Random Thoughts

According to the Christian Science Monitor , the embassy is supposed to be one of the largest in the world and it is meant to symbolize America's long term commitment to Iraq. Sure, $592 million is peanuts compared to the nearly $1 trillion the Iraq War has cost so far, but it is a bad investment and a waste of money for many reasons. For one, the U.S. remains largely hated in Iraq despite whatever progress has been made lately. Such a grandiose symbol of the much-maligned America will only exacerbate and fuel the anger and anti-American sentiment that exists there. It is quite inconceivable that the Iraqis will warm up to the U.S. anytime soon. Secondly, building such an expensive structure in a country where suicide bombings are a daily occurance and their scale/destruction is massive is a waste of money. I would not be surprised if the new embassy is a subject of a major terrorist attack. To prevent a terrorist attack, the U.S. would have to spend lots of military resources ...

I am a big fan of The Economist magazine because it always has neat graphs that get the message across without the need to read through articles. The reading, I save for people who love nuance or those who can't decipher graphs.

I checked out The Big Lebowski 's IMDB page and came across this amusing bit. You would think such a classic masterpiece would win many awards and nominations, but that was hardly the case. I suppose it has a cult following of its own, but its appeal in the mainstream may not be that great. May be it had tough competition that year. Fortunately, it did win the Best Foreign Film award from the Russian Guild of Film Critics . That got me thinking if the numerous mentions of The Dude's favorite drink, the white Russian had any bearing on the film winning the Russian award.

I am a big fan of The Economist magazine because it always has neat graphs that get the message across without the need to read through articles. The reading, I save for people who love nuance or those who can't decipher graphs.

It's nothing long or complicated, but it might save someone a few minutes. The stable version of Picasa for Linux is 2.7 as of today(01/02/2009). You can install version 2.7 following the instructions in the download page or add Google repositories to your sources as down outlined here . If you are like me and you want the latest [beta] version, here is how you would do it. First, download the RPM for Picasa 3.0 from the download page. If you try to install to install the RPM, your efforts will fail with errors indicating that you are missing some dependencies. Namely, you will probably need to install sane-backends, libgphoto, libgsane, libksane or some combination thereof. In my case, I was fortunate enough to have had all those programs installed. The one I was missing was lsb . I went ahead and installed lsb and Picasa 3 installed on my OpenSuse 11.0 perfectly.

Here are two bailout cartoons that I wanted to recycle from Greg Mankiw's blog.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds from Lifehack and I came across some good tips. One that was of value to me was their post on procrastinaton . The writer suggests that procrastinators should persistently ask themselves this one question. “What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?” l could not agree more. I am already practicing that piece of advice and it might shame me into doing "the best think I could be working on right now" and that is certainly not blogging. See ye!