Maurice's Musings – Page 11 – On People, Life and Technology

Global Financial Meltdown – So what’s new?

Oct 292008

The media are lathering us all up to the prespective of a great depression, matched only by 1929. Obama is just hanging in on page 4, and only because some deranged young idiot was supposedly plotting to assassinate him. As for McCain and Palin, they’ve completely dissapeared from the news radar, at least here in Switzerland.

I never cease to be amazed at how short peoples’ memory is. The stock market has gone through innumerable crises, the 1973-1974 wiped 45% off the DOW, black Monday (1987) took 22.6% off the DOW and the .COM bubble in 2000 cost speculators (and others) about $5 trillion. The world’s banks employees, motivated by bonuses that bear no relation to their true added value have been playing the market for years and now we are at the day of reckoning. And so what? We’ve lived through them before, we’ll live through this one again, and in 3 years the autumn-2008 meltdown will be no more than a page on Wikipedia, like the others.

But. And there is a “but” this time round. The previous disasters were accompanied by liberal doses of “well, take your medecine”. This time it’s very different. Governments suddenly made billions available to ailing banks and in the same breath announced that money for all other causes was short. Here in Switzerland, where UBS was bailed to the tune of 68’000’000’000 CHF (about the same number of dollars), the minimum interest rate on pension funds was slashed simultaneously.

Let us take a step back. In 1974 (and 1987, and 2000), we were fed the same crap. In 2006-2007, everyone was back to worshipping the incredible economy.

Will we never learn?

Wordl takes my breath away

Technology No Responses »

Oct 242008

I fell quite by accident on http://www.wordle.net, a program to layout words written by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM. The results it produces are breath-takingly beautiful, I’m at a loss for words (pun intended).

I dropped my mother’s autobiography (56’000 words) into Wordl:

The major words of the text spring out immediately, quite astonishing.

Sick of experts-exchange and content-less sites

Technology 5 Responses »

Oct 232008

These past few months I’ve been doing a lot of research and with time I was getting more and more annoyed by subscription-only sites (experts-exchange) and catalogs of abstracts (citeseer), they provide me with nothing and clutter up my Google results.

To solve this problem I used Add-in Express for Internet Explorer to build an add-in for Internet Explorer, which would allow me to hide irrelevant sites. Just for the fun, I extended it to handle all the major search engines, trickier than I initially expected but all good clean fun.

In the spirit of the Internet, I’ve published it, you can pick up a copy here.

P.S. The products and the service at add-in-express.com are amongst the best I’ve seen in a long time, highly recommended.

Project Management Dashboard – Excel with traffic lights

Finance, Technology, Work 7 Responses »

Oct 162008

Many traffic-light solutions for Excel exist but all the ones I tried only work for a single light, and I needed an array like this:

I wanted to create a light by simply typing a formula in the light’s cell, with the colour of the light determined by a value in cell elsewhere. The light must change colour as soon as the underlying value changes. This wasn’t as simple to implement as I thought, but in the end a bit of VBA led to this formula :
=trafficlight(Sheet2!B4,Sheet2!B$3,Sheet2!C$3)
and the rest of the lights are created by dragging this formula right and down.

The parameters to the TrafficLight function are:

The cell containing the value which determines the colour of the light.
The threshold to change from red to amber.
The threshold to change from amber to green.

in this example, the Sheet2 looks like this:

Project 1 has a value of 64 and thus is amber.

Here’s a ZIP file with the .XLS and the images project-progress-dashboard, feel free to use it as you see fit.

Notes:

The red and green images have an exclamation mark and a tick superimposed so that they are recognisable on a black-and-white printout.
You must keep the 3 GIF files in the same directory as the spreadsheet.
There is one bug. If you resize a cell containing a light such that the light is no longer contained within the cell’s boundaries, the light will not be deleted when its underlying value changes (you end up with an orphaned light). To fix this, there is a “Remove lights” button; clicking it will delete all images and pressing F9 will re-generate correctly.

Europe 1 – America 0

Finance, Politics No Responses »

Oct 152008

Quite astonishing that for once the European politicians have got their act together and addressed the financial cesspool that the banks have created. A shining performance by Sarkozy and Brown, from whom nobody expected such alacrity and cooperation.

