__________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Mourinho and me" 08/01/2009 18:52 ++ Recently I've gotten back to playing a game I retired a while back, Football Manager 2009. For those not familiar, it is just a strategy type game where you manage a football (soccer) club of your choosing. You don't actually play the soccer in it, all that is done by the AI. May sound a bit boring but it is tons of fun for anyone that enjoy strategy games, and even more if you are a soccer fan. It' a bit difficult to get into, but very rewarding in the long term. ++ well since I was in the mood for FM I also decided to try out a newer game from SI, football manage live. Which in a way is similar to fm09. The differences are in the fact that the game is played online similarly to an MMO. The other big difference is the fact that you don't chose from real life teams, instead you create a team and are given money to sign real life players. The game ends up having a very different type of strategy involved since you are only playing real managers. Its quite challenging to balance the financial part of the game with the quality of your team. I'm still quite new to the game so I'll get a better sense of the game once I finish my first season. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "A difference that makes no difference, is no difference" 08/01/2009 18:25 ++ This is the first post I am writting a post from a bus. I just go a tad bored being here without Carlin. I haven't posted in a little while. This is mostly out of lazyness and perhaps I have been a bit busy. At work I have been doing quite a few interesting experiments. We just finished a fairly long feeding study so things have been a bit more calm. So I have been doing a lot of work with nicotine. For the past little while I have been giving a group of rats nicotine in order to sensitize the to the drug. By now they are actually quite used to their daily dose, probably even a bit addicted. We are now testing some potential anti drug compounds. Due to the nature of the study and confidentiality I probably shouldn't give too many details about the compound. This study couldn't come at a more opportune time. Last month the FDA just blacklisted two of the most used anti smoking drugs. Xantix and zyban, which have been in the market for a while have been linked to complications involving patients with psychological problems like depression. Apparently a lot of these subjects have developed suicidal behaviour and other detrimental psychological imbalances. So this study may turn out to be very important depending on our result. So we'll see what happens. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Money can't grow on trees, unless you plant it." 06/19/2009 17:00 ++ So recently I became aware of a few very polemical comments the Brazillian president made during one of the G20 meetings. During a discussion regarding the current global economic crisis, Lula said that he felt the current crisis was cause by the inconsequential lifestyle of "people with blond hair and blue eyes". I can't be completely sure about what was meant here but his language during this interview suggests to me that he didn't mean literally blondes with blue eyes, but more likely meant rich americans (which tend to have those characteristics). These comments got Lula a lot of bad international press, and I do think his choice of words (even if it was in Portuguese) were extremely poor. It certainly damages the notion that Brazil is not a racist country, which in my opinion is something Brazillians are proud of. ++ For those that don't know, people often say that Brazil is a country with little racism, and it is not because people avoid using racial slurs and making "innapropriate comments". In Brazil these comments are just often seen as non offensive, and even used by the targeted ethnic group. It is a bit hard to convey the mentality, but in a nutshell it's ok to make comments on race since they are not used in an offensive manner. A good comparison would be if all of a sudden people started using the term Canadian in a pejorative manner, so that at that point people would avoid using the term even though originally it just meant that the person in question was born in Canada. So now people come up with another term for the same thing just to be politically correct, yet the idea that being Canadian is bad remains within that culture. I almost feel like in North America the avoidance of racism is what prevents us from moving away from the offensive aspects of it. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "You don't understand, I was born to be driven" 2009/06/19 3:32 ++Now going back to talking economics, I do have to say I agree with Lula's comments to some extent. Obviously ethnic background has nothing to do with the problem, the real issue is the irresponsible lifestyle of most americans. Americans live in an uncontrolled credit economy, and the people that should be in charge of overseeing this economy are greedy to the point that they take advantage of the system without considering the consequences of their actions. It really is frustrating to see such a super power like the US living above their budget, which really reflect the mentality of the people. It is impossible to ask the people to change their lifestyle, when people in the financial sector are not willing to change their ways first. ++ There are definately benefits in living in a credit economy, but it really needs to be something closely watched by the government. Many people like to think the USA is a free market, but that is just not true. The USA is managed capitalist country. It is also unfortunate that a lot of people managing that economy make bad decisions because of the interference of their own personal interests. I was not shocked to find out that the US has the biggest debt in the world, and this debt at this point is actually growing almost exponentially. While that wasn't shocking to me, it was shocking to find out that the US pays hundreds of billions of dollars just in interest every year, and that is one of the biggest expenses of the US government. Now you may be thinking, what are they doing to fix the problem? Well there are a few tools they can use and are using, including foreign governments that buy the US' debt. These includes China (owning over 700 billion dollars of this debt), Japan ($600+ bi) and other countries like Britain, Brazil and Russia that own over 100 billion. The other big solution is to have their federal reserve buy the US debt. How does that work? Well the federal reserve uses their own currency to buy the debt, which is basically just printing money. