Taxes

In Canada, taxes are due April 30. Guess who's just doing his now?

For years (more than 10), I have been filing my taxes using tax software. Back in the old days, we used to have to print out our tax returns (on special BLUE paper) and then stuff it into an envelope (which barely fit) to mail it in. It wasn't long after that Revenue Canada (now called the CCRA -- our IRS) experimented with electronic filing. I must have been one of the first to try that. There was no Internet back then -- or at least, it was still acedemic at the time. That seems like 10 years ago at least.

So here I am, at 2:00am on the day they are due, filing my taxes. And what do you know... I discovered a bug in QuickTax. Off to the Intuit website. You know, for a company named Intuit, the web site is not very intuitive. It took me 1 minute to discover that the web site didn't have a record of my bug in its knowledgebase, and 29 minutes to find the phone number for tech support. "Intentionally hiding the tech support number -- a sure sign customer service is a top priority!"

To top it off, the tech support number is LONG distance for me. Geez, louise! Can't you even afford a 1-800 number? OK, I figure it'll cost me a few bucks on my phone bill -- I need to get this fixed tonight. I call the support number, at 2am remember, and am told by a computer voice that the current wait time "exceeds 60 minutes". What? Excuse me? 60 minutes of long distance to talk to a rep who probably can't help me anyways. Uh, no thank you.

Why do I keep purchasing this software? These bozos at Intuit have proven, time and time again, that they are the most customer unfriendly company on the planet. 30 minutes just to find the phone number? At least 60 minutes on hold for a long distance call? This wasn't free software - I paid money for it.

Oh, the company did offer to help me right away for $20 (priority support). Hey, it's your bug! I'm not paying for support. Paying for tech support is the most ludicrous invention ever. I'd pay if it turns out I did something wrong, but not if you have a faulty product in the first place.

End of rant.

A win for P2P

A court threw out most of the lawsuit filed by music and movie producers against two P2P software providers -- Streamcast and Grokster.

This is important, because both parties acknowledge that P2P will become a significant technology for things other than sharing MP3s.

Yay!

Baghdad Chief of Police

I saw an interesting story over the weekend about one of the problems of returning Iraq back to normal.

In one day, four men showed up at American military sites in Baghdad claiming to be the former Chief of Police for that city and wanting his old job back. After doing some background checks, the Americans determined that none of the four men were actually the police chief. That strikes me as funny. Can you imagine the number of people who show up wanting their old jobs back, as government employees, etc.? How on Earth would the Americans be able to tell if someone is telling the truth?

I also saw a piece where people are annointing themselves to certain positions without U.S. approval. One guy is going around calling himself mayor of Basra. Many men are claiming to be police officers, and the Americans are having a tough time recognizing the real police officers from the self-appointed ones.

And finally, this morning I heard the Americans found $600 million in U.S. cash stashed away in one of the palaces. $600 million. In cash. Wow. Three things came to mind. One, that's a lot of paper currency. How the hell did Saddam acquire so much? Did he just call the U.S. Treasury one day and place an order? Second, do you think the soldiers were tempted, just a little bit, to stuff some of the cash in their boots. I mean, if $100,000 goes missing, noone will notice. Heck, maybe $605 million was found, but they decided to "round down" if you get my drift. If I was a soldier, I would certainly think about "liberating" some of that money if I thought I could get away with it free and clear. And the third thing that came to mind is, I wonder where that money ends up. I mean, is it like "drug money" in which the army gets to use it to pay its expenses? Will the CIA use it to topple the next regime? One thing is for sure -- you and I will never hear about this money again. People will forget, and the money will one day just disappear from its storage location.

Throw away SMTP

I've had an idea similar to this for years. SMTP should be changed to require some form of source authentication. Headers should not be forgable. Scrap the protocol if need be, who cares if some applications break or need upgrading. The insecure way of sending emails should no longer be supported - period.

The article suggests some form of secure digital certificate should be required as a prerequisite to sending email. And servers should enforce send limits. Those are good ideas, and I support them.

