Strange and sad news...

I got a phone call from a buddy, who told me he had news about a guy we both used to work with. I'll call him "Bill." Way back when, I spent quite a bit time with Bill outside of work, and considered him a friend. I hadn't heard from him in a long time, but attributed that to just being busy.

Apparently, Bill's life went off the rails. Big time.

It seems that at some point he sold the Financial Planning practice he inherited from his father. This was a VERY mature practice with at least 50 million in Assets Under Management, and easily generated at least $300,000 in annual revenues. Apparently, he ran it into the ground, and most of the clients left. By the time he sold it (for $200,000) there was basically only a handful of remaining accounts.

In September of 2004, he was arrested for misdemeanor DUI, and felony drug posession. He pled guilty to the misdemeanor, and got the felony dismissed. He paid a fine, and got 3 yrs probation. Essentially a slap on the wrist.

On New Year's Eve 2006/2007, he was arrested for Kidnapping, Rape, Assault and Robbery. Yes - all FOUR charges in one fell swoop. He's currently in prison in lieu of 2.2 MILLION DOLLARS bail. He's done. His life is over.

In retrospect, he was a pretty messy drunk. Acting really stupid, etc. I just never would have imagined he got that bad.

Springdoo is COOL

UPDATE: Springdoo was cool. They no longer offer the service I was talking about.

Nappy-Headed Ho!!!

The 3 men who stood accused in the "Duke Rape Case" have been exonorated, but not without tremendous cost. Their families have not only suffered, but spent millions to provide legal representation for their sons.

The lying accuser is named Crystal Gail Magnum. See the following link:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0411071duke1.html

Imus was wrong. Now THIS is a nappy-headed ho.

I hope fate follows her and truly serves justice upon her.

Finally got an iPod... and my XBOX 360 likes it...

I finally broke down and got an iPod. I loaded it up with a bunch of music, video, etc.

I love it. It made my recent trip to Hawaii much more pleasurable, and my upcoming trip to Florida will put it to more good use.

However, I also have an XBOX 360, and had understood that I'd be able to plug the iPod into the XBOX 360, and play music from the iPod on it.

I installed the "Optional iPod support" from XBOX Live.

I plugged in the iPod. The XBOX 360 shows all of my content but doesn't play it. Even worse, it seems to crash the XBOX 360.

I figured out why. The "Optional iPod Support" module assumes that the content on iPods is AAC. All of my content is MP3.

This seems kind of stupid, since the XBOX 360 natively supports MP3.

Microsoft seems to have no clue about this issue yet, and I can't seem to find out anything about it on the web. Hopefully someone really smart will read this and help me out...

UPDATE: Apparently, only some of the songs on the iPod exhibit this action. The songs affected are from a Blue October CD I ripped ("Foiled") on my MacBook to iTunes, and from there to the iPod.

It seems only songs ripped from that particular disc are affected. All the other songs seem to work fine... My bad... ;)

Zales ad - deceptive or honest...?

I just saw an ad for Zales Jewelers. They were advertising a sale on a specific style, saying that it was $$$ less than the regular price.

The shifty part is at the bottom of the ad. "Previous prices may not have resulted in actual sales."

In other words, they normally sell the item at an artificially inflated price.

I guess they get credit for admitting the whole thing, albeit in fine print...

Just getting started

I've just started this, and I have no idea what I'll do with it...

Stay tuned...