The other day, my mother called me with a message that my grandmother wants to “secure the future of her great-grandchildren” with an “investment” in gold. I called my mom back and told her that was a terrible investment. Here’s why: since 1833, gold has had the incredible interest rate of 1.97% per year while the consumer price index, aka, “inflation” increased at a rate of 3.29% per year, since 1913. But that’s not such fair comparison, so how about comparing gold and CPI since 1975. That comes out to be 4.35% and 4.35% for inflation and gold, respectively. Good investment? I think not! Gold’s barely kept up with inflation. Something that I consider an investment performs better than inflation *after* taxes.

I listen to this fellow named Dan Miller. He’s a pretty smart guy and has some great insight in helping me to find the work I love. As such, I registered a new domain name: http://www.48dayspodcast.com. I’m a pretty picky person when it comes to audio quality so I “remastered” Dan Miller’s podcasts for my own personal use. Yet, I really want to share them with others, so I asked Mr. Miller if he would permit me to do so; if not, I’ll just create a site that basically links back to 48 Days.

TECHNICAL GIBBERISH
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A few days ago I downloaded iTunes to listen to a few radio broadcasts that I like to catch. Well, I can’t really say that I liked it. Sure, it’s pretty nifty, but it’s got a lot of stuff that I neither use nor care for. So while I was at Davis-Kidd with Amelia, I decided to pick up a book to kill a bit of time since browsing bookstores is not my idea of fun, they only have books that I don’t want, or if they do, books that I can’t afford. It was about podcasting. After reading for a bit, it mentioned a program called iPodder. I tried out this program a few years ago when podcasting was a relatively new idea but was fairly unimpressed. Now, it’s impressive, just like Linux, this little puppy is developed by its users. iPodder is now known as Juice. Check it out, it’s free.

It seems that the more reading, gaming, etc. that I do, the dumber people seem. The most recent offense comes from PC Gamer Magazine’s July 2007 issue on page 16. “And if you’re performance at either degrades as a result of too much…” (sic) Since when is a person “performance”? What the crap! Another comes from a television ad that’s been running for the past few days “In less then 30 days…” (sic) First of all, then denotes time, e.g., one then two; secondly, than denotes a comparison, e.g., one is more than two. How hard is that? Apparently it’s a lot harder than I’d expect. Another common terribleness is that of the incorrect usage of the possessive apostrophe when applied to a name that ends in an S. According to Purdue’s Online Writing Laboratory “add ’s to the singular form of the word (even if it ends in -s), e.g. James’s hat”. This is a fairly common screw-up by professional companies, *cough* Blizzard’s World of Warcraft *cough*, where the ’s is left off in favor of only the apostrophe. This is just wrong, the only known exception being that of religious origin, e.g., Jesus’ apostles and Moses’ stone tablet. Anyhoo, I’m done ranting. I don’t claim perfection, I just think that professional companies should be, umm, I dunno, professional…

This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system, had this been an actual emergency you would be S.O.L.

Well I moved my blog from bear_beats.livejournal.com to here. I’ll be moving over the old posts and eventually deleting my livejournal account. I was frustrated by the lack of customization available.

*Edit*

I’m not deleting my LJ account. I just installed a crossposter plugin.

I’ve decided to host my own blog since I’ve got my own domain name. It can be found here at bearsunderland.com