These are my links for March 9th from 21:12 to 21:15:

• How I Learned Racial Discrimination – Teaching people to discriminate
• Tips for Effective Meetings – Use your meetings for arguing and get more done.
• Powerful Presentations – Present well.
• Parking Strategies – Save time, park fast.
• Income Diversification – Don't get too dependent on your job for your income.
• On the Job MBA – How to get an education while you are getting paid for it.

In movies and television, no one says “Goodbye” at the end of a phone call.  Have you ever noticed this?  They simply hang up when they are through talking.  How do they know that the other person is done talking? Even if they are calling to tell each other “Goodbye” for the last time the conversation usually ends up with something other than “Goodbye”.  Maybe Hollywood thinks that it would be too annoying to hear “Goodbye” at the end of every phone call or something. Maybe they are trying to show that the characters are “too cool” to follow such social norms.  I don’t know, but I do know that if you try this in real life, it will drive people crazy!

In college a friend of mine and I decided to follow the movie model and stop saying goodbye.  We’d simply hang up when we were through talking. I can tell you it positively makes for the most annoying telephone conversations you’ve ever had.  You are talking back and forth, your friend says something and then “click”. You don’t get a chance to reply or say anything–they were done so they hang up.  You can call them back if you have something else you want to say. You end up with conversations like:

A: Hey do you want to go get some lunch?

B: Yes CLICK

A: [Redials B]

B: Hello?

A: Um did the phone disconnect?

B: No I was just done talking.

I think the calling back thing would make movies a bit more realistic.  When someone hangs up without saying “Goodbye” (and thus giving the other party a chance to finish up any important business) the person who was hung up on, should immediately call back and say, “Wait, I wasn’t through talking!” or “Did you hang up or did the call drop?”

For the past month, we have had a trash mystery at our house hold. The trash pickup that we pay for picksup every Friday morning and requires that we put the garbage can on the side of the road.

The mystery occurs every Thursday morning. Someone pulls into our driveway, retrieves the garbage can, empties the contents and leaves without a sound. That’s not all. The service we pay for will only take out the bags in the garbage can. We had several items in the bottom of the can that weren’t in bags that had been there for several weeks. The mystery garbage pickup service cleaned out the trash can as well!

If you decide to break into a car, you should be careful not to accidentally dial the police as you discuss what items to take.

A guy watches movies with his wife and then films her crying at the ending.

YouTube doesn’t have a “Download” button.  However, you can download clips using one of these methods.

• Koha – Library management system.
• Moodle – Course management system.  Similar to Blackboard and Angel.
• Sakai – Another course management system.
• Mahara – Portfolio system that integrates with Moodle.

It sounds like the NY Times is planning on charging for online content.  Right now they ask you to register, but the content is free.  Rumors are that they will let you read a few articles for free before asking you to subscribe.

Maybe this will work, but I think it ignores the way the web is fundamentally different than a newspaper.  When I subscribe to a newspaper, I’ll probably read a good portion of it.  When I’m reading news on the web, I will read the articles I find interesting from a variety of different sites.  Subscribing to a newspaper that gives you 75% of your news probably makes sense.  Subscribing to a newspaper where you get 5% of your news is a harder sell.

For a subscription model to work well, I think you’d either need something like micro-payments or a subscription to a group of online resources. Micro-payments are problematic because they are confusing and because Americans seem to prefer unlimited or package options.  Subscriptions that give you access to a bunch of different web sites might work, but it would require publishers to work together.

Imagine a subscription where you can pay $20 per month and get access to the 20 top papers in the US, plus some sites like Britannica, etc.  Your subscription could be divided up between the publishers based on the number of articles, page views or time spent on each site.  As the number of subscribers grew, more publishers would want to be part of it to get some of the income pie.  As the number of publishers grew, more individuals would be interested in subscribing.

The company who seems uniquely positioned to pull something like this off is Google.  They could easily show subscribers results that they have access to, while showing non-subscribers what they are missing. Since Google controls a good percentage of the traffic for many of these sites, they would be a good company to handle the subscription process.  More importantly, if these companies simply start restricting access to their content, Google will probably stop showing their content in the search results.

I would think that the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind would be thrilled with the idea of colleges using Kindles for textbooks.  After all, Kindle’s can read the text to you which would be a great advantage for people who can’t see.  This seems like a big step up from a regular book that may or may not have a braille or audio edition and if such editions exist are going to be hard to find and probably much more expensive.

It turns out those two organizations see things a bit differently.  Instead of being happy about the advantages such a device would give blind people, they decided to complain to the DOJ about several pilot programs to use Kindle’s in several universities.  Their logic is that the devices are difficult to navigate if you can’t see. While I see their point, surely the devices aren’t any more difficult than letting a blind person find and read a book in a large library on their own.  They also complain that blind students wouldn’t be able to use the web browser capabilities of the device (which presumably doesn’t offer text to speech capabilities).

I think it is idiotic that they are preventing programs that would make things better for the people they represent.  Technology progresses incrementally and trying to hold up new projects that are beneficial just because you want them to be beneficial in other ways is a sure fire way to reduce progress for people with disabilities.

Intuit makes Quicken and Quickbooks.  I stopped using Quicken for Mac because it can’t import OFX files. Most banks have a way for you to download your transactions in the OFX format.  Pretty much every piece of financial software in the world can handle OFX files, but not Quicken.  I noticed that there is a new version of Quickbooks out that works on OS X and thought that surely it wouldn’t be crippled in this way.  Shows how optimistic I am.  It turns out it can’t handle OFX files either.

Here is what Intuit is doing.  Rather than letting people import the files themselves, Quicken has found they can charge banks extra money to be Quicken/Quickbooks compatible.  They take the OFX file from the institution, turn it into their own format.  If someone buys their product and finds it can’t import transactions from their bank, Intuit can blame the bank and say that the bank doesn’t support the right format.  Worse still, the charge the bank one fee to support the format their PC software uses, and another fee to support the software that their Mac software uses.

In reality, these formats are the same.  Quickbooks and Quicken look at the file and see who it comes from.  If it comes from a bank that hasn’t paid Intuit money, they return an error saying that the financial institution doesn’t support the right format or the platform (PC or Mac).

It is so frustrating to work with Intuit because they are taking something that should be an open standard and exploiting the banks by using their customers as leverage.  If enough customers start complaining that the bank doesn’t support something, the bank will probably have to go ahead and pay Intuit.  The customer on the other hand, buys a product that may or may not work with their bank.  They can’t rely on open standards to give them compatibility.