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Is there magic to using plastic wrap?
A number of weeks ago, I tried to wrap up leftovers from our dinner and it dawned on me that I've always hated plastic wrap. I think there must be something wrong with me as I can never rip it off the roll without making a mess and it usually doesn't stick. Years ago, I recall my father buying the big rolls at BJ's Wholesale Club and I hated them. Plastic wrap seems so popular, but the mechanism for slicing off pieces hasn't evolved. My mother-in-law wrapped stuff up when she was here to visit without any problem, so I think that I need a few lessons in plastic wrapping.
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Dumped Sirius!
Today we finally dumped Sirius radio! We got it as a gift from my in-laws a few years back and they've been paying the fee since then which was fine, however, we got real annoyed at the DJs. In January, we got my wife a new car with a built-in XM receiver and she enjoyed the 3 months free. However, I held out subscribing until they sent me an offer I couldn't refuse (the dealer said to wait until they sent a good offer and they sent several offers). When I subscribed, it also came with free online access which was pretty neat. I found an XM Radio plugin for my Squeezebox and was pleased. I discovered that I could stream 2 XM stations at once, so I picked up another Squeezebox today (used) and hacked the XM plugin code to let me connect twice. Now we can stream 2 XM stations at once or have XM on one Squeezebox and MP3s on the other; this also works out well so that we can play children's music on one box and whatever we want on the other. Very cool. Goodbye, Sirius and the crappy DJs! (I hope things don't go downhill when/if the Sirius/XM merger is finalized.)
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Sales tax on downloads
Today I went to purchase the professional pictures that were taken of me at the marathon last week and one of the options was electronic download as opposed to CD. This wasn't offered last year and would save me $16 (the $84 for the electronic download is already extortion). I got to the checkout page and saw that they wanted to charge me sales tax. Whoa...that doesn't fly in California. According to the California Board of Equalization's publication about downloads
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You can never have too many backups!
Yesterday I went to open up my website that I created in RapidWeaver and found that my site was all screwed up; I didn't realize this until after I exported it to my server. Luckily, I was able to quickly restore what was on the server as I have a week's worth of archives of my server in tar.gz files. However, getting the RapidWeaver file back required me to go back to the previous night's backup. The problem seems to have arisen from the upgrade from RapidWeaver 3.5 to 3.6 where it converted the data file. A 3.6.1 update was released, but it appears I had already done my conversion before the update came out.