Home on Josh Giersch

There’s a new service sheriff in town, sez Pravda.

JRE has had harsh words for the Straits Times in many, many blog posts over the last two years, for all sorts of different reasons.

My lease comes up in two weeks, so I’m hunting for an apartment.

Agence France-Presse brings us this little gem: SINGAPORE - A Singapore lawmaker has a simple explanation for the city-state’s lack of babies: procreation, he says, is “not our forte.” […] “We should accept that as a people, our procreation talent is not…

The BBC website has just posted a rather good glossary of terms that’ve cropped up a lot in coverage of the Continuing Financial Crisis From Hell.

There’s a certain subset of investors who take it all a bit too seriously.

In Singapore, the government tightly restricts the number of cars on the road, and enforces this restriction through an auction system for car permits.

Buying a pig in a poke, colloquially, is to buy something risky without examining it beforehand.

Sunday night: “This is looking suspiciously like the last act of Hamlet (or maybe Reservoir Dogs).”

In Singapore, insurance companies do more than just cover you when you turn up your toes.

At the beginning of August, the Zimbabwean central bank knocked ten zeroes off the Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate, and suddenly one USD was worth about forty ZWD.

Because the last post was so popular: ZimbabweanEquities.com has printed yesterday’s OMIR at somewhere north of 164 trillion to the USD.

Update: The Old Mutual implied exchange rate today is Z$78 billion to 1 USD.

Update: Hi to everyone arriving from FT Alphaville, Market Movers and the Economist!

Fuel prices in Malaysia are so heavily subsidised that it’s cheaper to drive across the border to Johor and fill up there (at a subsidised 60 US cents/litre) than it is to fill up in Singapore (US$1.57/litre this morning).

My typical Sunday morning involves sitting in one of the cafes on Mohamed Sultan Road, demolishing a coffee and leafing through whatever reading material happens to be lying around.

You’ve probably noticed how weak the US dollar is lately.

Act I: In Which I Can Suddenly Speak Mandarin SFX: Phone ringing AUTOMATIC VOICE: We are now transferring your call to a consultant.

Presented without comment, via Boing Boing and Reuters: _A protest action by a group of Singaporeans with Japanese anime figurines such as the 5-inch tall Ultraman, robots and monsters with placards met some real-life police in the city-state._ A handful…

A few weeks ago, someone noticed an enormous open interest position in the 700-strike calls on the S&P; 500, for September expiry.

Roy Morgan Research has just completed a comprehensive survey of AFL supporters, and found a few little gems.

It’s almost done.

In 576 A.D., Japanese temple-building company Kongo Gumi was founded.

I like Safari.

Time has announced their Person of the Year.

Australian 20-cent coins are made of a 75-25 copper-nickel alloy: 8.5 grams of copper to 2.8 grams of nickel.

Spot FX broker Lonely wail down the line, “Four-five small?

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children (now on DVD at any self-respecting video store) is not telling a story.

23.5 - Kilometres walked 1 - Hawaiian pizzas eaten 1 - Cups of coffee drunk 216 - Photos shot 136 - Photos inexplicably unrecoverable 4 - Letters in the word I used Update: Got ‘em!

And submitted to Overheard In New York: “See, the rule is that a guy can’t have both hands full.

I’m in San Francisco!

Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food.

I auditioned for Temptation this evening.

Update: Welcome, Carnival of the Recipes readers!

I forget where I found this recipe, but it’s a pretty nifty way to spice up a stir-fry.

The Academie Francaise has announced that the French for “blog” shall be… …le bloc-notes.

I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released.

How to use a Motorola Razr V3 as a Bluetooth GPRS modem with your PocketPC - placed here in the hope that someone will google for it and find it useful.

Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases secret government documents from thirty years ago.

Zac showed me an experiment this morning.

Or, to give this article its full title, I Want But Am Absolutely Not Allowed To Buy Because It Would Be Utterly Pointless… If you’ve read Gizmodo or Engadget in the last month or so, you’ll have seen at least one article devoted to drooling over this: Th…

Goodbye, little iPaq!

And it’s not Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Three weeks ago, I bought a 1GB USB flash drive.

The corollary to Clarke’s Law (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) is that any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

We (the flatmates) picked this recipe up from The Age’s Epicure section a few weeks ago.

Ryan - one of my friends from college - has just kicked off his blog.

Thinkshiny.com - influencing Bush Administration policy since 2003.

The upgrade to MovableType 3.0 has been completed.

We have a cat.