TRADITIONAL ECONOMICS.
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies and the economy grows.
You retire on the income.

INDIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You worship them.

PAKISTAN ECONOMICS
You don't have any cows.
You claim that the Indian cows belong to you.
You ask the US for financial aid,
China for military aid,
Britain for warplanes,
Italy for machines,
Germany for technology,
France for submarines,
Switzerland for loans,
Russia for drugs and
Japan for equipment.
You buy the cows with all this and claim of exploitation by the world.

SRI LANKAN ECONOMICS
You have a cow and a bull,
you let the cow be President and the bull be Prime Minister
and let them blame each other for the state the country is in.

AMERICAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
You profess surprise when the cow drops dead.
You put the blame on some nation with cows & naturally that nation will be a danger to mankind.
You wage a war to save the world and grab the cows.

FRENCH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.

GERMAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so that they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves.

BRITISH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
They are both mad.

ITALIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You don't know where they are.
You break for lunch.

SWISS ECONOMICS
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
You charge others for storing them.

JAPANESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You re-design them so that they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create cute cartoon cow images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide.

RUSSIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 17 cows.
You give up counting and open another bottle of vodka.

CHINESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim full employment, high bovine productivity and arrest anyone reporting the actual numbers.

Hahaha!

Just found out something really cool a few days ago on the Dell US forums.

When this particular laptop model that I have was first introduced, it only offered a 16MB or a 32MB Mobility Radeon 7500 GPU (the 64MB version came out a month after I got mine). Naturally, I opted for the former, since I'm not much of a gamer, and only play the occasional Need for Speed series and others that I just want to try out for the heck of it. Guess it turned out to be quite a good decision.

Apparently, people have realized that it's possible to stick a 64MB Mobility Radeon 9000 into the i5100, and it works without a hitch. Of course, Dell doesn't publicly admit that this is possible, or offer the upgrades directly as 5100 spares. Furthermore, there are rumors that a 128 MB version of a later GPU (the 9600?) might be released by Dell sometime in the future that will have the same form factor as well. Whether this turns out to be true remains to be seen. The reason why this is good news for me is not so much from the gaming aspect, but from the point of future-proofing. Longhorn is definitely going to need some kind of decent GPU to do all that D3d desktop crunching, and I surely won't be getting a new machine when it's released. Of course, I won't have a top of the line system by 2005 (or is it 2006 now?), but I'm sure Microsoft will keep compatibility in mind. Not everyone upgrades their machines every few months.

Another quite surprising fact is that the CPU in this laptop can be upgraded as well. Although not too many people have taken this route, there are some who are successfully running stable 3.06GHz P4's at decent temperatures in the Inspiron 5100.

I'm not thinking of any upgrades just yet, but it's something I might surely consider sometime in the future. Naturally, the hard disk and the RAM are upgradeable like any other laptop as well...so what else could one want? It almost seems like I've got a desktop that I can upgrade whenever I feel the need to, but with the added advantage of portability. You can only imagine how convenient it is to be able to carry this thing back home every weekend with all my school work and other data on it.

Never has the site had so many hits in a single day before. The last I remember, the maximum was somewhere in the lower 40s.

A couple of hours ago, the count reached 64! That's 64 unique visitors during the last 24 hours. Referer logs tell me this has to do with my recent Firefox-related posts. Who would have thought...

I've loved this theme for the Mac OS X version of Firefox ever since I saw it, and the author who created it doesn't intend on porting it to Windows for several reasons.
But I still want it.

So here's a peek at something I've been working on, little by little, during the past couple of days. Click to see more.



It's a personal mod at this stage, so please don't ask for it yet. Besides, it's not nearly close to being complete. I might release it in the future, provided:
- Nobody else releases one before that. I don't have much time to get this done as fast as many other themers out there. I'll be taking my time.
- I get permission to release it from the author of the original Mac Pinstripe theme.
- I'm convinced that this, in no way, infringes on any of Apple's copyrighted work. Not too keen on getting into legal problems...

Once this is done, I doubt I'm going to need any other themes for a long time.

I looked all over the place for a 128x128 Firefox PNG dock icon after I installed it yesterday. And since there weren't any, I decided to make one myself using the official logo/icon last night.


Click the preview to download it.

Oh my goodness!! Enough said!

I'm planning a redesign of the pictures page...not the individual galleries, just the main page. Right now, there's too much scrolling involved, and it'll only get worse as more galleries are added. I want to code it in PHP from scratch, but it'll need more free time than what I currently have.

Decided it's time for a new theme as well. Thinking of something green this time, but I can't be sure. Maybe in the next couple of days...

EDIT: The new theme is up.
It's called Swirl, and as planned, it's green...a nice shade of it too. This will be the new default. As usual, you're welcome to use any of the others if they suit you better.

"Tamagotchi, the once ubiquitous virtual pet that was discontinued in 1998, is to make a comeback later this year. The new versions of the pocket-sized gizmos, called Tamagotchi Plus, go on sale in Japan on 20 March.

The devices will be able to communicate with each other via infrared, which means that they'll be able to go on virtual dates, buy each other presents and even have little Tamagotchi babies."

Full Story: Tamagotchi Returns - be afraid.

---

Anyone remember the first generation of these things? Goodness...they were the fad of the year. I remember, every second person in school had one, until it reached a point where it became such a big distraction that it was banned from our classrooms and confiscated if found.
Now it's back...with infrared connectivity. I can imagine the chaos these things are going to cause in school classrooms when they hit the shelves. More annoyed teachers. \o/

I still have an original Tamagotchi that I got as a gift tucked away in a drawer. Wonder if it still works...

It's become so dry here in Southern California, that everything I touch seems to be zapping me because of static. It's annoying. I touch the door knobs, they zap me...I touch the car, it zaps me too.

The odd thing is that we actually just started the chapters on electrostatics in physics class a couple of days ago.

I'm so glad the week is over. Man, was it gruelingly busy.
And of course, it always feels good to be back home.

I finally fixed a problem I was having with my laptop. Ever since I got back from Bombay in January, the CPU temperature has been going up way beyond normal. In fact, I even had it shut down on me at 80C once because of the P4's auto-shutdown mechanism (thank goodness for that). The fans had to be constantly running for it to be running at decent temperatures.
The solution? Compressed air! All I had to do was give it a few bursts of air from the back vents, and it's been purring at a happy 37-40C ever since (as compared to 60-70C earlier). It's amazing how much of a difference dust can make to the cooling system.

I also changed my email address this weekend, and sent out a mass notification mail to everyone. Finally ditched the Hotmail account that I've had for almost 5-6 years now. Got quite sick of the space constraints and the constant influx of junk mail. Now I have a nice 50MB POP3 account on my own domain. Yum!

Firebird 0.8 and Thunderbird 0.5 in two days. Excellent. Along with ditching Hotmail, I ditched Outlook as well. I've always wanted to go back to using Tbird, but Hotmail Popper just didn't cut it. The Calendar extension for Tbird is the best extension ever, and that made the decision to switch back even easier. Big props to the Mozilla Foundation dev team. You guys just keep making things better and better.

Got this in my Hotmail box today. Junk mail taken to a whole new level of absurdity?
Click if you dare

How does anything in there have to do with anything?!

Changed font faces and sizes around a bit. I like this better.
Easier to read at higher resolutions. I keep coming back to Verdana too...seems to be the most readable font, I think. Also returned to the non-colored legends, although with a different font this time.

At 800x600 or below, it might look awfully large, but you shouldn't be using those resolutions in the first place.

Yay! It's a February with 29 days! \o/
Don't ask...