Noteworthy

On finance

1 min read Noteworthy

From an article in the LRB, discussing three books on finance, one of which focuses on Jim Simons who founded and ran the most successful hedge fund ever, but whose successor was Robert Mercer of Breitbart and Trump funding fame:

I'm not sure if this counts as an irony. Perhaps it is too gloomy for that. But the fact is that the main impact on the world of Jim Simons, both a deeply brilliant man and a good person, was to make enough money for his Renaissance colleague to get Donald Trump elected president. That's all Just a consequence of what modern finance is, and of its grotesquely outsize role in the way we live now. It is easy to diagnose decadence in a society historically and geographically distant from us. It is harder to see at close range.

Fluxiom and Box.net

1 min read InternetNoteworthytech-stuff

I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about Fluxiom, Vienna based file storage and sharing app for a few days now. I was always too busy, and now Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is stealing my thunder. Read his review and you’ll have a good idea of what mine would have been like (only without the number crunching in the end…my research would have stopped after comparing prices).

The only thing I might have added was that the service I’m currently using, namely Box.net, seems to be doing it all right: They’ve got sharing, they’ve got tagging, there’s a mass upload feature (through a Java applet…Michael Arrington seemed to have missed that when he wrote in his review that no other service provides mass upload). The good thing about this approach compared to Fluxiom’s? No need to zip!
They are also a lot more generous with their space, giving away 1GB for free, and 5GB once you’ve referred five friends (which isn’t that difficult, really).

I’d have really loved to like Fluxiom (they are from Vienna after all), but as they are that outrageously priced and their basic plan doesn’t even provide the features that would actually make them different from Box.net (full-text search, version check), I’d be crazy to actually pay that much money.

Shades

1 min read Noteworthy

shades
It seems to be an unwritten law of physics that no pair of shades shall survive one (1) summer. At least not the pair of shades you like wearing, and didn’t just buy for that rock-star entrance you had planned for last night’s party.

Since I’m subject to the laws of physics – written and unwritten – I can’t help but hunt for a new pair of shades each and every spring. Last year’s shades fell apart spectacularly while I was wearing them. I’m not kidding you: one of the temples simply fell off my ear, rendering the whole contraption unusable. The fact that at the precise moment of disassembly I was sitting inside a car and steering my way out of a parking lot, didn’t exactly help in lodging that memory within the “fun times” area of my brain.

So today I went to a popular Swedish clothing store, because usually they’ve got at least one pair that’s just plain and black, and they’re cheaper than cheap (I do have the suspicion that there could be a correlation between cheapness and falling temples…I might have to look into that). Vividly remembering last year’s incident, I bought not only one, but two pairs, since I had learned last summer that it’s impossible to find the exact same shades a second time (another unwritten law I suppose).

“Take this, unwritten law of physics!”, I thought as I unpacked the shades at home. I put them on again, just to check if maybe they’d look even cooler within the confines of my own abode, when another unwritten law instantly kicked in: the unwritten law of stuff looking nice in one mirror, ridiculous in another.

So here I am, with two pairs of shades that make me look as if I’d decided to win a Bono Vox contest. And believe you me, there’s nothing in the world I’d like to do least.