Year: 2011

International parking tickets in Washington D.C. and New York

Freakonomics has an interesting article on pending parking tickets for a number of embassies in Washington D.C. and New York.

In 2003, the state department issued dire warnings to embassies in New York and D.C. threatening to withhold foreign assistance if parking tickets were not paid. So far though, it seems no foreign assistance has been withheld.

Here’s D.C.’s top offenders:

Russia – $27,200
Yemen – $24,600
Cameroon – $19,520
France – $19,520
Mauritania – $8,070

The Holy See, it’s worth noting, has only one outstanding ticket for $25.

In New York, the list of top offenders is a different set:

Egypt – $1,929,142
Kuwait – $1,266,901
Nigeria – $1,019,998
Indonesia – $692,200
Brazil – $608,733

So what do these countries have in common? Oil wealth? Moxie? In 2006, Forbes Magazine hypothesized that it was the level of a country’s corruption (according to the Corruption Perception Index) that predicted the level of parking ticket delinquency, along with a country’s level of anti-American sentiment.

Barcelona bullfighting is no more

Via Kottke blog I’ve learned that Barcelona just celebrated its last bullfight. Apparently, the vote has past last year to stop this old tradition. And as much I am in favor of preserving cultural bits, I do agree that bullfighting falls under animal cruelty and thus should be stopped. New York Times has a few photos.

Octoberfest celebrations at Bavarian Delicatessen

Bavarian Delicatessen once again organizes an annual celebration of the Octoberfest. Coming Friday, September 30th and Saturday, October 1st, they will host an all you can eat buffet, beer, music and more beer. Since the place is small and is likely to be packed, make sure you book a table by calling either 25-747441 or 99-603051. Here is a photo of a poster hanging right outside the Bavarian Delicatessen shop right now.

Day in brief – 2011-09-26

I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/0xzXIt0B Harry Potter Meets Metal #
I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/dzBUg1ZA Richard Resnick: Welcome to the genomic revolution #
New note : 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills – Smashing Magazine http://t.co/2v7y0FzD #
New note : The Startup Entrepreneur's Guide To Risk Management http://t.co/j2RN3D3r #
@savvides Even if someone have done it, you should still do your own. It will be different. And it will be yours. :) #
@savvides Google was a latecomer to the web search party. But they did it anyway, and most people are glad about that. :) #
@kushakov интересно, на толстых мальчишек тоже распространяется? :) #
@photomatt This is the smallest portion of trout I've seen in my life. Kid's fish fingers have more fish than that. :) #
Power cut in the office. Running off a generator. #limassol #cyprus #
Power is back. I wonder if that will be a regular thing now of it was a once off. #limassol #cyprus #
@lufandever weird choice of a picture for condom packaging. :-) #

A glimpse of the future in IT

Here is a quote from a recent GigaOm post:

Enterprises spend $270 billion on software every year, yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Shocking? Well, such was the problem for Chiquita before they moved to Workday. But rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world, and every individual within those enterprises. When we need to derive anything beyond the basics from our enterprise software, most corporations are out of luck.

This problem is only getting worse. With 1.8 trillion gigabytes of information projected to be generated and stored this year alone, our enterprise technology is on a collision course to become utterly useless if something doesn’t fundamentally change. The data being created is obnoxiously large, with IDC citing that “by 2020, IT departments worldwide will need to administer 10 times the number of servers–both virtual and physical–50 times the amount of data, and 75 times more files.” Our software, infrastructure, and organizations are ill-prepared to manage this scale of data creation, let alone generate anything meaningful or useful with this amount of content being created and shared.

The way I see it, if you want any job security at all, IT is an excellent industry to work for. Of course, only if you are agile enough to keep up with all the changes and developments.