Why is our economy in trouble?  Because the people with all the money accepted promises of money in lieu of money from way too many people who could not actually provide said money.  How did we get into that situation?  Because bans look for idiots to work with.  Why?  I don’t know why you’d set up your clients to fail knowing full well that if your clients fail you must also fail, but…

I can tell you how they managed to get so many people who couldn’t pay them: they actively recruited stupid people.  In fact, they still are.  Here is an authentic sales pitch from Chase (Freedom):

“CLAIM YOUR REWARDS NOW!” is a link to a PDF with a fantastic offer.  By spending so much money with my Chase Freedom card I have become eligible to… SPEND MORE MONEY!  But since I’ll be spending less money than if I paid full price for 3 magazine subscriptions that I couldn’t possibly want I will be SAVING MONEY! $154 in saving!  And all I had to do to earn the right to spend less money is to spend more money!

If lending and credit institutions cannot manage their greed then (uninformed) customers and (idiot) consumers will never manage their credit and we will all manage to run out of money. 

Try some mad libs:

We are in a/an _________(adj) financial crisis because ________(adj) _________(noun) owe/owes/owed money to ___________(noun) for __________(adj) ___________ (noun).  

Fill that out – please – because I have no idea where the money went, since I gather it never existed, which makes as much sense as reading glasses for a Texas Cave Salamander.

So in talking to fellow tiny god Sullivan, we came to discuss that our 10 year high school reunion will be potentially coming up within the next year.  I know some of the tiny gods are also from the great class of `99, and a few more are within a year or two either way.

So I pose to you the question, if your class holds a reunion, would you go?  If I got an invite to one, I would definitely show up.  The thing I can’t figure out is,  why?  Most of my “friends” from then transferred before we graduated.  Sully is the only person I would still call a friend from those days, and I don’t need a HS reunion to reconnect with him.  I’ve not had much contact with anyone else from high school.  Some were customers at my various jobs.  A few were co-workers.  A couple I ran into on campus, maybe I even had a class with one or two of them.  Aside from the “oh, hey, we went to school together” connection though, there isn’t anything there.  So why would I spend an evening in a room full of strangers?  There certainly won’t be any “remember when” moments, or anything like that.

For those of you reading this – do you have old friends to reunite with?  Do you need a class reunion for this purpose, or have you mostly stayed in touch with those people?   What good does it do to see these people from 10 years ago, when the next day, you are going to go about your life and forget about them for another 5-10 years.

anyhoo, i felt like ranting, and this seemed as good a topic as any.  perhaps someone who didn’t hate high school would like to chime in.

One of the things that has been holding me back while using Chrome is the lack of integrated delicious.com tools. I keep all of my bookmarks there and not having the ability to search them has been driving me crazy. Chrome has a feature that was sort of hidden, and does almost exactly what I want: Search Engines.

If you hit the Settings button and open up Options, you’ll see a section called Default Search. Hit the Manage button there and it will open up the Search Engines window. Make sure that the checkbox at the bottom for Use a suggestion service… is checked. Hit the Add button.

Name it whatever you want and give it a short keyword. I use “del” but youcan put whatever you want there. Then for URL, put this in: 

http://delicious.com/search?p=%s&u=[USERNAME]&chk=&context=userposts&fr=del_icio_us&lc=0

Obviously, you want to put your delicious.com username in there. also obviously, leave out the brackets.

Now when you want to search your delicious bookmarks, just type your supplied keyword and your search term into the address bar. I’ve setup several other Search Engines: ebay, thinkgeek, amazon, etc. In the URL above for the delicious search, you’ll notice that I slipped a ‘%s’ in there. That is where the search terms go.

I just figured I’d share this since it seemed like a really cool feature and I didn’t recall reading anything about it on launch day.

Hello, and welcome to the Tiny Gods lost-and-found desk. If you’ve lost something while visiting us here at tinygods.com, there is a good chance that you’ll find it here! What was that? You did lose something? Hmmm… You say you lost a Tiny Godcast? Well I do have one of those back here. These are very valuable items, so I hope you aren’t offended that I must ask you to describe it to me. I wouldn’t want you to run off with somebody else’s Tiny Godcast!

Ok, so you say that it includes:

• Sullivan’s busy new schedule?
• The career of a Guitar Hero?
• The secret criminal life of the dog-cloner?

It does look like this Godcast belongs to you. They are all very unique, after all. Are you sure you still want it? It’s pretty old. It looks like it has been sitting on Mandrake’s computer gathering dust for a few weeks. I guess that’s what happens when a responsible Tiny God such as Sullivan passes the task of editing to a lesser god, eh?

What’s that you just said? Tiny Godcasts get better with age? You are so right! Here you go, and have a nice day!

Download: tiny-godcast-ep07.mp3

Edit: Pasty asked me why I tagged this post as “Babe of the Week” and, even though I wanted to keep these sexy images off the site, I feel obligated to answer with PICS!

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Many of us are in this situation: our work/school runs a google apps account for us while we maintain a separate, personal account.  This is a problem when I want to check both Gmail-boxes without sharing mail between them – logging into one account will screw up the cookies for the other apps (Reader, Docs, Calendar, etc.).

