Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

I”m almost embarassed sometimes to whip out my Blackberry to check email. The Berry I tote, you see, is ancient. The Blackberry 857 was released last century. I think it was the first one to have the full screen and keyboard. I remember being in a demo with the RIM guys when this was the hot new thing. But no more.

Nowadays Blackberrys are blue. They”re also telephones and PDAs. They”re small. So while my dinosaur (company-issued) gets me what I need - instant email access when I”m out of the office - it”s hardly a cutting-edge, Hip Internet Dude kind of thing to carry.

But today I feel better about it. I”m at a conference, you see, and the conference lobby has an “email center” where people queue up to check their email via the web. And at most times there”s a line. Sometimes a dozen deep to get on one of the four machines. These appear to be people still tied to a PC and browser to get their mail.

Today I exchanged about a half-dozen messages with folks at at HQ; got things moving, got things done. All on my ancient Blackberry, and all instantly. So my Berry may be a relic, but I guess there”s still a lot of people who”d kill to have one.

P.S. being at a work conference with the wife rules. Snow sucks.

The other night at trivia (we came in second, one point off the win - damned Midnight Cowboy), I was talking with That Yellow Bastard and Brown about life as the hip Internet/technology dudes that we are. But that”s another post.

I started thinking out loud about how folks like us (who work in and around the Internet) get exposed to pretty much a non-stop stream of information during the day, and how people like doctors, garbagemen, Starbucks workers and the like who don”t work in front of a PC don”t have this infostream in their reach 40 hours a week.

And now, with RSS my constant companion, the infostream has really turned into a flood. Now, as I work on my PC, the information comes directly at me. I rarely hunt for information anymore. It all finds me.

So today, I decided to take note of what came into my brain through my feeds. Below is a summary of what I learned from each of the 47 RSS items I felt compelled to read during my workday. This - in chrono order of what I read - comes from about 75 feeds that delivered probably 400 items from 6 p.m. Wednesday to 5:30 p.m. today.

- HUMAX will be making DirecTV equipment
- Yahoo Image Search launched some improvements
- AOL Local Search launched
- Somebody built a four-story Super Mario Bros. mural out of Post-It Notes
- James Van Der Beek is coming back to television
- There”s a Hello Kitty iPod Mini dock thing
- iPod Photo Import feature unveiled
- Somebody”s made a held-tilt mouse controlled by webcam recognition
- PNY plans to sell 2GB flash audio player
- Preview of Kenwood”s KCA-iP500 iPod adaptor
- Europeans expect to have artificial eyes available by 2010
- Apple rumored to be buying TiVo
- John G. has a real problem with Dell
- Is Google coming out with a calendar search feature?
- Disney planning to finally release Song of the South on DVD?
- High-end RVs are spurring trend of posh trailer parks
- UAW trying again to organize at Southern auto plants
- Photos of Porsche Chopster
- Google, Yahoo downgraded by stock analysts
- Is the WSJ killing itself by requiring subscriptions for online content?
- Microsoft implementing tougher anti-piracy measures for its software
- Rumors of Yahoo buying Flickr
- Judge says FCC crossed the line with broadcast flag
- Witness in Edwin Edwards case says EWE”s friends out to get him
- Televangelist Gene Scott died
- Progress of state smoking ban in Ga. Legislature
- State senator wants to split Fulton County in two
- Vertical Search gaining traction
- MGM”s plans for Mirage City in Vegas
- Harsh message people get when they misdial Sprint PCS collections
- German operations of search engines set up self-policing board to
remove illegal content
- Robin went to the dentist
- Steve Jobs is 50 today
- yes.com shows you what”s been played on terrestrial radio stations
recently, in case you can”t remember the 28 songs places ever play
- Australia is being terrorized by a giant eel
- Sony”s given up on the PSX, which was supposed to be a combo PlayStation and DVR
- You can buy a dildo that hooks to your XBox
- Analysis of why Apple might want to buy TiVo
- Barnes & Noble is fighting back against Google”s AutoLink toolbar feature
- Warner Home Video will sell DVDs cheap in China to fight piracy
- Somebody who reads the wife”s blog actually likes Maroon 5
- You can buy a USB drive that looks like a Tiki
- ChoicePoint is now getting sued over their identity leak
- Is Apple losing interest in FireWire?

Obviously, a varied set of information. Some of it”s work-related, some is tech-geek related, and some is quite random. But I started the day not knowing any of it, and maybe I would have learned about 5 or 6 of these things eventually if I hadn”t been sitting at my PC being fed by RSS.

Will I remember all of this stuff? No. Would I want to? Probably not. But at the time I read each of these things, I deemed the information worth knowing. And there”s more stuffed in my head now than when the day began.

Again, I”m not sure that”s a good thing. But worth noting.

We had some fairly intense weather move through Atlanta last night. A little bit of hail, lots of lighting and heavy rain. The dogs started freaking out, which had the wife convinced a tornado was coming at us.

Couple this with our recent ice storm, the two ex-hurricanes that moved through last year and the general threat of severe weather we live under in the winter (ice) and spring (tornadoes), and you”d be inclined to think weather is a negative thing about living in Atlanta.

