Peon's Place

Reaction to the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed nearly 10 years after masterminding the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil was strong and swift from American political leaders:

Former President George W. Bush stated “A victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also stated “The killing of Osama bin Laden does not lessen the suffering that New Yorkers and Americans experienced at his hands, but it is a critically important victory for our nation. New Yorkers have waited nearly 10 years for this news. It is my hope that it will bring some closure and comfort to all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”

Read the rest of this entry » Osama bin Laden: 1957-201…

While humans have been a spacefaring species for more than 50 years, it’s quite possible we have not performed that most basic of acts, sex, beyond terra firma. Yet.

Rumors have long swirled that astronauts may have hooked up in orbit, perhaps even as part of secret sex-in-space experiments run by the Russian or American governments. But those stories are likely the product of overactive and overheated imaginations, experts say. A Russian space official, for example, has been quoted as categorically denying his country’s space program has conducted any such weightless experiments. ”There is no official or unofficial evidence that there were instances of sexual intercourse or the carrying out of sexual experiments in space,” Valery Bogomolov, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Biomedical Problems, told the news agency Interfax. “At least, in the history of Russian or Soviet space exploration, this most certainly was not the case.”

What about NASA astronauts?  Read the rest of this entry » Mile High Club? How about…

Unhappy at your job but not sure if it’s the right time to leave? You’re not alone.

A recent survey commissioned by talent management firm Plateau and conducted by Harris Interactive finds that 31 percent of employees are not satisfied at their current jobs. In fact, a whopping 74 percent of workers — satisfied or not — would consider leaving if approached with another offer.

“During the recession, the fear of not knowing what would happen next made people cling to the jobs they had,” says business coach Libby Gill, author of You Unstuck. “Now, there are signs that we’re slowly coming out of it, and people are starting to look up and think, is it time for me to move on?”

According to the Plateau survey, the top five reasons employees consider leaving are salary (57 percent), needing a change (31 percent), career and advancement opportunities (29 percent), change of profession (22 percent) and concerns for the employer’s future (18 percent).

Read the rest of this entry » When it’s time, it&…

I am going to exclude the fact that my mother is already planning this as her retirement job in a few years. But seriously, where does this put my generation, being 25-35 years behind?

Baby boomers facing retirement are worried about their finances, and many believe they’ll need to work longer than planned or will never be able to retire, a new poll finds. The 77 million-strong generation born between 1946 and 1964 has clung tenaciously to its youth. Now, boomers are getting nervous about retirement. Only 11 percent say they are strongly convinced they will be able to live in comfort.

A total of 55 percent said they were either somewhat or very certain they could retire with financial security. But another 44 percent express little or no faith they’ll have enough money when their careers end. Further underscoring the financial squeeze, 1 in 4 boomers still working say they’ll never retire. That’s about the same number as those who say they have no retirement savings.

Read the rest of this entry » The Baby Boomer Generatio…

Apparently we’re having yet another new telephone area code in the San Francisco bay area. Go figure, all of the new cell phone plans outweigh the downward trend of home phone lines and complete lack of pager numbers. Represent the 669…! I can only see numerous sexual innuendos coming out of this.

The past four nights have combined a stunning total of around 14 hours of sleep, and my saving grace is this warm cup of cocoaespressocoffee that I make with our nifty machine upstairs. I’d blame Ron and the brunch that I went up to the city for on Saturday, which then led to breakfast on Sunday morning, but that’s honestly only a small section of the story at this part. On the flip-side, tonight is (tentatively) the first night I’ll be in my own bed since Thursday! You have no idea how I am looking forward to that.

Let’s see.. a couple weeks ago, when I had more free time (ahem), I passed through 10,000 gamer points on Xbox Live. It’s only fitting that the 80 point achievement for being crowned ruler of Albion in Fable III would be the achievement to push me past that milestone. I don’t think I’ve turned on my Xbox 360 since. I was going to purchase a Kinect, too.. but not if I don’t have time to play!

