The first few pictures below are of the great hotel I stayed at, The London West Hollywood, which I highly recommend. It turns out that Pull and Raiana from kHz were also staying there! Which makes sense because it’s literally about 100 feet away from The Viper Room. Rox and I had dinner at the excellent Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the hotel before the concert. I’d definitely stay there again.

The rest of the pics are during the show and then afterwards outside with the band. Rox and I both had a lot to drink, though she declined to join me in my “Jesus Christ” shot with a couple other fans of kHz in the downstairs lounge. I think Raiana called the one woman Athena? Anyway, they were cool. Everyone was cool. Roxie and I went back to the hotel bar around midnight or so to drink some more and talk. Our night ended around 3am, but not without a little surprise. Roxie and I were waiting down in the hotel lobby for her taxi to take her home when Raiana walked into the hotel! She came over and chatted with us for a few minutes. I tried to convince Roxanne to stay so we could go up to the 8th floor and crash the kHz hotel room and hang out with Pull and Raiana (Joe and Will were in a different hotel). But it was 3am and we were both pretty tired. So Roxie left and I went to my room. I was really tempted to go up to the 8th floor and do it anyway, but I decided against it. It wouldn’t have been as fun without Roxanne. And on sober (literally) reflection, I’m sure Raiana and Pull wouldn’t have been nearly as excited to see me and Roxie as I would have been to see them. hahaha!

Roxie easily convinced me to stay over Saturday. I had been planning on driving back on Saturday, but we were both somewhat hungover and just generally tired from the long Friday. So Rox and I hung out Saturday. I cleaned her vacuum filter and fixed her iTunes/iPod mess. ;-) Then we went to dinner and saw a movie. I slept over on Roxie’s custom “Floor Bed”. We had a nice Sunday morning and then I came home. I was really sad to leave because it was something I had been looking forward to for so long and now it was over. Meeting the band was awesome, and spending two whole days with Roxanne was super fun. It was just such a good time for me.

Thank you kHz (Pull, Raiana, Will, and Joe)!

Thank you Roxie!

I wanna do it all again!

Seriously?

We’ve seen well over a year of daily, almost constant, media coverage of these candidates. Who doesn’t yet have enough information to make a decision? Is there really anyone out there who hasn’t made up their mind yet? And if so, should we really care about their opinions? Haven’t they been paying attention? If not, why not? Because they don’t really care, or their lives are too busy to pay attention to politics? Maybe they’re lying in order to attract attention to themselves?

I don’t know, but I can’t think of a reasonable excuse for not having made a decision.

This whole concept of being undecided this close to the election, after extremely long campaigns and extensive media coverage, doesn’t make any sense to me. I can imagine that someone might change their minds between now and the election, due, perhaps, to some significant upheaval or scandal within one of the campaigns. But I can’t understand how someone could claim to be undecided at this point in time.

I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise because maybe I’m missing something.

In related news, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is doing an interesting series on various aspects of both John McCain and Barack Obama. The two links below are to the transcripts of the stories on their styles of leadership. Each page has a link to watch the streaming video of the original broadcast as well:

• John McCain
• Barack Obama

But after reading the reviews on iTunes, I think it’s safe to assume that this new incarnation will be lucky to last through October.

The image below is of the first three reviews available on iTunes (at least as I write this, they may change later). You don’t even have to read the reviews themselves, the titles are more than enough.

• "There Are No Words to Describe How Terrible This Show Is"
• "Wow, the cheese is overflowing…"
• Any my personal favorite, "Dear God It’s Bad"

A few other choice titles from further down the list include:

• "Watching this made me feel embarrassed for NBC"
• "Written by nymphomaniacs?"
• "F@$#ing S*&t"
• "A Knight in Dull Velveeta is more like it"

I’d like to reiterate and expand on something I said towards the end of my Fact Checking post on August 24th. Here’s the portion I want to reiterate:

I want to touch on the “$12 trillion” drop in home equity. I don’t know if the figure itself is accurate. But the number isn’t important. What’s important is that the email doesn’t mention the even larger rise in home equity that started back in the late 1990’s, and ballooned into the now infamous “housing bubble” after 2001. Why did that occur? This takes us back to 9/11. Prior to that day, we had already seen a huge bubble in the stock market that was still in the process of deflating and was only hurt more by 9/11. One of the decisions made at that time was to drastically and quickly reduce the Prime Lending Rate, eventually all the way down to 1%. And it stayed low for a long time. This artificially low rate for such a long time made money “cheap” to borrow. Combine that with people being afraid of the stock market after what happened with that bubble, and you have a perfect recipe for real estate prices to skyrocket. People and institutions wanted to put their money somewhere, but were hesitant to go back into the stock market. They saw how cheap it was to borrow money, and the rest is history that we’re still living through.

I learned two more pieces of information this week that I’d like to add to the above as additional reasons for why and how all of this mess was able to happen.

