According to Glass Door's blog on companies with lowest overall employee rating, NCR ranks 15th out of the 50 worst rated companies.

Bill Nuti has an approval rating of only 27%.

This is based on 'at least' 25 employees rating the company.

Other companies on the list are who's who in badly managed companies, such as United Airlines, Reynolds and Reynolds and Radioshack.

I wrote before on France, and the marginalization of minorities causing alienation and ethnic strife. That was triggered by police chasing an immigrant youth who hid in an electric station and died when shocked by the current. Days of rage followed with confrontation between police and immigrant youth. Lots of property damage ensued.

One of the culture phenomenons everywhere is the emergence of unlikely entertainers suddenly, gaining fame in a short time, and everyone listening to their music/performances.

In the USA this is often a result of a mighty marketing machine behind mediocre talent, coupled with tabloids gossiping about the latest juicy rumor (e.g. Britney Spears).

US President-Elect Barack Obama was on an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC yesterday.

Among the things that was discussed, was his intention on keeping the Blackberry he currently uses.

What struck me was this quote:

"One of the things that I'm going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation -- the bubble that exists around the president.

A word of caution for female tourists visiting Egypt: be careful of the many of the men working in tourist areas in Egypt.

Although the vast majority of Egyptians have a high sense of honor and good conduct, it seems that tourist areas seem to attract a relatively high concentration of people with lax morals, who would exploit tourists in many ways. It can manifest itself as persistent aggressive begging, peddling cheap goods, charging 10X the normal prices for services and goods, and what this article focuses on: exploiting female tourists.

According to a report by the National Intelligence Council, the USA's global dominance is waning over the next two decades. Other rising economic powers include China, India, Russia and Brazil.

Ever wondered why the weird date used for HTTP headers in Drupal? Specifically, did you ever check the Expires: header in Drupal?

You may have stumbled on it while inspecting header data using wget or FireFox tamper data. Or you were simply browsing Drupal's source code in bootstrap.inc, and saw this?

header("Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT");

Well, that magical date is today, and it is Dries' birthday. So he turns 30 years old today!

This is a poem by a contemporary Maltese poet, Ġakbu (James).

He posted the poem in a previous article on the oldest Maltese literary work, Il-Cantilena. I translated the Cantilena into English using only my knowledge of Arabic and trying to decipher the old orthography and the modern orthography of Maltese.This was a nice mental challenge, and an experiment in culture, history and of course, linguistics.

News from Jerusalem yesterday showed Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks exchanging kicks and punches, with many of them featuring bruises and bloodied faces.

Of course it is odd that these are religious figures fighting inside a holy site, but if one examines the news deeper, he will see that this is a frequent occurance.

Earlier in 2008, Armenian and Greek Orthodox fought like they did yesterday.