I’m primarily a Mac user. But occasionally, I need to test out my software on a PC. So a few months ago when Office Depot was offering big rebates on eMachines computers (what they’ll do is offer their own rebate in addition to manufacturer rebates so that you end up with a really hot deal), [...]

I remember in an economics class once hearing that everyone is better off if every place (country, state, town, region, whatever) produces and exports whatever they produce best and imports whatever somebody else can produce cheaper, and nobody puts up trade barriers. The idea seems great on it’s face–everyone is creating as much value as [...]

I had the idea yesterday that a standardized protocol could be created the enable email clients to interact with whitelist-based SPAM blocking software. Given the complexity of identifying SPAM by textual analysis, whitelist-based SPAM protection appears to be getting more popular. I plan to start using it myself with some of my email addresses in [...]

Wired News is reporting that the DOJ has dropped its investigation of the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps of US citizens because the NSA won’t give the DOJ lawyers security clearance. If somebody (ie. congress) doesn’t step in and protect the American people, this is extremely disturbing–the Bush administration violates any law they want (including the Constitution), [...]

The Bush administration, claiming national security concerns, plans to scuttle the suit alleging that AT&T illegally collaborated with the NSA to spy on US citizens. I’m becoming more and more convinced that, in the interest of the security of the citizens of the US, it’s time for members of the republican party to collaborate with [...]

I mailed in my tax returns a week ahead of the deadline. I got my federal refund today. It was $127 more than expected. I think I’d better take another look at the Book of Revelation, because something weird is going on here.

What do Japan, Germany and Italy have in common? No, I’m not talking about World War II. I’m talking about the fact that their English names aren’t the names they refer to themselves by–they’re exonyms (I didn’t even know there was a word for it till now!) Japan in Japanese is Nihon or Nippon, Germany [...]

You’ve heard of the 5 W’s–who, what, when where and why–possibly in relation to writing or analyzing news stories or press releases. The 5 W’s are also applicable to choosing keywords and sites for AdWords keyword or site-targeted advertising. For example, considering how these five dimensions relate to potential customers for CaRP (my RSS to [...]

Ars Technica has an article about an intellectual property case where someone if France sued someone in the U.S. for publishing something that’s protected by IP laws in France but not in the U.S. I’m a little torn on cases like this–we don’t want other countries imposing their laws on us, but we also don’t [...]

Wow, they still haven’t figured this out… Same problem as last year: when you download your transaction history from PayPal in tab-delimited format, each value is enclosed in quotes. That’s correct for comma delimited files, but tab delimited files are supposed to just have tabs between the data items with no added quote marks. So [...]