Don't Back Down

It seems that the state of South Carolina - rarely at the forefront of anything - may be proposing something fairly interesting: An electronic license plate.

There is no telling if these plates would ever see the light of day. For one, they are potentially expensive - the inventor is trying to get the cost under $100 per plate (which means that they are over that point now). There does not appear to be a reliable source for the cost of the metal plates, but since they are often rumored to be stamped out in stacks by prisoners, you have to assume they are awfully cheap.

Which makes the question: Why switch?

It was only a matter of time before someone actually put one of these on the menu somewhere, and leave it up to Dunkin' Donuts to be the ones to do it.

Now I'm really more of a fan of Krispy Kreme when it comes to doughnuts - but since they do not have breakfast sandwiches, they missed the boat here (though they did have free doughnuts on National Doughnut Day, no purchase required - you had to buy a drink at DD).

With all the hubbub from the announcement that the government can snoop on pretty much anything they like - first Verizon calls, then later almost anything on the internet via a program named Prism (save Twitter, because that's so important), it leaves me wondering why there is such an issue.

The issue is that there was no transparency in the program. It was announced that the current administration took steps to figure out who leaked the documents - and later that person could get years in prison. But why is this? They shouldn't get prison time. They should get a parade.

It seems like just about each time I drive down some street or another, I end up stuck behind a row of buses. Yes, a row of buses. Okay, two may not actually qualify as "a row", but just how many do you need? One would surely do in most cases, and two is definitely more than enough, especially when it seems like they stop every hundred yards or so. Surely people can walk a hundred yards to the next stop rather than having the buses stop as often as they do, right?

Before being accused of saying the government should exist at all, I actually think that there is a place for the government - I just think that the government - especially at the federal level - should be really small, and I don't get why once something is enacted it is so difficult to get rid of it.

I recently had a client where everything was working fine - but they were unable to link to any secure (https) sites when creating entries in Movable Type. Unfortunately, there were no messages to be found, and everything worked just fine - as long as there were no https links in the entry.

To make matters worse, just changing the https link to http made it work just fine - which at first seemed to make no sense whatsoever. It's like that one character put the database over some sort of size limit or something. Alas, even that wasn't it - bunches of (other) characters would work fine, just not those particular characters, making it seem like that site itself was the issue, and that is what eventually led to the answer.

I generally don't read the terms of service. I rarely read the end user license agreement on software I use either. I don't think most people do. Which is why it's interesting when I do, to find out what is in there.

With the announcement that Google is discontinuing their Reader product, I figured I would revisit Bloglines, a site I used regularly before Reader, and also a site that contains a bit that most people never would think is in their Terms of Service.

Way back when - and yes, I am dating myself yet again - television shows used to be so much longer. I'm not just talking about the shows themselves, but the length of time they ran used to be longer too.

Sure, there may not have been as many options, but what was there ran for a lot longer. Your typical season would run for 24 episodes - that's nearly half a year. Now even the longest season is perhaps 22 episodes, and many of the more popular ones (looking at you here, cable) get maybe 10 if they are lucky.

To make matters worse, the shows themselves are shorter. If you watch a show from 30 or 40 years ago you can see that it had a much smaller percentage of commercials. So what happened?

I remember a number of years ago when the last phase of Independence started. They said that they were working at a rate of converting about a mile of the road every ten years. That's pretty slow, even for the government. Whether that is completely accurate or not, I don't know, but what I do know is that they are going about it all wrong.

When they completed the first phase of the project - roughly from the edges of Uptown Charlotte to around Briar Creek Road - the area surrounding Independence Boulevard was cut off completely. There was none of this limited access that has become the mantra of the next few miles.

I understand that there are businesses there that they want to preserve, but what no one seems to understand is that those businesses are doing nothing but failing and leaving a scorched wasteland behind.

Our oldest son graduates high school today. I've noticed an increasing number of people who mention the phrase "one down, one to go!" (we have another who is supposed to graduate in three years). What I find amazing about this is that it only means he has graduated high school. Why the celebration?

For starters, there should be no celebration here. Every time we turn around, there is a celebration, from graduating kindergarten to graduating elementary school to graduating junior high (you kids call it middle school these days) to graduating high school to graduating college to graduating more college to getting some other degree. And that's just school.

The other day, I was reading an article - which unfortunately I cannot find right now. I am sure it was online, as I rarely read anything offline any longer. This article pointed to the NC Unclaimed Property site, where you can search for unclaimed property belonging to you that is just waiting to find its way home.

Before I continue, I should say that I'm really quite good - anal, really - about keeping track of things. I balance the checkbook (including not just checks, but credit cards, savings accounts and even retirement accounts) regularly. Some might even say religiously. I have done so for years. I even keep backups and backups of backups. I can search the history going back to 1998 for just about anything. Put another way: It would be highly unusual that anything went missing.

But sure enough, I had unclaimed property listed on the site.

Now that I've mentioned - more than once - the fact that smartphones may not be all that smart, and make it seem like I'm nothing more than an old codger who doesn't care for all this new technology, let me say that I love technology. I have a ton of technology. I use it every day, in fact. But as I grow older, I find that more and more I want technology to work for me, and not the other way around.

When I recalled a couple months ago how I had been using a phone for years that resembled a smartphone, it made me think about the entire process - how you end up depending on the devices themselves, and that's just wrong.

Recently I mentioned that smartphones may not be all that smart after all. Then again, they may be our new overlords, since they have us all sitting around tables tapping on their shiny glass surfaces - so it seems that something is certainly appealing about them.

There is definitely something going on, however, because those shiny baubles have definitely attracted a crowd. Visit any phone department or store and you will find few alternatives.

So what is it that is so darned appealing? Ultimately, they are almost always more difficult to use to make a phone call, because pressing buttons is many times easier on a feature phone versus a smartphone, and voice dialing rarely works.