I think even a simpler approach would work. Basically, all email should be tracable to a particular source IP address on the Internet. No exceptions. How hard is that to do? My email client could then be configured to ignore all email from that source. In fact, ISP's can set filters upstream to ignore those emails for me.

Let's assume that most spam is sent by big honking servers located outside North America. Block those addresses upstream, and blam. The amount of spam (and the amount of network bandwidth spent sending spam) are instantly reduced. How could spammers possibly get around this? Send spam from their own PC's. Blam. Those are blocked too and the spammer can't send any email, even legitimate. Hack into other people's servers (open SMTP relays), then Blam. Unsecure servers are blocked until the admins properly secure them. There is no way around such a system.

Service

I do all my banking through either the ABM machine or the Internet. The only time I have to venture into a branch is when I want to do something really obscure like foreign currency exchange.

A couple of months ago, I noticed a strange service charge on my account. Normally, I don't scrutinize the charges, but this was big enough for me to care. So I called the bank's 1-800 number. The lady on the other end reminded me why the fee was deducted, and as soon as she told me I was satisfied. But just when I was about to hang up, she asked me if perhaps I'd be interested in their lower fee account.

"Hold on a second", I said. "There's a lower fee account?" Yes, it's a new product they introduced a year or so ago, that would reduce my bank service charges by 66%. Instead of paying $15 a month on my business account, it would be less than $5. Nothing else would be different. The things I pay extra for now (Internet banking) would be included free.

Of course, I took the lower fee account. But why wouldn't they just charge me the lower fee to begin with? Why do I have to accidentally stumble into finding out about this new account type? If I qualify for the lower fee, call me or send me a letter ASAP! I want to be notified right away!

And today, I was talking to my cable company. Again, by accident -- there is a problem with my cable connection. As I'm speaking to the rep, he asks if I would like to switch to their bundled service. Huh? Oh, you can save $10 a month and it would be no different to what you're already getting. OK, switch me to the bundled service then.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that people who subscribe to a service (cable, phone, bank, etc.) and leave it alone generally don't save money. If you check in with the 1-800 sales reps every six months, you can save some real money over the long term.

I might just phone my phone company today and see if there is anything they can do to lower my bill. And the cell phone people.

Scott

Inifinte loop

It's interesting what you come across when you search the Internet for your own name.

This blog's first shout out::
Feedster blog

Thanks Scott Johnson. Love your site. Feedster rocks.

What Kids Call Each Other

A couple of years ago, I caught my 5-year old nephew calling his 6-year old sister "Monica Lewinsky" as an insult. She was greatly offended. Great shouting ensued. "No, I'm not." "Yes you are!" Once the fight broke up, I asked each of them if they knew who Monica Lewinsky was. Neither did, of course. But I found it funny.

Last week the same kids were calling each other terrorists. "You're a terrorist." "No, you're one!"

My generation was the MTV generation, I guess if their generation should be called the CNN generation.

Apple Valuation

As an addendum to a previous post:
Fact 1. Apple has $4.5 billion in cash
Fact 2. Apple's market cap is currently $4.7 billion

Thus, the stock market apparently views Apple's business (of selling computers) as being worth around $200 million. In that light, AAPL stock is a bargin these days. But only if you think the company will continue to make a profit.

Love Is In The Air

Don Box discusses how Microsoft is ready to become a developer-loving company again, after losing its focus in the last few years. Sounds exciting.

I remember receiving a whole bunch of gifts from Microsoft back in the late 1990's and I was always really excited by them. Then, in the last couple of years the gifts stopped. Microsoft should be giving away gifts again...

The Demise of Sun Microsystems

Robert Cringely had an interesting article last month:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030213.html

He opined that Sun, losing money hand over fist these days, will go out of business in 5 to 10 years. Essentially, the combination of Linux with cheap Intel/AMD servers will dry up Sun's bread and butter -- it's server business. Noone will want to pay $60,000 for something they can get for $5,000, and Sun can't afford to drop their prices too far too fast - the economics are working against Sun big time. Robert states that Sun is really going to have to make a bold move in order to survive, but he doesn't know what that move should be.