My friends in L.A. certainly share this view.

But the current situation out there - 30 inches of rain over the past couple of months (when they would expect no more than 10) - has mudslides flowing through homes, backyards of Bel Air mansions (complete will pool) breaking off and tumbling down hills and sinkholes appearing out of nowhere.

Of course, Californians don”t want to be completely dry, because that”s when the wildfires happen. The earthquakes can happen any old time.

So here”s my view on weather. In Atlanta, we can expect some severe storms in the spring; we have to be prepared to suffer through the occasional ice/snow storm in the winter and every once in a while the remnant of a hurricane comes our way. But it”s somewhat predictable, it comes and goes quickly, and the fairly consistent pattern means we”re “tempered” from the weather - that big tree that fell during Ivan sure can”t fall again next year.

In California, on the other hand, the weather is usually pretty damn nice. Almost all the time, in fact. But when things do turn ugly - and they do - it seems they have much more catastrophic and longer-lasting problems. I saw a lot of this recently. Mudslides can happen a couple of days after the rain ends, or can be touched off by minor showers after the ground has been saturated.

Imagine living on a hillside - or below one - in L.A. right now. How do you sleep when there”s a very real possibility that your house might tumble down the hill or that somebody else”s might come down on yours?

So I”ll take the tornadoes, I”ll take the ice, I”ll even accept a hurricane once in a while.

Dell has officially pissed me off.

I bought a refurbished PC today (yes, I”m aware that I also just bought a Mac Mini - the Dell system was $364, so get off my back), and during my entire purchase process, there was no notification that I was going to be charged sales tax.

Dell has a “shipping and tax estimator”, and after entering my address (including, of course, my state), the estimate was $0 in sales tax. Of course, as their site says, this is only an estimate.

Those of you who are savvy Internet shoppers know one incentive for buying big-ticket items online is that you can often avoid sales tax. Anything I buy for more than $100, I tend to get online for this very reason.

And PCs surely fall into this category. So I was pleased that the Dell “estimate” (which still stated $0 tax through my purchase) was for no tax (and free shipping).

But then I get the email receipt for my purchase. Tax: $29.10.

Motherfückers.

This, obviously, is a matter of principle. Getting a nice (refurb) machine for less than $400 total is a great deal. But I believe Dell is deliberately concealing information about sales tax during the purchase process.

Consider the following:

1) Dell”s “shipping and tax estimator” could (and should) know that the company charges sales tax for Georgia shipments. And it could (and should) know that the minimum sales tax anywhere in Georgia is 4%. So it could (and should) “estimate” the tax when I selected “Georgia” in their state pull-down at 4%. That”s an easy thing to do, yet they don”t do it.

2) My email receipt contained this message below my order total:

Dell Outlet collects tax on orders delivered to Georgia, California, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. For shipments to other states, tax relates to the third party service contract only. The purchaser is responsible for remitting any uncollected tax on their order directly to the local taxing authorities.

So why don”t they just drop this language into the order page? I double-checked by going back through the order process. It”s not there. You can”t tell me this is hard to do.

3) When I sent an email off to Dell customer service (by the way, they are also making it harder to find a customer service email these days), their system apparently scanned the contents of my message and sent back a detailed explanation of Dell”s policy on collecting sales taxes (no, it doesn”t say anything about why Dell does not tell you their policy until after you order). So they”ve got email systems that are sophisticated enough to automatically provide answers, but they can”t tell me before I buy that I”m going to pay sales tax?

All of this, as I said in my email, has changed my perception of Dell. I used to trust the company and their products. I still trust the products, but I”ve lost trust in the company.

I understand that states are cracking down on Internet retailers when it comes to sales tax. And I imagine Dell would love to not collect this tax. It must hurt their business, since they fail to adequately disclose the fact that most customers will be charged tax.

But Dell is being shady about sales tax, plain and simple.

Loyal readers of The Wisdom will remember my distress after an extensive round of rating movies at NetFlix yielded their top recommendation of Wet Hot American Summer.

Despite my best efforts, I could not rate this movie out of my recommendations. So I stuck it in the queue, figuring someday I might actually want to see whether NetFlix knows me better than I know myself.

Well, thanks to some very poor queue management on my part, Wet Hot American Summer snuck its way up to the top and got shipped out before I could stop it. The wife and I watched it Sunday night.

Jesus what a horrible movie. I get their intention of creating a campy (no pun intended), ironic and smart send-up of Meatballs, but oh how they failed. I would imagine the agents for Janeane Garafalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Molly Shannon and maybe even Michael Ian Black were fired shortly after this thing premiered.

NetFlix, why do you hate me?

I”d like to make note of and point out the difference between two performances at The Grammys tonight.

1) JLo made a point of trying to capitalize on the event by manufacturing a “public debut” of her and Mark Anthony in some super-lame Spanish soap opera song. It bombed.

2) Melissa Etheridge made a point of showing up with a chemo-bald head in her first performance since undergoing cancer treatment to pay tribute to Janis Joplin. And she kicked ass.

JLo is fake, Melissa is real. JLo is opportunistic, Melissa is brave. JLo is selfish, Melissa is respectful.

JLo sucks. Melissa rocks.