On the other side of the pond (is Bush still president over there?), McCain is too busy slinging mud at Obama in a last-ditch effort and Paulson’s plan seems rather ineffectual by comparison to the Europeans’.

It seems that Europe is finally assuming the role it should take; with a population of some 450 million it’s about time.

Insurance price according to your passport?

Finance, Politics No Responses »

May 312007

I was flabbergasted to learn that the price of car insurance in Switzerland is a function of your nationality. The surcharge can be as high as 97% if your unlucky enough to be from pretty well anywhere in the sourth-eastern Medditerranean area and, curiously, anywhere in north or south America (article in French).

The insurers argument is that drivers from certain countries statistically have more accidents. Now I can follow the reasoning, the problem is that each company has wildly differing prices for a given nationality, which to me smells of poor statistics. If the sample is large, the surcharges should be approximately the same.

What’s even worse is that the no-claims bonus is aplied on the surcharged price. This means that a driver from country X, whose initial policy has a 94% surcharge, who has no accidents for 10 years is penalised forever.

Legal as it may be, this practice stinks of racism. Shame on the Swiss; are they alone in doing this?

Massive craziness in Poland

Society 1 Response »

May 302007

Have the Poles gone mad? I wrote off the communist witch-hunt, of which McCarthy would have been proud, as once-off silliness brought about by group shame of collaborating with the communist secret police. There was also healthy silliness – the Polish rock band Big Cyc (Big Tit), whose 4th album featured a nun drying condoms on a clothes-line.

But the silliness has taken a turn for the worse:

A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle. The spokesperson for children’s rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head. (source BBC)

Teletubbies are queer? What on earth has got into the woman?

It would appear that the affliction has spread to neighbouring Belarus:

Customs officers in Belarus have ordered drivers crossing over from Poland to carry a condom or be denied entry into the former Soviet republic, Polish customs officials claimed on Tuesday. The Belarussian guards have allegedly demanded that drivers include a condom in the emergency first aid kit which road regulations say they must carry. (source)

I’m racking my brains trying to think what the motivation could be.

Polish men can’t resist Belarussian women and Belarus doesn’t want their gene pool polluted?
Belarussian women all have the clap and their authorities want to spare the Poles? (seems unlikely)
Belarus wants to insult the Poles by implying they all have the clap?
Belarus wants to insult the Poles by implying they can only get it up once (by insisting on only ONE condom)?
The Belarus have a secret agenda in which condoms are used for something else than contraception?

If anyone has the true reason, please let me know 🙂

Harry Potter – A work of genius

Literature No Responses »

May 282007

An aspect of J. K. Rowling‘s genius which many seem to have passed by is the number of children who have (re)started reading.

My two sons read on and off during their early years but never so avidly as the Harry Potter series. As of the second volume (the Chamber of Secrets), they squabbled so much that we instated a rule that each child could read only one chapter at a time and then pass the book to his brother.

Getting them reading again was great, but perhaps just as importantly their English vocabulary improved immensely (their mother tongue is French), and for this Rowling gets my most sincere admiration.

Out of curiosity, we all read some of the books in French; the translation is exquisite, Jean-François Ménard‘s turns of phrase are a joy. Our favourite was “Sorting Hat” rendered as “Choipeau”.

Parents and teachers of the world owe a great debt to Rowling.

A remedy for ghastly colleagues

Society, Work No Responses »

May 272007

I was working for a consulting company in Rome when I met one of the most crass, self-imbued turds I have ever had the misfortune to cross. His disdain for his fellow colleagues was boundless and it was mutual, not one of us would have urinated on Jay, even if he burst into flames.

One morning, nursing a grappa-induced hangover, I decided the time was ripe to give Jay a dose of medecine. My colleagues enjoyed it, I hope you will too.

Jay,
I am leaving [company] today and would like to take this opportunity to settle some things with you.

I’m writing this slowly as I know you can’t read very fast, so pay attention.