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "I am sevice !!" 2009/06/18 5:00 ++ So recently I became aware of a few very polemical comments the Brazillian president made during one of the G20 meetings. During a discussion regarding the current global economic crisis, Lula said that he felt the current crisis was cause by the inconsequential lifestyle of "people with blond hair and blue eyes". I can't be completely sure about what was meant here but his language during this interview suggests to me that he didn't mean literally blondes with blue eyes, but more likely meant rich americans (which tend to have those characteristics). These comments got Lula a lot of bad international press, and I do think his choice of words (even if it was in Portuguese) were extremely poor. It certainly damages the notion that Brazil is not a racist country, which in my opinion is something Brazillians are proud of. For those that don't know, people often say that Brazil is a country with little racism, and it is not because people avoid using racial slurs and making "innapropriate comments". In Brazil these comments are just often seen as non offensive, and even used by the targeted ethnic group. It is a bit hard to convey the mentality, but in a nutshell it's ok to make comments on race since they are not used in an offensive manner. A good comparison would be if all of a sudden people started using the term Canadian in a pejorative manner, so that all of a sudden people avoid using the term even though originally it just meant that the person in question was born in Canada. So now people come up with another term for the same thing just to be politically correct, yet the idea that being Canadian is bad remains within that culture. I almost feel like in North America the avoidance of racism is what prevents us from moving away from the offensive aspects of it. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "katajjaq" 06/01/2009 22:48 ++ I was just talking to Carlin about different cultures which kind of got me searching around on the web for some unique music and I came across Inuit Throat Singing. I've been in Canada for eight years now and I had never heard of it. So I went ahead and asked a friend of mine who's inuit about that, and I learned quite a bit about this very unique type of music, which apparently is usually sang by a pair of women that use each others mouth as a way to resonate sounds produced by their throats. Very cool stuff and very different from tibetan throat singing which is really neat as well. It was sad though to see how little Inuit/native culture is known even in Canada. It's really a dying culture and I just wish there was more incentive to perpetuate that part of Canadian heritage which is actually very rich. For some years after I moved to Canada I always sort of found Canada to not have much of a culture, I always felt Canada was too much like the US. In reality Canada does have a lot of culture, it just seems that people I've met maintain so much of their European culture that there is little room for other less popular ones to become part of Canadian culture. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "It's their world, we just live in it" 05/22/2009 19:15 ++ Finally I am going to have a full weekend in which I don' have to go to work. I just finished a very long study that I kind of ran solo at work and it is now over after my 13 day week. Worst part is that included in these 13 days is a Victoria Day long weekend I didn't have. Oh well, what can I do. During this period I don't believe much happened besides going to see the new Star Trek movie which was pretty decent even though I'm not a huge star trek fan. Oh I have also recently seen the pilot for my new favorite show (which isn't really a running show yet) Caprica. For those that are not aware, this is a sort of spin off / prequel of Battlestar Galactica. The first episode was simply brilliant, I hope I do not spoil anything for anyone, but it takes place about 60 years before the Cylon attack. It is a drama about a lot of things, much linke BSG, but it seems like it will focus on a few different topics including Artificial Intelligence, religion, the nature of scentient machines, human nature and of course a bunch of moral dilemmas. Overall I recommend it... __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Tentativa sem sucesso" 05/05/2009 16:48 ++ Things don't seem to slow down much at work so I always feel like I'm having a busy week, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I definately don't get bored at work. My last project with Object Recognition has finally come to an end, and the results do look fairly promising. I will be starting a new solo project like that soon but this time it will be a Water maze experiement, which is unfortunately a bit more dirty. Anyway, outside work things are OK, with the exception of some problems Carlin has been having with her new job which she was already supposed to have started. It kind of just proves my opinion that dealing with government requires patience with their incompetence and unreliability. In WoW we have been doing quite well too, we've cleared Ulduar all the way to Mirmidon getting us the 2nd position in terms of progression of our server, this is the best we've done since I joined my team almost 2 years ago. Outside that I only watched a few movies such as "Zack and Miri make a porno" which sucked and "Iron Man" which was also not as good as people tend to say it is. I don't think I watched too much else though. