How I'll defeat the common cold

"The common cold is actually any of over 300 different viruses. Each one of them, like the chicken pox, can only be caught once in a lifetime."

As I've already said, I have iGoogle set up as my homepage. One of the widgets that I've placed on it is the "Gullible Info" widget. What that does is it gives out a quote every time I refresh the page. And the quote that started this post is just one of them. You should check it out when you have the time. There are really quite a few interesting things there.

But the reason that this one caught my attention is, well, because I have a cold. Not something out of the ordinary. I mean everyone has one at least once a year. And whatever you do and no matter how much you take care of yourself, you still catch one sooner or later. What intrigued me was the fact that you can only catch one form of the common cold once in a lifetime. That means your organism develops immunity to that particular form of the cold. I didn't believe that. So I decided to do a little more investigation. And what other better resource there is that the good old Wikipedia. And right from the start, I had my answer: "once one has caught one of the many cold viruses, one is immune and may never catch that particular strain again". Bummer, I was sure they got it wrong. I'm only counting the times I caught a cold. It 's possible there weren't 300 colds in my life time, but each year I catch another one? It's like I'm a "common cold magnet".

After that, I tried to find out if there are indeed that many forms of the common cold. But I don't think it was there. It's even possible that no one knows how many there are, so I assume the information is somewhat correct. Three hundred seems like a reasonable number. And then it hit me. My genius plan was set: I will catch every single form of the cold so I will be immune to the damn virus(es). So I started to do a little math, just to see how long it will take for me to become invincible.

Invincibility calculations

• if I catch one cold per year I would need more that 300 years. Since I don't plan to live that long, I deducted I would need to speed things up;
• if I manage to catch a cold about 4 times in one year, it would take me about 75 years. Awesome but I should have started a little while ago. I'm 24 already I should have caught about 96 forms of the cold so far. And I doubt it. I need to speed things up even more;
• if I can get sick about 10(ten) times in one year it would only take me about 30 years to pull this through. Since I think I managed to catch about 50 strands so far, maybe even more, I'll be somewhere in my late 40's when I will be totally immune to this horrific disease.

OK, now that I've got all those things sorted out, what's the easiest way to catch a cold? My mom always said to wear a hat and gloves when I go out. "You don't want to catch a cold", she said. If she only knew of my great plan. But apparently Wikipedia doesn't agree with my mom: "experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection". That's not so good for me. What this means is "seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others". And there you have it. The best way to catch a cold. Thank you Wikipedia. There must be some other cool informations in there, but I'm not in the mood to go into any further research. I have what I wanted.

And now, let me get on with my plan. The only thing I need to do now is put my body through a lot of temperature changes like jumping from the fridge to the oven and look around for people that have a cold and make them cough on me or rub against me. That sounds pretty easy. And I only have to do this for the next thirty years. This way I'll break once and for all the myth that says: no one is immune to the common cold.

Boy, I sure hope it will be worth it. That's a bad way to waste your life.

I'm on a roll baby!

Yesterday, out of pure boredom, I started dropping cards. Entrecards that is. What else? I thought I might find something interesting to read, something to waste time with. And I did. But besides that, I decided to take a spin over at JoeTech.com since I saw his script on most of the blogs and web sites I've visited. Now, normally I'm not a lucky person. It rarely happens for me to win anything and when I do are just prizes that are not worth the trouble to claim. It happened on his website also: I've won 1 ec about a dozen times, but I decided it's not worth all the hustle to claim it. I mean I would have had to copy the winning code, send him a message, then he would have had to check the code and send me the prize. And all that for 1 ec.

But JoeTech.com has another spinning script. One that let's you win links on his site. So I tried that one out. And Guess what: I'VE WON! One small text link. As soon as I entered the link to this blog and hit the submit button, the script says I've won yet another link. This time a better one. I figured out that you can spin the handle until you lose because after I've entered the details for the second link, the script said "come back tomorrow" or something like that. So I was pretty happy I won two links.

