Outrageous sales tax rate

We were in the Chicago airport yesterday and had lunch. I almost fell off my chair (that seems to happen often with me) when I saw the tax on the bill. It was 10.22%. Wow, that is like VAT in Europe, but I think the highest I've ever seen in the US, except for hotel taxes.

The end of running my own server

After many years of running my own server, it is finally time for me to wind things down and let the professionals maintain my server tasks. Monday, while away in New Jersey, my mail server stopped responding. I tried to ping it, but the neither the cable modem nor the server responded which lead me to believe that the cable modem hiccuped. Luckily my father was able to goto my house and reboot the cable modem and life was grand again (my server has been running constantly for 4 months, so the issue was connectivity). However, this was the last straw in running my own server. In August, I moved all my web services to a virtual server at VPSLink and it has been running flawlessly. As my virtual server has limited RAM and space, I decided to leave mail running on my own server and since SMTP has automatic retries when mail delivery fails due to connectivity issues, downtime wasn't a big deal, or so I thought. While the mail wouldn't be lost, it would be delayed which I now realize is just as problematic.

So, I've decided to give Google's Google for Small Businesses a try. The basic account is free and gives each user their own account with 2 GB of space. I simply have to set it up and point my DNS to it. Over the course of the next week or so, I'll do 2 things. First, I'll change all my DNS handling to GoDaddy as their Total DNS Control comes free with each domain registration (currently I run BIND and do my own DNS with a backup DNS elsewhere) and then I'll move over to Google. In addition, GoDaddy will handle incoming email and redirect it, so I can setup email addresses on a few of the domains to point to other places without actually having to have mailboxes. I have 11 domains to deal with, so this change over is going to take a little bit of time. I'm going to setup 3 separate Google accounts (each account can have multiple email boxes) and then lump mail from the other domains into those accounts. This is something that I need to do carefully or I'll make a mess and I'll drive myself crazy trying to fix it.

After I move everything, a few questions remain. I still run my own Asterisk based PBX; should I keep this or simply just have my Polycom phone hooked into the VOIP provider without having my own IVR system and multiple extensions? Second question is about my cable modem account. I have a business cable modem account which costs twice what a residential account does, but lets me run a server. Is this still worth it? I have 5 static IP addresses with the account. I just checked my email and this is a moot point for another year as I signed a 3 year contract for my cable modem. OK, maybe next December I'll change my service. Third, I run my Squeezeboxes off my server. I could setup an old Shuttle box I have which will be quieter and more efficient which is an option. Fourth, I have my server backup my virtual private server every day and my MacBook Pro backs up to my server daily. So, maybe I still need my server running, but if it goes down or the connection to it goes down, the consequences are minor (if the connection is down, my VOIP provider has voicemail which will pick up calls). Writing this out, helped me decide to keep my server. However, I might be able to scale back on the configuration as RAID1 is no longer as important, nor is a secondary hard drive, nor is a huge box, nor is a 1500 VA UPS.

New York Extortion Fees

We just returned from a trip back east and as part of that trip, we went into Brooklyn twice from New Jersey. I almost fell out of the driver's seat when I had to pay $15 in tolls for each roundtrip. I can understand paying tolls to maintain the roadway, but one bridge was $6 and the other was $9. That's completely outrageous.

Software Piracy on the Mac

One of the recurring themes in the shareware industry is how to best protect our work from people that don't want to pay. I know I've written on this topic before, but the recent release of Leopard has brought this back to the forefront of my mind. Another blogger wrote about how many people had pre-ordered the Leopard family pack via his Amazon link and was amazed. The family pack is simply the same as the single user pack (same CD), but the license agreement differs slightly in that it says it can be installed on up to 5 machines in the same household. Why would people do this? It seems to me that Mac users are generally honest people willing to pay for good software. I've seen this with my own software where people purchase multiple licenses and I only send 1 serial number (I'll send more than one if I'm asked, but my automated system only sends 1) and people have asked about installing on more than one machine.

Software isn't cheap, but it's good to know that many Mac users do the right thing and purchase software even though it is quite easy to pirate many pieces of Mac software, including Leopard.