Inflation - much higher than the governement says

From where I am, my observations of inflation yield a different result than what the government publishes for its figures. Of course, it's probably all those items in the "volatile food and energy" groups -- you know, those things you are utterly dependent on -- where I notice the largest increases.

For instance, I was just at our local BJ's Wholesale Club, where we regularly purchase stables like eggs and orange juice. Well, this week, both of those items had a sharp rise in price:

• Orange Juice (2 64oz container pack of Tropicana) - jumped from $4.69 to $5.09, or just over 8 percent!
• Eggs (30 eggs, 2.5 dozen) - jumped from 1.99 to 2.99! Wow - that is 50 percent inflation! And, if that was not bad enough, when I am ringing them up, they go through the computer as $3.15, at which point I lodge a complaint and then give up when it becomes obvious it will take much longer than 16-cents worth of my time to get credited.

I do not know why this much inflation is showing up now, especially on eggs (I know of no shortage of eggs - unless it is the corn being used to feed the chickens, and the competition for corn by Ethanol producers). Regardless, this type of inflation ought to be a bit scary. We also have some local Topps supermarkets closing, and perhaps BJ's is just taking advantage of the lack of competition in the region that is about to occur (leaving just Giant Eagle as a major player around here, and both they and Tops are darn overpriced!).

If this type of pricing starts to become an overall trend, get alarmed! I did mention the ethanol competition for corn earlier, and in all seriousness I have warned people about this before. Ethanol is a JOKE when it comes to "renewable fuels", since it is simply competing with our food supply for demand. Prices are going to skyrocket on everything from Cereals to livestock products that are corn-fed.

If you are seeing similar big leaps in prices showing up on your groceries, let me know. I wondered if it was a regional thing or everywhere. And, with the US Dollar falling like a rock to the bottom of the ocean, I expect many more things will start increasing in price since we are so ridiculously dependent of foreign made X, Y, and Z (read: everything!)

New e-ink cell-phone coming soon.

E-ink is a type of display that, if you are not aware of already, you will be in the future. It is awesome for the simple fact that it takes so little power to operate it, especially on devices where the information being displayed is not changing often - like cell-phones, and e-book-readers.

Motorola has a lovely example of using e-ink technology in a great way: a new strip-down cell phone that boasts operating times of 7.5hours of call-time on a single charge (and darn near two weeks while "on" in standby mode)! Wow! That makes my current phone seem like a piece of crap to say the least.

Check out this article on the new Motorola Cell-Phone with E-Ink technology. It is debuting in India, and is supposed to end up in the USA in the not too distant future (I sure hope!).

This caught my attention too:

Helping to keep the price low will be the unit’s embedded Linux OS, which won’t be burdened with playing back video and shooting digital images. Sources quote Motorola officials as saying they believe the F3, once it makes its way to the US, could sell for as little as $50 even without carrier subsidies.

Excellent! On all accounts. Use that open-source technology (Linux), and keep the phone basic and affordable. I just hope when it gets to the US market that Motorola does not feel compelled to embellish the thing with a camera, and such. The good news is that the E-Ink display does not really lend itself to pictures anyhow, since it is a low-refresh-rate black/white technology (and, thus no streaming video either FOR SURE). I am looking forward to this one!

Converting my website to ASP.Net 2.0

I have put off converting my company website to DotNet for a long time. I never saw the pressing "need" to do so, and thus my website remained Classic-Microsoft-ASP (VBScript) since about 1998. But, times change, and I finally had some "extra" time (over the Thanksgiving holiday) to dedicate to making the conversion happen. And, since the hosting company I had decided to completely RUIN my SPAM-filtration when they changed mail-server packages (I went from getting ZERO SPAM to being inundated with it!), I decided to move hosts and move to a host where I already used ASP DotNet 2.0 for my new Gluten-Free Baking /Recipes Books site.

When I started the book sales site in DotNet 2.0, it was my first hands on experience with the latest features of the DotNet framework for ASP. I avoided DotNet 1.0 and 1.1 COMPLETELY since, imho, it left a LOT to be desired. ASP.NET 2.0 finally addressed a few of my concerns with the earlier frameworks, with the inclusion of "master pages" and other really nice features. These master-pages allow for a version of visual-inheritance of sorts, and is a HUGE step up from before. This is one of the features that convinced me to migrate my site.

