I also like this excerpt:

I mean, half of Wall Street is unemployed right now. There are plenty of unemployed traders out there whose resumes don't include such entries as "Worked for years at small unit of AIG that helped destroy the universe; throughout that time was completely ignorant of burgeoning global disaster unfolding 5 feet from my desk."

-janelane

AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Today I visited an intake structure on the Chattahoochee for a new water treatment plant. At the structure, water is pumped out of the river and over to the plant for treatment and delivery to the public. The pump station has six 60 million gallon per day pumps. Shown above the ground in gray is the pump motor which is 2,700 horsepower and weighs 12 tons. This one pump station is capable of drawing 360 million gallons per day of water from the Hooch. Inconceivable!

The field trip was training since I'll be assisting on a pump station design for a much smaller water treatment plant out of town. Aside from a private tour of the new water reservoir in Cobb County, this is one of the coolest things I've seen.

-janelane, my job kicks ass

503575568_ooT2w-M-1.jpg (JPEG Image, 338x450 pixels)

Awesome April Fool's joke! Auto-reply to spam, auto-breakup...this tool has everything I need!

-janelane

Gmail: Google's approach to email

ATLANTA -Governor Sonny Perdue announced today the approval of two Georgia Fund loan commitments of $5,200,000 and one Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) commitment of $1,000,000 as part of his vision for sustainable economic development. The Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority (GEFA) executive committee approved the commitments to help finance water infrastructure projects for the cities of Carrollton, Monroe and Roswell.

"GEFA's programs are a tangible commitment by Governor Perdue and the General Assembly to assist local governments across the state with their efforts to provide clean water, sewer and solid waste improvements," said Phil Foil. "In addition to the public's health and safety, these projects are critical to a community's ability to prosper economically."

GEFA helps communities prepare for economic growth and development through the provision of low interest loans and grants. The Georgia Fund is a state funded loan program administered by GEFA for water, wastewater and solid waste infrastructure projects. The loan program has maximum flexibility and accessibility, providing fast loan approvals. The Georgia Fund finances loans to local governments for projects such as water and sewer lines, treatment plants, pumping stations, wells, water storage tanks and water meters. The DWSRF is a federal loan program administered by GEFA for water infrastructure projects. Eligible projects include public health-related water supply construction.

As a water professional, I can't help but be excited about the above news snippet from one of my local professional associations. Yeah, engineering work! However, as a Georgia taxpayer, I am deeply dissatisfied by this news. What they hell does he mean, "community's ability to prosper economically"? Roswell has one of the richest zip codes in Georgia. And, since I work on this stuff all the time, I know that Atlanta's water infrastructure is in far worse shape than Roswell's. Anyone who's been trapped in a sink hole inside the perimeter knows that.

It's stories like this that make the amount I don't know about local politics seem vast indeed.

-janelane

E.U. President Calls U.S. Stimulus the ‘Way to Hell’

LOL! I haven't even the read the article but it sounds very thought-provoking. :-)

-janelane

E.U. President Calls U.S. Stimulus the ‘Way to Hell’ - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — Spurred on by a tidal wave of public anger over bonuses paid to executives of the foundering American International Group, the House voted 328 to 93 on Thursday to get back most of the money by levying a 90 percent tax on it.

Ha! Okay, the House may be ignoring a lot of larger issues, but this is a pretty humorous and creative way of dealing with the legalities of denying those bonuses.

-janelane

House Passes Bill to Punish A.I.G. Bonus Recipients - NYTimes.com

As before, your books, annotations and clippings are auto-backed up on Amazon.com. But now, if you buy multiple Kindles (dream on, Amazon), all of them remember where you stopped reading in each book.

Jeff Bezos was on Jon Stewart last night pimping the Kindle. It's beautiful, but not being able to share books or back them up on your own hard drive is so 2008. :-)

-janelane

State of the Art - Amazon.com’s Kindle Goes From Good to Better - NYTimes.com

Mr. Kritzman, who also teaches a graduate course in financial engineering at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, set up his study to accurately measure the long-term impact of all the expenses involved in investing in a mutual fund or hedge fund. Those include transaction costs, taxes and management and performance fees.

Excuse me, but, no. What I do is engineering. What those blowhards do is financial maneuvering.

Probably you can tell I read this article before the one about index funds.

-janelane, simmering

Strategies - The Index Funds Win Again - NYTimes.com

Just thought you'd like to know I'm investigating propane and propane accessories at work.

Last Monday I was in a car accident and suffered a severe concussion that didn't manifest symptoms for 24 hours (weird, I know). Since then I've periodically lost the ability to speak. I go from normal speech to slurring, to mute. Its being looked at, but the reason I made this thread is because... I realized that it is exactly like TCP packets overloading the sliding window, or a web server with limited resources getting too many requests: overload the throughput on the queue and everything after that is lost.

So I made a diagram tonight when I had a bad episode to prove I can still think.

When things are bad, and I fill the shrunken word queue, I can't speak until it self empties. Full empty seems to take between 30 seconds and one minute, and seems to happen at a linear rate. However, if I limit myself to the actual word queue/minute throughput, I can speak continuously for a longer period. Normal speed speech very quickly fills the queue though.

Strange, but accurate. If my mind is a Turing Machine, my word queue is malfunctioning and is too small to hold enough words to speak normally.

My Post Concussive Syndrome Speech Disorder: A Malfunctioning Word Queue