Wholesale prices for oil and gas are going down, but it doesn’t look like British Gas is going to reduce the retail prices.

What can be done in order to cause people not to use dark background and light font color on their web pages? Reading long text, which

looks like this

can be frustrating! Yes, I know about bookmarklets and use them extensively (you should as well, if don’t already), the “zap colors” one being my favorite, but why do I have to use it in the first place?

According to this wikipedia entry, the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is perfectly valid English…

For testing purposes a colleague of mine selected an LSE stock at random. The lucky winner was CRT.L - Chariot Plc, the new lottery runner, which failed miserably during the first public sale of its tickets. Having the luxury of Reuters feed on my workstation, I could easily check, that the new threat to Camelot started around 180 pence per share when they had their IPO in February, but today it is worth a little bit more than 5p.

I saw a link in my favorite property whining blog to an article in New York Times, which talks about mortgage-backed financial securities in the US and their role in the current housing boom.

Even more interesting is the quote from John Keynes, given in the blog: “A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him” .

BBC informs us, that a major fraud, targeting account information of private clients was prevented by a new government body, called “Soca”. The acronym stands for “Serious Organized Crime Agency” which I find rather amusing.

As already mentioned , profits are rising, and the investment industry expects unusually high bonuses this year. Goldman Sachs have allocated more than half a million USD per employee on average. Naturally, most of the money will go to the fraction of the work force.

I have recently registered with Google apps for your domain . I was surprised with the speed by which they processed my application and gave me a go ahead.

So now I can create e-mail users in my own domain and have a full-fledged web interface - and all for free! Addresses are something like

andre@baryudin.com

or any number of other e-mail addresses I can think about - for any purpose, including spam filtering and mail sorting. Google chat and Calendar are available as well.

As mentioned earlier , I have been suffering from increasing numbers of spam comments. I got tired of it and installed the anti-spam module for Drupal, mentioned in that blog entry. It looks like with a little twisting and adjusting, it catches almost all of the garbage. Cool!

It looks like investment banks’ profits will be exceptionally high this year as well. On the radio they have been saying that once again “those people with six figure salaries will get extra high bonuses”. Not me, unfortunately.