Drug Stocks

What happened today with Schering-Plough (SGP) is exactly why I have never bought a pharmaceutical stock and don't plan to. I've always had this belief that every pharma company was one FDA study away from a 20% drop or worse and I had been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while. Of course on the flip side you could say with these stocks they always have a pop in them if they get approved for a new drug but the drug approval process creates so much volatility in these stocks as the FDA takes a very long time and creates many news stories causing lots of pops and drops on rumors of approval or FDA wanting more information.

I'd like to expand on this post with some more research to support my reasons but I'm moving to NYC tomorrow and I'm exhausted.

CVS, Walgreens, Duane Reade

You are kidnapped and dropped off in one of these stores with all name brands removed. Can you tell which one you are in?

I believe all of these stores are too similar and would never invest in any of them for that reason and also there are just wayyyyy to many of them. If I see a CVS next to a duane reede, my only incentive to goto one over the other is which one is physically closer to me at the given moment. These companies are expanding way to quickly, in the last 3 years within a 5 mile radius of my house there has been a CVS, Walgreens and Duane Reade opening and the CVS that opened there was one already 2 miles away from the next closet CVS.

Also I'd like to add how sick I am of seeing all these stores pop up when I see new retail space free up. They are the least exciting store to see come to your neighborhood, I'd rather watch a starbucks open up across the street from another starbucks than see another one of these cookie cutter "pharmacy" stores.

Jew on Easter

This is an actual conversation with a linksys tech support person I had today while trying to get a download link to upgrade my girlfriends wireless router. Yes yes I know I can put OpenWRT on it but I didn't want to bother....

Fritz S. (29829): Hi, my name is Fritz S. (29829). How may I help you?
justin: I cant get to your downloads paghe
justin: to upgrade my firmware
justin: It asks to pick a region and says url data is still loading and has me hit back
Fritz S. (29829): Can you please confirm the model number of your Linksys product?
justin: wrt54g
justin: ver 2.0
Fritz S. (29829): How about the version number?
justin: 2
Fritz S. (29829): Thank you.
Fritz S. (29829): I will send you instead the link on where you may download the firmware.
justin: ok thank you
Fritz S. (29829): You are very welcome, by the way, Happy Easter!

justin: i'm jewish
Fritz S. (29829): Oh, I am so sorry.
Fritz S. (29829): I am so sorry for the delay.
justin: its ok
Fritz S. (29829): Thanks.

/me goes and celebrates Purim now

Attention Grocery store Cashiers

Do not wish me Happy Easter when I'm buying Hamantashen.

subway ads

I think the reason they have ads on subways is it gives you something to stare at when there are crazy people talking to themselves on the train car or homeless people asking for change.

I just had to do this....

Gum Sucks

Why is it, that I'm left with a taste worst off than the one I started with, after I chew a piece of gum? After the mint flavor wears off, I'm left dehydrated with a crappy taste in my mouth. Am I the only one this happens to?

Should have done this a while ago...

Added to .bash_aliases the following

alias confgrep='egrep -v "^$|^#"'

I find myself too often going through massive config files and only wanting to see what is actually in the config, instead of weeding through a massive amount of whitespace and commented out documentation. I think squid.conf is probably the worst offender of this and the default snmpd.conf has a good amount of spew in it as well. Literally all of squids documentation is located in it's configuration file, while it is somewhat useful, it's usually just means a bigger PITA to find what you are looking for.

Inline Search and Replace

I was going through some old code tonight from college that had my student id(SS #) in it and I wanted to strip out my SS # from it. I run into this situation a lot where I need to do a mass inline search and replace. I hope this command is useful to anyone else

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/MyIdentity//' {} \;

Optimal Configuration for 3 vs 3 seats: PART 1

THE PROBLEM

The LIRR has a section of seats in each car that are 3 seats facing one another (see diagram to right). I always aim to sit in these set of seats due to the fact that I'm 6'5 and sitting in the regular seats hardly offers me enough leg room to sit comfortably for an hour long train ride. Of course this only works in my favor if no one sits across from me. If they do, I gain nothing from this seat and in fact I'm no better off than I would have been sitting in a seat with my knees in the back of the seat in front of me. This fails in every situation a person sits across from me no matter how old they are. I've calculated the only way this could work out is if the person were to have no legs at all.

I had a 5 year old (estimate) sit across from me last week on the train that his legs were too small to go over the edge of the seat and flex his knee, so I was left with him kicking my bony knees all the way to NYC. Petite women think they are special and can fit without a problem, but no matter how skinny you are, you are fat to me in this position. There's the occasional person who thinks "Oh I'll just spread my legs and they can put their legs in between mine or vice versa." First of all lady, I barely do that with my girlfriend and I just met you, and quite frankly you're ugly and you sir, I'm not homophobic but I'm not inviting you into my personal space with myself spread eagle, nor am I entering closer to your jean bulge(is it a penis or not? I'll never know) with my freakishly long legs just so we can have a "little leg room."

There are a couple of reasons I put myself through these risks everyday.

1. 75% if the time I'd say everything works out optimally. No one sits across from me because I make it abundantly clear how my massive frame(more of a portrait than a landscape) is mostly made up in my legs(think pencils).
2. When people do sit across from me, it usually doesn't occur till Jamaica station, which is only about 20 minutes into Penn, but this annoys me even more as I will explain shortly.
   
3. If everyone follows unwritten commuter code for sitting in this seating arrangement, then 3 people can sit here optimally with maximum comfort level and thwart off all attempts at anymore people sitting. I will explain more in Part 2 when I discuss the optimal seating arrangements.