Tom’s weblog

I had started this a while and forgot to publish it, so a little old but that does not mean the idea has lost merit.

Saw a reference to an interesting post over at John Dvorak’s site today. He was referring to an editorial which appeared at the The Independent, a British publication. A very interesting read, for the most part summed up what I have been thinking these past few weeks.

One of the replies I found most interesting was someone who was obviously against the current plan begin proposed which would include a public payer option and held up as examples that the current system works people who are getting good care on the Medicare system. I guess someone forgot to tell this guy that Medicare is government run and paid for health care paid for by taxes on all.

Found this BBC article today and figured others would find it interesting also. On the site I found it at I was looking at some of the comments and began to wonder, were we reading the same thing? To each their own I guess.

Took a look at my T-Mobile wireless bill this weekend and the city utility tax charge is still there, bit more than bothersome that. I did a little searching and found that Olympia levies a 9% taxes on phone service. So I called them up again asking where I can send information showing that my address is not in the city, will hear back from someone this week.

Upon reflection, I realize this would make a lovely class action lawsuit. There must be many thousands of people out there who are being charged these fees for localities they do not reside in and do not realize it.

It also occurred to me that I bet the sales tax they charge is also at the Olympia rate, not only does this compound my irritation but it is illegal. The law is that they must charge the rate for where the service is delivered, my house in this case. Perhaps a call to the Department of Revenue is in order to get these guys smacked down.

Something for those of you out there who don’t live in a city. I was just looking at my cellular bill and noticed they are charging me a City Utility Users Tax. Well, I do not live in the city and feel that I pay enough in sales taxes which I cannot avoid to the city when shopping that I need not send more of my money to them. I called the company to get rid of this and was told that they base whether to charge this tax on the zip code which very inaccurate, my zip code covers two cities and about a quarter of the county. Hopefully they can clear this up and I can stop having to pay about 3.50 a month for service I don’t receive, not much but it does add up. If you don’t live in the city then check your bill and make sure there are not any incorrect charges there.

Finally found a quick way to convert the .tod files which my JVC camcorder produces into the much more usable mpg format. I have tried the ffmpeg method but when I use that the resulting files cannot be opened in my editing program which does me no good. This same editing program also has a batch convert option, I just pull that up and point it at the directory full of tod files and tell it make me mpg files, takes a little while to run the convert but it is really only the time it takes read in the file, swap a few bytes and write it back out. The program is called VideoRedo, I have the TV Suite version, I really like it. The program will also pull in my TiVo files and allow me edit them for output to a DVD. I see that this version costs a bit at $75 but I think it is worth it.

One note, if you are doing this then first specify the output directory then add the files to convert, this way the resulting batch file will have the correct output path.

I was chatting with a friend at work Thursday afternoon when someone who sits nearby joined in. Somehow the discussion turned to government regulations and after a short while this other guy was getting quite angry about this topic. There was no way to just discuss this with him, his viewpoint appeqrs to be the only one that matters and any competing ideas are so wrong and dangerous they have to be literally shouted down with vulgar language.

In a nutshell, his contention was that the government required banks to make loans to people who could not afford them and that this is what has lead to the current economic problems. At the time I was too flabbergasted at his reaction to respond but it occurred to me later even if that was the case, the banks were not required to structure these loans to fail or make them without performing due diligence. Our current problems were not the regulations fault but greedy banks looking to grab whatever they could damn the consequences. (Of course, there is a lot more to this topic but I will leave those books to someone else to write.)

I don’t care for induhviduals who hold such extremist views that a simple debate is just not possible. The only way to discuss current events with these induhviduals is when one just agrees with everything that is said, that is not a debate or discussion though.

Heading back to Tacoma on the sounder train. Very cool, free parking and an hour ride to Seattle. The only drawback is the train leaves Seattle only 35 minutes after the final out which does give much time to hang out. Perhaps next time will go north on the train and then take the bus back, havt to check the schedules. By the way, the Mariners won, yeah!

I have been hearing a lot more talk lately about how global warming is bunk. Or that if it is happening then mankind is not to blame, that what is happening is just part of a natural cycle.

Let’s look at it this way instead, no matter how one feels about this topic the actions that would be required to reduce CO2 emissions will have the added benefit of reducing the amount of pollution that is generated which will in turn improve air quality. That will mean we all would be healthier for not having to breathe the junk combusting fossil fuels produces or eating foods contaminated by the same.

Think about it, actually being able to see a blue sky in the middle of a big city.

Just trying this out, picked up the wordpress app for for my iPod. Pretty nice can do all usual stuff on the blog and I don’t have turn on the big computer. I am being so green.

Just got a call from “cardholder services” letting me know I could lower my interest rate to 6.9%, just press nine to talk to operator. I was curious so I bit, first thing I ask the person who comes is what bank are you from and her reply is what card do you have? OMG!! They call me out of the blue and expect me to give them my credit card details, I politely said sorry and hung up the phone. Look out people, the scammers are out in force.

I think that I got my 15 minutes of fame today, while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Daily GizWiz, a letter I sent was read out. A couple weeks ago I had sent in a letter asking Leo Laporte to not sing with the jingles, when I was listening episode 769 in my car the dissonance between Leo and the music was really quite bad, the guy does great shows but can’t carry a tune. That’s fine, he does audio not music podcasts. I suppose I should follow up that letter with one extolling the good things about the Daily GizWiz show, might take a while to find them though. (If you listen to this show long enough you would understand this statement)

I suppose I do at least owe an apology to the all the other Tom Stidham’s out there (I know you are out there somewhere), I did not put my city in the letter which would mean everyone else who also has my name might have been asked if the letter was from him, no doubt leading to much confusion. Sorry about that, will try not to overlook this in the future.