So, I have it done, and only need to re-point the DNS entries to the new hosting company. Needless to say, my existing hosting firm has yet to reply to my "notice of non-renewal" I gave them -- in which I specifically told them to acknowledge receipt of! All the more reason I am leaving ActiveHost - they have been terrible with communications, and this is just one more occurrence. I have one more company hosted on their machines, but not for long... that too will be migrated soon. And, in all this effort, my ASP DotNet 2.0 skills (using C# = "C Sharp") have been improving considerably. I still much prefer working with Borland Delphi, but the development of C# was overseen by an ex-Borland guy that was a primary architect of Delphi from what I understand -- so, there are enough similarities to make the transition somewhat tolerable for me.

For anyone else that is sitting on "ancient" classic ASP web sites just waiting for a reason to upgrade, take a look at the DotNet 2.0 ASP Framework and features. They definitely represent an improvement over ASP Classic (a big improvement), and now that most hosting companies are supporting the framework, it should not be too tough to migrate.

New Political Team in Office, but same old thing?

I have been closely watching the actions of the newly elected House and Senate, and quite honestly, I do not expect much to change with this new batch of faces. Sure, the balance of power has supposedly swung a bit more towards the Democrats, but what will it mean with regards to the everyday issues that neither party wants to act on according to the overwhelming will of the people?

Issues like illegal immigration, which a vast majority of the US population wants brought under control, is bound to stay in its current state of disarray and rampant violation of existing laws while lawmakers talk about "comprehensive immigration reform" (code-phrase for amnesty!) instead of doing what the people as a whole want: stop illegal immigration completely! I heard this report the other day about how a couple companies were demanding that their workers provide (within 2 weeks time) proof of a valid Social-Security Number (when they were found to have provided fraudulent ones already), and if they could not, they were fired... and, then, some Democrat from CA allegedly sent a letter to the company firing the workers (with invalid SSNs mind you!) telling the company they should back off since their actions could be taken as "discrimination" or such! Can you believe this crap!? The employer is screwed -- bound by law on one side saying they can not legally employ someone without a valid SSN, while at the same time some lame congressman gives them a pseudo-warning about how if they abide by the law that they could be violating someone's rights by being discriminatory. We all know that the companies are the ones that got themselves into this (by hiring tons and tons of illegal workers over the years), and that the actions of this congressman is just another move by supporters of cheap labor and illegal immigration / open-borders to try to thwart any sort of tide against their agenda.

My fellow countrymen (all legal residents of this country that is), we are being screwed over by both sides of the political spectrum. "Right/Left", "Conservative/Liberal", no matter what you call them, they are out for only what furthers the agenda of the only persons that matter: those with the disproportionate massive resources, power, connections, and money to get the attention of our lawmakers and elected officials!

I have heard various Democrats talk about how the current vote outcome was an endorsement of their (amnesty) immigration policies. I have heard Republicans talk about how they have strayed too much from their parties core-values. Fact is, the vote in general was a "grudge vote", a vote for change, and if the latest round of elected officials fails to act upon the opinions and consensus of the people, they too should be voted out at the earliest opportunity. Forget all these ridiculously divisive "issues" they all seem to run on, and focus on the one thing that matters: are they listening to us, the "average", when it comes to the massive problems facing this country with illegal immigration, "free trade", the war, and everything else. I sure hope to see something soon that would give me an indication that government officials are taking note now that the election is over, but I fear my hope will soon be crushed as it has for many, many years in a row (regardless of the party in power).

And, I have not even started to talk about addressing this burgeoning national debt, deficit spending, and unbelievable trade-deficit we are facing. And, so many other important issues. Please, government representatives, show us that your are really listening to our concerns!

Free Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 - Don't bother!

Microsoft just released a new free product called Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007. The feature list looked interesting, so I downloaded it, installed it, and gave it a quick try. Basically, all it did was piss me off. And, this blog entry discusses a few reasons why.

