Let me start out by saying that I am one of those unusual people who actually PURCHASES books for my, my children’s, and grandchildren’s pleasure and education.

Philip Jern

I read, and influence others to do so. I encourage you to write or otherwise contact HarperCollins and express your disdain for their policy of causing e-books to ‘expire’ after 26 checkouts.

The voices against the TSA and its policies of Gestapo-like treatment of ordinary citizens are getting louder all the time. I’ve been waiting for you people to catch on for a while.

I did get a chuckle out of this lovely bit of YouTube wankery:

Welcome to the party, folks. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be appalled at this stuff. You should be, as well.

When I purchased it (a Canon ip7600) the ink cartridges cost 9.99 each.

I saw one today for $18.00.

It seems like more and more, when I turn the printer on it wants a couple of cartridges replaced. I’m not going to pay $36 to turn on the printer when I can get almost 100 prints made at Walmart for the cost of turning on the damn printer here.

There are a lot of places I can get an 8×10 print made for 1.99.

Don’t get suckered into buying a color printer, folks.

That tablespoon (or so) of ink in the cartridge works out to ink at $4,608 a gallon.

India ink bought at Amazon.com comes in a 2 oz. bottle for $3.15. That’s a far more reasonable $201.60 a gallon. If you can call that reasonable.

Greedy Corporations suck. I’m looking at you, Lexmark, Canon, and HP. There’s no possible reason that the cartridges couldn’t retail for 6 or 7 dollars, based on materials cost.

You created the ink refill business by charging the prices you have. Drop your DRM on printer and cartridges, charge a fair price for the ink, and cartridge refillers will go out of business. Are you really too stupid to see this?

I imagine you are.

This set me off on a train of thought…

I looked up the size of an HD movie. It appears that such a movie represents about 4 to 8 GB of data in uncompressed form, and compressed for over-the-net viewing it might weigh in at an off-the-cuff average of 2 GB of actual transmitted data. That’s 2³⁰ * 2, or 2,147,483,648 bytes of Data.

Twitter, as most geeks seem to know, is limited to 140 bytes (characters) per message. Why is this? It’s because that’s the message limit for an SMS text message as defined by the telephone companies.

So, an HD movie is the data equivalent of roughly 15,339,168 text messages. The phone companies seen to charge about 20 cents per text message across the board, data plans notwithstanding.

At that price, the phone companies think it’s worth $3,067,833.78 to stream that HD movie.

That same 140 bytes of data costs Netflix about 3.25*10^-9 cents.

That’s 0.00000000325 cents.

So, in terms of actual costs, a text message costs virtually nothing to send. Or you could say that it costs about one cent per 4 million text messages.

If you are a world-class text messager, you might be able to send about 1200 text messages a day., let’s say 35,000 or so a month. (There have been higher counts recorded!)

Text messaging plans are the worst deals on the planet. Printer ink? Pikers. For corruption and sheer craven greed, no one beats the telcos.

Dear Phil Jern,
My name is Sandra Gxxxxxx and I am an editor at www.gpsmycity.com. We are currently compiling a self-guided walking tour to Indianapolis that will be published on out site www.gpsmycity.com as well as in an iPhone application.
We hereby seek your permission to use one of your photos of Lady Spray Fountain on Flickr.com as part of the tour guide in question. The photo we need is:
www.flickr.com/photos/pjern/4797268948/
Naturally, we intend to credit you fully for the authorship of this photograph.
I thank you in advance for your permission and look forward to hearing from you soon.

People need to get out of the habit of thinking that they’re entitled to other people’s work for free if they intend to resell it. I visited the site mentioned, and found out that they’re selling iphone apps.

I was offended by the tone of “Oh we’ll give you credit” and thanking me in advance for my permission, (which isn’t likely to happen ever!).

Greedy people suck.

I was at the Wanamaker street fair, and the local FD had this ladder waaaay up in the air. With a storm rolling in. If you look close, you can see one of the firemen up there near the top, taking a photograph.

who? Me, of course! Follow the link in to the Flickr page, and then go over to the Ask Metafilter page where my denouement took place. I still have this problem with over thinking things, it seems :)

I’ve just filed a chargeback to the bank for the current month’s bill.

I apologize for recommending them in the past.

Eastgate was a social center of my formative years; it was THE shopping mall on our side of town forever and ever. In many ways, it marked a boundary as well, the city seemed to end at Eastgate- the land beyond was definitely terra incognito at that time.

Eastgate is where my brothers and sisters had their first jobs, where I bought my first girlfriend the first present I had ever purchased for anyone outside my family; the destination for informal dates; it was where we went back-to-school and Christmas shopping.

I’ve been driving by it daily, oblivious, for the most part, to it’s gradual decay, my mind seeing it as it always was, camouflaging the stark reality of its decomposition. I think I last shopped there about July of 2003, and I think it closed finally in 2004.

The outlots are thriving in their own way, and serve to hide the central decay from Washington street and Shadeland Avenue. Driving up Shortridge road, however, becomes a little like driving past a graveyard, the bare parking lots with weeds poking through every few feet like a vast grey-and-green sward, the yellowed walls of the shopping center becoming its own mausoleum.

I poked my face up to the locked doors to the food court looking through all the way to the other side, remembering chasing my son through the game arcade that used to be here when he was maybe 8 or 9 years old, the echoes of the little kiddie train that ran on the mall at Christmastime; the record store where a girl I had a crush on in high school worked; and wandering the Christmas-decorated stores with my first sweetheart.

The stores eventually scattered to other venues, as did my siblings and I. Still, I felt a pang of longing and sadness for the innocence of those times, now gone, like the very life of the mall.