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So Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) completed its acquisition of Merrill Lynch (NYSE:MER) as of yesterday. Yet my holding in MER carried with zecco Trading has not been converted to BAC shares yet. I tried to enter orders to sell some BAC but the order was rejected and orders to trade MER are, rightly so, canceled.

It was not until after 3:40 PM before the conversion of MER into BAC appeared in my account.

And I have another bone to pick with zecco. It's margin interest rate, currently at 7.5%, is astronomical compare to it's non-frill peers, e.g. Interactive Brokers.

OK, it's not all negatives. Some positives are: 1) it's relatively quicker to transfer fund to and from the account. Deposits are usually available in two business days after initiated and withdrawals appear in the destination account in one business day. 2) Trading using the website is relatively painless. Unlike some brokers, it does not impose any restrictions in volatile stocks.

Windows Explore refused to run after a malware infestation. Instead, I always get an "Explorer.exe- Application Error" window with the following message:

The instruction at 0x01b00065 referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be written"

And the desktop will refresh after the window is closed. This happens only when the computer is in the normal mode. Using "System Restore" to restore the compute to any previous restoration point all failed. I googled around and most suggest I found seemed to be irrelavent. Until I found a suggestion to use "System File Checker".

System File Check in Windows XP will scan all protected files to verify their integrity. It will try to replace any file it found to be not the correct version. "System File Checker" can be run at command prompt "sfc /scannow". The computer must be logged in to a user that is the Administrator group.

Unfortunately, when I tried to run "sfc", it asks for Windows XP SP2 disc. I didn't have the disc handy. Eventually, I just installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). The problem went away!

As much as I'm a firm proponent of free market and self-responsibility, I strongly believe US are obligated to reimburse investors who lost money to Madoff at least an amount equal to their principle.

That is because the authority failed to do their job in uncovering the problem, despite wide spread suspision around Madoff's operation.

On the other hand, the Madoff affair is not an example of the failure of free market. It is precisely the opposite. It is a reflection of failure of the regulation. It is precisely because SEC has the authority to investigate but failed to do their job that give many investors a false sense of security. If the government would have stated that it "has no authority to investigate" and advise any investor to make their own investigation before entrusting their money to anyone. I'm sure people would be much cautious and suspicion of wrong doing in Modoff's part would be taken much more seriously.

I heard this argument by Glenn Beck on my way to work. Glenn argued against bailing out The Big Three. I was turned off by Glenn Beck when he promots GM automobiles in his program. Now he's shown his character by speaking out against the bailout of the Big Three when though GM is a big contributor to his program.

In the Thanksgiving gathering, the topic of conversation turns, naturally, to the current economic condition. When I made my remark that the country is in the best condition in the past twenty years, I was immediately countered by the question: "Compare to what it was twenty-five years ago when you just arrived in The States, was the economy better off today." Actually, I've been pondering about this question a lot lately and my "best of the times" remark was largely the conclusion from that. Maybe mentally I'm already approaching my 知天命(know my roles) years, I've been spending more and more time in reflecting the path I've been taken, and the path the country have been taken. And indeed, I see the country could econimically in the best condition than any time in the past twenty-five years. True, the country hit a speed bump and the economic activity today is slight off compare to what it was a year or two ago. True, auto industry is in need of putting into life support. Yet, amid all this groom and doom, a sense of insecurity finally set in.

A sense of insecurity has been absent for too long. After nearly fifteen years of nearly un-interrupted economic boom and a sweeping victory over Iraq of the Desert Storm. American people started to feel it is invensible. This sense of invincibity, reflected in the economy, is increasing willingness to take risks and as a result, we've seen a period of time of un-interrupted asset bubbles, in which, one bubble starts to form before the previous bubble fully deflate.

The first asset class to enter the bubbling stage is the stock. When Allen Greenspan gave the "irrational exuberance and unduly escalating stock prices" remark, the stock market laughed at it and never looked back again, so it seemed, for a long time.

The bubble of the stock market, at it's early stage, was in close cooperation of another bubble: the dot com bubble.

The dot com bubble eventually turned into a dot com bomb. While the dot com bubble was deflating, a much bigger bubble in real estate started to accelerate. Given that the home equity is by far the biggest portion of all the asset values, hopefully, this real estate bubble would be the ultimate bubble. So far we're seeing the effect of the bursting of such a bubble: it is bringing down the value of almost all kind of asset class.

I think the return of a sense of insecurity is good for the long term health of the economy. As long as the sense of insecurity does not turn into panic, it can set the stage for another long period of growth.

http://www.cycom.co.uk/howto/cvssshtunnel.html

ALEXANDRIA, Pa. — Rev. George M. Docherty, credited with helping to push Congress to insert the phrase "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, has died at 97.

I had been an opponent to the removal of the phrase "under God" from the Pledge, until that day on my way to work after dropping my daughter off at the Catholic school.

I changed my mind when I related the issue with guy marriage. The argument against guy marriage that I resonant with is the that it dilutes the meaning of the marriage. By the same token, if we force people that does not agree with God to pledge his allegiance "under God", it also dilutes the meaning of his entire allegiance. By that argument, I now support the removal of the phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance.

It turns out that Latex support in WordPress is not built-in. Instead, there're several plugins available to enable the use of Latex in WordPress. "WP Latex" appeared to be the "Official" plugin that is used by "blog.wordpress.com".

The plugin that enjoys five star rating is "Latex for WordPress". But I opt to use the newest one: "Easy Latex", released by the author only a couple of days ago. So far, it seemed to be working, as long as the math tag is appeared in the the visual view as plan courier font.

These are a couple of major accomplishes I made over the this long weekend.

1. Retired "Berlin". Replacing it with "Paris", a server-class beast, which is configures so all functions requiring the server to listen to the ports that's visible to the outside world are carried out in two virtual machines, hence isolating the host OS of "Paris" from the outside world at the boundary of the virtual machines.

"Andrew's Favorite Math" has been dormant ever since "Prague" and "Helsinki" were lost. Lately, I learnt that Latex works with WordPress. Reactivating the site becomes much appealing. So I Installed WordPress in "Mont-Valérien" and will import the archieved contents, hopefully, within the next few days.

2. Snow-proofed the shed. It has been consuming most of my Saturdays for the past six month. Yesterday (Saturday) was dry and I took the opportunity to lay down the rest of the roof felt to protect the roof deck from water. Shingles will probably wait until next spring. The shed has been nice and cozy for the past week. Today I moved several wheel barrows of gravel to form the ramp so I can move the lawn tractor to it's new home, freeing it's place in the garage for my car.

All-in-all, it's been a productive weekend.

The latest cvsnt is not compatible with wincvs.