The Haphazard Blog

The World Cup has gone on for 3 days and I think I’ll share some of my thoughts.

It seems to have started out pretty slowly. I don’t think we saw a truly good team until the last game today with Germany. They attack almost non-stop. That is why I had hoped that U.S. Soccer would be able to hire Jürgen Klinsmann to bring that style of play here.

Moving on to the U.S., they ended up with a draw. They got a somewhat lucky goal when the England keeper misjudged the ball and didn’t position himself right behind the ball. They had a real shot to go up 2-1 with the ball bouncing off the post and out.

So Sad. (For England)

Overall, their play seemed disjointed. There were a lot of good individual efforts, but they didn’t play as well as a team. At times the defense broke down and there did not seem to be much feeding the ball to the forwards. I want to see a lot more offsides calls on the U.S. Then at least you know they are pushing to score. Quick comparison: Germany had 9 shots on goal (18 total), 4 goals, 7 offsides and U.S. had 4 shots on goal (12 total), 1 goal and 2 offsides. Watching England handle the ball, they seemed to be able to pass it around at will around the U.S.’s 18M box. The U.S. would get near England’s and would be able to have a couple touches before they’d force a shot or just have it taken away.

I hope they are able to improve over that performance. They had a real opportunity to beat England by holding them to only 1 goal. As it stands now, Slovenia is in the driver’s seat with their win today. The U.S. definitely need a win, and most likely need a win, a tie and a Slovenia or England loss.

The next few days should give us some more good games with Italy, Spain, Brazil and Portugal still left to play their first games. I’m not sure if the games have really been slow, or if it’s the collection of announcers that ESPN has put together. They got rid of the really bad ones, but most of these guys don’t seem to get excited at all. I feel like a good set of announcers are knowledgeable and get excited at the right time. If you’re looking away from the TV, they should get you looking in time to see something happen. (It sure would make working and watching Soccer a lot easier.)

Finally, this isn’t much of a bold prediction, but I think Brazil wins it all. I’ll be rooting for them (unless they play the U.S.).

After a night to think about it, here is what I think happened right now.

At first it seemed a little Sixth Sense-like with Jack’s realization that he is dead. As best as I can tell, that did not mean he was dead the whole time.

I think his life on the island was the beginning and end of the series. Everyone did crash on the island. Everything we saw happen on the island, in flashbacks and flashforwards all happened during their “lives”.

After each character died, they moved on to another life as themselves (it seems that when they move on they are “themselves” again). So the flash sideways is life after death. What happens after you die.

In the grand scheme of things there isn’t a concept of time. Each “life” doesn’t necessarily happen in a sequence, but what they all experienced together on the island was the most important thing that happened to them. That binds them together. Perhaps that is why their lives/paths will always cross no matter what.

I’m not quite sure what the realizations and reunion was. My first thought as I watched it was is this is how it happened, but as their lives intersected they saw what they could have instead and chose those lives instead (totally wrong). Now all those people had all the memories/experiences of their other lives that.

For now, I think that is the mystery that remains for me.

That finale is going to take some time to process…

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a “Privacy Loophole” in many social sites. I’m not sure if they just wanted to pile onto the the whole privacy fire or if they really don’t quite understand what it is.

The bottom line is this is nothing new. It’s called the Referer (I do know this is spelled wrong, but somehow this is how it was spelled in the actual standard) and it is very simple. It is part of the standard that is essentially the basis of the “world wide web”. When you click a link, part of the information that is sent to the site that link points to is the address of the page where the link originated. So when anyone clicks the link to the WSJ article in the previous paragraph, the people at the WSJ will know how you arrived at that article.

This is how I know ~75% of the traffic to my site is from Google searches. So, if I’m on my Facebook homepage (http://www.facebook.com/jhgandhi) and I click an advertisement (it has to be a direct link to the advertiser’s site) they will know where I came from and could visit my facebook page (of course, they’d have to be my friend to see more than basic information).

The simple solution (which Facebook and MySpace implemented quickly) is to just have the ads link to a page on their own site that then redirects to the advertisement’s site.

This “loophole” is everywhere a page with personally identifiable information links to another page. It has been around since 1990. Other information a web site gets includes your IP Address (can be used to get a rough location), what Operating System (Type and Version) you are running, what your screen resolution is, what fonts are installed on your machine, what browser you are using and a bunch of other things. This site has a good summary of what it can capture when you visit their site (this site will read all of the information that you transmit and display it to you).

It is good that they published the article, but it comes across as somewhat sensational when it is something very common all over the web. It likely took only a few minutes for them to make the changes to their ads so that the potential for people to use the referer is eliminated. So remember, when you click a link from my blog, wherever it takes you, they could find out you read my blog. :)

The big news today was the 1000 point drop of the Dow. Early blame is being placed on a bad order for Proctor & Gamble stock. So that makes sense. If a bad order for P&G is executed it’s one of 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so it would send it down a fair amount. But that doesn’t explain all the other stocks dropping.