I started by installing the product into a VMWare Virtual Machine (for good reasons: I hate how MS products tend to pollute my systems, take over the place with "required" additional software and components that eat up 100's of megabytes, and so forth). So, I install into an environment where I can easily get rid of the entire experience if I desire.

The first annoyance: everywhere I turned in this "free" product, I encountered a need for a non-free Microsoft product. I wanted to try the Email feature - to send an invoice. Nope, can not do that without MS Word installed! WTF?!? I want to send Email, not write a letter. And, since I am in a clean virtual machine, no MS Word is available. So much for testing all sorts of things in here. The promised PayPal interface features rely on using Microsoft Word Templates for PayPal Emails. Lovely (not!).

Next, I want to export some information... hmmm... guess what the "export" supports. Yep, it is Export to Excel, and if you click the export button without Excel installed, forget it - you are presented with a messagebox reminding you how Excel is required.

And, you are presented with multiple reasons to upgrade to the "professional" version or whatever (yep, that is the non-free one). Sure, upgrade... then you can probably be forced to buy even more supporting Microsoft Applications.

Next, errors. I choose to "send books to accountant". It failed with some ridiculous messagebox of HTML errors when the MS Live signin didn't work. Wow, that's a great way to handle the fact I do not have an account setup in the application.

Next, the software is slow. The initial company setup thing is ridiculously slow when it starts creating the initial company entries in the database (or whatever the disk-drive is churning away on for a minute or so). Reports are also slow. Heck, with only one order entered, it still takes 10 seconds to generate a single line report summarizing my one order. Lame.

There is a bunch of visual (and useless) FLUFF. It is now well thought out. It is certainly less-than-intuitive in many areas. I setup a couple products for sale, and there is a field for weight - with no associated unit of measure, and you can only enter numbers. So, if you sell something measured in pounds, and another in ounces, there is no differentiation. Then again, I do not even see where the weight is shown ever again on a report (like, e.g., shipping weight totals - where you may charge based on how heavy your packaging is). You can add fields to various forms, but it seems they can only be of TEXT type, even though the instructions say you can choose what type of field they are (yeah, one choice). You can then add your custom field to the normal view, but even that is a pain - no simple drag-drop to position the fields... it's buttons labeled "move up, move down", etc... and many clicks later, you may get the layout you want. Sad.

Continuing with how lame the layout is... finding invoices after I created them was almost impossible. The ONLY place you can get to them (from what I can tell) is to go to the "customers overview" page (with visual buttons in groups called "start a task", "more tasks", and "find")... only with a button in that Find group can you get to Invoices. Not from the upper menu-bar as I would expect. Once again, WTF is someone thinking? This layout is horrible. IF I can get to something via this graphical/flufff screens, I damn well should be able to get to the same functionality through the menu-bar and/or hot-keys. And, this is for an application where a good quarter of the menu items seem to be nothing more than links to external applications (you guess it: things like Word, Excel, Outlook, Word Templates, etc).

Speaking of invoices, though you can modify what shows on the invoice, you can not add your custom fields created for the items you are selling; thus, adding weights to the invoice is impossible from what I can tell.

Well, at least they priced it at the point of equilibrium with its true worth: nothing / free. OK, perhaps that is a bit harsh... for free it can help quite a few people setup accounting in a hurry. But, I have to believe there are some nearly-free accounting applications out there that make this one look bad. Some of the reports are nice, but once again, for more reports, you are pushed to "upgrade to view more reports". I guess I should have expected no different.

And, what is with this need to call every product XYZ-next-years-date-here? It's 2006 Microsoft! It seems everyone thinks that somehow the promise of getting an apparent "future" year's product early is a compelling reason to purchase. (sidenote: this applies to software big time, as well as automobiles, and much more!) And, I am also sure it is done so the product in question does not appear outdated as soon (for anyone unfamiliar with the real release date). This is just ridiculous marketing crap.

Bottom Line: "FREE" software doesn't mean good software, and it certainly does not mean the software is a good solution for your business. Check it out if you are OK with all the Microsoft-dependencies, or if you just do not want to spend money on your business accounting systems. There IS some "value" in here depending how you want to use the app -- just not the value I am looking for in such an app. I am going to check out some other alternatives, perhaps even writing my own if it makes sense for my needs.

