Was Gov Palin also Miss South Carolina?

We know she was almost Miss Alaska, but maybe she is also Miss South Carolina.



While this interview didn't touch on "the Iraq" or "the Asian countries", it did talk about the plight of "US Americans".



I do come at this from a computer science background, but it seemed to me that perhaps this isn't the real Sarah Palin! She must be kidnapped because she was replaced by a poorly coded artificial-intelligence robot who strings together political buzzwords.

I may be forgiving because I'm in the industry, but the machine was doing pretty well right up to the "one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today" phrase was not inserted in an appropriate place.

The end of Wachovia

Well, Wachovia got theirs yesterday when they became a part of Citigroup in a firesale. I'm pretty sure this all went down because of a run on the bank triggered by this blog post.

Certificate of Deposit Renewal Scam

In today's volatile markets, it is a good idea to hold some percentage of your portfolio in cash. One great place to park your cash you won't use for a while is in a certificate of deposit (CD). CDs are FDIC insured and lock in an interest rate for a given term. In exchange for a fixed term an interest rate, there is a penalty for early withdrawl of funds. CDs will typically yeild more interest than money market accounts in exchange for less liquid money.

Since CDs are very similar, you should shop around for a good rate before getting a CD. Banks know this and they've arranged a nice little scam to have a high initial interest rate and then turn around with a pitifully low interest rate in the future.

They'll give you a good up front rate (say 4.25% APY) for 6-12 months. Then when your term expires, they send you a form telling you your CD is about up and that if you don't want to change the interest rate they'll renew the account for the same term. However, these "renewal" rates are much worse than the prevailing "new money" rate. As an example, Wachovia is offering a new money 4.30 APY 12 month CD. However, their renewal rate is 1.2 APY for a 12 month CD. I'm not sure how long this link will work, but it is really telling how this scam works. A 300% difference in rates is completely absurd and below market in every way and is there only to abuse loyal customers.

You might claim this is not a scam, but at minimum it is totally immoral that these banks are not upfront about this. The only way to learn is through losing a lot of interest potential the hard way. When shoping for rates look at both the promotional rate as well as the standard rate.

So do yourself a favor, if you have a CD coming due, ALWAYS call and ask for the best "promotional" rate and threaten to take your money elsewhere if they don't give it to you. 10 minutes of your time can make you hundreds of dollars in interest. The Wachovia rep told me today that "everyone does this", but just because everyone does it doesn't make it right. I'm never going to bank at Wachovia again. Everyone may do this (maybe you lose 1.0% APY other places), but I've never seen it done to the level that Whachovia does. If I can't trust them to do the right thing on CD renewals, why should I trust them with my money?

Make your Windows machine easy to reinstall

I'm a PC, and I got myself PC in a bad state. There is a virus going around at work and I seem to have gotten it. Then when I edited my registry, I horked myself badly to the point where the only resolve was ritualistic sacrifice and rebirth.

This is the second time I've re-installed this machine and it was much simpler this time because I have a data partition that is not the same as the Windows boot partition. That way, I can keep all of the data on the data partition and blow away the operation system. Once the OS is re-installed and patched, I simply re-install all of my programs and I'm good to go.

I'd recommend this setup (at least for Windows XP):

Take your drive and carve it into two partitions when you get a new machine, a 20 GB partition for installing Windows and whatever is left for the data part of your system. Store all your files (music, movies, software, files, whatever) on the data partition. Just keep OS things on the Windows drive and treat this drive as temporary.

If there is a failure/spyware/virus/etc, then don't bother fixing it if you think it will take you longer to fix it than re-install Windows (regedit is probably the most terrifying program on a Windows machine). You can think of reinstalling Windows as your 30k mile checkup. Starting over from scratch clears all of the garbage you've aquired over the years and gives you a fresh start.

Note: I'm not going to pretend that reinstalling Windows is a trivial thing to do if you aren't in the industry, but neither is dealing with a sick Windows machine or having to buy a new computer everytime things get ugly.

While you re-install your machine, you can watch I'm a Mac ads on your laptop and wish you spent another $2k to be virus free.