School’s going well. Stats is still a joke, and I have large projects in both my business and microeconomic theory classes, so that should be entertaining to compile together last-minute. Go me!

Lastly, are we tired of hearing about Charlie Sheen yet? Just when we get out and away from Lindsay Lohan, the media becomes fascinated with another drug/alcohol abused victim. I can’t wait to see who our new celebrity target will be once Charlie is completely washed up.

I woke up. I went for a swim. I came to work, and made some taquitos. My day has been hell ever since.

I make my round of call backs for customer issues that I have open, and after 2 phone calls, I actually end up with 3 more tickets than I had to begin with. Seriously? And it’s been like this for the past 2 weeks. I’m finally taking a breather from my day to complain to the world right now. TGITh?

So, I scored a 97% on my math test from last week. The one that took me 25 minutes to do and had people upset that I walked out of class so early. I missed a single point on a graph, while technically correct, apparently was not “pretty enough” for the professor. Sorry, I did not utilize colored pencils in my drawing. Sue me.

I finished off all single-player achievements in Assassins Creed: Brotherhood over this past weekend, and “accidentally” spent 8 hours playing Fable III, on the holiday Monday. The new game is pretty much like Fable II, with updated graphics and the ability to have random online players join your game, marry you, divorce you, and then give me 262,000 gold coins. Thanks for that by the way, my newbie character is now a landlord god, and I’m purchasing any and all buildings I come across.

As a finishing note, eBay’s trademark policies are killing me. That is all.

In a move to the direction of additional Facebook creepiness, you can now take your stalking to a whole new level. And by that, I mean, the stalking now comes to YOU.

The Breakup Notifier app lets users select the friends whose love lives they want to monitor and, whenever they change their relationship status on Facebook, it sends an e-mail. ”You like someone. They’re in a relationship. Be the first to know when they’re out of it,” says the tagline on the app’s website.

Dan Loewenherz, 24, a developer based in Beverly Hills, California, said it took him just about four hours to build the application. He launched the app and its website Saturday, and in the past 36 hours the site has been visited more than 700,000 times and the app has been downloaded by 40,000 people, he said.  ”I was blown away,” he said. “This weekend, I just thought it would be a fun thing to do. It was going to be a little joke, I was going to send it to some friends… but I think people really like this idea. I just didn’t intend it to be this big.”

So it’s that silly time of year when we believe we should be “extra nice” to our significant other. Or if we are lacking a partner, we’re sure to feel extra bad about it, thanks to Hallmark and two-and-a-half isles of pink crap on the store shelves, ranging from heart-shaped candy, plastic flowers, and teddy bears that will eventually become a favorite toy of Rover.

I’ve been Valentine-less for the past 4 or 5 years, so I’m rather used to this routine by now. Just make it some ordinary day and try to not notice how cheery and giddy and crap some people can be, or how much people try to NOT be into the holiday, so much that it’s obvious they’re hurt by it all. The whole thing makes me laugh inside, like a 9-year-old, receiving valentines from his entire home room class at school.

I was lucky enough this year to have an internet valentine as a joke this morning, it’s been something to at least laugh about together. So thanks, mysterious person that we told the public about!  =)

For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy your long waits at the restaurant tonight, and the fact your movie will likely be sold out before you get there. Bwahahaha!

How many of you spot a police officer, of any uniform, and feel a sense of trepidation more than a sense of relief? Let’s say you’re driving on the freeway, at a comfortable 64 miles per hour, and you see a California Highway Patrol officer sitting on the side of the freeway. Engine on. Radar gun targeted. What do you do?

If you’re anything like the majority of the population, you ease off the gas pedal, even though you were already traveling under the speed limit. You may even tap your brakes slightly our of a “slow down” reflex. Why is that? Are we more scared of the CHP and other law enforcement than we should be? Shouldn’t you feel safety and security as opposed to fear?

