Caprock Canyons State Park, Texas

Clouds reflected in a pond.

Near sunset.

Exposed gypsum layers. Lots of these all over the place. Exciting for a rock hound like me.

Just slightly after sunset, with a longish exposure.

Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma

View of a nearby wind farm from Mt. Scott.

Lichen-spotted rock on Mt. Scott.

Elmer Thomas Lake, seen from Mt. Scott.

These berries were all over the place. I only ate a few. They weren’t as tasty as they look.

Bison by the roadside. He was not impressed with us.

Prairie dog. I think his name was “Eddie”. Yeah. Eddie. That’s a good name.

Red Rock Canyon State Park, Oklahoma

Rappelling grooves cut in the cliff edge.

MJ contemplating the next step.

Roaring River Fish Hatchery in Missouri

Whirlpool draining the source of the spring.

Feeding frenzy in the raceway.

Big trout in the headwaters of the Roaring River.

Last week they offered DiskMagik, a hard drive defragmentation tool from Rose City Software. There are quite a few defragmenting tools out there, and one person asked a question:

While it is true that defragmentation is necessary, what I really wonder is the feautres in your software DiskMagik. I have installed the ffollowing software:

http://www.Defraggler.com
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html

Now both the softwares are free.

So I would like to know what are the advantages of your software that gives me an idea to buy it.

Pretty reasonable question. There are free alternatives, some of them very well respected. Defraggler, for example, is from the same people who make CCleaner, which is a great system cleaning tool.

Rose City software developer and CEO Joseph Burke answered:

There are freeware options for most software today. Developers from Third World countries flood the market with knockoffs. If you wish to trust the integrity of your system to an unproven freeware product because you cannot afford a few bucks for really good trusted software, that is your choice.

Ouch! Let’s see, in one paragraph he insults freeware, third world developers, and the person asking the question! And he completely failed to actually answer the question or offer any reasons why his software is worth paying for.

Turns out that the people who check BitsDuJour don’t suffer fools gladly. Joseph Burke was quickly taken to task for his attitude. One respondent pointed out that some of the best applications on the market are freeware, and listed a number of well-known examples. Another pointed out that the two freeware defraggers in the original question are from London and Hong Kong (both cities will no doubt be surprised to discover that they’re in the third world).

Now, most people who are trying to attract customers would realize they’d made a mistake, and try to fix it. Not good old Joseph Burke though, no sir. He barreled on ahead with another post:

Look be my guest… use garbage freeware with zero support or backup and risk your system. Unlike you jokers, I have have spent thousands of hours working with programmers from China, India and Russia and I *know* how much junk comes out of those countries (and many others as well) and just how many bugs there are. […] If I valued my time at just $5 an hour which is probably what you do, I have read morealready wasted more time than the $15. If you cannot afford $15 for a piece of software you obviously don’t use your computer for anything much more than computer games and are not a customer of Rose City Software, not are you worth wasting our time conversing with on message boards.

Jinkies. Zoinks. Wowie. Ooof. Etc. Will I be buying anything from Rose City Software? No, no I don’t think so. Ever.

You know what’s kind of ironic? Rose City Software has a page of freeware that they recommend as interesting. I wonder if they mean ‘interesting’ in the ‘knock-off garbage’ sense of the word?

Addendum… See the juicy goodness for yourself HERE.

One of the cops who responded suggested that it was likely either just kids being morons, or some sort of low level gang initiation (which falls under ‘kids being morons’ too). By and large this is a good neighborhood and town. Low crime, quiet, even boring. But we’re pretty close to Aurora and Joliet, both of which have significant crime problems. And no doubt even Plainfield has its share of delinquents who think randomly trashing private property is somehow fun. So, the cop’s explanation seems reasonable enough.

One thing that sort of struck me as odd, though…

On the Monday after the vandalism occurred, we had a guy (“I’m not a salesman!”) from a home security provider going door-to-door. He had a nice shirt with the name of the security company embroidered on it, and a metal clipboard – you know, the usual guise of someone who wants to look like an official representative. He seemed to know the whole story about the vandalism, and was asking each house if they had a security system, and if so what brand it was, and if they would be interested in becoming a ‘demo house’ for his company.

If I had Spidey senses, they might have tingled. I don’t, but I did find it in mildly bad taste that they would be using this situation as a sales opportunity. I told him we’ve got a system already, and no, I won’t divulge who with.

My wife and I talked about it later, and we wondered some things…

• How many homeowners blithely respond that “No, we don’t have a security system”?
• How many of those also indicated when their house would be unoccupied? “No, the appointment would have to be in the evening as I don’t get home before 5pm”.
• And how many of those said “Sure, come on in (read: have a look around, see if I have anything valuable)”?
• How would a home security system stop someone from slashing tires on the street?
• Who the heck buys a home security system from a door-to-door salesman, anyway?

To anyone of a cynical nature (me!), the circumstances & timing were just a tad suspicious.

