I first heard one of Bank of America's promotions for their new "Keep the Change" campaign while on a business trip last Spring in Arizona. The idea sounded preposterous - the bank would help you save money by taking the difference between your debits and the nearest whole dollar and depositing it into your savings account - theoretically helping you create a nest egg for the future. Somehow, they expect that we have no financial planning abilities, and that the nickels and dimes they transfer from one account to another will make us all rich some day, something we couldn't have achieved on our own, through stocks and bonds, real estate, or common sense.

Now, the commercials are getting more air time. This evening, during Winter Olympics coverage on NBC, an ad featured a young boy doing the math in his head while his mother paid for groceries. He gleefully spouted off 87 cents if she had been charged $4.13. Oh, what a bright young man, and how lucky we are for Bank of America to come to his family's aid and prepare for his inevitably illustrious college career! Ridiculous. If his parents have to rely on Bank of America to guard their piggy bank, it's not likely that little Johnny is going to make it to a community college, let alone a reputable four-year university.

The "Keep the Change" campaign effectively gives Bank of America the right to overcharge you not just on a small number of your purchases, but EVERY purchase. It guarantees that you will always pay more than the cost of goods. It gives Bank of America the right to take even more money from their clients and invest it as they choose to make even more money for the bank. And what is the likelihood that this campaign will even be around when it's Johnny's turn to brave the SATs? Marketing programs come and go, and with silly exceptions like Free Checking, most don't have much staying power. And what if Bank of America merges or gets swallowed up in some future unforeseen acquisition. Will the program continue?

Bank of America has always annoyed me. They're the IBM or GM of banking. Huge, but not offering anything positively differentiated from the competition. I've used Wells Fargo for the better part of a decade, and I can't remember the last time I stepped into their branches. My online banking does everything, and it doesn't ask me if I want to "keep the change" or get fries with that.

There's a myriad of blogging applications out there. The most famous are Web hosted, from Google's Blogger to Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal offerings, while other user-customizable applications include WordPress and iBlog. For me, when I was looking to move away from strict HTML, driven by Bare Bones' BBEdit, I needed a few things - the ability to keep my louisgray.com domain name, the ability to post new entries while retaining access to site history and categories, while also not requiring massive SQL server maintenance.

After downloading a number of programs, running them, installing them and hoping all would work out, I stumbled upon the answer - RapidWeaver, from Realmac Software. RapidWeaver not only accomplished everything I was looking for, but it easily integrates with Apple's iLife applications, so if I choose, I could post a photo journal, run a podcast, or manage a more global site, beyond the blog.

RapidWeaver is a stand-alone Mac OS X application, which comes standard with a variety of customizable themes, offers comments, powered by HaloScan, and has a very simple interface. It's not perfect - we're still aching for the introduction of permalinks, which they swear are coming in version 3.5 in the next few months, and it's not portable - meaning I can only update from the home laptop. As a result, you'll see a dramatic scarcity in blog entries, say between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Monday through Friday.

If you run Mac OS X (and you should), and want to get started, I'd say give RapidWeaver a shot. You can download a trial here.

Much ado is being made these days about "Web 2.0", which loosely refers to both a user-driven, highly customizable Web experience, represented by Blog sites, photo and movie hosts, but also Web-driven applications, like Google Maps and Google Earth. Some companies have tried to rebrand themselves as Web 2.0 companies, even with only minor changes to their product offerings and business model. A great example of this is Zazzle. Like Cafe Press before it, Zazzle offers users the ability to customize everything from T-shirts to mousepads with their site logo or Web address.

Last week, I thought I'd muck around with Zazzle, and found myself taking a photo I had of our 16-year-old beagle, and framing it into a postage stamp. I ordered 3 sets of 39-cent stamps with Molly on them, posing on our couch. Two sets will go to my wife, and the third, to my mother-in-law, who loves her little grand-dog. They arrived today, and should start hitting envelopes tomorrow. Cute, but not exactly what I associate with next generation Web apps. Just cute.

Dick Wolf, the producer behind the mega-hits Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent is back at it again with yet another courtroom drama, called Conviction. This drama has been said to focus more on the characters than on the cases, in a significant change from the traditional L&O series we've known for more than a decade.

NBC is getting behind the show in a big way - offering heavy promotions through the Olympics, and in what's a world first, that I know of, the show's pilot is available for download on iTunes before it airs on TV.

You can get it now: Conviction Pilot: Free

The download weighs in over 200 MB, but the price is right, and it just may be a good show after all, one to add to the TiVo season pass roster, should it rival the originals in quality. The show is set to debut on Friday, March 3rd on your boring old television.