Oh well, if you want to hear this for yourself have a listen to the podcast over at Leo’s site.

Sometimes we hear about how google searches are no longer any good and Microsoft likes to make it sound like their search is so great but every time I use Windows Live search I am disappointed and when the same search is run at google I generally find what I need on the first page. For instance this morning I wanted to resume a big download from MS that I had to suspend the other day. I figured there must be a way to launch the file transfer manager that Microsoft uses but there was nothing in my start menu. I typed the query “reopen microsoft file transfer manager” into IE (because that was open) and it used Live search and I was disappointed, nothing obviously relevant. So I turned to google (this time in firefox) and right near the top is a link which has the information I want and it is a page at Microsoft no less.

Hopefully Microsoft does not buy Yahoo, it also returned the same useful link near the top of the results, at least there is some competition for useful search results out there which likely be lost of MS bought Yahoo.

Microsoft can not even index their own web sites for useful searching, why would anyone expect them to index other sites usefully? And the unfortunate news this week out of CES is that MS has bought off Verizon and Dell so that Live search will be the default on their platforms, there are going to be a lot of disappointed users out there who don’t realize there are other choices easily available which do a much better job

and I am not sad about that, except for the employees, this sucks for them. I quit going to Circuit City when they started that DIVX disk idiocy, that was a bad to begin with and died the death it deserved. The few times I did go in the local store I was typically frustrated, the thing that irritated me most was how they setup the displays, every row had a cardboard insert on the top which made it impossible for me to see from one row to another. I am looking for something which is obviously not where I am and looking around to find does not help, I left the store. Of course, what likely led to their demise more than anything is the fact the management at Circuit City decided that getting rid of experience would improve the bottom line. Hmm, apparently not.

Had a weird thing today, there was a rally downtown for Obama so we went by just out of curiosity but they would not let me in to the ball room until I had made a donation, quite odd since they were doing an auction at the time, might have wanted to bid on something. Came back later and asked about that, first they said it was a security matter (bogus!) then the guy finally settled on the excuse that they needed to do that since it might mean that republicans would come in and eat all the food, this seems very unlikely. He couldn’t just admit that they wanted you had to contribute in order to join in. Weak. Once we got in, the kids got something to eat and I checked out the silent auction, had already spent everything so did not get anything else. Oh well, chipped in a little bit to help him out.

I am feeling a quite frustrated with Apple today. Over the weekend I thought I would update my ipod touch to the new 2.1 firmware so I went into itunes paid my 9.95 (had not paid for 2.0 yet) and then nothing. The only download that happens is a little 0.4 kb file which does not tell me anything and that is it. I suspect that the powers that be at apple get quite irritated when the firmware is put up for download allowing people to just grab it free and update their hardware but with experiences like this why should one go through the legal channels to obtain these updates? I will try again to get this tonight suppose if it still does not work I can try to get my money back from apple but the phrase fat chance springs to mind. I can always dispute the charge at the credit card company and would be well in my rights to since they did not deliver the goods.

Earlier this decade a lot of conservatives were saying that even though Saddam Hussein did not have WMD it was good thing we took him out because the Iraqi people were suffering under him. Well, what I want to know why in the world is Bush not sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Myanmar to take out the Generals there and bring relief to the people who are suffering from the cyclone and their authoritarian rule? Seems like if that argument is going to valid for Iraq then it should be applied in all instances where citizens are suffering.

I was downtown a couple weeks and there was an anti-abortion group there with a large poster on the side of an RV. It was an interesting message they had, the caption on the sign was “He’s not heavy he’s my brother.” The picture was that of a fetus apparently in utero. I found this quite offensive actually since there is only one way for a woman to carry a fetus which is her brother is if her father impregnated her. So along with everything else these groups advocate apparently they also feel that incest is acceptable. Amazing.

Will the demise of HD DVD push you to buy a Blu-ray hi-def player?

So this poll which appeared at Computerworld after Toshiba announced the end of HD-DVD asks a very specific question. But notice, there is no possible answer here for “Yes, I will buy a Blu-ray player now”, worthless poll. If you are going to ask a specfic question then at least give the option to answer said question in a positive way.

I was considering installing XP today on a new drive I picked up last week (a vast expanse of 500 gigabytes woohoo) when it occurred to me that the next service pack for XP is due out soon. Wanting to save some time since it can typically take an hour or so to install a service pack I went to google and searched for “windows sp3 status”  whereupoon I get a “We’re sorry” page, apparently this is similar to automated requests from virus or spyware.  This took me by surprise, just what is the spyware looking for here? This seems like a pretty generic query to me.  Turns out I just need to remove the status term and it works but if I simply search “windows status” it works.

It gets even stranger, apparently the problem only occurs when I search from the firefox specific page, kind of wonder what is going on here. And I just tried it again and the query worked, perhaps google figured out I am not spyware or something, whatever it is they are doing something interesting here.

When I logged into my linux box this morning the quote that come up was:

“He is the best of men who dislikes power.”

Interesting quote that and also interesting that this apparently came from Muhammad. I’ll leave the interpretation to the reader.