noah’s mark

A guest post from Inés:

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My 401k personal rate of return is -20.4% year-to-date.  The loss from a change in market value has cancelled out effectively 75% of Microsoft’s contribution to my 401k.  Last week, the number was about 11%.

Oh, and my 401k investments are rather conservative - I have friends heading towards -30% on their rate of return.

My advice is to not look at your 401k for the next, oh, decade or so.

Honestly, I don’t know how people “play” the stock market.  My heart skips beats when I look at the dollar amount that I’ve “lost” since the beginning of the year.  Sure, I know it isn’t real, and that I’ll (hopefully) get it all back in the future, but christ if it isn’t unnerving.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1832128

Sometimes, despite my intense cynicism, I find myself truly excited for a new product.  Unless you are living under a rock (or work at the most anti-google company in the world, a.k.a. a company in the Redmond area), you know that T-mobile will be releasing the first Android phone tomorrow (the G1).  And, for a few reasons, I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found myself working much more in vim and emacs. I’m not quite sure what started it off, but I think I wanted to figure out, for myself, how efficient I would be using only lexical completion (in vim; vim doesn’t have intelligent omnicomplete for C#, that I know of) vs. using Visual Studio’s intellisense for C#.

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Little bit of extra activity - I decided to clean out some of my drafts, one about DTrace and one about AOP (the one about Firefox’s SSL policy I wrote this evening).  I’m not sure if they are in a state of completion, so please leave comments if you see obvious omisions.  Grazie!

Today’s happy little rant comes courtesy of some asshat at UMass Lowell.  The article is entitled:

Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

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I was reading this article, on LWN, about “DTrace envy”.  The short of the article is that, despite great efforts, the DTrace “ecosystem” of tools has yet to be replicated on Linux.  Forgetting the technical considerations for a minute, it might be worth your time to read through the comments at what appears to be a partial example of what I term “political argument”.

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I just watched a talk about AOP given by some guy from PARC (Gregor Kiczales), and I have to say the following:

Before I watched this talk, I thought AOP was just another bad idea.  After watching this talk, I realize that AOP is Yet Another Really Bad Idea.  Either that or this guy is just a few steps away from needing a nurse to cut up his food.

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My coworker Michael uses this one, which I’ve found saves me a bit of time and a headache.  Normally, to paste into a command prompt, you have to right-click on the command prompt; this is well and good if you have your hand on the mouse already, but annoying if you have your hands on the keyboard.  Instead, try the following:

1. Alt+spacebar (activates the window menu)
2. E (for the “Edit” menu)
3. P (for “Paste”)

It is a little bit awkward at first, but as it becomes muscle memory, you’ll find it much faster than moving your hand to the mouse and back.