Month: April 2013

Cyprus, what’s going on?

Reading the news these days is interesting.  Have a look at the following snippets, for example.

One:

THE CABINET has decided to fire the chairman of Cyprus’ natural gas company, DEFA, because of serious misconduct, government spokesman Christos Stylianides said yesterday.

Two:

THE HOUSE Ethics Committee will look into whether parliament was misled by the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) governor over the terms of reference of an investigation he launched into the island’s banking debacle.

Three:

ON SUNDAY a Greek newspaper carried a report that Attorney-general Petros Clerides had suspended prosecution for driving offences against his son.

Clerides, declined to comment until Monday night on a television current affairs show where although he was not specific about the reported offences – drink driving and not having an MOT – he did confirm that an offence had taken place and that he had suspended prosecution.

Everybody who spent even a few month in Cyprus knows how corrupt is the government.  But lately there is a flood of reports on all sorts of government officials.  What’s going on?  Did people have enough finally?

Happy birthday, Gmail!

It turns out it’s quite a birthday day today.  Not only GitHub is being five, but Gmail is being nine!  Between the two of them, that’s a lot of my screen time right there.  Anyways, happy birthday Gmail.  Please stay free and awesome, and thank you for all the time you saved me with your excellent spam filters.

Gmail Infographic

 

Happy birthday, GitHub!

GitHub is five years old.  I find it really difficult to believe that the service I rely on so heavily, both at work and at home, haven’t even been around so recently.  I use GitHub both at work, and at home.   In fact, every single piece of development I do, even if that’s just for a one time bash oneliner, I start it with a new git repository.  And more often than not, that repository ends up being pushed to GitHub.

octocat

 

 

 

Happy birthday, guys!  Please keep doing what you are doing.  It obviously works for millions of people.

What does it feel like to lose a lot of money (quickly)?

Here is a Quora question that I got in the personalized weekly newsletter.  I never had anything close to a lot of money, but I’m pretty sure that if a miracle happens and one day I do, I’ll lose them all pretty quickly.  Thus, I was vaguely interested in the answers.  However, the answer by James Altucher (most voted) was way more than I expected.

Then Internet stocks started to go down. This is ridiculous, I thought. The Internet is here to stay. I knew nothing about stocks or valuations or anything resembling rational thought. I doubled down. Then quadrupled down. Then 8-upled down.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month. When anyone says, “this is ridiculous”, that’s code for, “I’m about to lose a lot of money”.

I couldn’t stop. I was an addict. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

I was the worst idiot. Writing this now I feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I had 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine and feel my blood going through my whole body when I saw how much was left. I was going to zero and nothing could stop it. There were no jobs,  there was nothing.

Read the whole thing.  It’s fascinating and impressive.