I, for one, never liked the fact that Sun seemed obsessed with what Microsoft was doing all the time. Scott McNeely loved to make jokes about Microsoft and Bill Gates, and did so at every opportunity, but he should have been MORE obsessed about his own business, not Microsoft's. Novell had the same obsession, and look what happened to them. Apple, for a few years, was Microsoft obsessed too, but they turned things around with the iMac and now OS X. Folks, it's not rocket science. You win the race by racing as fast as you can from the start to the finish. Sun has spent too many years standing still, too many years making jokes, too many years trying to win by lawsuit what they couldn't win in the free market. Even if they win in court, there's no way to receover all those lost (directionless) years.

Feedster

This feedster thing is cool. Think about it. Through web logging, and now search engines for web logs, you can now search out other people's opinions at the click of a mouse. It's like instant polling. This might the first time in history that human opinion was cataloged so effectively.

Stress

I have so many things on my "to do" list now that it is scary. I wish I could clone myself for a couple of days, so that I would have a chance to get things done. After the work is finished, my clone would have to disappear of course. I enjoy being unique.

Question: let's assume science is finally able to clone a human, so I can order a clone of myself. How would you know which is the clone and which is the original? Probably by tattoos, piercings, scars, calluses, wrinkles, etc. Even a DNA-clone would not have those things... In fact, an exact clone would be "too new".

Another question: Do identical twins have identical fingerprints?

Laci Peterson found?

Police find the bodies of a woman wearing maternity clothes and a baby boy along the shoreline of the same bay Scott Peterson said he was fishing. Could they be of Laci Peterson and her unborn child? There's a good chance.

On a completely separate and unrelated note, why would you dump your wife's body in a lake, and then tell police you were fishing at the same lake at the time of the murder? When they find the body later, you've basically implicated yourself.

Scott

Both Apple and Microsoft want Universal Music

I read an article (in the New York Post) that said both Microsoft and Apple were interested in buying Universal Music. The article said "the prospect of a tech giant like Apple or Microsoft delving into the music business is an affirmation that it is possible to make digital downloading profitable".

Is Apple a "tech giant"? I mean, no offense to all those that love the company's products, but can they be compared side by side with Microsoft? I kind of view Apple as a David, next to the big Microsoft Goliath. I'm sure alot of Apple fans do too. When I think tech giant, companies such as AOL, Sony, Philips, LG, etc..come to mind.


AAPL
Sales: $5,742 Mil
Income: $65 Mil
Market Cap: $4,895 Mil


MSFT
Sales: $28,365 Mil (+393% more than Apple)
Income: $7,829 Mil (+11,944% more than Apple)
Market Cap: $264,859 Mil (+5,310% more than Apple)


SNE (Sony)
Sales: $57,117 Mil (+894% more than Apple)
Income: $70 Mil (+7% more than Apple)
Market Cap: $29,820 Mil (+509% more than Apple)

It appears that, on the basis of market cap, Microsoft is 54 times the size of Apple. Sony is 6 times the size. Microsoft being almost a pure software play is almost all profit. Apple, being mostly a hardware play, has very thin margins by comparison. Sure there are other ways to compare the two. But it would all work out the same in the end. Microsoft could purchase all of Apple at current market prices just with one year's profits, and have enough left over to buy every single American man, woman and child dinner at McDonalds including dessert.

Thanks to the Globe and Mail for the Shout Out!

Do you think Jeferey Simpson of the Globe and Mail reads this blog???

Mr. Simpson's latest column appears to be his personal take on the removing the weeds column I wrote myself a couple of days ago.

Thanks Jeff.

Steal This Blog

OK, I need to take a break from thinking about this silly war. My favorite TV clip from the past couple of days, the scene of three or four Iraqis pushing a cart full of stolen goods past American troops at a checkpoint of some sort, waving at the troops in joyful happiness... and the troops waving back. Yes, the sweet taste of freedom... being able to steal whatever you can carry, and burn whatever you cannot.

The saddest thing I saw was a scene of the empty Iraqi Museum, which used to contain artifacts from 5,000 years of human civilization. Heartbreaking. That treasure didn't just belong to Saddam Hussein. It didn't just belong to the Iraqi people. The treasure in that museum belongs to the whole world. A quote from CNN... "Here we see some ancient pottery that survived 5,000 years... until yesterday." Ugh.

Anyways, I'm tired of thinking about it.

Anarchy continuing

Yikes. Of all the things that could have gone wrong with the U.S. plan to topple Saddam Hussein, who would have predicted that the Iraqi people would be harming themselves?

Anarchy and looting continue as U.S. troops stand by

I mean, the U.S. tried hard to wage a war that didn't hurt civilians. Now civilians are running around like wild bulls in a China shop, destroying everything in sight. Today I was reading about the destruction of schools and hospitals. People were walking into banks and walking out with an arm-load full of cash.

What do you do? You're committed to not hurting civilians, but the civilians are not behaving as you had expected. Parades, yes. Bank robbery, no.

Perhaps this was Saddam's plan all along. "You want Bagdhad? Here it is... take it. Good luck, I am outta here!"

The Iraq - Afghanistan Connection

I am not the only one to mention what has happened with Afghanistan, apparently. A quote from the Austrailian web site The Age:

Seventeen months later, such confidence looks grimly ironic. For most Afghans, "liberation" has meant the return of rival warlords, harsh repression, rampant lawlessness, widespread torture and Taliban-style policing of women. Meanwhile, guerilla attacks are mounting on United States troops, and the likelihood of credible elections next year appears to be close to zero.

Yes, what the U.S. has promised to undertake in Iraq is not going to be easy. I wish them the best of luck -- I really do. I've always said, if what the Americans appear to want to do actually works, Mr. Bush's and Mr. Blair's risky gamble will have paid off handsomely. The same way betting your house on a 45-1 long-shot at the racetrack will pay off handsomely. It's just not wise.

Info on OPEC countries

I thought Iraq had a lot less oil than that. Turns out they're second largest in the region.

	IRAQ	IRAN	SAUDI ARABIA	KUWAIT
Population	23 Million	64 Million	20 Million	2 Million
GDP per capita	US$1,100	US$1,700	US$8,900	US$14,400
Oil reserves (barrels)	112.5 billion	99.0 billion	262.6 billion	96.5 billion

Source: OPEC

OPEC???

Does anyone think the invasion of Iraq is really just a ploy to break up OPEC? I mean, the U.S. obviously doesn't want Iraq's oil. But maybe the U.S. wants to add to the list of countries that don't participate in OPEC. It's possible...

If enough oil production happens outside of OPEC's control, then OPEC will have no power. Member countries won't follow the production limits if other countries are not heeding those limits.

As you can see, I'm still struggling to come up with a motive that fits.

Liberation = lawlessness?

When the U.S. invaded (and then quickly departed) Afghanistan in 2001, the Americans left behind a cabal of feuding warlords to run the country. While the Taliban brought peace to the country after decades of war, one can argue that the destruction of the Taliban has left Afghanis worse off than they were two years ago. So, recent history does not bode well for the Iraqi conflict.

And today, we're reading that Iraq has denegrated into lawlessness, while the U.S. troops stand by. I can understand Saddam's palaces being raided -- hey, raiding a palace is truly a symbol of a country's new found freedom. But Iraqis are raiding UN buildings, foreign embassies, homes of private individuals, private factories, banks. Religious leaders (both Saddam supporters and U.S. supporters) are being killed by mobs inside Mosques! Families (mother, father, children) are roaming around trying to find something to steal.

This proves the American plan was not well thought out.

I, like many people in the world I guess, have been undecided whether this war is a good thing or not. In theory, I'd like to see the world freed of all brutal dictatorships. Sometimes a revolution needs a gentle push to get going. But what is happening in Iraq? Is it a revolution? Or is it just pure chaos?