Even as a layman, I see some real problems with this law.

The whole thing is built on the concept of Internet affiliates living in the state. It is not at all clear to me that a click-through affiliate constitutes a physical presence for the retailer. That’s like saying that a 1099 salesman represents a physical presence – even though he is not in any legal sense an employee. I do occasional freelance work writing software for a company in California. Does the fact that I live in Illinois mean they have a physical presence here? I don’t think so.

The article notes that there are “more than 7,400 state and local tax codes in the United States”, which, while technically true isn’t particularly relevant – states and large cities might attempt to enact similar laws, but it’s very unlikely that every taxing body in the nation would follow suit. Still though, if/as more state governments enact similar plans, it really does place an increasingly unreasonable burden on online retailers to track the tax laws potentially affecting every order.

This tax is not going to level the playing field for brick-and-mortar stores, anyway. I don’t buy online to save money on taxes – I buy online because the basic price is usually much less than what a local retailer charges. Even if you add shipping costs and remove local taxes from the equation, the online shopping is still often cheaper.

Further, it’s an administrative nightmare not just for the affected retailers, but also for the state. There will have to be an entirely new government office to (try to) discover and keep track of which retailers are affected. How do they even determine which click-through affiliates are in their state? Surf every web page for a click-through link, and do a whois to find out if the owner is a state resident? And what about someone who lives in New York, but has a web site that’s hosted in Texas? If Texas enacts a similar tax law, might they not reasonably claim that the “physical presence” is in their state, not New York?

Once the state has figured out which online retailers to pursue, how will they then determine how much business they’ve done in the state and the extent to which items are taxable? After all, many taxing bodies apply different rates for different kinds of goods. Most companies are probably not going to be keen to voluntarily turn over the necessary records. It many not even be possible to force them to do so.

The bureaucracy alone will easily eat half of the anticipated tax revenue. The other half will be eaten up in court disputes. And if, by some great misfortune this law does eventually pass legal muster, one possible outcome is that an affected online retailer will simply cease their affiliate program. And who will that hurt most? The affiliates who happen to be residents and taxpayers of the state.

What an incredible load of junk! The commercial stuff was easy to deal with – if it’s older than a version I’m currently using, it’s gone. If I’ve never used it, it’s gone. If I can’t even figure out what it is, it’s gone.

The CDs I made myself are a bit more problematic. I’ve backed up important stuff at various times over the years, as well as a ridiculous amount of drivel. Rather than just tossing all those discs, I loaded them all onto my hard drive so that I can sort through them. Probably only a freak like me would actually look forward to reviewing and cleaning out 40,000 files. I have a feeling when the project is done there will be only a thousand or so files left – which will probably all fit on a single DVD.

As I started the sort project, one of the first things I ran across was this advertisement for my old Bulletin Board System…

3500 files! 3.8 Gigabytes of storage! That was a huge amount back then, but now for $30 you can get a microSD card with more capacity and which could easily be swallowed. My BBS was never a raging success with individual users – I was a bit late to the game for that. It was however a very active file distribution hub, often moving 100 megabytes a day, which was no small thing in the days of dial-up modems.

Sometimes I miss the title of SysOp.

My first Big Mistake with judging technology was with CD-ROM drives. I read all the geek news so I was aware of them, and eventually they started coming with new computers. But when I got my first one I thought “Well, that’s neat, but I doubt I’ll ever have many of them”. Today I have a 16.5 gallon plastic box in the basement, full to the gills with data CDs, containing god-only-know-what. At a guess, there’s well over 500 discs in there. One of these days I’m going to sort through them and get rid of the obsolete and useless ones. No, really I am.

Same deal when USB first came out. It sounded like a nifty idea, but I couldn’t imagine ever having more than a couple of USB devices. I figured sure, a mouse, maybe a printer. Ooof. So wrong. So very, very wrong.

Laser printer, ink jet printer, two USB hard drives, mouse, Palm, iPod, handheld GPS receiver, Wacom pen table, memory card reader, UPS monitor. That’s eleven devices that are hooked up pretty much any time I’m at my desk. Add a couple of thumb drives, and it’s a real mess. And that’s just on my primary computer. Luckily both of my LCD monitors have built-in USB hubs! My notebook and my server each have a couple of devices attached to them, and there’s a couple more rarely-used USB gadgets floating around, as well.

I can hardly wait to see what I’m wrong about next. Let’s see if I can rig the game – I don’t think that small-device hardware makers will ever standardize power adapters so that we no longer need a metric ton of wall warts all over our homes.

I’ve recently finished all my core classes, and have just a handful of electives to complete. So last week I’m poring over the available elective list, and comparing it to the master UoP catalog to find out what’s available online. I come across an interesting sounding elective that might be of some use in my job, “COMM 470 – Communication in the Virtual Workplace”. I grab the master catalog and look it up… it isn’t available online, and can only be taken at a physical campus.

Does that seem right to you?