Month: September 2008

Chart courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Seen outside the head shop/furniture/jewelery store Shanti Baba on Queen Street West:

Photo by your ‘umble accordionist.

Is “Mike Litoris” (say it out loud a couple of times) his real name, or was he just having fun with a TV News reporter? I just can’t tell anymore…

Mike Litoris is looking a little droopy. Perhaps Mike Litoris needs a little stimulation. Do you know where Mike Litoris is?

SFGate’s Culture Blog has more details on Mike Litoris.

(Yes, it’s from 2006, but it’s making the rounds right now.)

I’ve been thinking that sooner or later, someone’s going to have to take the blame for the credit crisis. Of the people involved, the easiest target are the poor: the people who took out subprime mortgages and then defaulted on them. They’re not organized and don’t have much in the way of media representation, and would thus make the perfect scapegoat. I was wondering why none of the talking heads or representatives of the banks had gone after the poor yet.

I was wrong: Larry Kudlow blamed the poor in a roundabout way, pointing the finger at Congress, who “forced” banks into giving subprime loans to people who’d never be able to pay them back. What’s even more surprising is that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called him out on it:

The fact that bankers had an ironically humourous term for high-risk customers — NINJAs (short for No INcome, Jobs or Assets) should be a tip-off to you that they were a necessary part of their get-rich-quick scheme. Their debts were terrible investments that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, but when used as “filler” for packages that contained much better investments, they could create investment vehicles with triple-A ratings, which would then sell at a huge markup. Think of it as being like an unscrupulous butcher in the old days: he can make a more money by making sausages out of sawdust with just enough meat to hide the taste rather than making sausages entirely out of meat.

(I posted an explanation of how subprime sausages were made in this entry.)

Crooks and Liars and Oliver Willis have more to say on the Kudlow piece.

There are a few slots still open at tonight’s Ruby on Rails Project Night, which takes place in Accordion City’s Kensington Market Area. It’s happening tonight at 6 p.m. at the Rich Media Institute (156 Augusta Avenue). If you want to attend let organizer Corina Newby know at corecorina@hotmail.com.

Here’s what presenter Paul Doerwald has to say about his topic tonight:

“Programmers generally hate writing documentation. That’s because most documentation is kept separate from the code and becomes hard to keep up-to-date. Besides violating the DRY principle… it can lead to misleading documentation, which is generally worse than none at all.” [Subramaniam/Hunt ’06]. Why do developers hate writing documentation, and why do stakeholders and managers keep requiring it? Is there agile documentation beyond inline API documentation (JavaDoc, RDoc, etc.) and comments in the code? What parts of a project deserve separate-from-code documentation? How do we identify them, capture them, and keep them relevant?

Tonight’s Toronto Ruby on Rails Project Night presentation discusses the problem of documentation, explores some key aspects to consider when writing effective documentation, and dreams of a future of testable, executable documentation, where non-code knowledge could be integrated into your code.”

And here’s what presenter James “Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants” Robertson has to say about his presentation:

WebVelocity is a new Smalltalk Development Environment that is oriented around Seaside for Web Development and Glorp for Object/Relatonal Mapping. Come and see how WebVelocity re-targets the Smalltalk development experience into the Web Browser and simplifies the challenge of learning a new environment for newcomers. We’ll even build an entire application using Active Record and Scaffolding during the presentation, with minimal programming. If you’re a fan of Ruby on Rails, you need to come out and see this presentation!

This photo was featured on Reddit today under the headline “I found this gem on the door of the local Burger King”:

Someone’s already turned it into a “demotivational” poster: