I was a user of ma.gnolia. In February, ma.gnolia lost all user data irrecoverably. This meant for me that all my online bookmarks — pointers to interesting sites and articles that I wanted to remember — were gone. Luckily, I could recover most of my boomarks from my blog archives and the Google cache. However, [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article (must pay for access) about Deutsche Bank trader Boaz Weinstein. He just netted Deutsche Bank a $1.8bn loss, wiping out the gains of two years of trading. Guess what his hobbies are? Chess, Poker and Black Jack. He was famous for his gambling — he had even [...]

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be [...]

I recently had a client apply for a credit card. She is a homemaker, with no personal income. The house she lives in is in her husband’s name. She would have asked for a $3,000 credit line, just to pay miscellaneous expenses and to establish some credit on her own. So the computer is told [...]

I really like YouTube Comment Snob. It automatically hides all comments that don’t meet certain criteria for correct spelling. It’s amazing how many useless, annoying and downright stupid comments you can avoid using a criterion as seemingly unrelated as spelling. I just wish I had such a filter for all sites that allow comments — [...]