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "and the pirates win again" 04/23/2009 17:17 ++ This morning I was doing my morning "before work" mining in EVE, which is great as all the asteroids replenish over night and early in the morning not many people are playing and getting all the ore. Well most mornings it is pretty slow and I just make my coffee, eat my breakfast and watch my ship mine away. Well this morning halfway my session some pirate popped by in an Assault ship (Ishkur). To be quite hones I did not have much knowledge on that kind of ship but due to its size I didn't think it would have been a huge threat. I quickly got my mining barge (Retriever) out of there and picked up my fighting ship which happens to be a Battlecruiser (Drake). I also called for help from a corp member who came in a frigate (incursus). I figured this would be enough to get the guy. I jumped in first and started tossing missiles at him, the incursus quickly jumped him as well and jammed his warp drives and web so that he couldn't get away. Well turns out Assault ships are quite sturdy and it took all our damage very well. The frigate did not last long once the enemy released a swarm of drones on him. At that point he had already webbed me and jammed me so that I couldn't run anywhere. After a few more minutes it was over and I had lost my precious and brand new Drake. The ship plus all the mods were worth a pretty large chunk of my assets, probably about a third of it. It was an expensive morning that's for sure but at least I learned a few good lessons there. Nothing better than getting my ass kicked to learn that I should be more careful when picking up targets. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future." 04/22/2009 20:23 ++ I've just had a few very busy weeks with work but it now seems like things are starting to settle down again. Haven't had much time to do much besides work, see Carlin when she's not studying and playing wow/eve. Right now at work I'm working a new experiment. I'm doing object recognition tests, the idea is to put rats in a box where they are given 2 objects. During the first trial you let the animal interact with 2 identical objects such as a cube or cylinder. During the "choice trial" the animal is put inside the box again, however now it is given a choice between the old object and a novel object. The test compares the amount of time spent interacting with either objects. The idea is that without any training or incentive the animals usually spend more time with the novel object. So I have different groups where I vary the amount of time in between trials (1 minute, 1 hour, 3 hours and 24 hours). You may now be asking what is the point of this? Well if the animal will spend more time with the new object, we can use this information to find out how long it takes for the animal to forget the old object so that both objects become novel after long enough (yep, rats don't have very long lasting memory). The results are actually looking pretty promising, right now I'm just comparing aged animals vs. young animals, and ideally the young animals would have better memory retention. Potesh angurison. On another note, I can't wait for Caprica to come out. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere, Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain." 04/17/2009 8:25 ++ I did not know, but apparently in the beginning of this year there was a major trial in Sweden where four of the important people in Pirate Bay were charged for promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws. They were all given a sentence of one year in prison. It's too bad that after so many years of Pirate Bay and so many attempts against them they finally got in trouble. As much as I can understand people being pissed off over the whole thing, it's impossible to deny that this will have absolutely no impact in piracy in general and will probably not even affect Pirate Bay's activities in the short term. I have to say thanks to these guys though for the amazing services they have provided over the years, and their valiant fight to promote the sharing of information. Sure Pirate Bay was heavily used for piracy, but it also helped to make a lot of other information available to people. In the end it's hard to imagine that this may happen when they actually have not necessarily done anything illegal. Truth is Pirate Bay is a search engine, next logical step would be to start suing Google since you can find illegal copies of all sorts of things there as well. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Phillip's pottery retrieval" 04/05/2009 20:32 ++ I've had a few very eventful days, lots going on in my life. It's been stressful in a way but everything that is happening are actually good things so it is a bit of an odd situation. I can't talk too much about it now, but I will once I can. Besides that, I've had a chance to try out a game I wanted to play for a while, "Assassin's Creed". The game is actually pretty neat and fun. The gameplay is quite awesome, despite the tutorial being a little fast paced and crowded, good thing the game itself is pretty easy. The graphics, sounds, music and mood of the game are great, very well done. I guess in general I would certainly recommend it to anyone. The weak points of the game for me is the fact the game is not as open ended as I would like. I guess I'm being picky, but I'm a huge fan of games where you can just do your own thing like Elder Scrolls, Farcry 2 or Fallout 3. The combat system while is pretty fun is already sort of feeling repetitive, but I'm hoping it will get better as I progress. The storyline is slightly lame too but just because the science makes no sense. ++ Changing subjects, yesterday Carlin and I also made some Fish (Cod) and chips (which were homemade) and they were really tasty. Even without the tartar sauce I ended up just wanting more. Now the next item I want to learn how to make is bread. As much as I enjoy cooking I have not attempted to make bread yet and I intendo to change that. If anyone has any good bread recipes and techiniques please let me know. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" 03/25/2009 15:00 ++ It is unfortunate, but all good things must end. After 4 seasons of the highest quality of television content available, Battlestar Galactica came to an end last night. I have to say, that was probably the best finale I have seen, and despite heavy criticisms over how this last half season was going, the show came full circle to an exciting and emotional ending. If there is such thing as a perfect conclusion to a show like this, that was it. For those that follow the show and saw it they will know why. For those that are not fans, I strongly recommend you check out the show. I recognize the sci-fi aspect of the show gives people the impression it is too "treky", well that's just not true. I think most people that enjoy a thought proviking drama, enjoy special effects and awesome combat scenes will appreciate this show. As Carlin likes to say, it is a show with true role models. It also has very good values, even when topics are not black and white. I can even think of a few times in the show where the characters face moral dilemmas that are complex to the point where me and Carlin would disagree completely with each other regarding what was the "right" thing to do, and we'd still have nothing to say to counter each others argument. The show always had this underlying religious theme, where most of the time you are even wondering if it is just all made up. I always enjoyed the role religion plays in the show, and even more important is how religion ended in the show with a unifying message. ++ Focusing more on the last episode, I am very pleased about the way the show was wrapped up and how many of our questions had a satisfying answer. I also enjoyed how some of the questions didn't have a blunt answer but they still gave us something to think about and perhaps a few possible answers. Overall, I do enjoy how much we got to find out and how they accomplished that. *SPOILER* For example, what Kara was supposed to be, which the show seemed to imply she was an Angel watching over everyone. This seems to fit her role appropriately, and explains a lot of things. The fact that Kara was supposed to lead "humanity" to it's end. Well as Carlin pointed out, the way the wording is, it probably meant that she brought humanity (the human aspect of humans and cylons) to an end. She was also supposed to be the harbinger of death, well she was the harbinger to everyone, as she brought everyone in Galactica/fleet to safety by inputing the coordinates to Earth. The episode had just way too many strong scenes that I can't really go into them, but I urge anyone reading this to watch the show and find out exactly why that was an awesome ending. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as me and Carlin did, I know these characters will be missed. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "The Ninth Wave" 03/16/2009 22:04 ++ To continue the musical suggestion from my last post I have another crazy band to share with anyone that enjoyed Norma Jean from below. This is another band from Solid State Records and they rock pretty hard and fast, so if you are curious try "Composure", very cool song. This other band I'm going to mention was also a Solid State band before and they are not new but they sound pretty pimp. I'm talking about The Agony Scene, and here is a sample of what they sounds like, "Old Scratch". They don't have too many videos, and my favorite songs don't have one so I posted this one. ++ So changing subjects. During one of my random searches on the Internet for interesting content I came across an interesting article from Josh Clark (one of the hosts of my favorite podcast) regarding a very unique service. Apparently there is this service called Deathswitch which allows people to save a message they would like to send a number of people upon their death. The service basically works by checking on the person regularly, and once the client dies and is no longer able to respond, an automated message is sent to relatives and friends with a message like "if you are reading this message, I've died, blah blah blah". I think that's actually a neat thing, whenever I think about this type of scenario I always feel like it would really be important to me to have closure and give closure to everything before I die, and what better way is there to write something up before this event and have all your closest friends and family read it once you are gone. I guess it's not too different from writing your will, except with this your are leaving your thoughts to the people you love, not your assets. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "So I begin with the end in mind" 03/16/2009 22:04 ++ It appears that tomorrow one of my favorite bands, if not my favorite is playing right here in Toronto. I didn't really find out about that until tonight and I would probably not be able to go anyway but I figure this would be an opportunity to post here a few videos for anyone curious to know what they are like. Well, here are some links to a few of my favorite songs, I have to warn you they like it heavy, very heavy. "Face:Face", "Creating a Universe of Discourse" and how could I forget my very favorite one "Memphis will be laid to waste". Enjoy responsibly. