Clearance! : take 60% off and take additional 20%

With the holiday season almost gone, no doubt one has seen such notorious and blatantly misleading sales pitches. I have wondered many a time as what the mark up price was and I got my answer yesterday. It is more than 100%. I was at Wilson's leather to buy a jacket and I found one that was marked at 119 MSRP. I figured that seemed reasonable enough.

The girl at the counter rings up 229.88! Huh what the hell just happened. Among the many tags attached to the jacket there was another tag with the price 229.88 written on it! It turns out the tag with price 119 was set by the parent company G-III apparel and the 229.88 a discounted price Wilson's Leather was selling it at. The tag from Wilson's leather was half torn. I would be hazard a guess that it could be have been sold at a price 250+.

The girl at the counter nonchalantly says explains that they mark up the price just before the holiday season and then offer discount. This gives the customer an illusion that they are getting a good deal when in fact they are paying the original price of the item. Oh well!

God Booms: Stop acting as if you discovered Antarctica. It is elementary sales strategy and my minions in the corporate board rooms need their yachts!

Me: Yeah yeah and you have the nerve to call greed a sin when you have your minions doing this!

God: Piss off! Its my creation and I can do whatever with it.

Me: Grrrr

Grits and loads of fat!

I was in NC visiting a friend. We went to a local diner for breakfast.Ordered a big breakfast of eggs and pancakes and grits. I let the grits sit while I attacked the eggs and pancakes. Taking my own time. The butter on the grits had melted and coalesced into this. Yeh, I lost my appetite for it. Damn!

The New Regime

NIN's drummer Ilan Rubin released a solo album titled "The Coup". It is available for free download and also be streamed from band's site.

Role Models

Watched this movie. It was meh! One time watch. Watch it if you if it is free or you can spend time on something else.

Freedom has a price!

Its was a Friday evening and I got lost in a book. Sipping home brewed ice tea, I finished the book "The Complete Persepolis". It is a biography of Marjane Satrapi in the form of a comic.

The childhood of a girl with the Iranian Revolution as the backdrop, her personal revolt against new regime,her move to Venice as a teen and back, her marriage and post divorce life make an interesting read. Rather it be pure prose or a biography penned page after page, the comic approach does a great job in keeping the reader visually and intellectually involved through the roller coaster. The black and white illustrations complements her story.

The strong foundation of a woman laid by her parents in a conservative country that has archiac/sexist laws, sees her through all her tumulus teen years. An identity crisis coupled with little gestures that are made in defiance against regime are very insightful of the problems that women face and yet is inspiring. It is sad, it is hilarious, it is revealing, it is a story in ways one can relate to.

It is worth a read.

Holy Crap! Kansas Supreme Court just ruled

The daily trip to reddit and I chance up a link to this blog entry when I caught the tag line of 60 million mortgages could get invalidated. My interest was piqued. I looked up the original court ruling and it is here. I read it.

Disclaimer: I AM NOT A LAWYER and my summaries can have errors.

My summary:

A guy buys a house and takes 2 mortgages. The second one is from Millennia Mortgage Corp. In the mortgage that he signed MERS, (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc) is defined as a nominee for Millenia Mortgage Corp. Some time later Sovereign takes over the mortgage but doesn't notify the local county of it.

Unfortunately for the guy he has to declare bankruptcy. He declares Sovereign bank is the creditor and files intent to surrender the property.

The company that gave the first mortage Landmark Bank, files a petition with the Court intending to forclose the property and names the guy and the Millenia as the defendants. Now the important event. Landmark doesnt serve notice of the litigation to MERS or Sovereign.

Since there are no answers from the guy or from Millennia so the court enters a default judgment. The property gets sold and Landmark files a petition confirming the sale. Now Sovereign goes "hey hold on", files a petition requesting that sale be be invalidated and the summary judgment be overturned, says it was not notified and MERS is a part of the action.

Court goes OK and listens to arguments from all parties and defers judgment. MERS makes an entry and files a petition to vacate summary judgment.

