Trying out disqus

I am trying out this commenting system from disqus. Seems to be promising.

Why raise gasoline tax?

A panel has recommended a increase in federal fuel tax to combat the decrease in consumption by motorists. This mechanism seems to be consistently used by the government. My county is planning to raise property taxes to compensate for the heavy reduction in property prices.
Here are a few points that can be considered before raising the fuel tax.

• Can the government not do the same as its citizens? Eliminate pork and focus on the essentials? I know this will not happen as the emphasis has been on more government spending.
  
• Maybe a portion of the $700 billion bailout could be used to repair the roads. Roads are part of the infrastructure and it is likely the money will be spent inside the country.
  
• The recommendation were probably made when the prices were high. Now that the gas prices have plummeted over 60% ($1.55/gallon), I do not feel the pinch as much and am open to driving more. This may increase consumption and demand and hence raise prices and make more money to build roads and bridges. We may just need to wait a little.
• and the most important point; More taxes may drive down consumption. Partially caused by increase in cost as demonstrated earlier this year and partially due to the common man's frustration. Politically it would be difficult to explain the increase in taxes against the background of the bailout of the banks and auto makers.
  

BlackBerry Storm

I liked the clicky touchscreen. It is much more usable, for me, than the Iphone. I enjoyed typing. For a second I regretted getting the Bold instead. A choice of unlocked versions of both the Storm and the Bold were available at the BlackBerry DevCon. Only for a second though.
Typing is much faster on my Bold and without wi-fi and gps, Storm is a non-starter to me.
It would not have been as easy to write this blog on the Storm.

Next Generation Navigation System

This is thinking out of the box. blaupunkt overlays directions on a real time video feed as you are driving. The idea feels awesome at first, but as I thought through it, it seemed more gimmicky than useful. It captures speed limits from the street signs and possibly could be used to capture a lot of other information. Unless the aim is to allow a blind person to drive a car, I do not see the utility in capturing information that the driver can and must see and use. Capturing speed information is useless as the driver can easily see the signs and choose to follow or ignore them.
The technology probably can be useful in other applications. Time will tell.

Happy Days for my BlackBerry 8820

The latest Gmail client (2.0.5) is much faster, responsive and seems to consume less resources. It also seems have added led notification for new email. I am not sure I like that as much, because I only want to be alerted on work email. Gmail notification is just additional noise.
Yahoo Go! has been updated. Now I can use menus to navigate the applicaton.

BlackBerry Media Sync and iPod for the rest of us

I use my 8820 to listen to music and podcast, and the new utility from RIM BlackBerry Media Sync eliminates the drudgery of manually syncing my audio files.

Here are few pages you may want to browse through before you want to use it.

• What is BlackBerry Media Sync?
• How to install, synchronize, and update BlackBerry Media Sync
• screenshots

It seems that the utility replaces all the files every time it syncs, so the most efficient way to use it is to separate your static content from your dynamic content. I have manually copied all my music to a separate folder outside the Media Sync folder. I only use the utility to sync podcasts.

What the ......?

I dragged a folder from one machine to the other and out popped this dialog. My mind has been frozen for that last 30 minutes. If I click yes,will it move the files or just copy them? If I choose no, will it cancel the operation, hopefully!! If this is a prank it is a scary. It can tie knots in one's brain. I am too scared to touch the mouse anymore.
I clearly dragged the folder from one explorer window to the other and as I was performing this operation across different workstations, I expected a move. How can one explain this prompt? What were they thinking?
Let me go to apple.com, look at a Mac and get my sanity back.