i.justrealized

Almost a month has passed since school reopen. I’ve been spending time on things that probably didn’t matter to me that much. It saddens me a little when I look back on how I allocated my time.

To claim that school is busy, work is busy, is perhaps just a lie. I’m obsessed with reading US election news lately and it got the better of my time. I spend about 1.5 hours a day reading on something that would affect me little. This sucked.

Also I have a stack of books I can’t complete. Books that were purchased, perhaps, 2 years ago even. I aim to complete it last year, half a year ago and a month ago. I’m still bookmarking (pretty much the same) the third quarter of the book.

I read four books at the same time. I just realized how horrible an idea that was.

Time seems to pass faster these days.

Good news for people who develop in the Microsoft development environments, jQuery is to be adopted in Microsoft’s official development platform. I’m surprised by the announcement as Microsoft has shown preference in developing their own products rather than reusing what is out there.

Adopting jQuery is an excellent choice and Microsoft probably would drop their existing ASP.NET Ajax Framework in time to come since so many people are using jQuery already.

What excites me more is the possibility of implementing jQuery IntelliSense into Visual Studio. I love to see how that would work out.

On slight note, Nokia also adopted jQuery in their widget development platform.

I wonder if this would set a chain reaction affecting finance related organizations in the US. If AIG really goes bankrupt, it would be the largest corporate bankruptcy in terms of assets. AIG has US$1 trillion worth of assets.

AIG struggles to survive financial tsunami

Insurer American International Group Inc struggled for survival a day after a financial tsunami swept away investment bank Lehman Brothers and forced the sale of rival Merrill Lynch in the biggest financial industry shake-up since the Great Depression.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to review options for AIG — which has lost some 92 percent of its value so far this year — a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

Darkening one of the few bright spots from the weekend’s mayhem, Bank of America — which would surpass Citigroup Inc as the country’s largest bank by assets with the planned takeover of Merrill — saw its shares plunge. (Source: Reuters)

I have AIA policies. Regarding insurance policies, there likely be a takeover and the policy remains the same. If bankruptcy occurs for AIG, branches such as AIA (American International Assurance) probably be affected by value, but it doesn’t mean AIA would go bankrupt too.

I’ve been following the US finance thing a little, things don’t seem optimistic.

Aptana acquires Pydev. Pydev is an Eclipse plugin.

Aptana Acquires Pydev to add Python Support to Studio

We are very excited to announce that Pydev, the popular Python and Jython IDE, is now part of the Aptana product family and that Pydev creator, Fabio Zadronzy, will head up continued efforts to advance Pydev as part of the Aptana team. Like our products for Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and PHP, Pydev offers code completion, refactoring, code analysis, debugging support, and lots lots more. Pydev’s popularity in the Python community and Eclipse ecosystem made it the clear choice for Aptana. The acquisition sets the stage for a full Python suite of products and services ranging from local development to cloud deployment. (Source: Aptana)

Aptana is pretty neat. I use it for PHP and Ruby on Rails last time. But I didn’t find the syntax highlighting as good as Eclipse PDT and syntax highlighting is one of the main reasons I switched away. Pydev is pretty good already, lately they don’t have much significant updates.

Same data for the Olympics, different way of presentation:

From Sina and CNN.

At Sina Olympic front page:

At CNN Sports Illustrated:

Singapore news site, Channel NewsAsia:

Singapore rather covers Thaksin in the front page. That’s because we haven’t won any medals yet. Channel NewsAsia Beijing Olympic site talks about the Olympic spirit, the dance and some Olympic history.

American and U.K. media is feeding you lies about what happened in Georgia the night of August 7th, 2008. CNN claims that Russia invaded Georgia. The truth is Georgia had committed the act of genocide against people of South Ossetia, and Russia had no choice but to protect its own citizens!

The truth about South Ossetia War, Georgia attack, and Russia’s response

I’ve been reading a little on the South Ossetia incident. I haven’t heard of this place before this attack. I thought Georgia is a place in USA actually. But news reports have been bias here. The media seem to pay more attention to Georgia as a victim instead of presenting a more objective view of the situation. This could possibly be due to Russia’s politicians reluctance to release statements on the war, but the media seems to be siding Georgia on this one.

[Note: Most of the news I read is USA new sites.]

Oh no, the US economy is apparently not doing well. Starbucks closing 600 stores. US is about Starbucks right?

Starbucks closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States

SEATTLE (AP) — Starbucks Corp. has announced it’s closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States.

The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009.

The company says it will try to place workers from closed stores in remaining Starbucks. (Source: Yahoo)

With the US dollar dropping and the local dollar appreciating, it’s even harder to get a decent earning from US cheques. It probably is a good time to buy into foreign markets, taking advantage of the good rise in local dollar. Not the US market though.