What are you, people? On dope?

I told someone I thought the DJIA would fall below 8000 and hit 7000 at which point I’d buy stocks. It seems that 8000 is a magical number that whenver the DJIA hits it, the market rebounds. I’m betting people have an trigger to buy based on this.

Anyway, massive job cuts: Caterpillar (20,000), Boeing (10,000), Pfizer (8,900), Sprint (8,000), Home Depot(7,000), ING (7,000), IBM (5,000), Texas Instruments (3,500), Corning (3,500), SAP(3,000), Target (1,500).

According to this CNN article, more than 200,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year, according to company reports. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost over 2008, the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945.

And jobs in India at IBM went from 6,000 to 80,000.

So it’s our second snow day. The kids asked if they could help me with the snowblower to clean the driveway. Here are the results. I think Matthew has the hang of it — he just needs to think about what he’s doing before he does it — which goes without saying.

Matthew and Jeffrey working hard

As you recall in this post, I questioned how Jeffrey could NOT have one first place.

They posted the stats of the race and it turns out they used time and NOT placement to determine the winner. I think next year we should employ a ladder structure: i.e. make the top of each Den compete in the quarter or semi finals to try to get to a set of top 4 finishers. And then have the Finals be the race of those 4 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

That seems fairer — what do you think?

I’ve really resisted Netflix. Anyone that knows me knows that I had an idea about a Video Pizza rental business idea about 10 years ago. Kozmo.com shortly came out and it failed miserably. I think it was execution, and it shows since Netflix has done very well.

Anyway, now that Netflix offers unlimited streaming videos (note most are NOT new releases) to your PC, or your Xbox, or now your TV (with integrated streaming), or Tivo or Roku device. It’s great. My queue is big — 115 movies. Things that are fillers between the one movie I can check out at a time.

I’ve rented 3 movies so far from them this month (Grease, The Goonies, Fireproof) and it cost me $8.95 to get the service — I already had Xbox Live. One more movie and it’s $2.25/movie — and it’s delivered right to my door — even in the snowstorm.

If you don’t have Netflix, you should check it out.

SpringByExample All of the references and it’s pretty freakin’ current. Nice work.

“A copy of a copy is never as good as the original.” Added it to my Netflix queue.

I saw this post about generating more code that does stuff than spending time thinking about the quality of the code.

I have to say I get bogged down at times thinking about how best to do something rather than just writing the crappy code (and lots of it).

The kids had 3 snow days after a lot of snow fell, then freezing rain, then it froze, etc.

I went up to McCabe Lumber to return some railings. The roads weren’t great, but they weren’t impassable.

I-275

I-275

1. If you are a timid girly girl (that includes you males — you know who you are) stay home — don’t drive in the snow. Stay off the highways — you go to slow and you’ll get us folks stuck along with you.
2. Relax. I don’t know how many people (see item 1) I saw with their shoulders all hunched up like they were going to rip the steering wheel from the column.
3. Get off your damn cellphone. If you want to talk on the phone, pull into a ditch, because you’ll end up stuck on the side anyway. Easier solution: get off the damn phone.
4. If you have a sports car or a rear wheel drive car without traction control and/or bald tires — stay home — or go drive in some parking lots.
5. When you’re driving up a hill, for pete’s sakes, don’t slow down! The rest of us poor saps will get stuck behind you.
6. If you’re going to turn, don’t brake through the turn– you lose control — lay off the brake so the wheels rotate through the turn.

Man the Canonical guys make life upgrading your server easy! Check it out here

1. Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

2. Edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set:
   

   Prompt=normal

3. Launch the upgrade tool:
   

   sudo do-release-upgrade

5 minutes later and the server is upgraded. Sweet!