the Saddle

With out a doubt Pepsi, has the best commercials. As cheap as this seems, I appreciate decent advertisements – though I still probably wont buy any of their drinks, at least I don’t think I will…

Just had to post this:

Henny Youngman’s penetrating insight: “What good is happiness? It can’t buy money.”

Taken from a review by Davis Wessel of Gregg Easterbrook’s book ‘The Progress Paradox’.
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Becareful what you wish for.

Yesterday we were wishing we could get into the development class somehow. By the will of Allah, and the fact I was getting an office chair provided by DSPS – so I really wasn’t going to be taking a seat away from a CAL student, I did.

So I went bought a really expensive 2 part reader. The first two articles seemed a little light. I don’t need 30 pages to tell me corruption problems in Sub-Saharan Africa are partially to blame for stagnant and declining economic growth. THIS I KNOW ALREADY. And even if you didn’t the Economist has a really nice section this week on just that topic in 1500 words or less. Flipping through 600+ pages I came across 10 equations – and this being an upper division course at UC Berkeley, the finest university on the West Coast!

So now I’ve got a really nice reader and I’m hoping to get in to Advanced Micro…

Some days more just seems to happen. We returned to lectures and after a full day of begging to be let in to a class, any class, your just whipped. I’m thru with the ‘core’ theory for economics, macro – micro -econometrics, but I really want into development. Due to my concurrent enrollment status, it doesn’t seem too likely, but its kind of hard to say this is what you want to do for the rest of your life(which I think it is) -if you can’t even take as an undergraduate course.

The simplicity of dealing with higher education administrations. Why the theory of markets is completely forgotten in admissions procedures I can’t understand. They need money – and I need a course – seems like there should be a simple solution.

And to come home and be treated to a State of the Union adress, just really made my day. I actually scored the president much higher than I thought he would get. Granted there was alot of responses to issues the democratic canidates have surfaced in the last few months, but I tried to be objective in that George scored a + or a – for each paragraph of speech between the clapping. Overall he got 3 fewer pluses than minuses(49%), which was better than the House and Senate minority speakers(28% and 40% respectively).

Does that mean I’m turning elephant? Hardly- I have too much concern for social welfare and a large safty net, things I feel markets aren’t good at providing. But it does leave me in the precarious position of not being able to blindly support the democrats though.

I have a really bad back. Sometimes it decides to punish me for several days on end. Usually this is the time for me lie around the house and get a fair bit of reading done. Today I was forced to miss a joint party of two friends of mine, so I was fealing espically blue. In Berkeley, we have a new (well 1 year old) pharmacy which carries everything from a well stocked library to free tai chi classes. While there I decided to open up an account with their movie rental unit, this pharmacy was started by the guys who began Real Video so its a pretty good – though small – DVD collection. Since I was going nowhere I though it would be a nice idea to not only get the remake of Dune, but the sequal to it Children of Dune. The original film by David Lynch and its absolutely excellent. I own it. I can say with complete authority the remake by the SciFi channel is utter garbage. The two movies together run for over 6 hours. If you EVER have 6 hours free, no matter how bored you are, try to find something other to do than watch these films…. nothing could be worth the horror of how butchered a classic can be in the hands of cable tv.

Well, it was finally bound to happen. After four and a half years I had drive failure in my Machintosh G3. Truth be told it wasn’t really Apple’s fault, it was IBM’s (a deskstar drive). SInce this happens on the nexus of me installing OS X ver3, Mac World Expo across the bay, and thinking (albeit stupidly) that after two years of running a RAID setup and never using it, I’d kind of like to get some drive space back, it seemed relevant. In case any of you are wondering-the life for IBM’s drives bought in 1999 is about up.