I lend money on prosper.com. It’s a peer to peer lending service.
I just got my first default. Poor old henryjr declared bankruptcy and with it disappeared $93.52 of my money.
Overall, I’m up $263.89 but a couple of other folks are 3+months late on their loans. This is the part where it gets a little scary.
My team is hiring developers again. If you or someone you know wants to work in midtown in the financial industry, get in touch.
.Net, C#, Web Service, SQL, XML, ADO.NET, Object Oriented, Design Pattern, Excel programming is a plus
You’ll be talking to customers, so be able to speak well. In other news, I’ve been racking my brains for a way to screen resumes for team players without having to look for the words “Team Player” – I think you just have to find that bit in the interview.
Don’t know what made me look like a spam blog, but I had to get reviewed by a human to turn posting back on.
Phone is now back on!
Give me a ring!
We’re in Columbia, South Carolina, throwing a large dinner party. It’s in a very big house, like my parent’s house but bigger and unfamiliar. Some of the guests have arrived, and it’s nice time as we wait for the rest to arrive. It’s getting later and later and the last guests have not arrived.
I walk down to a central shopping area like 5 Points to see where our guests are. The streets are empty of the shoppers, strolling couples, and teenagers that usually pack this place. Instead, in some of the windows are people who look off. They are in the shape of people, the right bits, but they are lumpy or lopsided, like straw dolls. They are distorted like poorly made puppets and they stare out of the windows with skewed eyes that don’t blink or look around.
I am too scared to investigate or go into the shops, and I return home to tell my people what I’ve seen and to protect them.
When I get home, we figure out that there are aliens among us, that they have begun infiltrating. They begin as appliances and small home electronics. These aliens understand the general shapes of things, but not their purpose or uses. Their larval forms are crude approximations. So one might begin as a television, but not understand that the screen should be smooth and square, not wavy or slanty. A toaster might have too many slots or the slots might be too small. Things might have too many knobs or other suspicious features. When the appliance has grown large enough, it can shape itself as a person.
Given that I’ve seen a large pedestrian area already taken over, it stands to reason that these must grow quickly and that they must be harmful to people.
We find a cable box sitting on top of a television that has no LED’s on the front and isn’t plugged in. When I move towards it, the cable box skitters away, dragging its power-cord tail behind it. It scuttles towards a couch and I leap towards it, bashing it with a poker or baseball bat. Smashed, it is full of tightly compacted meaty muscle and guts. My guests and I begin searching the house for other aliens.
A man who looks like Robert Stack is at the party, a hard-bitten WWII veteran who tells us that we are all going to die. We aren’t organized enough. If this had happened during his generation, the party would have split up into organized squads and scoured the house top to bottom, starting at the attic and sterilizing it. Then they would have secured it militarily and made sorties out to find other people and begin killing every alien.
Instead, we are going to eventually try to negotiate with them, or understand them. This is going to get us killed. Understanding is for when you’ve already won and are dealing with harmless remnants.
This Robert Stack guy is a bastard, but he feels right and we feel doomed.
If you like the wallet I posted about in November, good news.
I stumbled across an instructable about how to fold your own Tyvek Wallet.
It’s not as nice, but it’s also not as twenty bucks.
We’re good. I know it. We only lost one game this season, and that one was in the finals against our arch-rivals BocceLism. They get to have the threepeat championship and we get to be second place for the second season in a row.
Next season we will have to go Tonya Harding on Lism.
Photos of our crew flamboastin and toastin when I get em.
Doing some last minute shopping for Sam and ran across Apartment Therapy’s post on Party Density.
Seems like they’ve got it down. I’m having a dinner party on December 25th, I’ll have to check the math for the space…
The unanswered question, of course is how many people you should invite to achieve good density of people who actually show up. One strategy of mine is to make my invitations personal if possible rather than sending out a mass evite. People I like will tell me if they are coming or not and I know what’s going on that night.
I don’t throw barnstormers in my living space anyway. I’d rather throw them at other people’s apartments and pay for food or liquor and they provide the space and the cleanup the next day.
Thought my pals might want to read this entry I found from Bruce Sterling about the Planetary Society’s campaign to fight for the mission and budget of NASA . It was bad enough when this administration removed “to understand and protect the Earth” as a primary goal of NASA. It just gets worse, and because there isn’t a clear bodycount, it isn’t going to be big news.
Go check out that article and then maybe give the planetary society a donation and sign their petition. I’m going to give them $20 and sign the petition. If you email me what you’ve donated, I’ll also match what you’ve donated.
Finally broke down and went to the hoity-toity Vail with some fellas.
Vail is really swank, really huge. We definitely went too early in the season because the legendary back bowls are packed snow. Coming here mid February when the bowls have been filled must be incredible and I’d be willing to go back here for a trip during that season. Even though we were here in the early season we were able to get some really good soft runs in through the trees.
Also – for the future – there are real, honest cliffs here that you can jump off of. I did not, because I am not that nuts.
