A friend at a costume party
Batman’s new ideals
I saw the new Batman movie the other day and the movie seems to be apologizing for the use of torture to fight terrorism, the use of unwarranted wiretapping and surveillance of citizens to fight terrorism, the use of local government and law enforcement and newspapers and television to deceive the general population “for their own good.”
While there is no sexual content, no swearing, and no blood and guts the twisted situations and themes of this film will have your stomach churning.
Is all of this honorable constitution and civil rights stuff just packaging for general consumption to make us feel good about ourselves while other more sinister values are being carried out in reality?
Koh Lanta video slideshow
Koh Lanta video slideshow here: http://www.wesedholm.com/?p=199
Koh lanta noi this morning
Visiting friends here for a couple nights. Small fishing villages and zero tourists. Not for long as they are building a bridge.
New video productivity… Bali videos, the Rythmatics,
Wells Fargo Gripes
I have one bank account with Wells Fargo and they have this handy feature that allows you to look at scanned pictures of all checks deposited into my savings account. This feature came in handy one or two times in the past and a couple minutes ago it would have come in handy however I was surprised that the feature is no longer free; they want three dollars per month to activate this feature. I guess I could call their 800 number and have someone help me… they probably charge for that now too. This online banking stuff allows customers to service themselves and must save the bank heaps of money; but the market is demanding more money. Another complaint I have about my Wells Fargo banking account is that I am only allowed five withdrawals from my savings account per month. The penalty is $10.
The problem is that I don’t know of any other banks that will treat me any better. I also have a key bank account; I don’t use them very much because they shafted me a year or two ago. I just tried to login to my online account with key bank and it is asking me to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to “confirm my identity”… it wants my credit card number, issue date, pin number, and that is just too annoying for me to tolerate. I think we need more competition in the banking sector.
I mean think about it, how do these guys get away with treating us like they do? And of course it only seems to be these large banks, phone companies, utilities, and credit card companies that get away with it. Wal-Mart treats their customers good. I’ve heard different about their employees… let’s not get started on Wal-Mart.
Does anyone know of a more customer friendly bank?
Skype was shafting me; changed my plan.
Somewhere along the lines Skype started to charge a “connection fee” of about four US cents per call. The dollar has continued its downward spiral making the €1.5 cents per minute more expensive yet. I was spending about $60 per month on Skype. I finally decided that that was just too much and was considering switching back to Vonage. The problem with vonage is that I can’t dial my contacts via voice recognition easily like I can with Skype.
So I got on to the Skype website and bumped into an unlimited landline plan to the United States for just €10 per month. This plan also included the voicemail and free phone number which I was paying extra for before. I immediately started thinking that this was too good to be true and simultaneously thinking that this was going to save me about $50 per month and cost Skype about $50 per month which led me to wonder why they would offer such a plan. I guess there must be heaps of Skype users out there who use less than €10 per month who would be suckers enough to buy it to make up for the money they’re losing when I sign up for this plan. Whatever the formula was I quickly signed up and am now deciding what to spend my extra $50 per month on.
Richard pryor
New Vocola voice-recognition command for searching my desktop with Google desktop search
I use Google desktop search to search my computer; up until now I didn’t spend the time to work out how to easily search my desktop using a voice-recognition command. Well now it is done and I thought I would share how I did it and what exactly it enables me to do.
Let’s say that I want to find all e-mails on my computer that contained the phrase “wild turkey”… I would say “desktop search for wild turkey” and voilà… the desktop search results would be displayed in my browser. Here is a Vocola command:
desktop search for <_anything> = SendSystemKeys( {Ctrl+Shift+f} )$1{Enter} Wait(2000) {tab_6}{enter}{tab_7}{enter} ;
My website on my new monitor
this is what my website looks like on my new monitor. I feel like an idiot for not doing this sooner. And that makes me wonder… what other idiotic things could I be doing right now?
