Went bowling last night with eniran,blacksquiggles,chickcurious and a whole bunch of other unknown people as a belated celetration of chickcurious's birthday. Mainly, I used it as an excuse to clear my head of bad thoughts that had been festering all day, with the additional bonus that I finally got to meet Adria and Cambria in person.

Bowling is a sport that you need to be drunk to fully appreciate. It's a sad fact, you just can't bowl when you're sober, even though that according to petkatyyazzick, I am a man and therefore genetically predispositioned to be good at it. HA! That's so not true, as I didn't even break 100 :D

Quotes from the evening:

I really suck!
As opposed to the rest of us? (chorus)

I need to be drunker than this to play.

If I get this, I get 69!!!

You're putting me off my stride!
What stride? You have zero!
(right after which, I got a strike, woot!)

Use the pink balls!

I was just talking and then my boob fell out.

Haircut appointment… check (tomorrow at 2)
Dry cleaning… check (pickup at the same time as haircut)

Now I only need to pick up a few books and I'm all set. Well, sort of.

Woman Turns Husband's Remains Into Diamond

A Minnesota woman has honored her late husband by turning his cremated remains into a yellow diamond so she could always keep a part of him with her.

Nancy Wodziak wanted to honor her husband Richard in a special way after he died from a brain tumor last October. So, she became the first person in the state to turn a loved one's remains into a diamond. Wodziak received her brilliant,half-carat yellow diamond after eight months of waiting.

“This certainly seems like a neat idea as far as diamonds are forever,” Bradshaw Funeral and Cremation Services spokesman Justin Bradshaw said. “Some people feel it's a neat thing and that they're glad that I told them and other people I think feel that this is not for them.”

“I think that's creepy,” a woman said in the report.

To create the ring, the cremated remains are heated to extreme temperatures, and then the carbon is subjected to a tremendous amount of pressure. The result is a stone identical to diamonds that develop deep within the earth over millions of years. The nitrogen in the air causes the diamonds to be yellow in color. The company says yellow diamonds also occur naturally but are very rare.

The cost for a quarter carat is about $2,500 and goes up to $13,000 for a full carat. The diamonds can be made into any size. Life Gem offers the services and some funeral homes assist loved ones in making the arrangements. The company also makes diamonds from the cremated remains of pets.

Honey, I shrunk the dollar

When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time. By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I have just one question about President Bush's trip to Europe: Did he and Laura go shopping?

If they did, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Laura must have said to George: “George, do you remember how much these Belgian chocolates cost when we were here four years ago? This box of mints was $10. Now it's $15? What happened to the dollar, George? Why is the euro worth so much more now, honey? Didn't Rummy say Europe was old? If we didn't have Air Force One, we never could have afforded this trip on your salary!”

The dollar is falling! The dollar is falling! But the Bush team has basically told the world that unless the markets make the falling dollar into a full-blown New York Stock Exchange crisis and trade war, it is not going to raise taxes, cut spending or reduce oil consumption in ways that could really shrink our budget and trade deficits and reverse the dollar's slide.

This administration is content to let the dollar fall and bet that the global markets will glide the greenback lower in an “orderly” manner.

Right. Ever talk to someone who trades currencies? “Orderly” is not always in the playbook. I make no predictions, but this could start to get very “disorderly.” As a former Clinton Commerce Department official, David Rothkopf, notes, despite all the talk about Social Security, many Americans are not really depending on it alone for their retirement. What many Americans are counting on is having their homes retain and increase their value. And what's been fueling the home-building boom and bubble has been low interest rates for a long time. If you see a continuing slide of the dollar – some analysts believe it needs to fall another 20 percent before it stabilizes – you could see a substantial, and painful, rise in interest rates.

“Given the number of people who have refinanced their homes with floating-rate mortgages, the falling dollar is a kind of sword of Damocles, getting closer and closer to their heads,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “And with any kind of sudden market disruption – caused by anything from a terror attack to signs that a big country has gotten queasy about buying dollars – the bubble could burst in a very unpleasant way.”

Why is that sword getting closer? Because global markets are realizing that we have two major vulnerabilities that this administration doesn't want to address: We are importing too much oil, so the dollar's strength is being sapped as oil prices continue to rise. And we are importing too much capital, because we are saving too little and spending too much, as both a society and a government.

