Midspot

Technical insanity at its best!

Stock Market Games – $1,000,000 virtual money – Win Cash and Prizes!

The Young Money Stock Market Game is a free game that allows members to practice trading in a lifelike brokerage simulation. By participating in the community, you can learn the ins and outs of Wall Street by investing $1,000,000 in virtual money. This virtual stock market game features real-time trading simulation and multiple contests. Beginning investors can practice stock market trading, compete with friends and investors, and win real money.

via Stock Market Games – $1,000,000 virtual money – Win Cash and Prizes!.

Google School: Find Images by Exact Dimensions, Make Wallpaper Search a Breeze

Everyone knows that Google Image Search sports a drop-down menu for filtering results by small, medium, large, and extra large sizes, but if you’re looking for the perfect wallpaper, for example, the imagesize operator is even better.

Weblog Design Live uncovers the undocumented search operator that’s also new to us and demonstrates how to use it. Just use the imagesize operator followed by the WidthXHeight in pixels, like so:

Here’s an example: [imagesize:640×480 muffin] finds 640px x 480px images related to muffins.

As the post points out, the imagesize operator is perfect for finding wallpapers that are the perfect fit for your screen.

via Google School: Find Images by Exact Dimensions, Make Wallpaper Search a Breeze.

Twenty Dollars

On their wedding night, the young bride
approached her new
husband and asked for $20.00 for their first
lovemaking encounter. In
his highly aroused state, her husband readily
agreed.

This scenario was repeated each time they made
love, for more
than 30 years, with him thinking that it was a
cute way for her to
afford new clothes and other incidentals that
she needed.

Arriving home around noon one day, she was
surprised to find
her husband in a very drunken state.
During the next few minutes, he explained that
his employer
was going through a process of corporate
downsizing, and he had
been let go. It was unlikely that, at the age of
59, he’d be able to find
another position that paid anywhere near what
he’d been earning, and
therefore, they
were financially ruined.

Calmly, his wife handed him a bank book which
showed more than thirty
years of steady deposits and interest totaling
nearly $1 million. Then she
showed him certificates of deposits issued
by the bank which were worth over $2 million,
and informed him that they
were one of the largest depositors in the bank.

She explained that
for the more than
three decades she had “charged” him for sex,
these holdings had multiplied
and these were the
results of her savings and investments.

Faced with evidence of cash and investments
worth over $3
million, her husband was so astounded he could
barely speak, but
finally he found his voice and blurted out, “If
I’d had any idea what you
were doing, I would have given you all my
“business!”

That’s when she shot him.

You know, sometimes, men just don’t know when
to keep their mouths shut.

I love it when companies fight in public!

Terminal Tip: Backup Delicious Bookmarks from the Shell

Linux/Mac only: Social bookmarking service Delicious is a great way to save and share your bookmarks, but what happens if they go the way of JournalSpace and lose all your data? You need backups!

Since Delicious is owned by Yahoo there isn’t a serious risk of complete data loss, but it’s better to have a local backup of your data than risk losing your account with no recourse for data retrieval. Since there are a number of ways to accomplish this, we’ll cover the geekiest method today, which was derived from but slightly different from the article linked below.

Open up a terminal prompt and type in the following, replacing username and password with your Delicious credentials.

curl -k –user username:password -o backup.xml -O ‘https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all’

If you don’t have curl installed, you can also use this wget command to perform the exact same task:

wget –no-check-certificate –user=username –password=password -Obackup.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all

At this point the backup.xml file should contain an xml representation of your bookmarks. You could even get really slick and schedule this as a daily or weekly cron job.

via Terminal Tip: Backup Delicious Bookmarks from the Shell.

Scott Adams Blog: Where’s My Rewind Button? 01/22/2009

Watching television still isn’t as good as real life, at least on average, but that gap is narrowing from both sides. Real life is getting worse while the quality of television continues to improve. Case in point, have you taken your car to the dealer for servicing during the current economic downturn? If so, I pity you. You already found out that the dealership is struggling on the sales side and they are trying to make up the difference on the service side. These days the sales staff has no function other than to hold your arms and legs while the service staff screws you.

via Scott Adams Blog: Where’s My Rewind Button? 01/22/2009.

Remember When Biden Was President? – City Desk – Washington City Paper

I think Joe Biden was president for a few minutes there, today, if my jailhouse reading of constitutional law is correct. The constitution says that “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office,” the president-elect has to take an oath of office. The 20th Amendment says that “The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January,” and that “If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified.”

Biden was sworn in before noon; Obama wasn’t. What are your memories of the brief Biden presidency? Yo Yo Ma played the whole time!

UPDATE 1:21 p.m.: My friend Ken Katkin, an actual constitutional law professor, wrote this on my Facebook page (Ken, please don’t sue me!) in response to another friend who asked whether the oath weren’t meaningless:

No, the oath is *not* legally meaningless, even if it is a ritual. Art. II Sec 1. Cl. 8 of the US Const. clearly states that “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following oath. . . ” Therefore, from 12:00 noon until about 12:01 pm today, the President of the USA was Condoleeza Rice. From 12:01 until about 12:03 pm the President of the USA was Joe Biden. Interestingly, this means that, technically, Obama was *not* the first African-American President! (And yes, I actually am a constitutional law professor!).

I was right! Joe Biden WAS PRESIDENT!

via Remember When Biden Was President? – City Desk – Washington City Paper.

Offbeat News: Driver Beats 98 MPH Speeding Ticket By Proving Honda Civic Can Only Hit 85 MPH

An English driver has beaten a 98 MPH speed camera ticket by re-purchasing his Honda Civic and paying a firm to test the vehicle. The Civic’s top speed as tested? 85 MPH.

21-year-old Dale Lyle was shocked to receive the ticket for going 98 MPH in the mail not only because he has a perfect driving record and no longer owned the car in question anymore, but because his 1.3-liter Honda Civic could barely get up to highway speed, much less do nearly 100 MPH.

via Offbeat News: Driver Beats 98 MPH Speeding Ticket By Proving Honda Civic Can Only Hit 85 MPH.

Yes, She Voted

I think there should be some type of IQ test required before you can vote. Do we really want someone that thinks like this, able to vote for our next leader?

Want to be successful? Learn how to sell!

The number 1 reason businesses fail is because they don’t have enough money. Whether you plan on owning a business or not, this is important for you to know because you work for someone. And that someone is a business. The people who tend to keep their job the longest are usually good at sales because if you are bringing in revenue it doesn’t make sense for your employer to fire you.

Whether you are an engineer, a receptionist, or a manager you should learn how to sell. I know selling sucks, but the skills you learn will come in handy. You sell yourself all the time, such as when you go to a job interview you are selling a company on why they should hire you. Here are a few things you need to know if you want to be a great sales person:

via Want to be successful? Learn how to sell!.