Where is your username registered?

Here is a neat little link that checks your user name across all the social sites and tells you if it is taken or not.

Username check.

Gulf Bank Hacked

Gulf Bank has sent an urgent SMS to some of its customers telling them that their ATM card will no longer work and that they are to replace their cards immediately at their respective branch.

According to sources within the bank, hackers have gained access to customer information and their deposits are now at risk.

Gulf Bank is now conducting a massive campaign to replace all the compromised cards.

More info here from Some Contrast.

Blog Action Day: Poverty

The Subject for today's blog action day is poverty, and here is a little clip about it.

Access your most recent apps / docs / servers from your Dock

Here is a cool hack you can do to access your most recent apps / documents / server / Favorite Items from Mac OS X Dock.

Here is a screen shot for my most recent apps used:



What you need to do it is to start up terminal and copy paste the below two lines:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
$ killall Dock


Don't copy the $, this represents the prompt.

My First Computer

Here is an ad for my first computer:



They say you never forget your first time, oh wait, they meant something else.

If you want to learn more about the Commodore Vic 20, check it out here.

My mobile powered off

My mobile just powered off. I did not charge it last night and thought it would survive today with the remaining electrons orbiting inside its small battery.
I shook the mobile hoping I might budge some electrons into giving it a little extra shot of electrical adrenalin, but no use. It was as dead as a high tech brick.
My first reaction was a slight panic; I was cut off, isolated, castaway on a desert island.
I felt like I lost one of my five senses. I am not one of those people constantly having their mobile fixed to their ear like an extra appendage but I need to know that I can, on a whim, call anyone, connect to anything, or just have my mobile comfortingly cradling in my hand.
In my isolation I drove home, driving fast, afraid that opportunity might come knocking in the form of a ringtone and the caller will not be able to get through. I rushed in the house, plugged in my mobile and watched patiently as the dark screen lit up. The reassuring battery bar was pulsing like a heart post CPR. I felt whole again.

Trading Blogs and my two new friends, Fannie and Freddy

With the meltdown of the US market, here are some trading blogs that I follow.

I did not lose any money, in fact I made more than I ever did last week, not by shorting stocks because it has been stopped but by buying Fannie Mac [FNM] and Freddie May [FRE] while they where rising during a short squeeze. Extremely risky and stupid but it paid off.





On Tuesday, 23 September I bought FRE @ 0.97 and FNM @ 0.96, and I sold both the next day with FRE @ 1.92 and FNM @ 1.84.

Close to a 100% return, Kaching!

The Stone and the iPhone

Word for Today: Finlandization

Finlandization: is the influence that one powerful country may have on the policies of a smaller neighboring country.

More here.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

During the period of Finlandization freedom of speech was limited. Public libraries removed from circulation books, more than 1,700 titles, that were deemed anti-Soviet and bookstores were given catalogs of banned books.[1] The Finnish Board of Film Classification likewise banned movies that it considered to be anti-Soviet. Banned movies included The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer in 1962, and Born American by Finnish director Renny Harlin in 1986.

Is history repeating itself? Is Kuwait being gradually Finlandized because of its powerful neighbors?

Hilarious Parrot

This parrot starts all proper and religious, then ends up partying. Funniest thing I ever saw.