Dumped Sirius!

Today we finally dumped Sirius radio! We got it as a gift from my in-laws a few years back and they've been paying the fee since then which was fine, however, we got real annoyed at the DJs. In January, we got my wife a new car with a built-in XM receiver and she enjoyed the 3 months free. However, I held out subscribing until they sent me an offer I couldn't refuse (the dealer said to wait until they sent a good offer and they sent several offers). When I subscribed, it also came with free online access which was pretty neat. I found an XM Radio plugin for my Squeezebox and was pleased. I discovered that I could stream 2 XM stations at once, so I picked up another Squeezebox today (used) and hacked the XM plugin code to let me connect twice. Now we can stream 2 XM stations at once or have XM on one Squeezebox and MP3s on the other; this also works out well so that we can play children's music on one box and whatever we want on the other. Very cool. Goodbye, Sirius and the crappy DJs! (I hope things don't go downhill when/if the Sirius/XM merger is finalized.)

Sales tax on downloads

Today I went to purchase the professional pictures that were taken of me at the marathon last week and one of the options was electronic download as opposed to CD. This wasn't offered last year and would save me $16 (the $84 for the electronic download is already extortion). I got to the checkout page and saw that they wanted to charge me sales tax. Whoa...that doesn't fly in California. According to the California Board of Equalization's publication about downloads

Products electronically transmitted to customers
Your sale of electronic data products such as software, data, and digital images is generally not taxable when you transmit the data to your customer over the Internet or by modem. However, if as part of the sale you provide your customer with a printed copy of the electronically transferred information or a backup data copy on a physical storage medium such as a CD-ROM, your entire sale is usually taxable.

So I sent the company email and hopefully they'll fix the problem. I suspect that when they started offering electronic downloads, they didn't re-tool their store to reflect this or don't have a clue about sales tax on non-tangible goods.

This is a bit frustrating as I've had to do this in the past with another company. Let's get with the picture, folks! I've known about the sales tax on electronic downloads for 13 years when I first had to do research on it; things, luckily, haven't changed with respect to this.

You can never have too many backups!

Yesterday I went to open up my website that I created in RapidWeaver and found that my site was all screwed up; I didn't realize this until after I exported it to my server. Luckily, I was able to quickly restore what was on the server as I have a week's worth of archives of my server in tar.gz files. However, getting the RapidWeaver file back required me to go back to the previous night's backup. The problem seems to have arisen from the upgrade from RapidWeaver 3.5 to 3.6 where it converted the data file. A 3.6.1 update was released, but it appears I had already done my conversion before the update came out.

I had a momentary scare, but with my paranoia about backups, there was nothing to worry about. Worst case was that I had to grab the files from the hard drives I store in my safe deposit box; there were only a few web site changes since that backup.

Cool application

I found this cool application yesterday. My wife asked me to locate the manual for some baby thing we have (it seems that we've collected a lot of stuff for our 5 week old and each thing comes with a manual to lose) and said that she had emailed it to me. I fired up DocumentWallet and looked for it. I've been placing all the manuals I get (most are available online) into a baby category in DocumentWallet so I don't have to search for things again.

OK, maybe DocumentWallet isn't new and I didn't discover it (yes, I wrote it), but this is sure a cool use for the app. With a smart category for everything that contains baby, I can find manuals quickly and easily. Why didn't I come up with this sooner?