Court says, thanks for playing, you don't have a ground for objections, lo and behold DENIED becoz
1) MERS is an agent, a Thanks for trying.
2) Sovereign didn't register with the local county about it getting the mortgage. Sorry, better luck next time.

MERS and Sovereign, files motions to reconsider. courts go hmmn, no thanks. DENIED!

Lots of stuff happens and the case ends up in Supreme Court of Kansas. The supreme court does a brilliant job of breaking down the agreement that the guy signed and what role MERS plays.

The orginal mortgage was split into different securities and sold. MERS is a electronic system owned by a private company that keeps track of who is the owner of the mortgage that gets split as securities and sold to other investors. MERS also is considered as a nominee of the banks and act on their behalf when it comes to buying, foreclosures and stuff.

The court concluded:
"The relationship that MERS has to Sovereign is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer. A mortgagee and a lender have intertwined rights that defy a clear separation of interests, especially when such a purported separation relies on ambiguous contractual language."

Damn! The court also concludes that the practices of MERS makes it almost impossible for the public to find out who really has the deed to the property on which the mortgage is taken on. If the mortgage is split so many ways, then who has the deed?

Quting the court:
"The practical effect of splitting the deed of trust from the promissory note is to make it impossible for the holder of the note to foreclose, unless the holder of the deed of trust is the agent of the holder of the note. [Citation omitted.] Without the agency relationship, the person holding only the note lacks the power to foreclose in the event of default. The person holding only the deed of trust will never experience default because only the holder of the note is entitled to payment of the underlying obligation. [Citation omitted.] The mortgage loan becomes ineffectual when the note holder did not also hold the deed of trust." Bellistri v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, LLC, 284 S.W.3d 619, 623 (Mo. App. 2009). "

Which means MERS which foreclosing properties can possibly no longer foreclose properties. Damn, double Damn! If this stays on, then we are looking at a big problem. A wild ass guess as to the fall out,

1) People who are forced to foreclose by MERS can get more breathing time , peace and some justice.
2) The tax payer will get shafted again unless the public hounds congress to hold people in wall street accountable.

Fun times. bah!

Calvin and Hobbes

ROTFL! The comic still makes me laugh.

Source: http://progressiveboink.com/jon/images/calvinhobbes/jon4.GIF

My fancy

For some odd reason Lewis Carrol popped into my head when thinking of poetry, here is a nice one.

PAINTED her a gushing thing,

With years perhaps a score;

A little thought to find they were

At least a dozen more;

My fancy gave her eyes of blue,

A curly, auburn head;

I came to find the blue a green

The auburn turned to red.




She boxed my ears this morning--

They tingled very much;

I own that I could wish her

A somewhat lighter touch;

And if you were to ask me how

Her charms might be improved,

I would not have them added to,

But just a few removed!




She has the bear's ethereal grace,

The bland hyena's laugh,

The footstep of the elephant,

The neck of the giraffe.

I love her still, believe me,

Though my heart its passion hides;

"She is all my fancy painted her,"

But, oh, how much besides!

Source: http://www.poetry-archive.com/c/my_fancy.html

DexTer

Started to watch this series. It seems interesting, It kind of stood out odd that the central character is a forensics/blood expert yet when he opens doors or cabinets at potential victims place is not wearing gloves and is leaving behind fingerprints. So much for being a show on forensics/blood expert who is a serial killer. The 4th season starts in a few days, might watch it.

Puffy rulez!

No puffy is not a dog or any other 4 legged animal. It is a pufferfish, it is the mascot of OpenBSD. I decided to give OpenBSD 4.5 a try. It has been a while since I used it. The install was a breeze. Grab the iso and I have a minimal X session working. I liked the fact that ifconfig could do wireless configuration instead of using a different binary in the Linux world.

ifconfig iwi0 wpa wpapsk "0xlongasskey"; ifconfig iwi0 up ; dhclient iwi0. Lo and behold I was connected to net via wireless. pkg_add -i was easy enough. I like aptitude better though. The FAQ was good enough to get the system up and running. Now I have a OpenBSD system with an Gnome that is consistent with my Debian system. Nice!

