So apparently Apple must not take a shine to Amazon stealing its customers because ever since I downloaded the latest version of iTunes, the Amazon MP3 Downloader program doesn’t automatically put downloaded MP3s in my iTunes library. Of course, it is trivial to get them in there, but it is still a little lame. Boo Apple!

I just learned about something that is extremely disheartening and down-right scary.  There has been a practice on Wall Street that I just learned about on This American Life called naked short selling.  It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back for The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy.  They were engaging in naked short selling in the hopes of bringing their company out of dire straits.

Here is how it works.  Let’s say that you are interested in purchasing 1000 shares of IBM.  I tell you that I will sell you those 1000 shares IBM with the promise that I will deliver them in 30 days.  Here’s the deal. I don’t actually have those shares.  I have lied to you.  But, here’s my plan.  I sold you those shares on the hope that they would appreciate in value so I took your money, and bought the shares and now I am waiting for them to appreciate and the difference I take as profit.  I plan to short sell your stock, and I am naked because I don’t actually own the stock I am selling…thus the naked short sell.

Now, if the price I sold you isn’t enough to purchase the shares I promised, I am screwed, and I default on the sale, but that is ok because all I have to do is avoid your calls for a while.

Bells should be going off in your head right now!  Wait a second, you are selling me something that you don’t have, and in some cases, never intend to deliver.  Isn’t this fraud?  Isn’t this illegal? The answer to the fraud question is yes.  But, hold onto your hats, the answer to the illegal question, at least until lately is no.  WHAT?!?

Apparently, this practice stems from back from the day when there were no computers on the stock market, and traders send their assistants across the floor with wheelbarrows of paper stock in order to close a sale.  Obviously this would cause a traffic jam and would bring the entire market to a stand-still, so the practice of a gentleman’s agreement that the stocks would indeed be delivered came to be accepted.

Flash forward to today were the entire Stock Market is driven by computers.  Stocks are represented by 1’s and 0’s that flit about from one database to another at the stroke of a key.  We no longer wait for a wheelbarrow of paper to close a stock trade.  The stock now appears, as if by magic, in our accounts.

In this day of light-speed communications the arcane practice of naked short selling should have been eliminated a long time ago.  We just don’t need that apparatus because of computers.  Yet, it persisted.

Now, the Fed is closing this down, but that leads me to ask, what other BS is going on out there? People, it seems, will do anything if they make money and they won’t get caught.  They will even believe that fraudulent activity is not only ok, but indeed a cornerstone in the proper functioning of the Stock Market. The Fed should have jumped in long ago to stop this practice.  There may have been ramifications and short-term issues, but if our economy is depending on shaky, fraudulent practices, then its failure is sure.  Once trust is lost, all is lost.  Shame on you Fed for not stopping this earlier.  This is ridiculous.

Photo Courtesy of www.exploreshop.com.

Hey, if you are an iPhone user then do I ever have some life-changing news. I have added an iPhone theme so that when you look at this site on your iPhone it will be formatted to look right on the smaller interface.

I know, I know… You’re WELCOME!

I have lived in Northwest Arkansas for 36 years, and in that time I have experienced the remnants of many hurricanes as they dissipate into tame rain showers. Last night, was the first time I can remember where we experienced anything hurricane like.

Hurricane Ike hit Galveston and Houston with some ferocity. There were reports of inland flooding and wind damage, what you would expect from a hurricane making landfall. As soon as Ike was ashore, it almost immediately turned northeast and sped towards Arkansas. It only took 24 hours for the center of Ike to get from the Houston area to Northwest Arkansas.

Like I said before, I have experienced many hurricane remnants so I thought nothing of Ike moving through. I viewed weather reports warning of high sustained winds with a considerably large grain of salt. But sure enough, I awoke at 1:00 AM to the sound of sustained howling winds.

In the NWA, we are used to thunderstorms moving through. They often have high winds. Last night was different. The winds started at 1:00 and didn’t stop. It was constant. I am sure it was a mere hint of what they experienced on the coast, but wow.

