Implies that they gave me something to begin with.

Inflation is now dragging the economy down directly.

It was time to raise rates a long time ago, but given this news, I don’t see how they can ignore the problem of inflation any longer.

I’ve attempted to hold professional correspondence with several native English speakers who often phrase their requests like so:

“hey can you the links about my page the for the targets pushes my site”

This is incomprehensible. I am not a grammar pedant, but if you ever hope to make yourself understood, you need to use language that properly communicates your ideas. Yes, that even means you’ll have to learn how verbs work. Sorry.

It seems that every successive time I seek to advertise something on AdWords, the number of clicks in a given time period increases drastically, but the number of actual conversions brought about from those clicks drops (even for ads targeted to only attract clickers who have a high chance of converting). This means I keep paying more for worse results.

AdWords has become completely useless to me by this time, and I am no longer going to use it.

That seems to be a trend at Google: start out with great products, then let them decay until they are worthless.

1. Fill a cup with ice.
2. Fill the space between the ice with lemonade.
3. Blend.
4. Charge twice as much for a cup mostly filled with ice.
5. Profit!

The effect of the economy on the restaurant industry is interesting, to say the least.

When you try to do as many things as I am trying to do, you quickly find out how long you must spend on individual activities when you choose to perform them in order to attain peak productivity. It probably depends on several things, including individual skill level and approach, but here are the times I’ve found best for myself:

Computer Science Research – 3-5 hours.
Mathematical Research – 4+ hours (as long as the problem continues to interest you and you’re not running against dead ends), with breaks approx. every 2 hours.
Programming – 4-6 hours, or until the problem is solved.
Web Design – 1-4 hours.
Social Sciences and Technical Writing – 2-3 hours.
Philosophy and Creative Writing – as long as the ideas keep coming.
Musical Composition – all day, with breaks but no interruption for other skills.
Piano practice – 1-3 hours.
Generating ideas – none at all; this should be a passive activity.

Just a quick thought while reading an article on Digg bemoaning the “stupidity” of this generation (but really bemoaning what the author seems to perceive as a decline in literacy, which in turn is actually a change in the way the current generation absorbs information, but anyway…)

Most children of this generation seem not to want to read because their only institutional exposure to reading reinforces it as a boring activity. I began reading rather early (4 at the latest, but I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t), but beyond the basic “learn to read” sorts of books, my first enjoyable exposure to reading was Nintendo Power magazine. Reading is a very universal skill, of course, so I soon began reading all sorts of other things (including some of the classics), but the fact remains that I had established it as a pleasurable activity before my love for it was kindled.

What of those who are more institutionally bound? Their first nontrivial exposure to reading is something they would never choose to read – and yet they’re forced to slog through it anyway.

The opposition to Google’s street view continues, and now they have to develop the very technology I suggested to them at my interview in order to comply with French law!

I have no sympathy for them whatsoever; they ignored good advice and must now face the consequences of their decisions. People will keep suing them and suing them until they decide it’s time to give people their privacy back.

Update: And several lawsuits and noncompliance with French law were apparently all that were necessary, as they finally began to blur faces in street view. Still, this was something I suggested to them nearly a year ago, the implementation of which would take me under a week to code on a normal scale (granted, I have no idea how it would scale up to the size of Google’s data), and had they timely followed up on that advice, they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble.