Posts

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New recycling laws/fees in California

Starting February 8th (my birthday), any product that contains mercury (batteries, circuit boards, etc.) can no longer be put in the trash. I think this is a great idea for helping the environment. However, I see a few flaws in the system:

  • It isn’t convenient. People will have to collect their stuff and go to the landfill on a Saturday (it is only open on Saturday for the Miramar/San Diego landfill).
  • People will be charged $0.25 per pound. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it is definitely a barrier to recycling. I’ve have to remember to take apart whatever I recycle so that I only recycle the circuit board from say a radio and not the rest of the bulk.
  • The paper has reported officials saying that they won’t be policing the trash for banned materials. If there are no consequences for throwing stuff away, people will continue to do it. The news reported that over 60% of the people in their poll would keep throwing out batteries.
  • For computers, there has already been a law requiring a recycling fee to be paid upfront. Now the consumer will have to pay a recycling fee twice for products.

I’ll make sure I keep a separate area/bin for this stuff and periodically recycle it, like I do with bottles and cans.

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Bluetooth Vodoo

I think that the concept of Bluetooth is great; allow devices to connect without wires. While there are standards on what to do, in my experience it just doesn’t work right all the time. With my cell phone, I still can’t get a headset to function properly. In dealing with software, I spent the last several days tracking down an issue customers were having with our software. As far as I can tell, it was Apple’s implementation of Bluetooth that got messed up on some people’s machines which caused our stuff to stop working. Of course, people blame us. Some day maybe I won’t have to fight technology to use it.

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Animal Control on Speed Dial

One of the best things about my Samsung A900 that I complain about a lot is that I can send my address book from my desktop to it over Bluetooth. This has allowed me to put all the names and numbers that I’ve collected into my phone even if I rarely use them (I did exclude some). Several years ago I saw a dog walking around the street (busy street with 2 lanes in each direction), so I called my wife and had her give me the number to animal control; ever since then I’ve had the number in my address book (at the time I was able to sync my phone with my desktop). Yesterday as we were walking our dog, we see a dog wandering around on a street where we had just seen someone zooming by at easily 55 MPH (residential street with a speed limit of 35 MPH). The dog looked like it had a collar on, so I tried to approach it, but it growled at me, so I backed off.

I pulled out my phone, found the emergency number for animal control (outside of business hours) and reported it. Unfortunately animal control never made it (I got a call later). I hope that the dog made it home safely. Loose dogs always scare me as the chances of them being hit by a car are quite high.

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WirelessModem up for sale

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to put my WirelessModem program up for sale. I’ve neglected the software for too long due to my own lack of interest (I haven’t used the software since I got rid of my Treo 300 a few years back). If anyone is interested in purchasing the source code to both the Macintosh side and the Palm OS side, please contact me. Serious offers only.

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USB to PCMCIA Adapter – hope for EVDO cards

I stumbled across a USB device that accepts a PCMCIA high speed data card (EVDO). This looks like an excellent solution for switching to a MacBook Pro and still being able to use my EVDO card. The problems are: 1) it isn’t shipping, yet, 2) they have no Mac drivers, and 3) it doesn’t list my card, the Sierra Wireless AirCard 580 as compatible. I’ve sent them email to see if they’d be interested in having me write a Mac driver. I’ll cross my fingers, but won’t count my chickens before they hatch.

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Laughable Sprint response

I sent email to Sprint asking when the next firmware update would be available for my Samsung A900 to address the Bluetooth issues I’ve been having, and part of the response I got back was

We at Sprint perform stringent tests and trials before launching any product, therefore there is no fixed time period for the software launch.

Really? Then how did the phone get out the door with one of the touted features, ability to use a Bluetooth headset, not working?

The more I deal with this phone, the more I want to switch to Cingular/AT&T so that I have a choice of decent phones with decent ability to use a Bluetooth headset.

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New Samsung A900 Update

Sprint/Samsung came through with another update for my Samsung A900 phone. The update was supposed to fix some Bluetooth problems and picture mail problems. I could care less about picture mail as I’ve only used it a handful of times since I’ve had it. Bluetooth, on the other hand, is one of the reasons I got the phone. My problem was that my headsets kept ringing like there was an incoming call. I was quite excited to see this update, but within a few minutes, my excitement turned to disappointment. My headsets still ring. I guess Samsung needs more time to figure out how to do Bluetooth. I’ll call Sprint and Samsung and alert them of the issue in case they think they fixed it. It can’t be all that hard to work with Bluetooth as other companies have been doing it for years and people are quite pleased. Maybe it is just Samsung’s CDMA development teams don’t have a clue; it hasn’t been until recently that US CDMA carriers really offered Bluetooth phones (Sprint had the Sony Ericsson T608 a few years ago, but that was a half baked phone with lots of bugs).

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Another new blog system

Last weekend when my wife were on a weekend getaway, I thought it would be neat to be able to blog offline and then upload my entries when I got home (we had no Internet access where we were). (The getaway was to get away from our house, not our work.) I started down the path of writing a program to do this, but didn’t finish over the weekend. Yesterday I discovered a program called MarsEdit which did exactly that. However, it didn’t support the blogging system I used. So I decided to switch over to WordPress as it is supported by MarsEdit and is quite popular. To top it off, the interface was a bit more to my liking. However, the transition was not easy, but I managed to get all the articles moved over.

We’ll see how this new system works out.

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The downside of upgrading

I’ll admit it, I’m a geek and wanted the latest and greatest. Do I have a need for it? Not usually, however, I upgrade most of my software as soon as an update comes out with 2 main exceptions, Quicken and QuickBooks. Upgrades for both seem to do very little for me. I had to upgrade QuickBooks in April because it didn’t function properly in Tiger.

Today I went to my accountant and brought along my data file exported from QuickBooks Pro 2005 for Mac to the Windows format. My accountant hasn’t updated his QuickBooks Accountant edition from 2004, but luckily he had no trouble reading my data file. Now if I had upgraded to QuickBooks Pro 2006 would I have had problems? Possibly and it would have been much harder for my accountant to do my taxes.

Lesson learned, don’t upgrade software if you have to be compatible with someone else.

When we were talking, he really doesn’t see what else an accounting package can do. He did make some good points and I can’t think of what I’d want it to do either.

I’ll keep upgrading most of my other software just because I’m a geek.

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San Diego Chargers or is it San Diego Whiners

The San Diego Chargers have decided not to put their expansion/renovation plans for the stadium and surrounding area on the ballot for November. This is excellent in my opinion as they are a private enterprise that seems to want concessions from the city and wants the city to spend tax payer dollars to help them make money. I’m not a sports fan, so maybe I’m jaded, but why should the Chargers get special treatment? Does sports really help the economy? From what I’ve read, not really (in terms of net gain).

Other cities in the county (and around the country) are trying to court the Chargers. I say, great, let them leave. We (the taxpayers) already spent a boatload of money about 10 years ago to renovate the stadium, we had a ticket guarantee so that they could make more money, and now pay them when a game is sold out because they are losing revenue due to becoming in compliance with the ADA. I say it is about time we give them the boot and if they can’t make money without taxpayer funds, that’s fine. Our city can’t afford to subsidize the Chargers nor give away 600 acres of land to private enterprise at a time when the city has a pension debt of almost 2 billion dollars.