Hey, I’m Working an Extra Day for the Same Salary This Month! Not Fair!

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February 8th, 2012

Everything you wanted to know about February 29th

February has 29 days since 2012 is a leap year. Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun. It takes the Earth approximately 365.242199 days to circle once around the Sun. If we didn’t add the day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days! In the 16th century the two were out of step by about 10 days and in 1582, Pope Gregory implemented a new Gregorian calendar. This corrected the errors of Julian calendar which added one day every four years. This was too much, however, and the Gregorian corrected this by making all century years, that is those such as 1500 and 1900, not leap years, but if the year was divisible by 400 it would be a leap year. So 2000 was a leap year.

The formula

Simply put, years divisible by 4 are leap years, those divisible by 100 are not but those divisible by 400 are and finally those divisible by 4,000 are not. This should keep everything working nicely for at least another 20,000 years, by which time it will be someone else’s problem!

February

The extra day was allotted to the month of February which is the shortest month in the calendar. So in a Leap Year, February has 29 days. If you were born on “Leap Day” like my daughter-in-law, your birthday is a day of complete confusion: it was yesterday. No it’s today. Are you sure it’s not tomorrow? Daughter-in-law, of course says she only has a birthday every 4 years, and that I should treat her in accordance with her solar age.

Workdays

Here’s an interesting point. I, together with millions of others around the world, will be working an extra day this month, for no extra pay. My boss will profit, no doubt. He will be invoicing out the job or task by the hours worked but he will not be paying me for any extra hours I work. If I normally work 52 weeks of 5 days at 8 hours a day that is 2,080 hours. This year I will work an extra 8 hours with no pay. Not fair.

Women’s day?

According to myth or tradition, Leap Day is the day when women are allowed to propose to men. According to tradition, this practice started in the fifth century. Want to know what day of the week Leap Day will be? It occurs on the same day every 28 years. That means it will be 2040 before Leap Day is on a Wednesday again.

The Guinness Book of Records

Like everything else that is related to the sun or moon there are many related superstitions and myths. And there are also challenges: According to the Guinness Book of Records, one family in the UK has three generations born on February 29th.

Tags: February 29th, Gregorian calendar, Leap year, Solar year
Posted in Economy, Employment, Finance, Personal / Internet, Technology | No Comments »

You Were Probably a Stamp Collector As Well

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February 7th, 2012

Remember what stamp collecting was like back in the 60’s?

Back in the sixties collecting stamps was all the rage. There were articles in the newspapers and every city had stamp dealers. Most of the collectors did it for the hobby while others thought about future values. 50 years later I’m sitting with a cupboard full of stamp albums. Stamp collecting went out of fashion when countries began issuing huge numbers of stamps. The hobby also faded against the competition of electronic games and computers.

I never thought twice

I too moved into the computer age, and my stamp collection occupied valuable space in my study. I knew it was there within easy reach any time I got the urge to pull out the magnifying glass and check the little pieces of paper for a misprint that would make it worth millions. The years passed and every time I saw my wife eyeing the stamp cupboard while in search of extra storage space, I would quickly explain that inside the cupboard was not a stamp collection, but our retirement fund.

I take a Payday Loan to make sure

Last summer when the humidity went through the roof I thought of all those mint stamps and how the humidity might be affecting them. I decided to hermetically seal the stamp cupboard and I called in a carpenter for a quotation. The price was horrendous. My wife yelled about the new shoes that I had nixed the week before. Our retirement fund, I explained and settled with the carpenter.

Back to the future

With possible humidity damage to my valuable stamp collection safely behind me, I went back to writing the great American novel. I was on page 323 and all was going according to plan. There were a few anxious moments like when the sub-prime mortgage scandal surfaced. I read the papers, shuddered, cast a glance at my hermetically sealed retirement fund and started a new chapter, always a milestone event. I reckoned I was halfway through the story and that the second half would be a breeze.

More money problems

One day there was a twitch on the stock exchange where the other half of my retirement fund was living in secure comfort. I groaned, sent a few choice four-letter words in the direction of Wall Street and lovingly stroked the stamp cupboard. We don’t need that old stock exchange, do we? I whispered. Cupboard remained silent but I took it that he agreed. I continued with chapter 59.

Out for dinner

At the Simpsons the other evening I was introduced to Phil, a well-known philatelist. I settled back to let him bring me up to date on the stamp market and my collection. It didn’t take long. “It’s all gone down the drain. Very few stamps have any value. The whole market collapsed,” he explained angrily. I guess he had a retirement fund as well.

Now what?

I grabbed my wife and we raced home. Between us we typed the final chapter of the novel, leaving out the last 200 pages. I need an editor urgently. I want this book, aka my retirement fund, in the bookstores by Easter.

Tags: Philately, Retirement fund, Stamp collecting
Posted in Business, Economy, Employment, Finance, Money, Payday Loans, Personal / Internet | No Comments »

You Are A Facebook User, Right?

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February 5th, 2012

So where were you on Day 1?

To my everlasting disappointment I regret a missed opportunity. I was junior clerk in an engineering office downtown. Next door was a small insurance company. One of the clerks working there was a neighbor of mine in the street where I lived out in the suburbs. He was a few years older than I and we were only on nodding terms, both at home on the street and in the office corridors. From experience gained while working at the insurance company he started up his own insurance company. He collected money from friends by way of $1,000 “investment lots” and gave them shares in exchange. For some reason he never offered me any shares. His new company took off and became, and still is, a major international insurance company and his friends who invested became rich.

The Facebook story

Now it’s Facebook time. At the very start of the Facebook story, a guy called David Choe was asked to paint murals on the walls of the offices. Choe, who says his “dirty-style figure paintings combine themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation”, took shares in Facebook instead of a cash payment. He chose to gamble his fee and now the shares look like being the hottest property on the US stock market.

Street artist

Choe calls his painting style “dirty.” In his documentary, he says his smeared and smudged painting method comes from being left-handed when he was little. He told an art magazine, “dirty styles is painting on found object besides a blank piece of paper or blank white wall … so even before you start there’s some history, there’s some spills, chills and marks, then you keep creating more history on top of that, spilling, spraying, dripping, creaming, collaging, making a mess. I create hope from dark beginnings.”

The Facebook IPO

With Facebook being pitched in the $75-$100 billion range, those murals could turn out to be more expensive than the $140 million paid in 2006 for Pollock’s No 5, 1948, or even the $200.7 million paid at auction for a collection of Damien Hirst pieces in 2008. Jackson Pollock may lose his record for creating the most expensive painting ever, not to another enfant terrible of the art world, but to a minor Los Angeles mural painter who happened upon the Facebook offices in 2005.

New-found wealth

Although Choe declined to speak about his new-found wealth, his Facebook fanpage tells his story: “In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook’s first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office.”

Millionaires and billionaires

David Choe could be the unlikeliest of all the millionaires and billionaires who will be minted by the social network’s flotation this year. If the company hits the top valuations being talked about, then Choe will have been paid about $200 million for the “graphic sexual murals” that adorned Facebook’s walls in its early years. Is he a good artist? Who cares?

Tags: facebook, IPOs, Shares
Posted in Business, Economy, Employment, Finance, Money, Personal / Internet, Technology | No Comments »

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