And exactly what is the real American motivation for this war? Don't talk to me about oil or freedom. WMD I was starting to believe. Perhaps the purpose is to start a worldwide peace? Or worldwide U.S. domination? Or is it just fun to flex your military muscle sometimes? Use up some of the old bombs so we can have an excuse to buy new ones...

Look forward to more uncertainty on this issue. From me, and from the President.

They call her what?

26-year old Esther Mok, a flight attendant from Singapore, is thought to have single-handedly infected 133 people with SARS, causing 9 deaths so far. Tragically, she's infected and/or killed her mother, her father, her pastor, her grandmother, and her brother... And yet, she has survived and is recovering.

Scientists are calling her a "super-spreader". (Which, coincidentally, is what Madonna was called in the 1980's...)

Seriously though, how would you like to be this girl who, through absolutely no fault of her own, killed so many people or made them seriously ill and yet she survived. If you're going to cause a nation so much grief and panic, it's almost better to end up dead afterward than to have survived it, don't you think?

I'd like to see this girl interviewed in a couple of years time to hear about how she was able to cope.

Scott

Dancing in the streets

Just when I thought I had it figured out.

The Americans go and raise the U.S. flag in downtown Baghdad. As Homer Simpson would say, "D'oh!". You don't go raising your own flag in a country you're supposed to be liberating....

Open Source vs. Open Standards

There's an interesting article on CNet about the over-use of the term open.

It's interesting to note that it's written by someone who works for Sun Microsystems. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Java is not open source, nor is it open community by this article's definition. It may be an open standard, but it is not recognized by any official standards body so can it really be called a standard?

Anyways, it' ironic that Sun should be trumpeting openness when Java is closed.

War: I've Finally Got It Figured Out!

Aha! I just had one of those sudden revelations. You know, where you're eating leftover pizza at 2 o'clock in the morning and then the meaning of life becomes clear.... Well, not quite the meaning of life but the meaning of war at least, it's a start.

OK. I'm convinced... this is the REAL reason the United States is waging a war on Iraq:

The world is a garden. Every country in it is a flower. Every flower is different, and that's what makes it a beautiful garden.

But nestled in amongst this mostly beautiful garden are some weeds. The weeds have been there for years (decades in some cases), and although the flowers didn't like the weeds, they felt there was nothing they could do. "Weeds are plants too", and they have a right to exist in nature. The flowers just had to learn how to live with the weeds.

Some tried to organize together and "contain" the weeds. They would build little fences around the weeds and try to convince them to stop acting like weeds. They would pass resolutions to try and get the weeds to comply. All in all, it wasn't working, but again, what else could they do?

Then one day, one of the little weeds struck down one of the flowers in a senseless attack. The whole garden was outraged (even some of the other weeds!), and so they all got together and killed the weed that did that. Everyone believes the garden is a much safer place for all without that nasty weed.

But that gave some an idea... wouldn't the garden be a nicer place for all flowers if there were no weeds at all (or at least, some of the other biggest baddest weeds were gone)? Without the weeds, more beautfiul flowers would grow. Some new flowers will be allowed to grow -- many of which the garden has never seen before. A couple of the biggest flowers decided that the garden would indeed be a nicer place for all, and so they began a campaign of removing all the weeds.

Iraq is the first weed. It's the easiest one to go after because: (a) there is existing precendents in place (10 UN resolutions for instance), and (b) Iraq was weakened 12 years ago, so the risk of a long, drawn-out, bloddy war is low. There is talk of other weeds being next: Syria, Iran, North Korea. I don't think they'll go after North Korea for a while, though, simply because North Korea doesn't align itself with very many terrorists. Islamic countries, sadly, are more urgent targets because of the terrorist factor.

Anyways, that's my view on why the U.S. is at war. They're going to clean up the garden.

