

The chief responded, “Aye, aye, sir, I’ll see to it immediately!”

The chief went straight to the sailors’ berth deck and announced, “The captain thinks you guys smell bad and wants you to change your underwear.” He continued, “Pittman, you change with Jones; McCarthy, you change with Witkowski; and Brown, you change with Schultz. Now GET TO IT!”

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS:

Someone may come along and promise “Change,” but don’t count on things smelling any better.

Received from GCFL.net.

Microsoft did something today.

My wife started getting dozens of dialogs with this error - “The certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com could not be validated. The certificate chain presented is invalid.”

Once I disconnected from my company VPN, I started getting them too (I can’t quite make that make sense, but that would be another story entirely.)

Anyway, I consulted Google, and found that Andrei Neculau solved the problem already and shared the solution here.

This is very cool:

After watching the video, you can find a paired “making of”  video here, (where I found them both) :

» Subaru WRX STI advertising/design goodness - advertising and design blog

We had to go back to the store for more candy - How about you?

The Wall Street Journal reports on online data harvesting in ‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web.

The crux of the story is something many of my generation already knew: anything you put online is public information.  Companies are systematically trawling the web for data, and they are putting all the scattered bits and pieces back together. They can put your professional Linked-In account together with your personal Facebook account, along with your rants on youtube and the cell phone number on the resume you posted to Monster.com, and maybe even whatever your friend Crazy Betty tweeted about you after her bachelorette party.  Yikes.

These companies “harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.”

“Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites.”

“Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.”

“Many scrapers and data brokers argue that if information is available online, it is fair game, no matter how personal.”

“New York-based PeekYou LLC has applied for a patent for a method that, among other things, matches people’s real names to the pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and other social networks. PeekYou’s people-search website offers records of about 250 million people, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.”

Thanks to Flowing Data for the pointer.  I can’t summarize any better than they did:

“My rule of thumb: if I put anything on the Web, I’m assuming it’s public.”

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Here’s another eye-opening graphic from  Flowing Data:

Pop Economics is the blog I would write if I wrote only about economics, and if I were a little more thoughtful.

Some call the last 10 years the “lost decade” because stock growth has been flat as measured by the S&P 500 (though it didn’t have to be that way).  Pop points out that you can lose a decade for reasons other than investment:

After 10 years, our incomes have gone nowhere.

Much has been written about the lost decade for stocks. Right now, the S&P 500 is at 1,125. Its high in September 2000 was 1520. That’s a sad stretch.

But there’s another lost decade that was even more painful. And for those of you who are just starting out your careers, this one was a hell of a lot more important than the S&P 500′s storm. According to a recent Census report, between 2000 and 2009, the inflation-adjusted median income of American households dropped 4.8%. (Hat tip to the WSJ.)

Furthermore, the income of employees starting in a down economy can be negatively affected for many years to come.  So, what can we do about it?

Above all else, be good at what you do.  It is easier to be good at what you do when your work and your passions align.  Fortuitously, you’ll also be happier doing something you love - and that seems like an important factor in spending the majority of your waking hours.  Better yet, most of us don’t have an only thing that we enjoy.   That brings us to the line that pushed me to post:

 “Do what you love” is smart advice. But, if you’re a normal human, you probably have many interests. Pick the interest that offers the brightest future.

Hmm.   This is different.