Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:28:08 GMT | 1 comment
It used to be that the best way to buy things in a foreign country was to use your credit card. Not anymore. The fees they are charging now are a big rip-off.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:57:40 GMT | 1 comment
Clinton in public was very impressive, but in private he did some stupid things. Bush on the other hand, appears stupid in public but impresses people in private.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:34:12 GMT | 2 comments
What is the right amount of airport security? Some might say that airport security is useless and terrorists will always find a way around it, so why bother having much. Others might say that they don’t mind the inconvenience and cost and would prefer to have massive amounts of security in order to minimize the threat of any possible terrorist action.
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:25:48 GMT | no comments
It is weird that a few weeks ago we were looking forward to our vacation, and now we are looking back on it. And we will never be able to experience any of this vacation ever again, except through our memories. This seems very strange to me.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:35:11 GMT | no comments
Many times when a young person is trying to figure out what they will do with their lives, they are given the advice to “just do what you enjoy”, and are led to believe that if they do this, then the money will follow and they will be able to support themselves with this activity. However, I think that this advice falls short of the truth, and a distinction needs to be made between “consuming” and “producing” activities.
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:20:44 GMT | 1 comment
On this cruise, I am still trying to figure out what we should actually be doing in a foreign city.
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:09:07 GMT | no comments
We went through the Hermitage Museum in two hours today. There are a thousand rooms in the Hermitage and you would probably need to spend two hours in each one to get the full impact. Even the ceilings in many of the rooms were so fantastic that I always made it a point of looking up when I first entered each room.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 06 Jul 2006 18:50:27 GMT | no comments
In college, I went to see a Shakespearen tragedy with some friends. They thought it was depressing, but I disagreed. I said that it was depressing when a story had a happy but artificial ending because this was like saying that we can only be happy when everything goes right. But in a tragedy, when everything goes wrong and the characters still find the will to move forward and live, that is what I find to be the most encouraging and uplifting.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT | no comments
Back in the 80s and 90s when basic PC applications like word processors were being developed, there were a lot of holes in what they could do. Even rudimentary features like numbered lists, foreign character support and tables were often missing. So users frantically upgraded to each new release to gain new features they could actually use.
However, at some point, the new features stopped becoming useful to most people. Sure there would be a few esoteric new features that a small percentage of people would use, but for most users, these new features just made the programmer bigger, slower and harder to use. This was the age of feature bloat.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 22 Jun 2006 01:00:00 GMT | no comments
Several years ago, I stopped using credit cards on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I still buy plenty of stuff over the Internet including almost all of my books, clothes, amusement park tickets, and more. However, I never give out my real credit card number. Instead, I give out a virtual credit card number that can be used only once. I didn’t do this because I was scared that some hacker was going to get my card number and misuse it; I did it because some of the merchants I bought stuff from misused it. Here are the tales.