monkey nonsense

Oops! Trader mistakenly spends $251 million
Taiwan stock trader looking for a new job after accidental share purchases
Updated: 1:13 p.m. ET June 28, 2005

TAIPEI, Taiwan – A Taiwan stock trader mistakenly bought $251 million worth of shares with a mis-stroke of her computer, meaning her company is looking at a paper loss of more than $12 million and she is looking for a new job.

The trader with Fubon Securities made a typo while filling in a small order from Merrill Lynch on Monday, creating confusion when many small firms inexplicably surged past the 7 percent trading limit.

“Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors,” a Fubon executive said on Tuesday.

Fubon said that the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems and would be fired.

“There is a paper loss of more than T$400 million,” said the executive.

“However, with a good outlook for stocks in the second half, there are no plans to sell the shares in the near term.”

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

I would add that to my Amusing News collection, but I guess it’s not that amusing to the lady.

You scored as Goofy. Your alter ego is Goofy! You are fun and great to be around, and you are always willing to help others. You arn’t worried about embarrassing yourself, so you are one who is more willing to try new things. Goofy 75% Sleeping Beauty 56% Donald Duck 50% Cinderella 50% Ariel 44% The Beast 44% Cruella De Ville 44% Peter Pan 44% Pinocchio 38% Snow White 38%

Which Disney Character is your Alter Ego?
created with QuizFarm.com

uh… don’t think this is terribly accurate. i mean… there’s a reason why i ate chicken teriyaki every day!

so… a bunch of my friends all decided to (or perhaps i suckered them into it) enter the Hot 995 Floats contest. we had no idea what we were getting into. how to collect 99+ pepsi products?! (no one ever drinks pepsi! everyone i know drinks coke!) how to build a boat?!

in total, our team collected close to 200 pepsi products! we all chipped in vicky asked the flight attendent on her airplane for all the pepsi products. angela set up a box for people to put bottles/cans into at her office. cindy and i randomly stopped at an intersection (piney meetinghouse & boswell!) to pick up one can of diet pepsi vanilla we saw lying on the ground

with enough pepsi products collected, we started to build a boat. none of us knew how to do. luckily billy and dan had some ideas (engineers are great like that) and we had a lot of epoxy we ended up with a catamaran-like raft and it looked pretty sturdy! we tested it out on a lake in my friend’s backyard, but since the lake was nasty, no one dared get on. so on friday night, the day before the race, we decided to really try it out. we went to the stonebridge community pool and asked the lifeguards. they were nice enough to let us in. and then even nicer to hop on our boat to test it out…

so for the remainder of the night, we drained out the boat (it took on LOADS of water), tried to waterproof the pontoons, and added more bottles to the boat. suffice to say, the test run did not go well… even with “just” the 120 pound lifeguard on it. our boat was supposed to support someone weighing 150-170 pounds!

it’s ok b/c on race day… the SS Monkey Business placed 2nd at the Hot 995 Floats !! uh yea… so we really lucked out with the draw. basically all capt’n dan “tim lo” had to do was stay on the boat and make it to the end (which i make sound easy, but really it was quite a challenge given… well yea… our boat was still kinda ghetto). We first ran up against a raft that was pretty unbalanced (and later on, its oar would break in half). In the semis, it was against a boat that stayed in the water too long (the captain had stayed on the boat in between his heat and the semis because it was too difficult to get balanced on it again). we made it to the finals where they turned on the waves in pool and where we finally ran into a seaworthy boat. we were kaput. capt’n dan “tim lo”, despite valient efforts, wasn’t even able to stay on the SS Monkey Business. (major design flaw: pontoons waaay too short so not stable enough in waves, but hey! the boat needed to fit in a nissan maxima and we had no idea they’d turn on the waves!)

still, we were quite surprised at how well the SS Monkey Business fared. We let it bask in its truimph for a bit and then had to scrap it

i’ll post pictures once i get them loaded. you can see pictures of the event at hot995’s webpage- here

started the day off by waking up at 6:30ish to go wait in line for a free mini DVD player at the new safeway opening up. originally, we thought of going at 6:30… that got pushed back to 6:45… got there at 6:50ish… line was already crazy long! we felt we were already out of the first 100 (who get free DVD players) but stuck around to see if they’d offer anything else worthwhile to people close by. they ended up annoucing the next 50 would get a voucher to come back at 8pm and pick up any leftover DVD players the first 100 didn’t pick up…

tina and i were #151 and 152. AHH!! oh well i doubt any of the first 100 would miss on their chance of getting the DVD player so really we weren’t that close. i grabbed lunch at safeway and heading to work, at least i’d get out of work earlier!

power went out at work a little after 9 this morning. after waiting around for awhile… they started saying we could either go to another one of the buildings (where there was power) or go home, as long as we were productive…

didn’t matter whether i went to the other building or went home ’cause the server i connect to at work is located on the same floor as me so there wouldn’t be any power… i was stuck updating documentation (booo)

i left at around 10:30 since my battery was nearly empty. awesome! at least i got to leave work early and the day started looking better… even if i did have to do crummy documentation at home

power came on back at work around 11 (a little after i left), but servers were down for quite some time later… more updating documentation (boo)

after the servers came back up, another problem came up with the licensing for one of the products i use… grr… ops guy at work said to call him about it, gave him a ring… got a disconnected number message…

ahh, all and all a pretty interesting but crappy (is everything broken?!) day… at least i’m home already

an email I received in response to my question to DMV about driver improvement classes:

Dear Ms. H,

Thank you for visiting www.dmvnow.com.