The Government just stole my Xbox 360!

OK, perhaps that headline is a bit misleading... the government is only stealing my (yet to be purchased) Xbox 360 from me because my neighbors and townsfolk yesterday voted in a lovely 1% city tax-increase on those of us who both live in our city and work in our city. Since only 30% of the city residents fell into that category, that is how politicians sold this doubling of our city-tax rate: "it will only affect 30% of those in the city... the other 70% will not see an increase"... so vote it in and screw the minority on this issue!

So, there goes my XBox 360 come January. I was holding off getting one til after the holidays, and now this lovely tax-increase is going to cost me my entire Xbox 360, some controllers, and some games to go with it since both I and my wife work and live in our city! I am pissed!

The sad part is I am very very sure that we personally will see absolutely zero benefit from this doubling of our local taxes. The city passed this levy under a "fear tactics" approach to things too, stating that if it was not passed, streets would fall into (even worse) state of disrepair, vital services would be cut, flooding would get worse (yeah, right -- use our recent mega-rain spells to cover for the city's lack of planning and developing every damn acre in site allowing no runoff and natural water-absorption areas), and so on! People fell for it all. I just hope that with all this extra money that I, and my fellow work-in-town residents must now pay, that we finally get some decent city services for it. We have no Recreation-Centers or Community-Centers like our surrounding cities all seem to have. We have crappy roads all over the place. And, there seems to be no solid planning for development -- just build wherever, whenever a developer finds some acreage to put up those new $300K+ homes on "postage-stamp" sized lots.

This same tax issue has come up 4 times in the 16 years we have lived here, each time failing. But, the local government finally saw the perfect opportunity this year: we had some very heavy rainfall that caused flooding widespread enough to make people concerned. It is the uncontrolled growth (new housing) that has eaten away at natural flood-prevention zones, and the same people that feel threatened are the ones living in poorly planned new developments that helped to make this problem exist in the first place. So, now that they have their fancy new houses, they can vote in a tax to more or less "insure" themselves from flooding (so the argument for the levy goes). Needless to say folks, if anyone wants to place a bet with me about whether this levy/tax ever leads to flood control, I'll take that bet. It will not make a damn bit of difference -- you were just scared and bought into the BS the politicians sold you, since at the same time they are promising flood control, they are approving continued rampant development of natural water-absorption zones throughout town. Just down the street, just a couple months after flooding issues, there are two major developments: a 90+ home development in a low-lying area (yeah, protect THOSE homes from water, right!), and another 100+ unit condo development at the foot of a hill on Rt82 - where flooding was already bad at higher elevations a few hundred yards up that same hill! This is insanity! But, fear and the promise of only affecting the tax-bill of the minority live-work-in-town group sold the tax regardless.

This will all surely energize me to further consider getting the hell out of this town. The government, backed by its threatened/coerced citizens, have just stolen my Xbox and I am pissed! And, since taxes never go down, each following year they will rob me of another service or product I would spend my money on.

Oh, but don't worry, I'm sure the government will do so much better with my money than I would! (mega-sarcasm!)

Novell and Microsoft "partner" on Linux? Yep!

For those of you who do not know that the SUSE "brand" of Linux is owned by Novell, well now you do. And Novell of course is also most known for its nearly non-existent (by market share) NetWare operating-system product. Novell, who has always been in fierce competition with Microsoft, is now teaming up with MS to ensure cross-compatibility between SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows.

In addition, the OpenOffice project (an open-source competitor to Microsoft Office) is also primarily maintained by Novell, as is Evolution (the open source alternative to MS Outlook). This latest "partnership" agreement has MS and Novell playing nice on the Office-Suite software front too, with the deal supposedly ensuring cross-compatibility between MS Office (including Microsoft Office 2007) and OpenOffice (via Open XML and OpenDocument formats).

It'll be interesting to see how this goes. If history serves as a guide, Microsoft will somehow come out with the better part of the deal and further solidify their dominance in the marketplace. But, who knows, perhaps this will help Linux finally become an acceptable alternative to Microsoft Windows.

Additionally, the two agree not to sue each over other software patents, which is great news in itself. Read the full article here.