MightyFunk

I posted this press release to several websites, and I thought it couldn’t hurt to post it here as it might drive up traffic:

I’ve been following the stock markets closely for the past month and a half - in particular the oil industry as that’s where all my stocks are placed. As much as I hate oil and love the environment, I would be foolish otherwise to place my investments elsewhere as other industries are consistently losing money. There’s a lot of finger-pointing as to why these oil prices are record high, but I can tell you.

Some people blame supply and demand - is there enough?

Others blame speculation - the commodities market and stock owners for artificially inflating the price of oil.

Bear with me a little bit - there is a ‘conspiracy’ I will mention, but first I need to elaborate:

I’ve been away from writing the last couple of weeks because I’ve become highly interested in investing. My motivation is that as I run my own business, I don’t have someone to hold my hand and tell me where my funds should be placed for retirement. Unfortunately, it’s something I need to think about - but I suppose I’m all the wiser for it.

From the AP 5/30/08:

TOKYO - A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.

Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.

I got ticked off a while ago and went out on a rant why Yahoo! should have sold to Microsoft. Basically, I got locked out of my own account and had to go through a 2-week reregistration process to get ‘my’ stuff back.

Truth be told, Yahoo! isn’t as useless as I made it out to be. It’s hard for me to believe, but people DO use Yahoo! as a search engine - and some alternative is better than a complete monopoly by Google (or any other search engine for that matter.)

Okay, so I don’t know exactly what they are serving at this gala-dinner event. And no, the title of this post is not intended to be racist but to point out a dichotomy between ‘expensive’ and a relatively ‘cheap’ food source. Chicken wings just happen to come to mind. If it makes the reader happy, I suppose I can change ‘chicken wing dinner’ to ‘fish fry’ even tho a fish fry would probably cost more. But why bother me about semantics.

In a few days (or weeks) from now, an acquaintance will be attending a dinner event with Barack Obama. The price tag? $4,000.

I’m updating my research into cameras for creating HDR photos. As of this writing, I’m putting 360-degree HDR imagery on hold. To be completely frank, you will want a Nikon D300 or a Canon Mark III series camera in order to produce adequate HDRs with the minimal amount of work involved. You may ask why, but my reasoning involves fast shutter speeds/frame bursts for minimal blur and artifacts, greater AEB range, and full-sized frames.

Am I the only one who finds it hypocritical that people are attacking Obama for his remarks on ‘communicating with’ some of these Bush-dubbed ‘Axis of Evil’ powers, when Bush himself turns around today and announces on the news that it’s okay for people here to send the Cuban people cell phones?

I’m all about keeping communications clear - the greatest harm comes with isolation - it keeps others from accessing knowledge, education, and potential opportunities. It also makes the people of these other countries sometimes suffer.

There’s not much more I can add to this…

I didn’t sign up for the ASAI (American Society of Architectural Illustrators) to be spam mailed. However, when I got my first email from them today, I thought something must have been wrong. I checked my email begrudgingly, and went to the link they provided.

Much to my complete and utter amazement, legislators are trying to pass a bill called the ‘Orphan Works Bill’ that will tear down the walls of copyrighted works. For those that don’t understand how copyrights work, basically any form of artwork that you create is automatically copyrighted under law. This protects an artist to a degree from having their work stolen and resold. In a loose sense, it is a ‘lesser’ form of patent - one that doesn’t require tons of paperwork, time, and legal fees.