1. In 1999, President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law. This Act repealed an important part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The Glass-Steagall Act was passed during the depression in response to the partial collapse of the banking system in 1933. Among other things, it contained several reforms designed to help prevent a similar collapse from occurring again. The part of Glass-Steagall that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed had to do with allowing different types of financial services to exist within the same company. The reason this prohibition was put in place is explained by this quote from a 1987 Congressional Research Service report:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bankers and brokers were sometimes indistinguishable. Then, in the Great Depression after 1929, Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. Hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud in some banking institutions’ securities activities. A formidable barrier to the mixing of these activities was then set up by the Glass Steagall Act.

President Clinton did not veto the legislation, but it likely would not have mattered if he had because it had been passed by the senate by a 90 to 8 (with 1 ‘present’) vote and the house by a 362 to 57 (with 15 ‘present’) vote, margins which were significantly more than veto proof.

Incidentally, Phil Gramm, co-sponsor of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, is now a Vice Chairman of (read lobbyist for) UBS, one of the world’s largest financial services company. UBS acquired the U.S. investment bank, Paine Webber, shortly after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was enacted into law. Oh, and did I mention Mr. Gramm was the co-chair of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign and one of Senator McCain’s senior economic advisers up until July 18th, 2008?

2. In July 2007, the SEC eliminated the Uptick Rule, which, similar to the Glass-Steagall Act, had been in place since the depression, specifically since 1938. I won’t go into the specifics of the rule itself, but its purpose was to help prevent what are called “Bear Raids” on a stock. A bear raid is trading strategy, some would call it a form of market manipulation, which can drive the price of a stock down very quickly. Although the uptick rule can’t necessarily prevent a bear raid, it does make it more difficult to accomplish, giving investors time to analyze the situation and the company itself time to counter the underlying cause (often a rumor, which may be true or false) of the bear raid.

The Uptick Rule does reduce, to a certain extent, the liquidity of the market, and its elimination doesn’t guarantee that a stock won’t plummet or the market won’t fall. However, many people argue that the loss in liquidity is a small price to pay for some defense against unscrupulous traders who seek to profit by short-selling a stock after starting a negative rumor concerning a company. In times such as we’re seeing in the market now, having the Uptick Rule in place may have helped cool some of the wild selling that we’ve seen in recent weeks and months. Last week, the Federal Reserve banned short-selling of approximately 800 stocks in the financial sector. It can be argued that the Fed may have been less likely to do this if the Uptick Rule had not been eliminated last year.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall may not have caused the real estate bubble and its subsequent bursting. And the elimination of the Uptick Rule may not have caused stock prices of major corporations to plummet. However, when combined with the economic conditions caused by the bursting of the stock market bubble and the 9/11 attacks, it is not unreasonable to think that the current crisis has been made worse because Gramm-Leach-Bliley was enacted and the Uptick Rule was eliminated. Only time, and the inevitable investigations, will tell. But in my opinion, some serious thought should be given to what impact and consequences these two events may have had.

The wood and the path I carried it down.
Click on each picture to see a larger version.

In case you’re wondering, I do have a standard natural gas heating system. The wood stove is just a nice extra.

This is all bunk, but still, I decided to go to the web to find out the real answer because the internet knows all.

Over the weekend, I was a little bored so I decided to see if something in the App Store might be of interest to me. I found a promising puzzle game called Enigmo from a company called Pangeasoft. I bought it for $5.99 and downloaded it. When I tried to launch it, it crashed, consistently, 100% of the time. So I went to Pangeasoft’s web site. It turns out they have a web page just for support for this particular app for the iPhone. Furthermore, they specifically discuss this particular problem and recommend some things to try to fix it. I tried all of their recommendations, but none of them worked.

The last Pangeasoft recommendation was to go to Apple’s web site and try their recommendations, which weren’t much different from the ones listed by Pangeasoft. The last recommendation on the Apple page was to file a report which would, “submit the report to the application developer”. This implies that, ultimately, it is the application developer’s responsibility, at least that’s how Apple views it.

As a customer, I don’t care who’s fault it is, Apple’s or the individual developer’s. So I decided to write to the developer via their support email to ask for my money back. Not because I was actually expecting them to give me my money back. I mean, c’mon, it’s only $5.99. But more out of my frustration at feeling cheated. I wanted to see what would happen.

I received a response from the CEO, Mr. Brian Greenstone, who said, “We just make it, we don’t sell it.”

Wow!!

He then said I should ask Apple about getting a refund. Fair enough. But damn, that is one helluva an attitude to take with your customers. No explanation, no apology, no offer to help me secure my refund. Even though they’re obviously aware of this problem, Pangeasoft doesn’t mention in the description of their game that this crashing problem exists and might possibly affect anyone who purchases the application. I would have liked to have known that before I made the purchase so I could have made an informed decision about whether or not to buy it.

Mr. Greenstone and I then got into a back-and-forth email argument about what I considered to be his lame treatment of a customer. He kept trying to focus on his contention that it was all Apple’s fault, which it might very well be. But as a customer, I don’t care who’s fault it is. He just didn’t get it.

Rest assured, I won’t be purchasing anything from Pangeasoft in the future.

If you click on the picture to the left to see the larger version, and then look in the middle of the right side of the picture, you can barely make out a set of parallel lines. Those are the tracks in the little dirt road that leads to my place.