Fill-in-the-blank Media

I think maybe the problem is the media… From ABC News:

Wells Fargo said it is “premature to comment.” Bank of America told ABC News it “supports the concept,” but is “studying the details.” Citigroup said it’s too “early” to “speculate.”

Look at that last sentence.  Just pick and choose whatever you want…  Here’s what I think Citigroup originally said:

“We think that early in the history of time, even before man walked upright, there was already a need for man to be propped up by others.  Originally this was done by small communities where they would gather berries and share with each other.  Over time, as man became upright, he made small tools and started to put seed in the ground.  Later, animals were used to cultivate food.  A barter system was established, where one man would trade his goods for goods from another.  Over time, a monetary system was established in cultures and then goods could be traded for ‘money’.  In the 1800s in the western United States, man started to speculate for gold.  Then government created Social Security and f***ed it all up.  But these bailouts sure help us – the banks.”

Accounting Exam #1 Study Guide

Below is a study guide for the H/M that we’ve used in class.  I’ve gone through all of the homeworks that required use of the H/M as well as the class outline examples.  For each account, if you hover over it, you will see which homework problem or outline item it was used in.

I make no guarantee of accuracy, nor do I take any responsibility for how well you perform on the exam.  It is up to you to study appropriately.  That being said, please add comments to this post about omissions or mistakes, and I will make every effort to correct them.

A    =    L    +   OE    <–    Revs     +    Exps

Assets	Liabilities	Owners’ Equity	Revenues	Expenses
Cash	Accounts Payable	Additional Paid-In Capital (APIC)	Interest Revenue	Advertising Expense
Accounts Receivable (A/R)	Dividend Payable	Common Stock	Sales Revenue	Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
Accumulated Depreciation	Note Payable	Owner, Capital	Service Revenue	Depreciation Expense
Equipment	Wages Payable	Retained Earnings		Insurance Expense
Interest Receivable				Interest Expense
Merchandise Inventory				Rent Expense
Prepaid Insurance				Supplies Expense
Supplies				Wages Expense

Blogs and Twitter

Why do I find this dull blog so funny for writing inane comments, yet hate it so much when people do the same thing on Twitter?

Chrome knows what Google is… better than I do…

I was trying to do some twiddling with my hosts file.  I added the following line:

127.0.0.1  www.google.com

I should be directed to my local machine, right?  Well, as long as you aren’t using Chrome, it works fine.  Also, putting in any other address would have been fine.  However, Chrome apparently is going to bypass that pesky hosts file when it “thinks it knows” what you want.  Ehh!

Now attempting to use Twitterfeed

We’ll see how much this irritates Dan Levengood!

Chicken for all!

Genie’s got a sweet deal with Tyson chicken:

One additional side note…in an incredible act of generosity, Tyson Foods has agreed to send up to 200,000 pounds of protein-based foods (chicken, etc.) to six Bay Area food banks in exchange for comments. Comments! They’ll provide 100 pounds per comment on this post. This is a way to make a donation with barely any effort whatsoever, so if you could, please take a minute of your time and go leave a comment over there.

Like she said: minimal effort… chicken for the needy!

iGoogle – Why not small changes? I hate the new design!

Google is great about making adding new features.  They’re always coming up with new things that I might like.  But I hate the new iGoogle design.  Tabs on the left instead of on top, applications (like BeTwitteredand The OFFICIAL Dilbert Widget) that don’t work, embedded Google apps (like Gmail) that take away features of the full-fledged app.

I have the CNN.com and ESPN.com widgets, and instead of just providing links, now I’m forcefed the summary that goes along with those feeds, as terrible as they are.  Finally, they put all of the tabs on the left, so I lost all kinds of real estate on the main part of the screen.

 

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

When your site works better in another’s browser

The funny thing is, Hotmail works SOOOO much better in Chrome.

Upgrade the upgrade???

Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t think Chrome is good enough to view email…

XPath – Common Mistake

When dealing with XPath, an extra forward slash (/) can make the difference between your application performing and making the decision that XPath just isn’t the solution for you.  So what is the difference between /Product and //Product?  Huge.

/Product means “go find the Product element that are my children”.  The engine only needs to look at child nodes relative to the current location.

//Product means “go find all of the Product elements that are a descendant of mine – I don’t care where they are at”.   This means that if your document is 50 levels deep, the engine will look through each and every one of them to find a product element.  If you have 10,000 elements to look through and then you have to go diving down the tree as well, it is obviously a more expensive than it needs to be.

Sometimes you don’t know where the element will reside in your XML document, so // makes sense.  However, if you know where you are looking, you should always use /.  Neither is “wrong”, but one can be a LOT more expensive than the other.

I’ve seen two XPath queries written today – one at work and one on the web, and both of them were using the inefficient double slash (//).  I hope this helps anybody who is doing any querying using XPath.