I need to get encrypted filesystem up and running, that's on my list of things to do.

You are naked!

The internet has made the world a true global village. Edward Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword". I would today rephrase it as "The keyboard is the mightier than the sword". People have been either stripped or stripping themselves digitally, consciously or unconsciously. No. I don't mean porno you pervs. I mean loss of privacy. Just as people leave stuff around in their house that can reveal their dna if examined, like hair, people leave digital footprints in their own computer or in places they have no control over, revealing a lot about them.

Lets say, my friend gave me a laptop to examine and tell me what kind of person used that laptop, I could begin with as simple as.

1) Examine list of installed software.
2) Examine the browser.
Fire up the browser and look at the following
a) History
b) Bookmarks
c) Cache
d) Temp files.
e) Cookies.
f) Stored passwords.
An average person probably keeps a lot of cached files around.
3) Look at IM logs.
Take Pidgin/YIM/Trillian as examples, you dont even has to be logged on to find this information,
a) They reveal the person's friend's list
b) If the person logged conversations, they would be in plain text or in the case of YIM (XOR'ed with your id)
4) A peek at my documents application data directories is a treasure trove of information, especially if a the person is well organized.
5) History of applications (Microsoft Word/Excell/Photoshop) that reveal the person recently edited.
6) Media players what the person recently watched.

I can now take a good guess about a person's personality. In yester years it was gossip or public actions that tradionally led others to know about a person. Now combine the above with the ones below, a stranger can know a lot about a person even without meeting or talking to the person and without 3rd person gossip.

Take it to the next level and determine the social connections and personality of the person.

7) Examining the social connectivity of the person via social networks. If the person has a public profile, then it is the Holy Grail!
a) Type of friends.
b) Events attended
c) Hobbies, ratings on different quizzes.
d) Self expression.
e) The causes supported
f) The political standings
etc
8) Blogs, Forums,

Think I am full of crap, well check out this article that was reported on Slashdot.

Take it to the next level of what the government can know about you. This presentation titled "Death of Anonymous Travel" is a good indication of how data can mined and where technology is headed.

All one can do is be careful about the digital footprint they leave behind. Stuff posted on social networks can easily come back to haunt a person.
Ex:
1) Suggestions on what not to do
2) Tweet about a job offer
3) Facebook and boring job
4) Boss and Facebook

Recommended reading: Future of online reputation

Future of Dating!

Hilarious!

Look in thy glass

OOK in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

But if thou live rememb'red not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Back!

I am back! I been traveling and dedicating my life to corp slavery which kept me away from the blog. Hellooooooo Digital world!

Shoe Laces: Being a kid again

God booms, "dude u needed help in tying shoe laces? you suck!" and goes back to making the world a confusing place.

Me rolls mah eyes "Yeah big G, I did and thanks to my friend, she rescued me when I need help, unlike you, who would have said, Gee boy, did you say prayers or say God helps only those who helps themselves :p thank you very much!".

Why did I need help tying shoe laces? Aah the reason is simple. I went hiking up in the mountains with my friends B, her bf, D and my friend M. We drove up to a mountain trail, up north with lots of gear. I haven't been hiking in the winter before, so had a wee bit of trouble, with the plastic snow boots. I messed up the way the laces were to be tied and B being a nice gal, she is, showed me how.

Made me feel like a 3 yr old again :p, learning how to tie laces.

Population 436

Population 436, just about 20mins into it, you can tell right away it is of the same genre of The Wickerman, The Reaping, it is all about small towns and greater good or some odd belief that their life is perfect. Well if you are bored and have absolutely nothing to do and no other movie to watch, this is passable. It is a movie that you can turn on and pay paltry attention to when you are working.

The Band's Visit

"The Band's Visit" is a simple, unpretentious movie and devoid of overt drama. Its far from the run of the mill stories. It is a story of people. Each scene oozes with meaning and significance. The characters are quite believable in their portrayal of everyday folks. A message/theme that is echoed through the movie, is that of love and music being a universal language.l

It is a story of an Egyptian police band that travels to Israel to perform in a local Arabic Cultural Center in the town of Beit Hatikva. To their dismay they find out that they landed in the wrong town. They were supposed to go to Peit Hatikva and not Beit Hatikva. They stranded and hungry. The story is then onwards is their experiences till next day morning when they catch the bus to the right place.