“When people ask what we are doing about these twin vulnerabilities, they have a hard time coming up with an answer,” noted Robert Hormats, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. “There is no energy policy and no real effort to reduce our voracious demand of foreign capital. The U.S. pulled in 80 percent of total world savings last year [largely to finance our consumption].” That's a big reason why some “43 percent of all U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds are now held by foreigners,” Mr. Hormats said.

And the foreign holders of all those bonds are listening to our debate. They are listening to a country that is refusing to raise taxes, and an administration talking about borrowing an additional $2 trillion so Americans can invest some of their Social Security money in stocks. If that happened, it would almost certainly weaken the dollar, further depreciating the U.S. Treasury bonds held by all those foreigners.

On Monday, the Bank of Korea said it planned to diversify more of its reserves into nondollar assets, after years of holding too many low-yielding and depreciating U.S. government securities. The fear that this could become a trend sparked a major sell-off in U.S. equity markets on Tuesday. To calm the markets, the Koreans said the next day that they had no intention of selling their dollars.

Oh, good. Now I'm relieved.

“These countries don't have to dump dollars – they just have to reduce their purchases of them for the dollar to be severely affected,” Mr. Hormats noted. “Korea is the fourth-largest holder of dollar reserves. … You don't want others to see them diversifying and say, 'We'd better do that, too, so that we're not the last ones out.' Remember, the October 1987 stock market crash began with a currency crisis.”

When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time. As I said, usually the markets do it in an orderly way – except when they don't.

Link is http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343449,00.html

I went shopping for sensible shoes and a dress shirt. I hate shopping, hate it with a passion. Therefore, like most men, I go into a store and my thought process goes as such. These are shoes. They are black. They fit. They look acceptable. Sold. This is a shirt. It is blue. It matches my suit. It matches my tie. Sold. Oooh, I don't have to iron it. Bonus.

So now I just need a haircut and to dry-clean my suit.

So here's my complete travel info, for those who want to know:

Wed 2 Mar 2005

Ottawa (YOW) to Toronto (YYZ)
Depart 6:00 am
Arrive 7:10 am
Air Canada Flight: 479

Toronto (YYZ) to London (LHR) – Terminal 3
Arrive 9:15 pm
Duration: 7hr 15min
Air Canada Flight: 868

Sun 6 Mar 2005

London (LHR) to Ottawa (YOW)
Depart 4:45 pm
Arrive 7:20 pm
Duration: 7hr 35min
Air Canada Flight: 889

I also received confirmation from the EMBL that I will be met by a driver at Heathrow that will take me to my hotel in Cambridge, and I'll be picked up from the hotel (9:30) to go to the interview itself in Hinxton.

I've been thinking “what if” scenarios since I found out I had the interview. This is not good. I don't want to get overly excited. Yes, it's a great opportunity for me, personally and professionally, if I get it.

*IF* I get it.

I can't assume that it's mine for the taking, even if they are flying me across the Atlantic… Thing is, it's hard not to think about all the good things this might bring. Being on the same continent as Katy, for starters, but also more money and a damn good experience on my CV. I just don't want to set myself up for a big disappointment if I don't get it… gah.

I gave myself a treat today and fired up VS.NET to work on updating my LJ client. I hadn't touched it in a while and there were some tweaks I wanted to do. Mostly, I switched the login from the XML-RPC to the flat interface, and it sped up the whole process like you wouldn't believe. I knew there was an overhead hit to the XML, but this is impressive.

I have the OK to take time off to go to the interview in the UK. I now have to book my flight. My interview is next thursday, so I have to be overseas by wednesday. This means that I have to book a flight less than a week in advance. When I checked the flight prices yesterday, a flight from Montreal to London departing tuesday night (arriving wednesday morning) cost 800$. Today, since this flight now leaves in 6 days instead of 7, the price is now 1900$.

Ahem,

FUCK YOU ALL!

Highly addictive, completely random:

http://burrito.pyoko.org/crash.swf

instructions:
click to aim, hold to gauge power, release to …hehe…”fire”.
when the word “aerial” is lit up blue or red, click on it to use the blue or red powerups.

And for god's sake watch out for the glasses girl…

My record so far is 1100m.