Legendary Bankers

It seems that over the weekend three bankers have made it into the legendary league occupied by the likes of Soros, Buffet and John Arnold.

Dan Spark, Michael “Swenny” Swenson and Josh Birnbaum collectively netted $4bn profits for Goldman Sachs in a speculative gamble.

Sub-primes
The 4 bet that sub-primes would turn sour by the end of the year, netting the bank $4bn in profits, more than off-setting it’s own exposure to the sub-primes market.

Work hard, do your research
Goldman stands to be one of the biggest winners from the situation to date with over $19bn in it’s bonus kitty.

Just goes to show, you get nothing for betting on a sure thing.

Blogger Tag Cloud Script

Being bored on a Monday morning, I wrote this script.

Its’ for bloggers with an FTP account, (non-blogspot account), this tag cloud will read the contents of your ‘labels’ folder and create a formatted cloud of links based on file sizes and category headings.

Blogger Tag Cloud Script – (php server – php 4 or higher)

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">




Untitled Document











Chunky Borders

// php tag cloud - blogger ftp accounts tag cloud for labels folder.
// The tag cloud automatically takes the contents of your labels folder,
// reads the files and gives the values according to the number of posts.
// Change the 'labels' location marked.
// Please leave my little marker at the bottom. Thanks.

$handle = opendir('../labels/'); // change **
if (!empty($handle))
{
while (false !== ($page = readdir($handle)))
{
if ($page != "." && $page != "..")
{ $filesize = filesize('../labels/'.$page); // change **
$labels[] = array ("page" => $page, "filesize" => $filesize); }
}


}
// tag cloud functionality ===
foreach ($labels as $key => $value){
$tags[$value["page"]] = $value["filesize"];
}

$max_size = 180; // max font size in %
$min_size = 58; // min font size in %


$max_qty = max(array_values($tags));
$min_qty = min(array_values($tags));


$spread = $max_qty - $min_qty;
if (0 == $spread) {
  $spread = 1;
}


$step = ($max_size - $min_size)/($spread);

foreach ($tags as $key => $value) {
$size = $min_size + (($value - $min_qty) * $step);

echo 'style="font-size: '.$size.'%; font-weight: 200; "'; // change **
$delim = '.';
$page = substr($key, 0, strpos($key, $delim));
echo ' title="'.$page.'" >'.$page.' ';
}
// end tag cloud

?>










Angelina Jolie – Locations of chidren

angelina jolies tattoo
Using this photograph of Angelina Jolie’s tattoo, I’ve geolocated each of her spawn.

And this map shows the location of each of Angelina Jolie’s children from the latitude and longitude tattoo’s on her arm.

Bearing in mind one of her children was born in a pond, we can only assume GPS was not experiencing the leaps forward of modern days.
Unless she wants to get them lazered out and corrected, here they are.

Serbia & Kosovo – A new front for the war on terror

Kosovo: 10th December marks the official deadline for sovereignty negotiations to end. For someone that’s visited Kosovo (and Serbia) within the last 3 months, I can bring back the following observations.

a) Kosovo has been invaded by Albanians:
Maybe you need to quantify this statement in wikipedia. As a foreign onlooker, the number of Albanian, not Serbian, flags throughout the territory leads you to believe you’re in Albania, not Serbia.

b) Almost 1/3 of the traffic on the roads is KFOR:
If, like the newspapers are saying, there is a rumbling of radicalism. It stands to be toward the Serbs.
With 45,000 troops stationed there, any attack on Kosovo is likely to be met with stiff resistance and international back-up.

In black and white
Historically pitted with conflict, there are no black and white solutions.
In an attempt to be seen to be ‘doing good’, KFOR’s presence has had the net-effect of setting both Serbia and Kosovo back 7 years, also, giving rise to the growth of criminal cells with close links to terrorism, who have prospered under the troops presence through illegal-goods, prostitution and the supply of drugs.

The politics
Personally, I don’t think the region has any potential for serious conflict, Serbia is too poor and Kosovo has too many troops.

If Kosovo achieves independence, you can expect that within 5-10 years resolutions will make it part of the wider Albanian authority, and eventually becoming part of Albanian territory per-se.