New RSS feed and some site downtime

makethebestofwhatsaround.com is going to have some downtime this weekend as we move over to a new ISP. I appreciate your patience with this issue.

On another site maintence note, I now have my feed RSS feed "burned" through feed burner. If you currently use RSS, you can update to the new feed by clicking here and hooking it up to your favorite RSS reader. RSS is a great way to keep up with all of your friend's blogs without having to check them out on a weekly basis. Not that I know anyone who's done this, but it can be useful to check out these sorts of things during downtmie at work. I recommend Google Reader, only because it is what I use and I've never tried anything different. The old RSS feed should still work but is less cool because it doesn't have the word "burn" in it. Everyone loves fire.

MigreLief: Migraine prevention for less than a dollar a day

I've previously written about how bad migraines are. If you get chronic migraines, there are three standard classes of preventative medicine you can take to lessen their frequency.

1) Blood pressure pills
2) Anti-depressants
3) Anti-seizure pills

They all have annoying side effects that I didn't want to have. Blood pressure pills can lead to fainting. Anti-depressants make you feel artificially good. Anti-seizure drugs slow your brain activity down, which is bad if you think for a living. I didn't want to deal with any of those side effects.

The fourth option my neurologist suggested was taking a daily supplement. The idea with these is that historically migraine sufferers are deficient in certain minerals. The supplement gives you a dose of those minerals that lessen the chance of migraines. The one recommended to me by my doctor was MigreLief.

Their website looks like a scam. Its very late night infomertial and web 1.0, but I've yet to have a problem with them. You take two pills a day and they charge 20 bucks a month for the pills.

They have probably cut my migranes in 1/4th, and my last migrane was in late June. I'm really glad I've tried these pills because each migrane is the loss of a day.

These pill aren't without side effects. The riboflavin in the pills makes your pee turn neon yellow! That is something I can live with and I'm very happy to have fewer migraines. You should give it a try.

Spring Awakening comes to San Francisco

I've previously blogged about Spring Awakening, a great show I saw on Broadway. They are bringing a touring cast to San Francisco for a short run.

Of course, not everyone enjoys this show. An accurate reviewer said in the SJ Mercury:

Of course, most of the hard-core theater audience is way past adolescence, and some wonder what all the fuss has been about.

"The show is a letdown," says Bill Schwartz of SF Playhouse, "and should more accurately be called 'Hormonal Awakening.' ... I am of the older generation. It's not for me."

In case you forgot high school, the third song in the show reminds you that life can be a bitch:

Fake news: Palin's daughter's pregnacy confirms she is Pro-Life

This story from cnn.com if not fake news, is at least very confused news or a reporter desperate to find a story.

If you've been away for the weekend, the story broke that Republican VP Candidate Sarah Palin's unmarried daughter is having a child at age 17. For the record, Ms. Palin is a supporter of abstinence education.

Teenagers will do what teenagers do, so I'm personally not concerned with respect to the story. We all know that children are independent human beings that make their own choices and after a point, parents should not be responsible for the actions of their children, good, bad or ugly. For me, a lot of the interest comes from how the media and the talking heads are treating this story.

From the CNN story, as you can imaging the "Family Research Council" is a conservative, pro-family group.

"Fortunately, Bristol is following her mother and father's example of choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation," Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said.

Another segement continues:

Evangelical leader Richard Land also backed Palin completely.

"This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don't get it," Land said in a statement.

Oh wait, but she made the "choice" to keep the child, maybe you don't get it Rich. The fact that she has a choice and not a government fiat that decrees she must have the child sure seems like a good thing to Libertarian minded me. I love the fact that people can keep their children (unlike China) and the fact that people can choose to not have children (unlike America a while ago).

Granted, in her position, she has no choice as it would be the end of her mother's political career if she didn't have the baby, but that is another blog post.

Somehow someone being pro-choice to the people in these articles means they are pro-abortion in all cases and somehow choosing to have a child means you are pro-life when in fact it means you've made a choice. They missed the "choice" part. Pro-choice means a woman has the right to choose either an abortion OR having a child.