Anonymous commented on Don't Give Your SSN to Headhunters And Recruiters!.
That won't matter so much soon. There are plenty of single moms and people that don't change their name anymore. Plus if you are from some hispanic countries, you get a hyphenated last name that is both of your parents' names anyway. No mystery there.
Anonymous Coward commented on Groupon IPO And Naked Short Selling.
I have used a discount service, perhaps similar to Groupon, but only for software.
Essentially the discount company ask you to market and advertise the discount day on your website. On their website they have a product page taken from information on your website. Essentially they get a 20 - 30% cut of a deeply discounted software product.
At the time I pretty much had a unique software product and the competition was way behind me. In other words, people could buy from me or not and if they really need the software they would have to buy it from my sooner or later.
The first time I did this discount I got well over 30 sales in one day, well above my normal average. But I sold at a huge discount. My actual returns weren't that much higher.
It doesn't take much to see that the discount company is doing very little real work and living off the risks you take.
Anonymous Coward commented on Groupon IPO And Naked Short Selling.
At most these discount companies might be good for raising awareness of your product, but the way the company I dealt with worked, they relied on your to advertise the discount day on your website.
I made well over 30 sales in one day, because I already had a high traffic website!
John Lux commented on Groupon IPO And Naked Short Selling.
You have exactly nailed the short selling of new issues. As a former market maker in IPOs, I can tell you that the shorts are always looking at IPOs because the underwriters and the company often try to push the price as high as possible, resulting in later declines after the initial enthusiasm. Good point on naked shorts.This is a defect-by-design in the stock clearing and settlement system. The banks set the system up this way on purpose, because it lets them steal.
Another interesting thing I noticed at my now-ex employer was naked short selling in ETFs, sometimes $1B or larger positions. That is clearcut market manipulation.
dionysusal commented on NBA CBA Arithmetic.
The players have all the power. The fans go to and tune into the games to see the players, not the owners. Players (and former players) have enough money to start their own league. Of course, the State (and it's stupid "laws") is no doubt preventing this from happening.
Really Cowardly Anonymous commented on NBA CBA Arithmetic.
Would that were true, dionysusal. However, modern sport seems to me to be very much like the old Roman gladiatorial games. Slaves competed as a spectacle for the masses, and while the best did quite well for themselves and were the superstars of their day (it is mostly a myth that defeated gladiators were killed), the real money was always made by the slave-owners who provided the fighters. Even with football (by which I mean soccer) players' wages are frequently cited as ridiculous but the owners of the big teams probably make at least as much back all the time. And a lot of them don't do very much other than forking over an investment now and then.
Really Cowardly Anonymous commented on Reader Mail - 11/06/2011 To 11/12/2011.
FSK,
When you do reader mail, how would you feel about putting a break of some sort between a comment and your reply to it? Sometimes it can be quite tricky to tell which is mail and which is your reply, without going back to the original post (which defeats the point of reader mail).
Keep up the good work mate.
Really Cowardly Anonymous commented on Reader Mail - 11/06/2011 To 11/12/2011.
Sorry, I take that back.
It does show up obviously when I view the reader mail post on its own. It's only when I look at the post from the front page of the blog (as I usually do) that it seems your formatting doesn't show up right.
No, that is a bug. It's a defect in the rawr plugin. Should I try and figure it out? Should I leave it as-is?
I wrote a PHP script that generates the "Reader Mail" template for me. However, WordPress has weird post mungling rules, when you have a combination of {blockquote} tags and CRs.
Therefore, I installed the rawr plugin. That enables me to post as raw html. The "Reader Mail" posts are in raw html.
My PHP script reads the WP comments table and generates the "Reader Mail" template for me. The output is plain html. Via the rawr plugin, I use plain html for that one post only.
It was easier for me to get WordPress to handle raw html, than for me to get WordPress to handle the Reader Mail template without mungling it.
Checking now:
- It works when you visit the post directly.
- It works in Google Reader.