The band is lead by old Lt Col Tawfiq. He is their no-nonsense, mr-iam-not-flexible-and-rulez-matter leader. The youngest of the band is Haled. Being a young guy he tries to pick up ladies with his singing. He is also the guy Tawfiq tries to bring in line for his non-conformist ways.

Dina, is a restaurant owner who informs the Band that they are in the wrong town. She offers them food and later lodgings after Tawfiq requests for help. Haled and Tawfiq stay at Dina's place and some of the band at restaurant and some at out of work local who frequents Dina's place.

The night becomes a night of change, a night of people opening up, a night of confirmation that people from the across the Arab and Israeli are just normal folks who enjoy the same pleasures in life. The conversation of Dina and Tawfiq at the local eatery, the walk to the park, the outing of Haled with locals and his encouragement of young man in the ways to talk to a woman, the quite family dinner at the local's place, to Tawfiq's confession, his warming up to Haled and their departure from Dina and their performance at Peit Hatikva are scenes were emotions flow, sublte facial expressions and body movements convey the meaning.

It is one of the decent movies I have seen in recent times. I should get the DVD sometime.

USB Cable Hell

I was visiting my friend and settled down to read the latest news buzz. I find it difficult to use the touchpad of a laptop hence carry a mouse all the time. Digging through my backup I came across my set of usb cables that are tucked away for use. I was stunned at the number of USB cables that I carry.


1. USB cable from Hell aka Apple product
2. USB cable for a camera
3. Common USB cable. (4 of them)
4. USB cable for a music player.

I have 4 products with non-compatible usb interfaces which makes life difficult. I wonder how I landed with the 4 of the common usb cables. I carry one and backup one in case I loose the first one. Come on, who hasn't forgotten their cellphone charger or didn't need to connect mulitple devices with varying length at the same time to the laptop.

God booms: People who don't carry so many devices and people who charge all their devices during the night, don't carry so many usb cables, retard!

But, but if you are on the move all the time it is easier to use the laptop as the charging source! :D I know, lame excuse. I shall vow to clean up my backpack of all the unnecessary USB cables.

Child Safety : ISTTF report

Its funny how many links one has to jump to get to the original report. A link from Slashdot to Nytimes to search on google lands one on Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies. It is an interesting report that shed's light on real problems than the hysteria that "Internet is dangerous" and one has to protect the children.

I ain't saying that there aren't any dangers. The dangers are real and the victims are real. The dangers being any of the following

1) Stolen identities.
2) Personal pics leaked on the web and morphed.
3) Cyber Stalking/Bulling
4) Fake personalities.
5) Harassment.
6) Sexual solicitation/harassment.
7) Gossip.
8) Fraud (419 scams)

In the case of minors, the bogey man is the pic of some creepy sick old "man" trying to get to children and is the predator. The media presents the same picture as well. According to the report, while this threat exists there are other threats that are more important and profound.

The findings of the report are contrary to the public perception of problems of the internet. Minors face the same kind of problems that face in real life in the cyberspace. A large number of sexual abuse comes from someone in the family or someone known to the minor in real life (stats from different reports) and cyberworld doesn't really exacerbate it. A significant contributors to the problem are minors themselves. That is, minors bulling, soliciting sex, spreading gossip, they being victims and the perpetrator themselves.

An easy example is say 2 15 yr olds, who are bf and gf exchanged naked/sexual pics of each other. According to laws in some states they are both victims and both perpetrators. Perpetrators since they are distributing child pornography. Well that is what prosecuting attorney is going consider as the basis of filing a case if these pics were found. The supreme court of US has ruled that teenagers can be tried as sex offenders.