At 2:45 PM. the DJIA moved from 10,236 to 9,872 (fell 3.6%) )and back to 10,203 (gained 3.4%) in 5 minutes. The NASDAQ, which has over 3,000 components fell 2.6% and gained 2.7% in the same period. The Russell 2000 fell 2.3% and gained 2.7%. Lastly, the S&P 500 fell 1.7% and gained 3.5%.

So it wasn’t just one stock, it was the entire market as a whole that had a very quick drop and a subsequently quick recovery. I believe that the only way that the markets could move that fast and that much is through computerized trading. There was not a massive sell off by humans placing sell (or short) orders.

Instead, the primary culprit was High Frequency Trading and Flash Trading followed by automated trading and the triggering of stop-loss orders. I think it is this last thing that is going to have human investors very upset.

To put it simply, investors will place a stop-loss order to try and limit their losses. What happens is an investor will buy a stock like Apple at $250/share. They will then place a stop-loss order at say $220 to limit their losses to roughly $30/share. The problem here is that computers caused an artificial and drastic move downwards by mostly trading amongst themselves that pushed Apple down below $200. So the investor had their stock sold at $220 as Apple plunged because of this fiasco. Then the market quickly corrected and Apple was back to $246 (and really was under $220 for less than 5 minutes. The investor has lost over $26/share and Apple stock went back to a proper price.

Congress has already been talking about financial reform and tomorrow, and maybe over the next week, they will be pointing to this event as another reason it is so badly needed. This won’t end at a bad trade.

It took some data loss for me to finally move to RAID. I was backing up my data to DVD every week or 2 and I was pretty comfortable doing that. My bigger problem with the hard drive failure was the amount of time I had to spend to reinstall the OS and all my applications to get back up and running. So I lost a little bit of data, but had to spend 2 days diagnosing the failure and rebuilding a machine to get back to work (since I work from home, I’m pretty much my own IT department).

My new machine came with a single 250 GB HD and my plan was to move to RAID by adding a second drive. That procedure would’ve been fairly simple. Install the new drive, launch the RAID software (in my case, Intel Matrix Storage Manager because my Precision T5500 has an Intel ICH10R southbridge) and create an array. Instead I got two 640 GB drives to replace my primary drive. This is where I was not sure what to do to migrate to RAID 1. It turned out to be pretty simple, but I thought I’d outline the steps here.

1. Write down the serial numbers for the drives and keep track of which drive is which (this may be the only way you will know which drive is empty and which has data when you create a RAID array, for me my drives were the same model and capacity, so the only difference was the serial number)
2. Install one of the new drives and use the software from the drive manufacturer to clone the drive (my new drives were made by Western Digital, so I used Acronis True Image WD Edition)
3. After the cloning procedure is completed, remove the old drive and install the new drive as your new primary drive and verify that you can boot into Windows
4. Install the second drive in your machine, boot up and launch the software that manges RAID (in my case, it is the Intel Matrix Storage Console)
5. Follow the instructions for your software to create a new Array (in the Intel Matrix Storage Console, Actions->Create RAID Volume from Existing Hard Drive)
6. Creating a RAID 1 (Mirroring) array should be straight forward (select the source drive, select the drive to mirror to and accept the risk that the data on the second drive will be destroyed)

All in all, it took just a couple hours to do everything (most of that time was spent letting the PC copy the data) and while I didn’t, with the Intel Matrix Storage Console, I could also keep using the PC as it created the array. Also, I still back up my data to DVD every week or 2 because it is still possible that both drives could fail. I’m only treating this as a time saver in the event of a hard drive failure.

After making six trades in the first 3 rounds, the Patriots made only one trade over the last 4 rounds. That meant they ended up making seven more selections (they had 8 picks and had to make 4 of them).

I’m not Todd McShay or Mike Mayock here, so I really know very little about how many of these guys will fare with the Patriots or in the NFL in general.

They took another TE (and another Florida Gator), Aaron Hernandez, with their 4th Rd pick. From what I gather this guy can line up anywhere (backfield, in-line or split out) so he seems more like a pass catching tight end but they said he should also be able to block. I think that is an expectation from all of New England’s TEs and RBs. So they couple him with Rob Gronkowski who is supposed to be a better blocker than receiver and Alge Crumpler who seems to be primarily a blocker at this stage of his career and there is a diverse group.

Next up was Zoltan Mesko, a punter. This is the first time the Patriots have drafted a punter under Bill Belichick. I also assume as long this guy is competent (he at least is pretty funny) he will be the Patriots punter, which means this will also be the first time under Belichick they have a young/rookie punter. One interesting fact is that Belichick seems to prefer left-footed punters.

Their next 2 picks were for offensive lineman (Ted Larsen and Thomas Welch) that the experts called projects followed by two more picks to take defensive lineman (Brandon Deaderick and Kade Weston). They closed out the draft with a QB, Zac Robinson who I can only assume is someone they believe they can develop. It’s good business, especially if you’re able to trade them later for a high draft pick or a good player.

Overall, it looks like a good draft for New England except for maybe addressing the right defensive end position long term. They traded Richard Seymour away before last season and lost Jarvis Green in the off season this year. My biggest hope is they got a really good CB in Rd 1 and they have finally stocked the LB position with enough depth to one day rival the 2001-2004 rotation. Almost 5 more months until the 2010 season begins…