January 2004
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What About Taxes?
USAToday wrote recently about the escalating cost of food, and how food is the third largest expense, after housing and medical care. Does anyone notice an important component left out here? Taxes. I checked the last three years of my accounts, and taxes are far and away the…
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Local or Express
While I haven't spent a ton of time in cities with subways or other public transportation – and the public transportation here in Charlotte is limited – it seems that the term express is typically used to indicate a route that doesn't stop as often. On the New…
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Mamma Mia
This weekend, we took a trip went to Buffalo, Toronto and Niagara Falls. Naturally, I'm sure you're thinking we were absolutely nuts – and you're probably right. This isn't really the time of year to head North. But we purchased the tickets for just $100 round trip, and…
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Take the Keys with You
Maybe the problem is the lack of pockets. Maybe the folks in the Seattle area don't have a local government as regulation-crazed as the one here in Charlotte. Or maybe they've finally served one too many lattes to people who come in out of the rain….
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No Football Here Today
For those of you who don't like to hear me bash the government, listen up. Another monster is on the block today – the National Football League. For those of you who don't know, the Carolina Panthers are in the playoffs this year, and they have a game…
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AS400 SQL Concatenation
I needed to concatenate some information in a table, and I wanted to do it with a SQL query, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to combine the two strings (one a constant, the other a field name) in order to produce…
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Leap Another Month
I'm thinking that life would be much more entertaining if we would leap months other than February during leap year. I mean why do we always pick on the little guy? To be fair, we could just start with January, the next month could go to February for…
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Do We Require the FDA?
I know I complain about it a lot, and I understand that there are certain instances where the government is perhaps trying to do the right thing. What I don't understand is why we're not allowed to do our own thing if we recognize the potential consequences and…
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Let Me Out of Social Security
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, three Texas counties opted out of the federal Social Security program. After twenty-something years, they've had pretty decent results, with workers earning two and three times what they would have with Social Security. What I don't get is that no one…
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Separation Anxiety
Everyone knows that divorce is a common theme in our world these days. Witness of the phrase starter marriage that has worked its way into our vocabularies. What has got me puzzled lately is how all the details work out down the road. Life is confusing enough when…