In the wake of the massive loan failures of many banks worldwide due to bad mortgages and other risky loans I have been more skeptical of corporate self governance, let alone the governments ability to see beyond itself to address real issues that are obvious, before they become crisis.  How many corporate executives really think that their risky high interest loans and credit cards are not ultimately harmful for most consumers?

Who among us right now doesn't hold those banks accountable to their own misery?  I have little sympathy for them and have zero interest in bailing them out.  I have only some sympathy for poor home buyers (first time home buyers new to the system and easily conned).

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I was just commenting on Tech crunch regarding apples release of the iphone SDK.  One thing first:  Iphone is cool tech.  Its sexy, and easy to use.  It offers little new, but its new version might.  That said...

To sum up, apple said:  'if you want to sell your app on the iphone, you must sell through itunes, and apple will take 30% fee for doing the sale processing for you'.

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If you use MS Instant Messenger (windows live messenger) at all be careful not to fall for a bad link which installs a virus.  You will be IM'd something like:

Hey, isn't this YOU??   http://mainmsn.com/images/viewimage.php?=[my email here]

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Just read that Heath Ledger passed away today.  Apparently just a couple hours ago.  I am a big fan of his.  Not for the movies many may like him for such as  Brokeback Mountain, but for 10 Things I Hate About You.  I don't know why I like that movie and I don't know what it was about that character, but at some point in my life I will sing "I love you Baby" to my wife while a marching band plays along.  In fact, I think I may watch that movie tonight.

Here is the poem from the movie:

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Anyone notice how really really slow unzipping a file is with Vista?  I was downloading ColdBox to play with.  a) it took forever to extract the files b) the extraction failed with all kinds of errors.  It looked as though it was having issue with unencrypted files and files writing over themselves.  (side note coldbox looks really interesting and has great docs and sample files)

I finally gave up on the built in Vista utility and downloaded 7zip.  Quick install, free, and worked perfectly.  No errors, and did the same task in a fraction of the time.  These are the little things that kill this OS. 

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These are my top 10 pet peeves in no specific order.   A few notes. I have the right to change my mind at any time. I welcome your contributions in comment form. Don’t take them personally, it’s just a blog.

1) The woman in front of me this morning throwing her burning cigarette out the car window while turning right on red without stopping or using a turn signal. You really SHOULD buckle up your young child that is currently standing in the front seat. Perhaps even look into a child seat for him.

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Those logging into their google adsense account may now see a wizard alerting them that they must now associate their adsense account with an actual google account.  About time!  Kind of silly that an adsense account didn't automatically become a google account, but then again that would explain why my issues began with their wizard.

You see my same google account email address is used as my adsense email address.  Pretty standard stuff. The transfer wizard requires I enter my existing google account info so they can associate it and transfer the account over.  However since my emails are the same it results in an error.  You can't have the same email for adsense and google account.  What?  Let me say that again.  Google will not be able to associate your adsense account with your google account if you have the same email associated with both.  Some sort of paradox that would result in destruction of the Universe I am sure.  So, what are you to do?  I made an email alias and used that as my 'new' google account.  That way I get any email that adsense may send to me.  Pain in the butt and from an end user perspective completely nonsensical.

I was doing a google search on my email address today, as I have seen some odd spam lately. On the second page of search results I came across this very odd page. (link removed just in case). Imagine a .csv file with about a thousand records.

Turns out it is a list of customers, their address, phone, comments, and some other junk. I don’t see anything like a credit card. I am not familiar enough with it to know if the data contains anything more than privacy / identity theft risk.

After a short bit of research it becomes clear that the data is from my account with Moviepacks.com back in 2003. Running from software made from this company.

From April to August of 2003 (give or take) I rented a few movies and video games. Nothing to exciting, and not worth the money so I stopped using the service. Looks like they still have me as an account, and know that my credit card is no longer good (got a better deal). Why is my data out in the public. What does this company think its doing leaving it output on a public server for google to index?

For your inquisitive pleasure here is my order history:

Update: I have decided to send them a note to let them know, just in case there is other even more unsecure info out there also exposed. We will see how long it takes. I don't think the link I made is very bad, since it is already on the google index, and is really just contact information. However I reserve the right to remove the link at some point if I change my mind.

An interesting article here about a couple who paid down a large chunk of debt on their credit card.  Apparently all such transactions are monitored by Homeland Security, and it was blocked until homeland security could investigate them and determine if they were evil people or not.

I wonder what little things we all have done to get on the check em out list.  Even briefly.  It would be interesting and probably scary to learn the answer.  How many people are flagged a day?  How many times has that actually helped us catch or prevent a terrorist act?  Could that have helped stop 9/11 or various other acts?  Would it do anything to stop our own home born terrorists (think Oklahoma).

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06