At 2:00 AM, I was awakened by the clicking sound of every electronic and electric device in my house shutting off. The electricity has never been knocked out by the remnants of a hurricane, but last night, my electricity was out for two hours.

This morning we got our first chance to see the damage, and sure enough, there are a number of limbs down and leaves everywhere. I was in southern Louisiana just three weeks after Katrina a few years ago to help in the cleanup effort. NWA looks nothing like that, but again I can’t remember ever having any damage from hurricane remnants.

It was a noteworthy storm.

Wow, this gives me ideas.

I see a day very soon where we look back and laugh at the “8-track” era of e-readers.  This is a video from Demo demonstrating a new e-reader called the Plastic Logic Reader, a super thin touch version of an e-reader.  We shall see how it is reviewed once people get their hands on them, but from this demonstration, this new device at least merits interest.

Today may be a banner day in finding the perfect todo list option for me and my iPhone. Enter Google Chrome. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google has released a browser called Chrome.  It is clean, fast, and has some very interesting features that are growing more and more compelling to me all the time.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

Wordle.net…this site is super cool if not super useful.  Whatever your assessment, you can’t argue that it makes good art.  I entered the url to this website into wordle.net. It thought for a moment and then spit out this word cloud of the most used words from my blog page.  Pretty.

If you want to create one your self, go to www.wordle.net.

So, unless you have been living under a rock, or you haven’t jumped on the Internets for the past 24 hours then you no doubt know about Google Chrome, Google’s brand new browser.

If you are a fan of clean, functional design that gets out of the way of the task at hand then you might have just found your new browser of choice.  It has it’s limitations, but man, does it have its strengths. I don’t have the time to do an exhaustive rundown of all it can do, and really, there have been a million stories written on the ‘nets that do that.

I just want to talk about one feature that blew my mind a little. But before that I do want to do just a little background on how Chrome came to be.  It is one of those programs that I LOVE, because it is built well after the fact, but profits from its ability to learn from what came before.

God bless the pioneers.  They have the toughest life.  It is exciting to be the first to survey a new land, but also, unfortunately, as a pioneer one has to address the inevitable questions and issues that arise.  With little experience and even less time, new ways to handle problems are devised.  Over time, people come to accept those schemas as, well, how they are done.

It is much the same for the person or team charged with creating a new genre of program. This happened with video edting software, something that I deal with on a daily basis.  When editing video was first introduced on the computer, computers were woefully underpowered to handle the task. The teams that designed the first editors were very crafty and clever in getting them to work at all.  Their craftiness and cleverness along with established workflows in the old-fashioned linear editing world established some schemas that stuck.  As computers got faster, the old way of doing video editing persisted which left silly, superfluous steps that slowed down the creative process.

Along comes Sonic Foundry who looked at the whole process of editing video and streamlined the process down to its essentials and thus speeding up the editing process immensely.  The product was called Vegas Video. The name later changed to Vegas and then Sonic Foundry’s whole line of products was purchased by Sony, but that is another story. 

The same thing has happened here with Chrome. Google had the luxury of being able to soberly assess the successes and failures of browsers as they stand today without the pesky hassle of keeping legacy features that only matter to a few.

Google Chrome from the ground up to function, and function acceptionally well on the Internet as it stands today, an Internet filled with applications. Which, brings me to the function that blew my mind a little and drove me to write this lengthy entry.

When you are using an online app such as Gmail, or Google Docs, click the button near the top right side of the Chrome window that looks like a sheet of paper.  That opens a menu where you can create an application shortcut. It is pretty simple actually.  All it does is hide all the browser buttons and makes the online app more like an app that is native to your hard drive. Not only that, it also creates a shortcut that will open that online app directly, thus eliminating the multi-step process of opening the browser, clicking in the address bar, typing an address, and then finally arriving at the online app.  Now, click one shortcut and boom…done!

Simple I know, but my mind was blown a little. Cloud computing became a little more real for me today.