This was quite a lesson for me. Little did I know that ma.gnolia was run by just one guy off a couple of Mac Mini servers in some basement. He didn’t even keep a backup. These days, when more and more services move into “the cloud”, we must be careful who to trust with our data. On the one hand, they must keep our data secure and not give it away to others. On the other hand, they must also ensure some sort of adequate backup. And if the services you use don’t provide a secure and stable backup, then you have to do it yourself.

Lesson learned.

SPIEGEL ONLINE has another article about Weinstein in German.

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 out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

Steve Jobs On What Drives Apple Employees via rc3.org

Indeed, life is short.

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 that her household income is $150,000; her mortgage/rent payment is zero. The fact is that her husband’s mortgage payment is $7,000 a month (which he got with a no income verification loan). She had a good credit score, but limited credit since she has only lived in this country for the last three years. The system gave her an approval for a $26,000 line of credit!

The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle – Executive Suite Blog – NYTimes.com.

It is insanely easy to get credit even in Germany. But this is just crazy. No wonder we are in such deep trouble.

YouTube – Obama: “Fired Up? Ready To Go!”. Via Talking Points Memo.

Here’s an economic proposal that I think makes a lot of sense. We’re talking about spending $700 billion to prop up a market for something that no longer has a market, thanks to it being abused and bungled out of existence as coordinated effort by all the top firms in America. [...]

That’s an ineffective plan, and we all know it. I propose instead that Henry Paulson give that 700 billion dollars to me. In return, I’ll stimulate the economy myself. I’ll stimulate the hell out of it — whatever you want. I’ll spend it like it was water, and I was some sort of… water-spending guy.

The first thing I’d do? Build new solar and wind infrastructure, and make untold billions of dollars providing power to the nation. The walls of my corporate headquarters would be covered with solid gold, and the business park would be laid out so that from space, it would look like Calvin peeing on barrels of oil.

[...]

Read all of it!.

So John McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns. That’s all nice and well but the thing I am worried about more is the guy’s taste! You would think that a gazillionaire like McCain could at least afford a decent interior designer. But look at this! I mean, please, have you seen the dog statue on the right? Unbelievable.

One thing is clear: somebody with as bad a taste as John McCain is not fit to be president.

Via Talking Points Memo

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