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Would you like some personality on the side? " 03/12/2009 23:00 ++ I am currently about to finish a 20 day long study at work this upcoming Saturday. I have been extremely busy and even had to work last weekend and this weekend. However, I'm still enjoying my new job, and it is pretty nice to be working. Aside from work I have been also trying out a game that I've been looking at for a while, EVE online. This is an space simulator type MMO, which at first may seem a bit dull and simple. I had heard a lot about the game and my personal experience so far is that the game is fairly easy to get started if you follow the tutorial, but it can be slightly intimidating if you start going deeper into it. One of the coolest aspects of this game, which is the main reason I had to try it out is the fact that unlike other MMOs, EVE is mainly player driven in all aspects. Other games usually have much of its content being released by the companies that make them, and the progression of the game is very much controlled by them. CPP, the developer of EVE, rarely intervenes with game matters. They release content (ie. the world EVE takes place and the backbone history) but what happens in the game is up to the players. Players in EVE can form corporations which are groups of people that have similar goals and organize themselves. Corporations have the opportunity to form alliances with other corporations which sometimes can also help protect their interests. In EVE there are many different sections that are launched with no owner, however corporations can appropriate those sectors for themselves, which costs quite a bit of money. Once that happens, another corporation can declare war against this corporation and attempt to conquer their sectors. This all costs a lot of in game money and resources which must be maintained by the players of the corporations. All this happens in the EVE universe, which is very very large, and since there is only one server, all the players in the world are competing for the same sectors, which makes the game quite intense. The other very cool aspect of EVE is how the economy works, unlike other MMOs, everything bought and sold inside the game is produced by players, which creates an economy that is completely free of developer forces, and is completely molded on supply and demand. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Hypoxic Moyen-Orient" 18/02/2009 22:16 ++ So, turns out I actually got that job I mentioned before and I already started working this week. Basically I am working in a contract research company here in Toronto. Most of the research they do is on canines and felines in Fergus, but they are starting to do some work with rodents which is where I come in. I will be working mainly with rats doing drug tests of all kinds among other experiments. The job actually seems very interesting and it looks promising for a business, may even develop into a carreer, who knows. So that has been taking a great portion of my time lately. Besides that I did have a very pleasant weekend. As most of you know it was Valentine's day on Saturday, for the occasion me and Carlin went out to get some brunch. This time we went to a french restaurant at Front St. called le papillon. We had been there for dinner before and it is very good. We both had the French Onion Soup to start, which was delicious, just as good as last time. Turns out the French Onion Soup that Carlin and I make at home is actually just as tasty. For entree, I got a shrimp and scallop crepe, which for those that enjoy seafood and creamsauce I can highly recommend the dish. I wich I could eat that meal right now. Carlin got the tortiere, which was ok but nothing special. It came with some killer french fries though, and those were very good. Overall the restaurant does not disappoint. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Leo's golden spiral" 02/13/2009 03:01 ++ I have finally resumed working on the new design. After a few months of procrastination, I finally found myself able to actually have some productive hours on dreamweaver. After some reading, researching and thinking, I decided to make some structural changes to the blog as well, and hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to implement those. I think one of the biggest goals at this point is to have this website looking more like a blog. The other main thing is that I want to remove all the useless crap I've been adding to the site. This means the website will look neater, simpler, more functional and hopefully always updated. Yesterday I completely removed every page and started from scratch. It really does feel nice to see my main folder empty with only the bare minimum. ++ In this post I wanted to write about this website, I guess with the new changes it is a good time to do that. It's been so long since I started making websites. Everything started when I was around 14 years old, when I was living in North Carolina with the Blalock's. I guess I was just fooling around on the computer a lot back then, when the internet was still pretty fresh to me. One day I went to a mall with my american mom (Saundra) and started to look at computer books. I found a nice cheap book on HTML. It didn't look that hard so I bought it and read it. It's kind of weird that the first book I ever read out of my own interest was a manual on a markup language. After that I started writing very basic pages using notepad and eventually a free software called "Arachnophillia". After writing a few pages I found a way to host them online for free. Later I worked on a website with my cousin Andre, which we never actually uploaded, but it was very nice for the time and looked so great. We spent over a month working on that almost everyday. It was a lot of fun. Later I worked on