Try this in Firefox, IE, Opera: log in to your work Gmail account, then open Reader and login with the same account.  No problems so far.  Now open a new tab and login to your personal Gmail account.  Go back to Reader and refresh and you see the problem.  The cookies are fucked!

Now try this in Chrome: log in to your work Gmail account, then open Reader and login with the same account.  Fine fine, now open a new tab in Incognito mode.  Log in to your personal account, Reader, Docs, whatever.  Head back to the non-Incognito window and refresh your mail and Reader.  It’s OK!

Bottom line: keep one account open in normal mode, keep your other account isolated to Incognito windows. There’s room for improvement, but this is a huge improvement over having to use separate browsers to manage your accounts (I used to use Firefox and Opera, now I’m 100% Chrome).

• The “application shortcuts” always default to non-Incognito, and I’ve submitted feedback asking for a command line switch or something to allow Incognito defaulted shortcuts.
• They could implement some kind of domain/namespace feature to precisely manage your Google cookies (ie. which windows or tabs/processes they apply to) so you could keep both accounts open in non-Incognito, or both in Incognito and generally manage the hell out of those fucking cookies.  

Here’s how Microsoft has pissed me off in the last 2 days:

[3 bullets and 4 updates below]

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Thanks to everyone who’s been maintaining the site – it’s running better than ever.  Here’s some dots:

• WordPress has been updated to 2.6.2 (from 2.6.1) so we’re up-to-date codewise. 
• The new theme is very slick (and supports Widgets) so it’s great to have that installed. 
• If anyone has suggestions or criticism for the sidebar/widgets or anything just go ahead and throw it in the comments for this post.
• We’ve discussed a lot of swanky changes for the upcoming author pages, I’m excited for the glorification!
• The new (2.6.*) branch has an improved Admin setup over the old code, so if you haven’t written a post in the last month – go give it a whirl!

Just awesome: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3169758
Some geniuses are making a site where you are gonna be able to download DRM free versions of old games for somewhere around 5 bones, that will run on XP and Vista.  It’s a sound plan and I endorse it.  I will be watching this one.  See?  Make things a reasonable price, and people are inclined to pay.  Some of the names include Fallout (for those of us who missed it the first time around), Planescape: Torment, and Redneck Rampage.  Here is to hoping it doesnt die screaming in legal.

Summer is drawing to a close, meaning that all of our favorite TV shows should be starting back up soon (if they haven’t already). Here are some of the shows I will be watching, in the order of their premiers:

Prison Break – Season 4 Premiere Monday, Sept. 1 (FOX)

Prison Break has definitely lost quite a bit from the first season or two, and the third season sometimes bordered on the absurd. I will probably watch the fourth season just because I’ve seen it all up to this point, but I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to make sure I see each episode as it airs, especially since it is on at the same time as Chuck, which I feel I have to watch since it is pretty much about me.

Entourage – Season 5 Premiere Sunday, Sept. 7 (HBO)

Entourage never fails to entertain. I look forward to seeing what happens with Medellin, and what kind of crazy stuff the boys get into this season. Season 5 is scheduled to run 12 episodes, and should see episodes with Sloan, Dom, and Saigon from previous seasons, as well as cameos from the likes of Mark Wahlberg and Tony Bennett.

Heroes - Season 3 Premiere Monday, Sept. 23 (NBC)

Season two was good, but wasn’t quite as great as season one was. It was shortened due to the writer’s strike, and we only saw 11 of the 24 episodes. Season 3 will bring us those other 13 episodes, as the “Villians” chapter, and then we will have a 12 episode “Fugitives” chapter. Looking forward to seeing Sylar return to his badass self.

The Office – Season 5 Premiere Thursday, Sept. 25 (NBC)

I’m kind of hit or miss in regards to The Office – I don’t go out of my way to watch it, or even catch up on missed episodes. Fortunately, that usually isn’t a problem. Sure, the episodes build a story arc over the course of the season, but you can just as easily tune in and watch a single episode and get some good laughs out of it.

Chuck – Season 2 Premiere Monday, Sept. 29 (NBC)

I watched the entire first season of Chuck while on our trip to PAX, and while it isn’t perfect, I enjoyed it. Perhaps it is because the main character is a guy named Chuck, who works for the “Nerd Herd” at a big-box retailer called “Buy More”. I dunno, somehow I can identify with him…at least up until the point where he learns all sorts of government secrets and gets a super hot CIA agent to protect him, under the cover of being his girlfriend. That part hasn’t happened to me yet. YET.

Lost – Season 5 Premiere in early 2009 (ABC)

Season four of Lost was pretty much fantastic – while I think season one is definitely the best season, season four comes in a solid second. There are only two seasons left, each one scheduled to be 16 straight weeks of episodes – no repeats, no breaks, which is why the season doesn’t start until early 09. I can’t wait.

What will you be watching this fall? Any recommendations?

I’m not a regular concert goer, but I’m going to bullet point and provide tidbits about all of the concerts. 3 from Friday, 4 from Saturday. (more…)