YouTube

Some time back PBS broadcast an excellent TV show, titled “Secret History of The Credit Card” through Frontline. I just found a YouTube version of the entire program and thought about posting them over here. The show (posted below in two parts) runs for almost an hour, so watch it at your own leisure.
Before you start watching the show, here is a small excerpt about it from the PBS Frontline website:

In “Secret History of the Credit Card,” FRONTLINE^® and The New York Times join forces to investigate an industry few Americans fully understand. In this one-hour report, correspondent Lowell Bergman uncovers the techniques used by the industry to earn record profits and get consumers to take on more debt.

“The almost magical convenience of plastic money is critical to our famously compulsive consumer economy,” Bergman says. “With more than 641 million credit cards in circulation and accounting for an estimated $1.5 trillion of consumer spending, the U.S. economy has clearly gone plastic.”

Follow this link for the videos:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/view/

I should acknowledge that, earlier (right after the show was broadcast), a couple of bloggers have linked to Frontline website where the entire show is available divided into 5 parts. However, I don’t think it received “enough” attention at the time. So this post is for those who missed the show on the TV and missed those posts too ; plus it never hurts to give some occasional exposure to important stuff like this.While you are here, make sure you also read a related article on Frontline’s website titled “Eight Things A Credit Card User Should Know“. Bookmark this stuff and remind yourself every once in a while.

This is a followup on my previous post about how Blogger and IE were screwing up my blog. I am almost html-illiterate and hence I am really averse to changing my status-quo from Blogspot to some new html stuff.

While I was changing templates, I stumbled across a few sites that talked about blogger enhancements/hacks. This site provides the script for creating a category list for blogger (apparently categorization in blogger is not possible directly like Wordpress). If you look at the right sidebar of my blog, there is a list under the title “Categories”. This list was created using the above script. The script makes use of blogger’s search and works and looks pretty cool. Although not perfect, it is better than having no categories at all. More blogger enchancements can be found here including changing background color, converting to three column layout, etc.

On a separate note, after my recent posting of a YouTube video starring Stewie and Brian from the Family Guy, someone asked me how to upload YouTube vidoes in your posts. There are two ways of doing this:

Method 1
First you need to register for YouTube which is pretty straightforward. Then, when you click on a move clip, below the movie clip you will see this box:Click on the “Blog Video” link and enter your blogger login and password (not YouTube password). YouTube will then add your blog. Once a blog has been added, everytime you click on “Blog Video” this box will appear:And now it’s as simple as the box says. Just put in the title and your text and click “Post to Blog” and you are done in no time !

Method 2
Do this, if you dont want to register your blog. When you play the video clip, on the right side of the clip you will see this box:
Copy the content of the field marked “Embed” and paste it in your editing window to insert the video. At times, when you publish the post, blogger will give you a error warning. If this happens, most likely you havent copied the embed script properly.

Check this YouTube video clip out. If my earlier post on payday loans was not very clear about the message, this will certainly be. A nice analogy indeed !:)

Feel free to interpret this in your own way. If you see someone else in Stewie (like credit card companies, phone companies..) please share your thoughts