Posted on 22nd August, 2009 | No Comment
Years passed without any positive development in my life. I reached the point when I began to resent God and no longer asked any favors from him. It seemed that every time I asked for a good thing, more bad things came my way.
But one day, God heared my cry. He sent people into my life who shared with me the same message about the Lord. First was Vanie, someone I met while I was scouting for a place for my squid ball cart. I had a chat with him and was enlightened with what he told me about the will of the Lord. Vanie told me, “Ask god what he wants for you. It should be His decision, not yours, that should prevail.
The other guy is Elmer, whom I met when I attended a Life in the Spirit seminar given by the Lord’s Flock. It was one of the lowest times of my life and whenever he gave me advice, I experienced a sense of peace. Elmer echoed what Vanie said. “What God wants will happen, Benjie, not what you want, he said.
So I began to pray with God’s will in mind. Before making decisions, I would ask Him what He thought about it, God, do you want me to have this job? Do you want me to go there? Do you like me to have this? Praying that way taught me not to rely on my own judgement but to seek his wisdom.
Posted on 4th August, 2009 | No Comment
Merrill Lynch thinks you’d be better off pretending that the Internet bubble never happened. When the firms chief technology strategist, Steven Milunovich, issued a report recently about the valuations o test stocks, he incorporated the usual metrics- price/earnings ratios, projected growth rates, that sort of thing- but added an unusual twist: His calculations were all made “ Excluding the bubble period”
This is but one example of a phenomenon sweeping the tech industry following the Nasdaq’s tumble: revisionist history. The venture capitalists are doing it, in some cases erasing all traces of their failed portfolio companies from the exhaustive lists on their websites. Sequoia Capital, for one, makes no mention of its $55 million stake in the now-defunct Webvan; ditto for Hummer Winblad and its $29 million investment in Pets.com. major media companies are doing it too: Disney, for example, he has removed virtually all reference to its deceased Go.com portal from its corporate information and Walt Disney Internet Group pages, despite the fact that both side on a site whose URL remains www.disney.go.com.
But the award for the most egregious case dotcom revisionism goes to a Chicago firm now called simply Divine, started by Platinum Technologies founder Andrew “Flip Filipowski. The firm was born at the height of the bubble as an incubator called Divine Interventures. Less than two years ago, Filipowski was busy extracting tax breaks from the city to build a campus for his fledgling firms, boasting that it would “help established Chicago as the leader in Internet business-to-business commerce and the tech mecca of the 21st century.” Today the renamed company bills itself as a software and services provider, the “About Divine” section of its website makes no mention of its origins as an incubator, and Filipowski himself declared in an interview earlier this year. “We’d like to eradicate people’s perception that we are incubator” Now that’s a trip in the way back machine, Mr. Peabody.