Today I gave it another try. My links were not there anymore so I thought that they only have a one day validity term. At first I won 4 ec with the first script. This time I decided to cash out and, to my surprise, the credits were added pretty fast. It's not a fortune, but maybe one day I'll hit the jackpot. After that I've tried the ads script and I won one small link. After that another one. And another one. And yet another one. Until I had about eight text small links listed there. And then it hit me. The links don't even last one day. They disappear when other people win and the whole thing moves like a stack. I think. And you can play the script more then once a day. So I tried to take all the small slot ads and I almost made it. Except for one.

Oh well, at least I had something to do for a few minutes.

Microsoft won't buy Yahoo...

... Google will buy Microsoft. And that's that!

The latest rumors that are going around are starting to get out of hand. Everyone is a investments expert all of a sudden. People are making predictions about this and that, about the impact this purchase will have on we poor end users. The market will be dominated by Microsoft. Boy oh boy, what will we do? The answer is simple: nothing. We'll just go on with our lives the same may we always have. Who still uses Yahoo! anyway? I know I've given up on their mail service a long time ago. Yahoo! News are more on the media-MTV side as far as I'm concerned. If Microsoft would buy Yahoo then two of the major instant messaging clients would have to be merged together and that can only be good news for the users.

Sure, it's one of the companies that helped mold the Internet to it's present shape and size. We could consider Yahoo! one of the founders of the Internet. But it's going down hill people. If someone doesn't buy it, it's going to disappear without leaving anything behind. And let's face it, Microsoft could use a little user sympathy. They need something that will take away from that cold corporate image, something to help them relate to clients. And besides, from what we've seen in recent acquisitions, being taken over is not such a bad thing for the users of the service. The products have only been improved after they were bought: YouTube, Ask, Blogger, Macromedia products and many others.

And if all else fails in trying to convince you that the world moves on, here's an older video from YouTube. This is to back up my initial statement: Google will buy Microsoft.

See that? Everything is going to turn out OK. No need to worry about it anymore.And please stop making all those predictions. Most of you don't even know what you're talking about.

Now that got me really mad !

Wandering from stumble to stumble (StumbleUpon, that is) I've just read an article published a few days ago in Times Online here. The fact that this article is 100% accurate doesn't bother me. I know first hand what Romanians are capable of. I mean, I'm one of them. What really bothered me was a comment left by Graham from Loughborough, England. Labeling an entire nation as "Nazis or gypsies" based on the bad deeds of a small percentage of them is utterly stupid in my opinion. The fact that only the bad things about people makes it to the head lines of the papers doesn't help. It' doesn't tell you anything about a nation. It just points out bad actions of individuals. If we would generalize in that manner, we could simply say the following:

• all Americans are trigger happy and war fanatics
• all Iraqis are terrorists
• all Britons are arrogant
• all German are Nazis
• all Russians are communists

And the list can go on for every nation of the world. I don't mean any offense, I'm just trying to make a point of what preconceptions may lead to. And another thing, stating that Romanians are gypsies is probably one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Romania itself has a gypsy problem, or to be more ethnically correct, a Rrom problem. I'm talking here of the Rrom population that has been granted Romanian citizenship. That doesn't mean they're Romanians, they hardly follow Romanian laws and they're the major cause of crime related problems that the world heard about. I'm not saying Romanians are saints, just look at it this way: if you ignore all the crimes where Romanian citizenship Rroms were the cause, then you would have never heard of the Romanian crime rate. It wouldn't be close to 0, but it wouldn't be that high.

And one last thing. Again, I'm not saying that Romanians are innocent. For what I know, it's possible that they're the ones scamming people on eBay or who knows where else. But who is stupid enough to buy the town hall, a MIG (that's a fighter plane, for those that don't know) or a helicopter for that matter(an older story, also a Romanian involved, also on eBay) on an online market place? I mean, come on people, what the hell are you thinking?