The registration of a teenager as a sex offender has life long impact on the teenagers. The only group that makes me sad is the group of teenagers who do dumb stuff not realizing the future consequences and end up getting charged in court and convicted and registered as sex offenders. I can't help but wonder if the society is punishing them way too hard, punishing them for life. I wonder what is adequate punishment for stupidity, actions becoz of lack of proper guidance, I don't have an answer.

One should read "Future of Online Reputation" to get an idea of the scope of audience and how reputation gets tarnished or built.

Laundry basket stolen

The past long weekend will go down as the most weird, surreal, ironic and irritating one. I had to travel on Sat and Monday, so went to do my laundry Friday night than leave the chore for Sunday.

I put the laundry for wash at the laundermat nearby go back after 30mins. My empty laundry bag/basket (call it what u want) was stolen from the laundermat. ! Whaat? Yeah it was stolen. Who steals an empty laundry bag/basket from a laundermat in a tad upscale town in the night? I laughed my head off and then I became irritated. I had to lug my clothes to the car, arrgggh, it is not fun when the wind chill is around 0 F or lesser.

WTF! Seriously WTF!

There are other things that happened. I will share them someday.

Laptop batt status cmd line

I was looking at /usr/bin and looking at binaries that I don't recognize to see what they do. A while ago I was thinking of writing a script to poll info out of /sys for power information but this command does it all!

halflife@darklord:~$ acpi -V
Battery 0: Discharging, 99%, 03:34:12 remaining, design capacity 7800 mAh
AC Adapter 0: off-line
Thermal 0: ok, 39.5 degrees C
Cooling 0: Processor 0 of 10
Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10
halflife@darklord:~$

Wanted: Movie

The movie was, eh. Angelina Jolie was sexy, Morgan freeman's role non-existent, some flashy action scenes and a story that kept me yawning all the while. Save your money and don't rent it or buy it.

Knife & Port Epic Fail

Being a recent fan of Port, I bought myself a bottle of port. Got myself a sumptuous dinner and rubbed my hands in glee about to open the bottle of port. What ensued had me laughing at my stupidity for days. Oh well life is boring without such moments.

The cork, yes the stupid cork was not firm enough. The cork screw miserably failed to pull out the cork. I tried to gently coax it out, but alas it refused to budge. I tried 2 different corkscrews. Arrgggh! Plan B. I started to chip away at the cork with a knife hopping to get to the bottom of the cork and out of the bottle. All is good until I reach to less than quarter inch of the cork. I am stuck! I can neither reach with the knife any more nor can I reach with the cork screw or anything that is long enough to get to the cork.

%#@^&*

What do I do now, What would you do? I did what an annonyed person would do and here is the result.


If you are scratching ur head as to what I did I figured my knife was strong enough to break the top of the bottle and I ended up with a broken knife! Epic Fail! ROTFL! I never imagined that the bottle was so freaking hard that it succeeded in breaking my knife! Put it the other way I never imagined I could break a knife in perfect slice by hitting it againt the bottle. Daaaamnnnnnn!

Duddeee! Yeah I broke the top of the bottle by smashing against the kitchen sink without spilling port. Yummy!

Been a while

I managed to disappear from the digital world before christmas and make a grand appearance now! :D The twists and turns can only be matched by the impromptu stream that is formed when it rains. Not knowing where it is formed and not knowing where it ends. I wonder what the year ahead is like?

Prisoner of Birth

Jeffery Archer rulez. I have been a big fan of his writings. "As the Crow flies" was the first book that I read of his and I was hooked. I have read most of his books. I was thrilled when I found his book Prisoner of Birth in B&N. So here is the plot,

Danny Cartwright, your regular bloke, proposes to his fiancé at a bar and she says yes! Her brother joins them and enjoy the evening until four drunk guys ruin their evening and Danny ends in jail after being convicted for his fiancé's brother's murder.

Danny while in jail starts educating himself with the help of his cellmate. and shuts himself off from outside world when his appeal fails. He urges his fiancé to move on. In a twist of fate he escapes from prison impersonating his cell-mate and then plots his revenge against the four people who were responsible for sending him to jail and killing his fiance's brother.

It is a fast paced thriller and well written. It is worth the money