Twitter as usual

I kind of missed these.
Apparently its not the RoR

5ive shows I'm waiting for new seasons of

1. Heroes
2. The Office
3. Burn Notice
4. 30 Rock
5. House
   

Strange Wilderness

Grandma's Boy was hilarious. This was not.
Memorable quote:

[sic] "Here are the sea lions. They're getting out the water because of the sharks. Good thing there are no tigers on the rocks. Otherwise they wouldn't know what the f*ck to do"

Peter Dante was funny in this film. I liked him in Grandma's Boy more. Justin Long sucked as a stoner. Or as an actor. He should go back to Mac commericals.

Hipster PDA Week 1 Results

I've been using my hPDA for a week and it's mostly been a positive experience. Aside from taking some flak from my less tech savvy friends it's been well received by my peers. In a short list, here are some negatives:

• Limited multimedia capabilities and no mp3 support
• Not a very 'rugged' device. My BB Pearl survived the thunderstorm by managing not to partially disintegrate
• Bulky - again, the Pearl has a smaller and more attractive form-factor
• Does not sync with Lotus Notes
• No internet apps or the ability to install $10 Apps ( like MonkeyBall )
  

What the hPDA does offer is a very good experience of reflecting on the various tasks and to-dos of my life. Sitting down with a pen and paper beats the BB Pearl hands down: Whenever I have attempted to do this on the Pearl I end up mostly fiddling with the device, pressing random buttons and eventually end up playing BrickBreaker. I find the pen&paper approach a lot more productive

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco By Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Barbarians at the Gate is probably the latest and latest in my streak of finance related literature. This was a very long and sometimes boring book. Overall I felt it is a worthwhile piece of literature that offers a glimpse into the lives of corporate CEOs, bankers, lawyers and PE firms. The book is set in the late 80s, which offers some hindsight into who made it out alive and who collapsed.

Trying out the Hipster PDA

According to Merlin Mann on 43folder.com in

is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.

Pictured here are some initial attempts at using my hPDA.

5ive PS3 games I want to play

• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
• FIFA 08
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare / Call of Duty 3
  
• Grand Turismo 5: Prologue
• Bourne Supremacy
  

5ive shows to watch on Netflix/Hulu

• Weeds Season 1&2
• Dexter
• Arrested Development
• Burn Notice
• Highlander
  

5ive favorite Perl libraries

1. DBI
2. XML::LibXML
3. List::Util
4. List::MoreUtil
   
5. CGI
   

Monkey Business Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle - John Rolfe and Peter Troob

This books seems to be as much IB gospel as M.Lewis' Liars Poker. Perhaps my expectation for this book were a bit high because my friends built it up, but it seems a little weaker than previous banking literature. Perhaps this is because you can only convey so much misery through text. This book walks a thin line of suffering for a paycheck so it cannot turn into a sob-story without turning into one of these.

The more amusing realization about this book and the way by which I came to read it is the following: everyone who recommended it after reading took an IB job and is as misearble as the characters in the book.

5ives: Banking books I've read

1. Liar's Poker
2. Monkey Business
3. When Genius Failed
4. Ugly Americans *
   
5. Den of Thieves *

* denotes books not read yet

5ives: 5 awsome open source/freeware programs

1. Mozilla Firefox & Thunderbird
2. Dia
3. Emacs
4. Winamp
5. BSPlayer
   

5ives: 5 excused I've used to avoid going to the gym

1. Intoxication
2. Laziness
3. Too much work to do
4. Golf
5. Laziness
   

Gone Baby Gone

I'm a movie critic by no means but I felt this movies to be a little drawn out and little 'scattered' towards the end.

5ives: 5 blogs I like to read

• Joel on Software
• The Leveraged Sellout
• Freakanomics
• Coding Horror
• Brownstoner
  

5ives: Things I do like about the subway

• the 'entertainment'
• successfully racial profiling that results in me getting a seat: guessing which Chinese people get off at Canal/Grand, yuppies and hippies at Park Slope and anyone with a flat bill hat between Prospect and Church
• utterly lost tourists
• getting a running start and shoving everyone into 4/5
• early morning BlackBerry email productivity and a round of BrickBreaker
  

5ives: Things I don't like about the subway

• running nose and no tissues. I end up combating snot for 45minutes. Sometimes I ask strangers for tissues. Rarely does anyone ever take pity.
• dudes in expensive suits on the 4/5. If I had a $5k suit, it'd cab it to client meetings
• the riff-raff
  
• people who have not yet adjusted to the daily violation of their 'personal space'
• people who stare back, thats just uncomfortable
  

I'm starting 5ives

Much like Merlin at 5ives.com, I'll be posting some 5ives here: Random musings, with five thoughts at a time. These mostly happen as an expansion of thoughts I have on the subway. Also, I've read somewhere that bullet points give credibility.

You can see them all here (via search)

Made To Stick - Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Made to Stick

some really good ideas in here about all the common traits of ideas that worked out.

I'd like to have kept a summary of this.

will post back with findings

Pandora ... it's full of leaks

Maybe not Pandora but Flash in general. My computer grids to a halt after an hour of Pandora usage.

When it starts, the memory footprint looks like this:

And over the course of an hour worth of usage turns into:


This will keep increasing and eventually thrash my computer to death. I'm switching to winamp/ShoutCast.

update: Two hours into usage: