I know if AIG goes out of business in one way or another (bankruptcy, getting burned to the ground by rioters, etc) – there will be tremendous repercussions for the US and possibly world economy.  But seriously, their stock market cap is $1.24 billion dollars (and this is after today’s jump in price after it was announced that they’re getting another $30 billion in Government aid).  I must be missing something about the structure of AIG’s stock – this market cap number has got to be missing a big chunk of whatever it is that makes up AIG’s mass.  I mean, their total loss for 2009 is somewhere in the ballpark of $90 billion dollars.  Even at their 52 week high of $51.47 a share – their market cap is somewhere in the ballpark of $138 billion.  And guess what, so far the government aid package has totalled $150 billion to them.

I know, I know – a trillion dollars in assets and almost that much in liabilities.  A big number minus another big number plus a stream of drops in the bucket in government aid equals a really bizzare stock valuation.  Thats why I titled this one AIG WTF!

Astronomers – if you’re tired of looking for dark matter in space, take a look over at AIG – they’ve got something that apparently has mass but cannot be seen or detected in any way whatsoever.  Bizzare, this is one of the reasons I am glad I’m an engineer.  Sometimes finance is less intuitive than quantum physics.

I just read about FriendFeed using MySQL as a data storage engine.  Very interesting post that highlights how much people have come to trust MySQL.  FriendFeed basically built their own object storage system inside a single table.  They manually create and update indexes in other tables in a nicely distributed and sharded database server setup.  Overall its what I’d call a “very impressive” implementation.  I can’t help but think back to how BlogLines used (or perhaps still uses) BerkeleyDB to store their data without a traditional RDBMS storage engine.  I wonder if FriendFeed considered using a solution like that?

I came across a pretty good presentation by Andrei Zmievski from Yahoo! Inc.  Its a 77 page walk-through of VIM for PHP Programmers – quite comprehensive!  It covers essentials like setting marks and jumping to them quickly – which was a personal pet peeve of mine.  Little did I know vim had that covered – even global marks across files !  Of course vim is a bottomless bucket if you’re going to pour sweat into learning it, Andrei admits it quite succinctly on slide 18 for instance – “vim regexp language is too sophisticated to be covered here.”

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Looks like the current Global Recession has now added Iceland to its “wall of shame”.  Iceland’s government topples amid financial mess – at least that’s how the Associated Press describes it.  Public dissent has caused the government to disband itself.

Iceland has been mired in crisis since October, when the country’s banks collapsed under the weight of debts amassed during years of rapid expansion.

The value of the country’s krona currency has plummeted, hitting many Icelanders who took out special loans denoted in foreign currencies for new homes and cars during the boom years. In addition, Iceland must repay billions of dollars to Europeans who held accounts with subsidiaries of collapsed Icelandic banks.

Haarde’s government has nationalized banks and negotiated about $10 billion in bailout loans from the International Monetary Fund and individual countries.

Wow, quite a stark picture of what happens when too much debt is amassed during “expansion years”.  Sounds familiar?  Yep, lets hope it doesn’t happen here.

Pete, a friend-of-a-friend who lives in Philadelphia and works at Gamestop recently enlightened me to the fact that you can now use Netflix on the Xbox 360.  Let me tell you, its a brilliant collaboration on the part of Microsoft and Netflix.  You can download the Netflix app and link it to your Netflix account – and stream anything in your Instant Queue via your Xbox 360.  The process is absolutely painless and a free trial for Netflix is available which gives you 30 days of free rentals and streaming.  So many great movies and TV Series are available for instant streaming.  I started watching Heroes this way (yeah, I know I’m behind, just started season 1, but I was a little bit disinterested at first given the somewhat “dorky” stigma the show had initially).  A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, Alien and Aliens, and oh-so-many other great moview are available for instant gratification.  Pete also recommends Heavy Metal 2000 as great background visuals for good conversation, which I plan to use next time friends are over to chit-chat.

Bottom line, if you have an Xbox 360 and you haven’t tried Netflix on it, you’re seriously missing out. It definitely beats digital cable’s on-demand service.  If more stuff was available on Netflix for Instant Streaming, I’d be even happier.  Also, HD streaming works if you have enough bandwidth, and let me tell you, there’s nothing better than seeing something you want in HD over your Xbox 360 with virtually zero effort!