Just a Memo

While talking about ING Direct’s increased interest rate (i.e. 3.3% from 3.0%):

me (10:43:26 PM): didn’t you want my financial advisor’s contact info?
juan (10:44:38 PM): im good for now, i want to start saving some money before investing
me (10:45:02 PM): ummm thats an oxymoron

You guys ever wonder how the names came about for the days of the week? As a little break, I took and wondered off to outer space and this question bothered me for a couple of minutes. For example, the meaning of the first part of “Thursday”. That is, “thurs”. What is it? What does it mean? Here are some definitions I have found from the biggest, centralized knowledge-base in the world (aka. the internet):

• Thursday is the day of the week between Wednesday and Friday.
• The name Thursday comes from the Old English Þunresdæg, meaning the day of Þunor, commonly known in Modern English as Thor.
• Some have adopted an acronym for Thursday, similar to Friday’s T.G.I.F., to say “So Happy It’s Thursday,” or S.H.I.T.
• In the popular rhyme, “Thursday’s Child has far to go”.
• In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the character Arthur Dent says “This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays”. A few minutes later the planet Earth is destroyed. Thor, for whom the day was named, also appears later in the Hitchhiker’s series and in other Adams books.
• In the Hindu religion, Thursday is guruvar or the Guru’s day.
• Quakers traditionally refer to Thursday as “Fifth Day” eschewing the “pagan” origin of the name “Thursday”.

Interesting aye? Well check this out… in terms of history, here’s one for the record books:

Black Thursday refers to October 24, 1929 when stock prices in the NYSE fall sharply, with record volume of nearly 13 million shares. Five days later, the market crashed on volume of over 16 million shares - a level not to be surpassed for 39 years. In popular imagery, the crash has come to mark the beginning of the Great Depression.

“How about in terms of the Bible?”, you might ask. Well, here it is:

There are two holidays that traditionally fall on Thursday. One is Maundy Thursday. It is the Thursday upon the eve of Good Friday. Biblical accounts have it that the “Last Supper” was on a Thursday, and it was at this meal that Christ gave the “mandate” to his disciples to “love one another”. The word Maundy is a corruption of the Latin word “mandate”.

Meanwhile, here’s one Thursday that most people in the US look forward to every year:

One of the most popular holidays in the United States is Thanksgiving. It always falls on the fourth Thursday in November.

Very interesting to find all of this stuff. I guess thats why people don’t like Hump-day (aka. Wednesday) that much. But once they are over it, they feel [like] S.H.I.T. =P

Stewart Butterfield, one of the smart people from Flickr, announced early this morning that you can now sign-in and have the option to integrate your Yahoo! account with Flickr. This is great stuff for those with Yahoo! accounts in that they don’t have to remember another login, for those that do that kind of stuff anyways. The only downside, a temporary one, was that for people using third-party Flickr API-based programs (like myself) have to wait for the developers to update them with the new authentication API.

The program that I use a lot would have to be by Jon Gilkison called FlickrImportr. I use it to do my uploads and set management. I would say that its 10x better than Flickr’s own Uploadr tool, at the moment.

Meanwhile, as I keep saying, if you blog and recently start taking more and more pics with your digital camera (point-and-shoot, phone and/or dSLR)… then Flickr is the way to go. Not to mention the great community that it has. If you ain’t sold, then check out the quality of pics Flickr photographers take via the Explore page.

Anyways, good morning and go Flickr!

PS. I wonder if Flickr would be adding that damn exclamation mark like Yahoo!’s. Looking at it, it’ll be hard to be grammatically correct when you write about Flickr, specifically when you describe something from Flickr like Flickr!’s website… its just plain wrong but so right with the current news. I need to wake up. Sorry for the nonsense early in the morning. Good times =)

Looks like CSS has been slashdotted. I guess this is not a surprise, for me at least, since CSS is like milk for a chocolate, webpage-cake… Yah, you laugh now… “Geek”, you say…

…I know man, WTF?!

But hey, its a hobby; its part of new media design; its my profession and passion … its my Life–Welcome! Anyways, just to summarize what this article links to, here they are… the 10 Best Resources (as of July 20, 2005):

• CSS Zen Garden
• The Web Developer’s Network
• Official Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Specification
• CSS from the Ground Up
• Listamatic
• CSS Vault
• CSS Layout Techniques
• Ruthsarian Layouts
• Position Everything
• StyleGala

As they say, practice makes perfect. Good luck on your quest to geekiness.

These past couple of days have been totally busy at work. I actually co-produced a training session last Wednesday amongst my other coworkers on what Web Standards can produce in terms of the company’s site, Military.com. It went pretty well, but I was a little upset at myself for not having enough time to plan the dry-run presentation with the Engineering department last Tuesday. So, I decided to put in a lot of hours after work the same night.

I think I was up till 5am Wednesday morning researching and planning the presentation, to make it really understandable amongst the peers. I guess you reap what you sow, the end justify the means… you get the point. Meanwhile, we got a lot of good feedbacks and questions from our coworkers, which we wanted to have and get.

I think the presentation made them re-think and re-organize their thought process and workflow. That is good, especially in the business were in–Online. You have to do things more efficient and think about the future. These two things hopefully were covered in our presentation. I guess we’ll see in a couple of months how the seed is gonna grow. Hopefully it provides our company with a good harvest.

Meanwhile, as I mention lately in my previous posts, I have been bowling a lot weekly. I guess this has been re-ignite with the competition I have been getting from Bigs lately. Its all in good fun.

I outbowled him this past Friday. I had an average of about 155 in 3 games. Pretty good for someone re-hashing the way they bowl, from straight-thrower to a slide-and-hook one (or however you call ‘em). But yah, bowling seems to be the thing that this household is currently doing every week these days. Its fun and everyone can do it.

It just sucks that we have to bowl on Friday 11:30am because the spot, Manor Bowl in San Leandro, has a $10 2-hour unlimited bowling special. So we usually get home from it late, like around 2-3am. However, you really can’t complain. The special comes with $0.50 beers and fries as well. But man, I think I only about three-fourths of it and I was buzzin’ already. So yah, I barely bowled around the 110/120 my last game because of it.

I guess from all of this, it goes to show that things might suck at one end… but it all just works out at the other. Good times.

From my mind to yours, keep your eye on the ball–concentrate, don’t procrastinate.