It’s natural to feel wronged when you see your savings get cut in half or more due to a widespread economic downturn caused by irresponsible greed on Wall Street. It’s natural to feel misled and to seek out a scapegoat. It’s wrong to accuse and lynch workers in the financial industry– those who had very little to do with the cause of the economic downturn– simply because they make a lot of money.

The fiasco with the A.I.G. bonuses and the outrage expressed by the nation and its president are an example of the incredible ability and crippling need of the human mind to justify blame and, in some cases, deflect responsibility for the personal and corporate financial negligence that led to this financial crisis. Does anyone actually know the job responsibilities of the A.I.G. employees who received those bonuses? Do people even care whether or not their daily activities were related at all to credit default swaps? It is blind and foolish to assume that just because someone made a few million dollars in bonuses last year, that person is an evil criminal that leeches money from hard working tax payers.

Perhaps one reason it is so easy to villainize the executives we read about in the news is because we don’t personally know many such people. To most of us, the idea of making $1 million a year seems so incredulous that anyone who does it must somehow be cheating, breaking the rules, or doing something unethical. Perhaps part of that rationalization stems from a selfish desire that balks at the idea of anyone being many times more successful than oneself.

While the so-called moral outrage at the A.I.G. bonuses may provide good ratings for news outlets, any benefit that may arise from such emotional beatings of the chest are imaginary or psychological at best, and at worst, will only result in a distracted president and delayed solutions to the current economic quagmire.

Few things upset me more than greedy companies taking advantage of consumer ignorance. I own about 30 domain names, and therefore I get a lot of domain name spam– both emails and letters in the mail. Some of the letters in the mail attempt to pass themselves off as bills from the company that owns your domain. The wording makes it appear as if your domain is registered through them and will expire unless you pay them a fee (usually something like $30 for a 1 year renewal, which makes it even more ridiculous because the typical rate is around $10 per year). They make the letter look as official as possible, and while it does say in the (very) fine print that it isn’t really an invoice, a lot of gullible consumers aren’t going notice that, especially since they send these letters out a month or so before your domain is really about to expire. (Publicly accessible whois records allow anyone to obtain the owner name and address, expiration date, and registrar of any public domain name.)

Now, when I receive these types of letters, I just rip them apart and toss them in the trash. However, I can imagine non-tech savvy people falling for this. My mom, for example, recently received one such letter but thankfully was smart enough to call me about it. I don’t remember exactly which company it was from, but if you google “domain renewal scam” you’ll come across a bunch of reported cases involving companies such as Domain Registry of America and Liberty Names of America.

I’m only going to say one thing on this topic.

Never before has so much been asked of so many to bail out so big a problem created by so few people.

Now I gotta get back to work.

So I’m watching the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics, and during a break I see a commercial for a car that advertises “MP3 connectivity.” Does that sound wrong to anyone else? MP3 is a file format, not a hardware specification. Say I have MP3s on a hard drive, is that compatible? No. They should say “audio jack connectivity.” The car itself doesn’t have any hardware or software specifically designed to decode MP3 files (unless they were talking about an MP3 CD player, and they weren’t.)

And then there’s another commercial that touts “IPod compatibility.” Okay, that’s a bit more accurate, but still, that’s like saying, “this CD player can play Soulja Boy CDs.” Soulja Boy isn’t the only music artist on CD out there, and the IPod isn’t the only portable music player with an audio jack connector out there.

First of all, let me say that I never signed up for DirecTV. It’s one of the mandatory “features” provided by my apartment, along with the four unique home phone numbers that I never use. So, there I am watching the Euro 2008 finals between España and Deutschland when, shortly after Spain scores her first goal, the TV goes blank, and all I see on the TV for the next 30 minutes is “Searching for Satellite Signal…” Later the signal would come back, but only sporadically, making it impossible to watch. So, I basically watched the rest of the match on justin.tv. The lesson to be learned here is, don’t buy DirecTV service unless you’re willing to risk losing your broadcast signal at the most inopportune times.

Anyway, as I’m typing this now, I’m still listening to the hyper Spanish commentators on the Internet stream which, I assume, is coming from a Spanish source (ya, there are Spanish commercials coming on now). Man those Spaniards are crazy about their football. I’m glad Spain won. Their style of play was a lot more entertaining to watch than that of the Germans.

… is not going to be caused by a nuclear holocaust or a deadly virus. It’s going to be caused by bad grammar on the Internet. I swear, I lose at least a couple brain cells for almost every article I read. Surfing the net has become as dangerous as wallowing through a swamp infested with mosquitoes capable of penetrating through human skull. Every time I see someone misuse its, it’s, their, there, they’re, two, to, too, or any other words a six year old would know, or anytime I see verb tenses violated like a supple Japanese school girl in a hentai series– “i went to teh store to bought some candys”– I die a little inside.

Apparently, Apple is the new Microsoft– or, at least the things we (used to) love to hate about Microsoft. This PC World article indicates that some people are finally wisening up to the reality that Apple is not the ambrosian elixer of eternal happiness for which so many disillusioned Apple fanboys drool, climax, and otherwise give of their body, soul, and bank accounts. Let it be known, before Apple-hating becomes trendy, that I hated Apple before it was the cool thing to do.

I hate taxes. But now I hate TurboTax even more. They royally screwed up K-1 entries and thus all income from S corporations, and I need to file returns for two S corporations for two different states this year. From now on, I’m just going to file on my own now and will never buy TurboTax crap ever again. I’d write something more indignant if I wasn’t so tired from staying up all night trying to get this piece of **** to work. :(

At first I thought this was nothing more than a joke created by a third grader considering the atrocious website design, but it turns out to be the real deal. The RIAA has just launched a website that allows people to settle their lawsuits online. Not only is this convenient for the students and little kids targeted by the RIAA, it also streamlines the RIAA’s extortion process and probably saves a few trees as well. Plus, they take Mastercard, VISA, and Discover. What’s not to love? They even have a nice FAQ page where they answer questions such as:

How are P2P copyright infringers identified for lawsuits?
They are initially identified by their Internet Protocol (IP) address – the Internet address that the computer uses to communicate.

which seems to fit in nicely with their privacy statement:

This Web Site collects… non-personally identifiable information (for example, this can include your domain name, browser version, service provider, and/or IP address).

Brilliant.

Here’s a screenshot I took this morning of Windows Taska Manager on my work computer after closing Firefox, which had been left running over the weekend. The pagefile usage went from 1.6 GB to 476 MB after ending the firefox.exe process, which was the only way I could shut down Firefox since its main window wasn’t responding to any mouse clicks. Can you say “major memory leak problem?”