Today, NASDAQ has iShares MSCI Malaysia Index Fund (EWM) listed as the stock with the highest dividend yield at 65.95% and selling for $8.33/share.

The other day Timehop pulled this tweet up:

I procrastinated on working on my absentee ballot, and ended up forgetting to do it before the mail-in deadline, so I ended up working on it tonight, and just dropping it off at the polling place. It was a short two block walk, but I am monstrously out of shape, and my allergies are terrible right now. The walk back involves climbing a hill, and by the time I reached the top of it, I was gasping and wheezing, in the throes of an asthma attack.

There is a meme floating around on the blogosphere, promulgated by Duncan Riley's spin on a post by Jason Calcanis of Mahalo fame, and seconded by technophiliac Robert Scoble. The idea is that startup companies cannot afford slackers, so anyone who is not a work-a-holic needs to be fired. (Note that Calcanis has eased off on this statement.)

shifting, sliding,
caught in indecision
trapped in a winding labyrinth
running round circles
fleeing from fate
this moment laden with uncertainty
a drop of rain falling into an infinite sea
roiling and raging
a faint ripple
erased by the unending restless waves

Interestingly, as I am debating the merits of various blogging solutions, Robert Thomas “beau” Hayes Link posts to the Blosxom Yahoo! Group and basically asks what blosxom’s fate is. (Interestingly, I don’t know if he intentionally meant the pun by using “wither” instead of “whither.” Get it? Blosxom. Blossom. Wither. Whither. Anyway.)

I find myself missing emacs, which is clearly a sign of pathology. The silly thing is that I clearly don’t use even 10% of its features. It’s pure nostalgia. Emacs is the only editor (aside from Vi, I suppose) that I’ve been able to run consistently on all the platforms I’ve blogged on—Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. (Yes, I’ve blogged while using Windows, but only as a stop-gap measure.) I haven’t really ever used emacs for something that I couldn’t do with whatever basic text editor comes with the OS (Notepad, GNU nano, Textedit.app—although, interestingly, of these OSes, emacs comes preinstalled only on Mac OS X—in many Linux distros, you actually have to manually install it. Of course, these are the distros that favor Vi—emacs vs. vi is probably one of the oldest computing holy wars around.) I suppose there is something masochistically perverse about having to type CTRL-X CTRL-C to quit. (I still remember the first time I was faced with an empty emacs buffer in 1994, and I had to bug my UNIX guru college roommate to help me regain control of my machine—an already old-at-the-time 486 running at a paltry 50 MHz. Don’t laugh, I’ve computed on machines running at 1 MHz. Machines that you can actually play some pretty neat games on.)

Again, I will be completely non-specific. It's this canker upon my soul, this ulcer gnawing away at my mind, the kind of malady that doesn't kill you, just weakens you bit by bit, wasting you away, until one day, you just don't feel like getting out of bed.

The last days of the Republic. Bread and circuses. Instead of gladiators going at it, we have common folk humiliating each other and selling each other out.

I spent much of the week basically retagging journal entries, rewriting stylesheets, and figuring out makefiles. You won't notice much of a difference and sometimes I wonder why I bothered, but hopefully it'll make things easier in the future.