Snowed In

February 6, 2009
Snowed In Devon

Today was a typical day in my new, post Barclays life, in Devon. Having fed the dogs their breakfast of Weetabix (don’t say anything), I sat down at my computer at 08:30. I had neglected my CFA studies for a couple of days this week so decided to catch up on Session 4, Private Wealth [...]

Read the full article →

Obama aims to reinstate the USA as a great nation

January 21, 2009

In his inauguration speech yesterday, President Barack Obama reaffirmed the United States’ government’s vow to uphold its constitution and live up to the lofty ideals that support its claim as the world’s greatest nation. And what exactly are those ideals which were first proposed by Norfolk’s most influential son, Thomas Paine? American Ideals The American [...]

Read the full article →

Widgets and Blidgets

January 16, 2009

Today I discovered a website that really impressed. It is called http://www.widgetbox.com What it does it allow you to build widgets, or in my case a blog widget or blidget which produces a cool viewer of my recent posts on my creditlust.com. It literally took under five minutes, it was intuitive and it all worked [...]

Read the full article →

Out with The Old and In with The New

January 14, 2009

A belated ringing of the changes took place today as I along with 330 of my colleagues at Barclays Global Investors was told my position was being eliminated. A first wave of redundancies had taken place in the San Francisco office in November and this second phase was expected. A large group of us had [...]

Read the full article →

Technology Overload

January 3, 2009

Today was spent developing a couple of web pages on Spring MVC Controller technology. I find it difficult to know what logic to put in the remote EJB’s, what to put in the controller, what to put in the service layers and then what to put in the JSP. This is how I broke it [...]

Read the full article →

CodeIgniter, SimplePie, Artisteer – all for one page

January 2, 2009

Today I spent about 12 hours getting to grips with a number of technologies: codeigniter – a Model View Controller PHP development toolkit simplepie – a RSS feed reader artisteer – a page design tool that generates two sets of output such that the main web site and the WordPress blog have the same styling The [...]

Read the full article →

Happy New Year

January 1, 2009

Welcome all to 2009! Today, I started on a new venture: a website and an ebook on the credit crunch and how to survive it. The site is www.creditlust.com/blog . Today, I bought the domain from http://joker.com set up the DNS to host the site at http://rackspace.com downloaded the blog software from http://www.wordpress.org created the [...]

Read the full article →

High Pressure Weekend

June 29, 2008

Finally, I get back to blogging. 3 weeks ago I endured the weekend of death. Saturday 7th June was my six hour, ever so difficult, CFA exam in London, and  Sunday 8th June., on the hottest day of year so far in Devon, was the Ruby Run. I marginally underachieved in both. The CFA results [...]

Read the full article →

London under Boris

May 9, 2008

So, with some amazement, I find London has elected Boris Johnson as its mayor.  I had taken him for a bumbling idiot but maybe I should suspend judgment. His first steps look promising. He appoints Ray Lewis, ex prison governor, to target youth crime. Maybe, with a good team around him, Boris can be successful. He is [...]

Read the full article →

How To Choose The Democratic Candidate?

March 3, 2008

The Democratic Party should be luxuriating in its choice of candidate. Both excellent, minimal differences in policy, both capable of leading the world’s (current) greatest nation. So how to choose between them? The one most likely to beat McCain? Charisma? Or on policy? Here is how the policies differences break down: Foreign Policy Iran: Obama [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →