blueZhift Blog

Now that the first rushed Wall Street bailout plan has been rightfully swatted down, maybe it’s time to really work on something to solve the problem. Why not gather the finest minds in economics and finance together to form an Economic Manhattan Project? Give them say 3 months to come up with at least 3 plans to fix the mess and prevent its recurrence going forward.

It would then be Congress’ responsibility to select the plan to implement. Of course the plans would be subject to debate and compromise. But under the watchful eye of the public, I think there’s a chance that the temptation to slip back into the usual mode of congressional business could be lessened. (One can dream right?) In any case, at least we would have on the table some plans that make sense and might just work.

Sadly, I doubt that any such thing will come to pass this close to a presidential election. But it sure would be nice to put our vast intellectual resources in motion for the common good for a change.

Well how about that? The bailout bill failed in the House today. Now maybe they’re actually listening to the taxpayers who don’t want to be stuck writing a huge welfare check for the well heeled morons who got us into this mess. With little oversight, there is no guarantee that all the jobs that this bailout supposedly would save, would be saved at all. As soon as they get that money, it’ll be business as usual with those of us lower on the food chain getting the sack while the CEO’s and CFO’s figure out new ways to get around the lame rules this bailout supposedly imposes. And still, nothing in the bill to help the perhaps millions of Americans in serious mortgage trouble.

If the system needs to be fixed, then really fix it! We don’t need or want Wall Street Welfare. Take as long as it takes to do the job right so that this doesn’t have to happen again. I sincerely wish that the Congress could find its way to putting the people first for a change instead of their rich pals.

There aren’t really many things that make me rage, but blatant stupidity is definitely one of them, and injustice is another. Against the backdrop of thousands of people losing their homes and being tossed out on the street with little care or notice from the government, we’re preparing to bailout the fatcats who orchestrated this mess to the tune of $700 billion USD or more! *RAGE*

What’s the big rush? This crisis was primarily precipitated by unbridled greed and overly abstracted financial “products” that effectively hid the true risk of the underlying investment. In the end, Wall Street became little more than a casino. Now, why all the rush to turn over hundreds of billions of dollars to the same morons who got us into this mess? I would rather see a well thought out plan that was transparent and made sense come out in 3 to 6 months, than something pushed through quickly that can only further enable the gambling addicts on Wall Street.

The world is not likely to end in 3 months or even 6, but with the US presidential election little over a month away, I guess the politicians are afraid the voters will punish them if they don’t rush something through. Sadly, I scarcely believe the electorate is that smart, otherwise why on Earth would anyone even consider electing McCain and Palin a viable option? Sadder still, I don’t think anyone responsible is going to be punished for the financial meltdown that has taken place. I suppose punishing blind, reckless greed would be just too un-American… *RAGE*

Last month I finished up a new anime music video (AMV) to enter in Yaoi-con’s AMV contest. Making an AMV is challenging enough, but making a shonen ai themed one added an extra degree of difficulty. I don’t know if it made the finals yet, but I’m pretty happy with, and it is apparently rather popular with crossdressing enthusiasts on YouTube!

A few months ago, YouTube introduced the Insight tool which allows video creators to learn something about the people viewing their creations. You can see things like what countries your video is popular in, age and gender demographics of viewers, and the search terms used to find your video.

My new video, Nando Mo Hime-chan, uses clips from the anime series Princess Princess which features a trio of crossdressing boys, the Princesses. Apparently it was my use of the term “crossdressing” that directed a large number of viewers to the video shortly after I posted it. Even now, nearly a month later, about 25% of viewers come across the video after searching for videos pertaining to crossdressing. The data also shows that 75% of viewers of the video are males spread evenly from the teen years to the 60′s, while female viewers are primarily teenagers.

The long anticipated Spore has been recently released for the PC. I’ve been moving away from PC games to consoles for the last few years now, but there’d been so much hype around Spore that I had been tempted to buy a copy anyway. But now I hear that the DRM in Spore is so onerous that people are starting to pirate it en masse. Apparently, you can only install Spore 3 times on your PC for any reason. So if your machine is infested with spyware and you have to reinstall everything, you’re out of luck with Spore if you’ve already used up your 3 strikes. Having had to reinstall Windows on numerous occasions, I can see this as a likely scenario for many. So I’ll be taking a pass on Spore, unless it comes to Xbox 360.

It makes me wonder if the powers that be are intentionally trying to kill off PC gaming for good. Most pirates weren’t likely going to buy a legit copy of the game anyway, but onerous DRM can only scare off customers willing to pay cash money for it. This doesn’t sound like a very sustainable business model to me. It reminds me of my local CVS drugstore, which in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Chicago, has started locking up things like body washes. Rather than hire security to catch shoplifters, they instead treat all of their customers like criminals and in the process offend and thus lose paying customers like me!

I have no time for screwy DRM, but I don’t want to pirate Spore either, so I guess I won’t be playing it on the PC at all.T_T

I’ve been playing around with the Google Chrome browser since the beta was released a few days ago. Normally, I won’t bother much with new browsers since, well they’re all pretty similar by this time. But I decided to look at Chrome because after reading Google’s Chrome webcomic, aimed at developers, I was quite intrigued and curious.

The first thing that impressed me was how much noticeably faster Chrome is compared to Firefox on my machine. But in fairness, Chrome doesn’t have the plugins I have loaded in Firefox, still it is impressive. But to cut to the chase, on my machine at least, Chrome and YouTube videos do not play nicely together. Videos would play properly at first, but later they start to play then no sound and no motion video at all. Right now, that’s a deal breaker for me.

Some other things I ran into were buttons in which the text was truncated, and page time out errors on some sites. It was like Chrome gives loading a page faster than Firefox if the web server at the other end is a little slow, which is common for heavily trafficked sites. The button issue may be due to my use of Stardock Windowblinds, nevertheless, Firefox has no problem with this.

I’ll still use Chrome on and off as it is updated, but it’ll need a lot more polish before I would seriously consider replacing Firefox with Chrome. My hope is that Firefox may adopt the V8 javascript engine and some other Chrome concepts in future versions. I suspect that Google hopes for that as well and Chrome is just a friendly nudge.

Some people say that you should live every day as if it is your last. I kinda feel that way about the anime cons I go to. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to go, so I’ll keep it up as long as I can!^_^ So after some consideration, I’ve made plans to go to Youmacon again. I had such a great time last year, and this year promises to be even better. And, because I just can’t keep doing the same thing, I’ve decided on a new costume to make for the con. Just like the AMVs I make, I need to feel some passion about my cosplays. All I’ll say for now is that it involves a long red wig!XD

It’s hard to believe that summer has come to an end. Tomorrow the kids go back to school, which of course means that I am going back to school as well. *sigh* Well at least we got one last weekend of summer fun in before classes resume. The weather here was wonderful today, so we took advantage of it by going to see the Clone Wars which was fun. We followed this up with a stroll to a nearby park playground before finishing up with our traditional visit to Borders and some Wow Bao for the walk back to the car. It was a glorious outing!^__^