Sigh. Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin is a fucking idiot.

She thinks we should "support our North Korean allies."

Fuck you.

Okay, let's be fair. It's mostly just a slip of the tongue, but I'm sorry. I don't want anybody who would confuse North and South Korea as my president. That's not negotiable for me.

And a few words on World War 3, which should be coming in the next few days or so...

Here's the story from CNN.com for the uninitiated.

I know we (in this context I use "we" as a citizen of the United States) need to be careful. We can't piss off South Korea, we can't piss off Japan, we can't piss off Russia, and we especially mother fucking cannot piss off China. They own half our debt after all.

But seriously. Fuck those guys. They killed two soldiers and two civilians for no reason. Fuck those guys. I'm not sure I care if it starts World War 3.

Last.fm is Tracking My Life

I really like last.fm, probably the best place to go if you're looking to discover new music. It's not very useful at first, but as the system tracks more and more of the songs that you listen to, it eventually becomes very, very powerful

[Sidebar: if you'd like to friend me there, I'm at last.fm/henrque. You probably don't want to friend me, there or anywhere else.]

However, there are times where I question the last.fm algorithm:


Katy Perry, I kind of get since I do listen to an inordinate amount of little girl pop for a 29 year-old single male, and Scientific American makes perfect sense. But Jessica Simpson? Really? She hasn't been relevant in years. Plus her music is awful. And she's an awful human being.

In the great tradition of the Burger King parking lot brawl between two pregnant chicks, here's a video of people in East Oakland throwing stuff inside a Denny's on Halloween.

Awesome.

Regrets and Not Regrets

I have a thing about "that guy." It's a universal phrase I use to describe anybody that puts themselves outside of the norm in a negative and outrageous way. Basically, an asshole who thinks he's not an asshole but has asshole moments.

Anyway, I'm about to be that guy. I'm going to complain about making more money than most people and how awful it was. I apologize in advance.

For the past couple days, I've really wondered about my decision to leave my previous company and attend graduate school. Here's a comparison:

Scenario A: I stay at my job, working from my apartment three blocks from the beach. In fact, with the reorganization that just occurred, I probably would have gotten promoted into a director position, which would also include a nice bump in salary plus more bonus money. I also don't spend a shitton of money moving to Boston, live in a crappy studio in Mission Hill, I get to live/eat/spend better, and I don't incur a ton of student loan debt.

Scenario B: My life now.

For the Northeastern MBA program, average salary coming out of school is something like 85K, which I was already close to making if I got the bonuses I would have expected to get. Essentially, I need to recover the 170K I would have made during my two years at school, plus my loans of about 30K in total over two years (thank god for scholarships).

By this calculation, I need to make something like 100K coming out of school to recover my costs in five years. I'm not entirely certain that's possible.