Scott

SharpReader feedback

SharpReader has one minor flaw. After I rebotted my machine after a power outage, I discovered all the blogs I was subscribing to was gone. SharpReader does not automatically remember your subscriptions (unlike subscriptions work in Outlook Express Newsreader, where changes to your subscription settings are automatically saved).

So Luke, if you're listening, SharpReader should AutoLoad and AutoSave the last subscriptions.

So this is what hell must be like

Hell.

Or should I say, Microsoft Hell for Windows, version XP.

I am currently trying to finish my latest book. I am days away from being done. This last chapter has been quite a tough one to complete.

My deadline was Monday. As of Sunday, I was still only half way through writing the damn thing, so I made the ultimate decision... I was going to stay up until it was done. I spent all day Sunday, all night Sunday night, all the way until Monday morning writing. And it was good. And all was well with the world. I was going to be done shortly -- I had about two hours of work left to go.

And then, the power went out.

No panic from me of course. I was more worried about "how long is this going to take" than anything. I actually took a little nap waiting for it to come back on.

It turns out, I should have been more worried. I lost about three hours work. But wait, you say. Didn't you have "AutoRecover" turned on in Word? Well, yes, I reply. I had it set to AutoSave every 4 minutes. The most I SHOULD have lost was 4 minutes. But I lost three hours. I could not convince MS Word to open the AutoRecover backup any way I tried. And I tried every way there was. Word would actually HANG each time it tried to open the file. So my backup must have been corrupt.

Well, moral of the story... even with AutoRecover. Save often. Ctrl-S is your friend. And as of midnight tonight, I'm still not done writing. I gave up trying to recover the file after a couple of hours, decided to head to work where I was AWOL today, went to dinner, had a long nap, and I'm just getting back into the grove now.

Blogging

Geez. Who would have guessed when I woke up this morning that I would be blogging like a mad man today. Five entries and counting.

First, I subscribed to Blogger Pro. I don't know what prompted me to do that, except I liked some of the promised features -- RSS feed particularly. It turns out there are a ton of other features. I've been posting my entries by email lately. My blog entries now have titles.

You may notice that I then changed the style for the site. No particular reason, although I like this compact yet imfortative style.

I then downloaded SharpReader and got hooked on other people's blogs.

I then learned about a blog search engine called Feedster. Cool. I added my RSS feed to their database.

I'm motoring along. This blogging thing might actually lead to something.

SharpReader and RSS

Tired of having to click through a bunch of bookmarks to catch up on your favorite blogs? Try SharpReader. It rocks.

By the way, feel free to subscribe to this blog's RSS v0.91 XML feed.

Trying out blogging by email

Blogger.com has an interesting service which allows you to post to your blog by sending an email to a predefined address @blogger.com. I'm trying it out now. This might be a good way of increasing my blogging frequency.

The jury is still out.

Anyways, I read an interesting newspaper article today on the reasons why the U.S. is going to war on Iraq, and the reasons why Canada wasn't enthusiastically supporting this war:
Jeffrey Simpson at the Globe & Mail.

Well worth a read.

Some very cool Flash animation

The pro-Microsoft camp is gaining strength...

Here is some very cool Flash animation.

"When you're holding the moon for ransom, you can probably use stability in an application." ;)

Who Pays for My Free Pizza Pizza?

I ordered a pizza today, and was cheerfully told I would get it in 40 minutes or it would be free. 99 times out of 100, I get my pizza within 40 minutes. No problem.

Today, the pizza took 44 minutes. So I told the pizza driver, "Hey, sorry guy, but you're late." Needless to say, he was very disappointed. "But I was stuck in the snow. I had to get people to help get my car going again." I think he was hoping that I wouldn't notice and just pay, like 50% of people probably do when their pizza is late.

So my question is, do drivers have to pay for late pizzas? Was I taking $15 out of this guy's pocket? I'm slightly regretting my decision to enforce their guarantee. But then the cynic in me thinks, maybe he was just running late and his "stuck in the snow" story is just a lie he came up with. Maybe he knew he was late, and this was the best story he could come up with. I don't feel that bad, and my pizza is a bit cold actually.