I’ve been sick the past couple of days and have been watching movies to pass the time mindlessly. I signed up for Netflix at a handy time, and was able to watch via Watch Instantly. I watched some entertaining movies, but I also watched a couple of documentaries. Netflix has a nice collection of documentaries available via Watch Instantly.

One that I watched was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. One idea that the movie put forth was that Enron’s partners were complicit in Enron’s fraud. The mark-to-market accounting was key to how long Enron was able to keep its house of cards up, but they needed to keep getting new infusions of cash to keep things going. The companies that bought into Enron’s continued existence certainly didn’t look very deeply at Enron’s ability to keep on paying. One, Merrill Lynch, even temporarily took some barges off of Enron’s hands to pull them off of Enron’s books. A bunch of banks bought into Enron’s LJM2 company which was used to pull more debt off of Enron’s balance sheet.

Arguably, Enron was a complex business and it was hard to understand all of the workings of the company. But, if you’re a bank that is considering investing, isn’t that a red flag? Complexity certainly doesn’t seem like a feature to me. The banks could have been taking it on faith and Andersen’s good name that Enron was turning out fantastic performance, but a writer for Fortune magazine managed to sniff out the trouble. You’d think the people forking over billions in investments could too.

I also watched a bit of Maxed Out. The movie talks about big banks’ predatory lending practices and how targeting people who will have trouble paying is good business for them. These are many of the same banks that invested in Enron.

Those are also many of the same banks that got bitten earlier this year when those bad mortgages they’ve been taking on (and CDOs they’ve been invested in) finally came back to bite them for real.

The phrase “too big to fail” has been bandied about, with respect to some of these companies. It occurred to me that maybe the converse is true. These companies are too big to not fail. They have so many executives and independent businesses that are out to produce outsized returns and win big bonuses that some of them are likely to take irrational risks and lose giant sums of money. With enough leverage, the amount of money lost could be enough to sink the parent company.

So, if these companies are going to run themselves in such a way as to allow these kinds of losses, they should also be allowed to fail. Or they shouldn’t be allowed to get “too big to fail”.

I do also think that a focus on quarterly profits and day-to-day stock prices, rather than the long term health of a business, is another thing that leads to problems like Enron and bad mortgages.

By the way, I know that all documentaries come with biases. I am sure there are other sides to these stories. However, there are plenty of indisputable facts out there. It’s grating that we, as citizens who are footing the bill for these mistakes and as shareholders in these companies, are not being looked after by Congress and Boards of Directors.

SCENE: Unnamed strategy room in the West Wing.

Bush: Hey, Gatesy. Look, our boy M.C. Cain is running a bit behind in the polls. This economy thing is really a drag. We need to do something militaristic to make M.C. look like the choice.

Gates: What do you have in mind?

Bush: Maybe we can bomb someone, or invade someone? How about Iran? They’re downright Un-American!

Gates: Sir, with all due respect we’re already stretched a bit thin with our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush: Well, c’mon. There’s gotta be something. That’s what I pay you for. Figuring out who to invade. What can we afford?

Gates: I think I’ve got a free helicopter in Iraq. We could send that into Syria. Take out a couple of civilians.

Bush: Syira? Are we at war with Syria?

Gates: Of course not. But, that would certainly stir things up a bit.

Bush: Gotcha. Okay, let’s rock and roll!

Whatever the local military factors involved in this US operation, it would be unthinkable to imagine that an incursion into Syria would not require a policy decision at a high-level.

At work, I’ve been busy with our various products, and trying to squeeze in some time to prepare for my four (!) talks at PyWorks. Yowza.

At home, I’ve been busy with the usual things that one is busy with when you have a child, a wife and a house. In addition, I’ve been working on a top secret project that has been brewing (in my head, and only recently in reality) for a long time.

Blogging will pick up again. This is just the way things go!

A company called OLO Computer is working on a small laptop that’ll cradle your iPhone and allow you to use it with a large screen and full keyboard.

[From DVICE: OLO to turn your iPhone into a laptop]

This thing looks cool. It just needs to:

1. Come into existence
2. Work
3. Not cost a fortune
4. Not somehow get shutdown by Apple

I was thinking that the eeePC looks pretty neat, but this could be even nicer.

This is not surprising:

In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on — “and recorded and transcribed” — the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. The two former NSA employees, who came forward as part of journalist James Bamford’s forthcoming book on the NSA, intercepted calls as part of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” whereby George Bush ordered the NSA in 2001 to eavesdrop on Americans’ calls in secret, without first obtaining judicial approval as required by the law (FISA). That illegal eavesdropping continued for at least six years — through 2007.

[From Major shock: Eavesdropping powers abused without oversight - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]

It’s just sad. President Bush has done so much damage to our country in so many ways. This is why it’s disappointing that the clock has run out to impeach Bush.

Fantastic-looking new Mac-only, WebKit-based web browser from the creator of Fluid: Mecca.

User scripts and plugins make it more like Firefox. It has some really nice looking UI features.

While I generally agree that there is more than just openness to choosing between iPhone and Android, I do take issue with this quote in an article that compares iPhone development and Android development:

The first generation iPhone sold pretty well, but was only after the debut of tools like push email — intended for business use — that sales of the iPhone 3G soared.

[From Macworld | iPhone Central | Opinion: iPhone trumps Android]

To try to make the connection that the iPhone sales increased because of features like push mail completely ignores the fact that iPhone sales increased after the price dropped to $199. The ability to install new applications and a huge price drop undoubtedly did a lot more to grow iPhone sales than push email.

ScreenAction Studio is a $16 screencasting tool that sounds like it has a lot of features. I find it a little disturbing, though, that they don’t have any screencasts or even screenshots. But take a look at that feature list:

Screen Capture:
– Captures & records on-screen actions
– Highlight key points using a fixed, smooth, auto panning, or scrolling camera
– Change cameras live during capture
– Record with date & time
– Record with audio, or add voice-overs & music
– Control the size & frame rate of your movie capture
– Splice multiple segments into one full length movie
– Add transitions for a smooth project flow
– Supports all popular movie & audio formats

Video Editing:
– Select any spot in your Action History to revert your project to that point
– Special effects & filters make your project a “big budget” production
– Widescreen & Fullscreen movie settings
– Add text, captions & credit effects
– Audio scrubber & mixer
– Loop & repeat options
– Paint & Draw directly on your frames
– Group & ungroup your project clips
– Blending modes
– Unlimited undos
– Color & lighting control
– Picture-in-Picture (PIP)
– DV & FireWire support
– Script & brush editor for advanced users

[From Mien Software]

I’ll probably have to give it a try one of these days, but it will be hard to convince me to move away from ScreenFlow.

Does anyone doubt that at some point soon Congress is going to pass a bailout? Sure, they didn’t pass the bailout yesterday but another bill will come along to take its place. In the meantime, stocks fell between 5 and 10% depending on the index you are looking at. It seems likely to me that Wall Street is going to come roaring right back just as soon as the bailout bill passes. What do you think? Is a 5% return over one week a pretty good deal?

Update: It’s not really surprising that people are back to buying today after yesterday’s massive selloff.