Bebe, después de cinco años, ha sacado un nuevo disco: Y. (léase Y Punto). Es un disco muy diferente a su trabajo anterior, y la verdad, ha merecido la pena esperar.
Archive for July, 2009
Seven Bedrooms
July 21, 2009I few days ago I ran across one of the many stories related to home buyers crushed by the weight of their mortgage loans:
After discussing their financials with a mortgage broker, the family was presented with a deal and payments they could afford (italics mine). The interest-only, adjustable rate loan sounded good at the time. And since they were not first-time homebuyers, they thought they knew what they were getting into. [They] figured they could always refinance before the interest rates were adjusted.
Soon, the family settled in their seven-bedroom, five-bathroom plantation-style home with a pool (bold mine).
They were also paying mortgages on vacant rental properties when they couldn’t find tenants because of the housing crisis.
The story did not provide details on dates but vaguely implied the purchase took place perhaps four years ago or so. The story did say that this is a family of four (two adults and two kids). I suppose the story was intended to draw some form of empathy, but I had to stop and wonder: four people in a seven-bedroom house, with five bathrooms? Four, seven, five? Seriously? Vacant rental properties? Interest-only payments? Empathy?
We didn’t expect it to implode was the thinking. But, realistically speaking, this situation is what is generally referred to as living well beyond your means. Whether shady characters in financial institutions were crafting even shadier products to pile up so-called toxic assets and pass them along while making a bundle is not the point. The point is, simply, seven bedrooms when they can’t realistically be afforded and were probably not necessary to begin with, pushing the limits of financial reality and sanity over the edge. Any disturbance in the force (and they sadly experienced a few, including, unfortunately, health issues) is very likely to blow the scheme to smithereens. The story has a happy ending or sorts: the rescue plan, after some maneuvering, seems to have helped this family’s situation, which is good (there is little point in having people end up roofless), yet there is a sense of responsibility that seems to have been lost to boundless meness and unrealistic entitlement, which handily obliterates any sense of empathy whatsoever when there are so many other families that lived closer to their means and still got caught in the storm or others that chose to (or were forced to) pass on owning because they made the sensible decision that they could not afford a place.
kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
July 14, 2009I recently noticed that my system.log was collecting these messages fairly constatly.
Jul 14 04:08:01 boxname kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0 Jul 14 04:08:31: --- last message repeated 3 times --- Jul 14 04:08:41 boxname kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0 Jul 14 04:09:08: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
It turns out the problem lies with Adobe’s license manager, and they provide a fix. All is well now.
Spammy Invites
July 8, 2009Is anyone else getting spammy invites at Ning as of late? Around mid-June, I started getting a relatively constant stream of invites from ramdon folks all over the map. There is little, if any, rhyme or reason to the invites, other than they mostly (and sometimes rather obviously) pr0n spam. The abuse folks asked me to leave the notifications intact, but after a while, the volume gets a little idiotic, so I started bulk-ignoring them.
Sense of Humor in Product Naming
July 2, 2009I love companies (and the folks behind them) with a sense of humor. Case in point: Stanley’s FatMax Fubar II.
Vote to Bring Back Atlassian’s Stimulus Package
July 1, 2009I can’t believe I missed it! Atlassian was selling, for a limited time, $5 5-user licenses for their products. Asides from the fact that I would probably buy them all just to have a stable of things available to play with, I could have really used Confluence and JIRA in one of the non-profits I work with (it falls, I think, under the commercial non-profit definition as it helps small, generally family-owned companies in Spain figure out things with exports, fairs, conventions, publications and such in a specific industry, even tho their budget is tiny tiny tiny, certainly not in line with current licensing prices).
As it stands today, I installed one of those cheap Compaq Presarios running OpenSolaris 2009.06 so they can have something that resembles a server. They’re embracing OpenOffice, and I’m working towards getting XWiki in a state where it’s usable for them, but I would very much prefer Confluence (not because XWiki doesn’t work but because I’m quite familair with Confluence and my support role is served much better by Confluence, which by the way, rocks).
So if you have a minute, vote and contribute.
