Save for Retirement and Get Wisdom, or maybe not. In a pilot program offered by AIG, the financial services giant, employees can delegate management of their 401(k)'s to the professionals who run their retirement accounts. I can't think of anything that scares me more than the concept of financial analysts and brokers getting direct access to multitudes of peoples monthly retirement funds.  I have a vision of people with unrealistic expectations of what to do to save for retirement, who have no desire to pay attention to the process, turning their money over to "professionals" who have historically underperformed the major indices. [New York Times: Business]
10:45:53 PM  #  

A Community Takeover of Mandrake?  More on the Mandrake (makers of Mandrake Linux) financial situation.  via [Slashdot]
10:01:38 PM  #  

Why is it that the weblogs by author's never have perma-links?  Neil Gaiman claims they might be coming in the next iteration of the site, so I won't get too critical, and I love both his and Gibson's work so much that despite the bitching nature of this post I would rather have their weblogs without perma-links than not at all.  Still, it's frustrating to see their posts that are insightful and poignant enough for me to want to link to and not be able to.  Like this from Gibson's log (it was posted on Friday, Jan 17, 2003 so just check the archives):

WHY I DON’T WRITE SHORT STORIES

Good ones are to novels as bonsai are to trees.

Might as well go ahead and grow the tree.

It’s easier to pay the rent with trees.

So, Mr. Gibson, if you frequent my weblog (which I know you do, Yuh!), think about including some perma-links.  By the way, I liked the free-form haiku.

11:45:28 AM  #  

Terry Gilliam claims "Good Omens" film is dead.  This is just a crying shame because I was REALLY looking forward to this film.  The book was absolutely incredible and I have yet to see a Gilliam film that I didn't like.  If you haven't read the book yet, you should run out to your local bookstore of choice and get it, because it is amazingly funny, in a very Monty Pythonesque sort of way.

"Unfortunately, I think our timing was rather bad, because we turned up in Hollywood in November of 2001 talking about a comedy film about the apocalypse. That was just bad timing. At the moment it's languishing. Nobody's quite got their act together to get it financed right now."

Neil Gaiman (who wrote the book with Terry Pratchett) still has hopes that it will get done.  Hollywood is a fickle beast though so it could really go either way.  One thing that surprised me about the above linked article was the film credit they used to describe Gilliam to readers unfamiliar with his work. 

"It's expensive is what it is," Gilliam (Time Bandits) said in an interview. "And we didn't get the money to do it."

Time Bandits?!?  They decided that Gilliam's most popular and recognizable film was "Time Bandits!"  I would have thought "Brazil," or "12 Monkeys," or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," would have come up before "Time Bandits."  I mean it was a great film and all but not Gilliam's best by any stretch.  Oh well, I guess I don't know sci-fi geeks as well as I thought I did.

11:32:34 AM  #