In the promised land of California, we see today that the unemployment fund is paying out twice what it collects and will go broke in 2010. Meanwhile our governator says "There's not a minute of the day when I don't think about..... and see the faces of the kind of people that this will affect", (when he's talking about the impact of budget cuts on the poor). Too bad he says those words while standing outside the Capitol promoting a $56K electric Hummer.

Meanwhile the stock market stays pumped up a bit longer so the banks and investment banks can sell more stock and raise more capital. And speaking of which:

NPR website had an excerpt from Frank Partnoy's book "FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street". He sort of gives an overview of derivatives from the 80's to the present. Very interesting how "crap was turned into cake". It's a long read, but worth it. Link is below:

Derivatives

I was zooming through My Space this weekend and ran across a link to a singer (Juno Roxas) that I had before but wondered where he ended up. When I was in college back in early 80’s, I’d spend some time going through bargain cd racks, looking for obscure bands I’d never heard of. Although you did end up with some mediocre stuff, every so often you’d get a band that for some reason or other, had never made it big even though they had the talent. I always felt like a miner finding a gold nugget when I found one of those bands.

Roxus was one of those bands. Unfortunately like many 80's bands they fell victim to the emergence of grunge in early 90's.

Drama reminded me a little bit of Patty Smyth and Scandal. I really like her voice a lot.

Boulevard was a Canadian band, did okay with two albums but never made it big. Maybe some of it is that it was harder for some canadian bands to break into the US, not sure. I remember reading the youtube comments when I found the video. Turns out the lead singer is now a firefighter, I think in Washington. From a fan's point of view, even though you know they have a life and it may be away from music, in a way I'm always disappointed, thinking "what do ya mean you're not making music anymore!" Funny.

So I’m posting some links to videos, a 80’s rock blast from the past.

Drama Link:
Drama

Boulevard Link:
Boulevard

Roxas Link:
Roxas

News came out a few weeks ago about researchers' efforts to deploy parasitic flies to control fire ant populations. Interesting concept, similar to other things I've seen - using existing predators to naturally control other creatures. In this case, the flies lay eggs which hatch and eat the ant brains. Link is below:

Fire ants

Here's a wedding video that definitely is something different from the usual wedding video. I loved it, and I assume that the participants in this wedding will like it more than the traditional video. Sounds like it was done in England.

Wedding Video

Update 5/30/09:
AZRON couldn't play video.
If you have an older version of Flash, that may be problem. Below is link to a help page I found on the vimeo website. See the first comment at the top, there’s a link to let you see what version you have.
Skinny

Help page

Some productivity products I found out about. Neither one is free, but they are interesting. Don’t know if worth paying for or not. The first one, jott.com, lets you phone a number and have your message converted to text and emailed to you, which is nice. There are other features as well.

The second one, techsmith, is a screen capture program Snag It, which lets you capture any screen image, add markings & notes, then send to people. Pretty cool too.

Jott.com

Snag It