A customer can earn five safe driving points by attending a driver improvement clinic. If the customer’s record reflects the maximum safe driving points, the five safe driving points will not be awarded for attending a clinic. Your record indicates you have the maximum safe driving points, which is five points.

………! does this mean… that my ticket will just negate 4 of my safe driving points and I won’t get any demerit points on my license?!?! … will my insurance still go up?!

though it’s almost a shame that my $75 and Saturday spent in driver improvement class will “go to waste”… but that’s OK if it means no points on my license!!

it’s been one year since i joined the “real world”

couldn’t have gone any slower… and yet, at the same time, it seems to have gone by quite fast.

annE (i think it was her…) once gave me a deck of cards that suggested good books to read… something like 52 great books to read… i am not quite sure why but most of the books i read (curious george, curious george takes a job, curi…) were not in it. i remember being somewhat sad that i was so illiterate in literature. that was like in middle school.

you’d think now, being older and having gone through many more years of school, i would be more well read… nope! that’s what going to a college such as CMU will do to you i only took one english class at CMU and had to read a short story like 20 pages long (SUCH a struggle!!!)

i keep wanting to read more, but i never know what books to read! how do people find good books to read?! if anyone has any book suggestions, i’d be very open to trying anything.

so far, on my list of books to read:

• martian chronicles- i loved this book in high school and since it’s been so long since i’ve read it, i figured i’d re-read it
• other ray bradbury books- i hear the illustrated man is good, though i have no idea what it is about
• harry potter and the half-blood prince- of course!
• hitchhikers guide to the universegalaxy (oops, i don’t even know the name of the book!)- so i actually own this book… but i’ve never read it. when people hear that (and the fact that i haven’t watched all the star wars movies), they usually wonder how i went to CMU… hrm… maybe i don’t want to read this

that’s about it… any other suggestions???

LONDON – Monkey business proved to be a lucrative pastime Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than 14,000 pounds (US$25,620; euro20,917).

The collection of three tempera paintings — all abstract — were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol.

But while Warhol and Renoir’s work didn’t sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo’s paintings.

An American bidder named Howard Hong, who described himself as an “enthusiast of modern and contemporary painting,” purchased the lot of paintings for 14,400 pounds (US$26,352; euro21,515) including buyer’s premium.

The sale price surpassed predictions that priced the paintings between US$1,000 (euro813) and US$1,500 (euro1,220).

“We had no idea what these things were worth,” said Howard Rutkowski, director of modern and contemporary art at Bonhams.

“We just put them in for our own amusement.”

Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between the ages of 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis.

His artwork provoked reactions ranging from scorn to skepticism among critics of the time, but painter Pablo Picasso is reported to have hung a Congo painting on his studio wall after receiving it as a gift.

“There’s no precedent for things like this having been sold before,” Rutkowski said.

from: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050620/ap_on_en_ot/britain_chimpanzee_art;_ylt=Ar6LPCRSJK8LBpJAEg5VKUbtiBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

so at work, i have to use linux/unix (what is the difference?!? … i’m such a failure of a CS major) quite a bit… so i had set up my own environment “settings in some file” that made it easier for me to use it… things like hitting the up button to repeat a command, hitting tab to complete the command, setting paths. suffice to say… nothing works. i had little to no idea how to set these things up so i was basically copying my predecessor’s settings, googling other things and so my settings file is pretty much a mishmash of crap… plus, my settings get overridden by the settings of our software product which has its own environment settings file that gets used… so yea…nothing with the command line really works.

normally, i dont care. all those features are nice and all, but i’m just too lazy to figure out how to get them to work properly. however, there is one feature i miss dearly… and that is the ability to delete. i’m not the best typist so i have plenty of typos… i just want to delete!! backspace, delete button, esc and then ctrl-x or ctrl-dd… i don’t care what it is, as long as it’s consistent, but it seems like with each different login i use (my own, the product’s login, a co-worker’s login), different platform and version (solaris or AIX and the different supported versions we have here)… the button to delete changes each time!!

this was me at work today:

ahhh!!! those weird characters are my attempt at using various buttons to delete my typo. and that’s not even the worst typing job i’ve had. there was one time it was so bad i started cracking up in my cube… my co-workers must have thought i was crazy… but i had been trying to type the SAME thing like 1875391859189 times!!

i hate computers

you ever hear those horror stories of parents leaving their kids in the backseat on a hot, sunny day- they leave the house intending to drop off the kid at the daycare/school and head to work, but somewhere along the way… they forget the kid is with them and just head straight to work. then when the daycare/school calls to ask why their kid didnt show up, they realize and rush out to save their kid!

scary scary thing to happen, i always wondered how someone could forget something so important just because it might be quiet/asleep in the back. today, i learned just how easy it is.

so i put my precious lunch in the backseat of my car to make space for erica in the front seat. after dropping her off, i drove to work. my lunch was pretty quiet this whole time (it rarely makes sounds). i parked my car and walked into the building. got all the way up to my floor when i realized… i’m missing something!!

realizing i forgot my lunch, i rushed out to save it! (ok ok, first i dropped off my stuff at my cube and logged into my computer. hey! just in case anyone is checking… they’ll know i got in early today and that way, i can leave early! ) luckily, today is cooler than it has been the whole week and i realized my forgetfulness pretty early on. my breakfast/lunch was saved. whew!

now if only i could make my lunch last until lunchtime… you ever notice how when you bring a lunch from home, it’s usually gone by 10ish, 11ish? or is this just some problem only i have?