- Only in my blog homepage, does the rawr plugin seem to be defective.
My options are:
- Leave it alone.
- Try to fix it.
- Try to get the rawr plugin writer to fix it.
Really Cowardly Anonymous commented on Reader Mail - 11/06/2011 To 11/12/2011.
If you can fix it it would be great (as I think I'm not the only one who prefers to scroll down the front page to see all recent posts at once) but on the other hand it's not really worth losing too much sleep over if the fix gets quite complex. Though I guess if you wanted to release the plugin for others you'd pretty much have to fix that if it's reasonably doable.
I have no idea how to fix it. I'd have to go through the PHP and figure it out.
I might try another raw html plugin.
Anonymous Coward commented on Another Fannie Mae Bailout - $5 Trillion And Counting.
Houses should just be treated as a utility where people need to live.
Instead banks, estate agents, government, landlords, buy-to-let schemes and local government all want to cash in.
Property prices and rents are far too high.
People in the UK look at property as a way to make money without working. Witness the various media reports and house prices increasing more in one year than a whole year's salary.
If someone is your family dies in the UK, you are saddled with a ridiculous 40% tax on your property. The government should have fixed this.
If two sisters live together and one sister dies, the UK government will kick the surviving sister out onto the street and take her house.
David Cameron, wake up now and fix this!
Anonymous 2274 commented on FSK Vs. Comment Spam.
As I mentioned before; I really recommend using the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. It adds a little checkbox that needs to be checked in order to submit a comment that a bot cannot detect. Once I added it on my sites; my comment spam has gone down to zero.
You are correct. Growmap worked perfectly so far.
It was getting ridiculous. I had 50+ spam comments per day.
(later)
No, I'm still getting spam, albeit less. I'm going to try other things also.
Saurabh commented on Added GrowMap Anti Spam Plugin.
Good to know that it works (I read your comment in previous post). Also just testing that if I can comment or not.Growmap greatly reduced spam, but not 100% eliminated.
I suspect that some spammers configured their spambot to compensate for the growmap plugin, running the client-side javascript. However, spammers tend to be lazy. Even though I have been getting spam comments, none of them have showed up on the blog itself.
I also noticed some trackback spam, but that wasn't serious. That's only a few per week.
ScottH commented on Employed Again!.
Congratulations! You're going to have fun - there are so many ways revisions can drop through the cracks and not get to the people who need them.
I had one job where our installer called from a store that was supposed to open in two days to tell me we had a problem; the stockroom he was standing in did not look anything like the room on the drawings. Doors were in different places and the entire shape of the room was nothing like his drawings.
Turns out the client had completely redesigned the store after our stockroom layout had been submitted and approved but forgot to forward us the new set of drawings. I spent a frantic hour and a half figuring out how to fit as much of the material on-site into the room (got about 70% to fit), the installer put it together and shipped the leftovers back and the construction manager went home to change out of her soiled clothes.
Construction gets pretty darn exciting sometimes.
thomasblair commented on Employed Again!.
FSK,
Congrats on the new job. I'll be excited to hear updates about this job as I work in the mechanical contracting business and we are currently working with some shit software. I'd be curious to hear more details and would love to exchange some ideas with you. Feel free to email anytime.
Once I get started, I could give you their information. I'm still not 100% sure what it is. It seems like a version control system specialized for construction.
Saurabh commented on Employed Again!.
Congratulations! and Good luck.
Robert commented on Employed Again!.
Congratulations on the new job man!!I'll see how it goes. It isn't amazing. It's a lower salary than my last job.
Still, it's enough to pay for food and rent. It's better than staying home all day. Maybe they'll bump me up once they see how awesome I am and they make more money from their website.
My jobsearch was very interesting. It's a illustration of why the economy is falling apart. Most interviewers don't say "Wow! FSK is awesome! I'd love to have him working here!" Instead they say "Uh oh! FSK is smarter than me! If I hire him, then my boss will replace me with FSK!" Of course, nobody will ever explicitly say that. They make up other excuses.