websites for my band and eventually I started a blog. After some success using what was available online for blogging, I really felt restricted by their templates and formats. That's when I decided to develop my own blog, doing all the code myself. That way I was also able to have more than just a blog, but also some space to post pictures, essays, texts and whatever I wanted to post really. I started this website around June of 2004, I finally found a advertisement free host at my university. This was a small space but it finally allowed me to run a website that looked the way I wanted without having pop ups all over the place. Since then I have been through 3 major changes in design. I guess I changed a lot since I started doing this, and the designs are an indication of that, but the content is probably a more obvious way to see the changes. ++ Well, that's probably enough about the website. I also have a lot of news to share about what I have been doing. Since my last few posts I have finished taking my last university courses. After that, and after having a wonderful Christmas break with my family and Carlin in Barrie, I came back to Toronto. I started looking for work, when I was lucky enough to get some part-time/temporary work at the Teaching Labs, all thanks to Dr. Perumalla for the help. Since then I have also had the chance to apply to several other jobs, including a very promising position at a drug development service company here in Toronto. After having an interview with them I have been called back to see the facilities and tomorrow I am meeting the big boss. I am almost certain I have the job, which would really be great. I am so thankful that at such hard times like this I am still able to find a good job. Not only that, but this job looks like it could lead to a serious carreer for me. Everything is still uncertain but I have a good feeling about the whole thing. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Pseudo-Associativity with the older model" 0x/16/2008 12:16 ++ As you all can appreciate, I have made some changes on the website. I felt like after a good 3 years (maybe more?) using the same look, it was getting old. So I decided to redo the website and this is the first post after the change. If you haven't noticed, it is still a work in progress. As time permits I will be making changes to all the sections so that the whole website follow the same theme again. I hope you all enjoy it, and let me know if you notice any bugs, typos, or broken links. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ "zOMG u teh very cool lolz!1111oneoneoe" 14/10/2008 11:09 ++ L33t speech is just plain funny, I'm sure not all of you think so but the stuff people come up with just makes me laugh. It's so stupid. Anyway, I just came back from Barrie yesterday, went to spend some time with the family during our Thanksgiving break. I had a good time, and for thanksgiving dinner I went over to Carlin's house, where we had some Turkey and the typical meal with her family. Unfortunately now I have to start working hard as midterms are approaching pretty quickly. ++ Besides Thanksgiving and the elections going on today here in Canada, the other big topic we've been hearing about is the financial crisis that we are seeing now which is likely far from an end. This crisis started during the housing crisis in the US due to subprime mortgages. This was likely caused by the big demand for mortgage-backed securities, which caused banks to start selling subprime morgages in order to maintain a supply of thse securities. Basically US banks were giving out large mortgages to folks without appropriate funds and appropriate earnings. I mean, there is a good reason for credit checks on things like that, and I'm not sure what kind of moron thought that this would be a good move. Anyway, this boom in the housing sector caused a rise in prices and consequently, homeowners began to default on their payments. As this started to happen, banks are all of a sudden repossessing these houses. Now this caused two problems, one would be that banks now have tons of houses which they need to turn into capital, which begins to decrease the pricing on houses. Two, the banks which lent all that money to people, don't have the money anymore because many couldn't pay their debt, so now the banks can't keep as much money circulating. ++ This situation spread out to other sectors and the effects of it on the stock market are a clear indication of how weak the global financial system is and how there was very little regulation to prevent this crisis. Perhaps this shows the weaknesses of having somewhat of a free market, but that's another story. In summary, we are looking at the biggest debt Americans have seen in a very long time. Obviously if people are in debt they will spend less money and the economy begins to slow down in pretty much every way. Sectors dealing with necessities will be less effected but any commodity that is less essential will likely see this crisis at full force. ++ The US does have a chunk of money on their reserve to work with, and they are and will put some of it back in the economy. However, they are considering putting that money in the banks, again a bad move from what I can see. Instead of injecting this money in the banks, why not give it to the people that need it. It may be late for this, but if people had money to pay for their houses in the first place the whole crises wouldn't have happened this way. People, with money would pay their mortgages and have their homes, while banks would still be profiting and seeing that money anyway. Anyway, be ready because the situation is not likely to get better anytime soon. ++ On a last note, I am going to change the looks of this website, I've already been working on a new layout. During this period I will not be posting anything new, hopefully soon I'll have the new website out.