You might have noticed that subsequent to [company]’s demise, things have been very trying for the team here in Rome. It certainly hasn’t even crossed your mind that a major portion of the grief we’ve been having is due to your crass, narcissic behaviour. For two months now you’ve been prancing around the corridors here like a bloated peacock on LSD, with hot air, vacuous promises and bovine excrement as your sole deliverables. How you could even imagine that [company] would actually take on a used-car salesman like yourself defies belief; it does however demonstrate clearly that your astonishing arrogance is matched only by your incredible stupidity. You have made an appalling image of our company and were you to have something other than dirt holding your ears apart you would be ashamed.

But I digress, I’m all for letting people fight their own battles, I have a personal axe to grind with you. You may recall that a couple of months back, when I resigned, I sent an email informing all concerned, in which I placed confidence in you to announce my resignation to the client at an opportune moment. A foolish mistake. Having made a complete botch-up of everything, you waited until we were re-negotiating the contract to make the announcement to the client at the worst possible moment. To worsen matters you did it behind everyone’s back and, spineless cockroach that you are, didn’t even admit to having done it. How you could try and sabotage so many of your own colleagues’ efforts to further your base little personal ends shows a despicable contempt. Fortunately the client saw through your miserable ploy, and we now all share a similar contempt for you. Truly, in the 25-odd years I’ve been working, you are the worst piece of scum that I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.

Had you a less faulty gene pool, you would have learnt that the world is a small place and people that you slight often reappear later in a superior position. I sincerely hope that this will occur and given the opportunity, rest assured that I will ream you dry with neither hesitation nor remorse.

Lest you perceive anything cowardly in sending this message, fear not, I have communication skills that you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams. You might like to focus your cramped, porcine imagination on figuring out the extent to which I have have spitefully blind-copied this email >:-|

To avoid any ambiguity note that I write this from a purely personal stand-point; don’t bother trying to associate this email with [company], I’m reachable at the address below.

As you may well imagine, I never got a reply.

Islam isn’t all bad

Law, Religion No Responses »

May 262007

Another interesting conversation with A. the other day. He married a Maroccan woman, converted to Islam and observes muslim tradition carefully. I always enjoy our discussions; born and raised Christian, A. understands my skepticism and is remarkably candid in explaining how Islam functions.

A. is a jovial chap and can share any joke. He’s also playful and joined his buddies in the latest fad of playing poker. Of course, the fun is betting and it only works with real money. Their stakes are minimal, 5 francs (about 4 US$) for a pile of tokens which usually last the evening. Problem: gambling is forbidden to muslims. A. resolved the issue very elegantly: he pays his 5 francs like the others, but if he has winnings at the end of the evening, he puts them in a pot, which buys dinner for the group when it’s full enough. (He admitted sheepishly that he had taken it on himself not to check with the imam if this way of avoiding betting was legal.)

We worked together for several years and once took a taxi on a business ride. I paid the driver, on expenses. Walking away I noticed that A. had returned to the taxi. “A problem?” I asked, not realising that he had tried to be discreet.
A. explained that it was Zakat. Muslim law dictates that you must give a small percentage of your income (some 2.5%) to the needy. From a philosophical standpoint, this strikes me as rather an intelligent idea; if everyone were to give a little to the poor, there would be less hardship (and less likelyhood of the poor revolting). I have no way of obtaining the figures but the apparent balance of wealth in the Middle-East suggests to me that zakat isn’t as prevalent as it should be.

This brings me to another discussion we had, where I had asked about the charia, in particular the stoning of adulterers. A.’s explanation was not quite the one I expected. In a nutshell, the reasoning he had been taught was this: The laws of Islam can only be fully applied when all of them are applied simultaneously. These laws stipulate that everyone in society must be provided for (food, clothing, lodging etc), must observe all the laws, care for his family, etc (we agreed that this description has many parallels with communism). Such a society doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, thus if all the laws are not applied, then not all the laws necessarily apply. The tricky bit is deciding what is applicable in a given situation. For example, in an extremely poor, under-developed country, perhaps the only workable method of dissuading robbers is to cut off one of their hands. In a more modern (or moderate) country, such practices would be unthinkable. Of course, if everyone had been cared for as the law mandates, then there wouldn’t be any stealing to punish and amputation would only be a theoretical threat.

A lot of this makes sense to me and the aims, at least in theory, are laudable. The difficulty I have is that nothing is black or white, just shades of grey according to who’s judging what and when. Perhaps it’s just that I’m too cartesian?

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