It is in my mind that officers these days are substantially more worried about being a California Highway Ticketing System than they are a patrol unit. Allow me to give you two examples:

1. I was in court watching a man defend himself for being given a ticket for driving around a cluster of vehicles in the far-right lane. The vehicles were completely stopped in a cluster, which would typically indicate that there was an accident. He utilized, completely safely, the right-hand shoulder to move around the vehicles at a slow pace. However because he had all 4 wheels of his minivan off of the freeway to engage in this maneuver, he was given a traffic ticket by a parked CHP officer 100 yards away. An officer that would rather sit and snipe at his prey than to assist in a poor traffic environment.
2. I received a ticket myself for occupying the diamond-lane. I was driving in lane #2, the left-most non carpool lane, going to work in the morning. I came upon an accident covering lanes #2-3. Instead of merging twice to the right to go around the accident, I merged one lane to the left, into the carpool, and back into the normal traffic lane once I had passed the accident. It was 2 minutes later that I was then pulled over by a CHP officer, who would rather write $1000 tickets than to clear an accident off of the freeway. My intention is only to get to work safely and in a reasonable amount of time, so that I may pay taxes which go into your paycheck, sir. Thank you for instilling the belief that you are “out to get me” rather than the statement that you are here to “serve & protect”.

I feel that my justification in this is solidified by increasing fines given out by the traffic court system over the past several years. While fines may start out at a meager $30, the addition of more fines and fees of the court system ups fines to a nominal $494 to a $620+ range. And that’s for any speeding or other minor traffic violation which could have designated a patrol or city police officer’s to substantially better use. Is it not enough that my taxes increase to pay for city “services” such as the ability to fine citizens?

So here I am, sitting in my silly Statistics class, a mathematics course that is substantially lower than any other I have taken in the past fifteen to twenty years. A friend of mine states that this will become more difficult in the end, as I roll my eyes and hope that it does.

I waste two nights a week here, Mondays and Wednesdays, for an hour and a half a night. The term “waste” comes into play due to the fact that there are no classes which start at 7pm or later, so as opposed to taking a 3-hour class like the two I had last semester or the other two I have this semester, I utilize two nights for a class in which I will not learn anything for at least the first two months. Thank you, Business Administration pre-requisite!

We have tonight finally moved onto learning about the Mode Average of a set of numbers, which I learned about in 7th grade – when I was 12/13 years old. Modes are my favorite because they can be completely and wildly inaccurate as a measurement of an average set of numbers. If you’re still clueless, think “the number which most frequently appears” — congratulations, you have now learned the most difficult thing of the first two weeks of statistics.

I filed my taxes yesterday – after difficulties with H&R Block’s software that I’ve used for the third straight year, I should be receiving over $4200 back; whenever California and Obama get around to dropping that into my checking account. Thank goodness for claiming mortgage interest and property taxes.

My Packers won the Super Bowl this past weekend, which you knew already. And by “my”, I mean “the team I’ve been repping all year long, especially once we realized the 49ers were a wash”. My favorite football teams, in order, San Francisco 49ers, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints. And if you must know two additional facts.. 1) I repped the Saints the entire season last year, and 2) I am now 4-0 in my last 4 Super Bowl picks (Giants/Steelers/Saints/Packers).

I’ve been playing the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood game I purchased post-Christmas pretty heavily for the past two weeks. It’s essentially Assassin’s Creed II (and a half), with multi-player that I have yet to get into. I even “forgot” to go to sleep twice last week, coincidentally Monday and Wednesday night, after this slow-paced statistics class.

I could give you some of the retarded things that go on in this classroom. Such as the guy divided 33/53 and came up with 25%, using a calculator. Or the the teacher explaining how to find the middle number of a short 5-number list, for ten minutes, and the guy next to me asking “Can you explain that again? I got lost.” I swear to god, I was going to stab somebody with my mechanical pencil. I do not see how many of these students passed high school mathematics, let alone achieved the pre-requisite of Introduction to Algebra for this class registration.

That’s it for now. Time to doodle and diddle some classic stick-figure artwork in my math notes. Ciao~