kirkwalsh.com

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have any questions, please see my policies page or if you would like to contact me, you can do so here. You can find out more about me here. I sincerely thank you for visiting!

If you’re not reading Lifehacker every single day you should be asking yourself why not. Lifehacker is what the internet should be, a fantastic resource for making your life better and more productive. Just today, they have two essential articles for living.

The first is a link to the Google Phonebook Removal Tool. Typing in any residential phone number in Google brings back your address and a helpful Google Map to your house. While someone would have to know your phone number to use the trick, those aren’t exactly hard to get.

The second link is to a guide on using apostrophes. This is something that drives me bananas. When I drive by a marquee that has a misused apostrophe, I seriously consider no longer shopping there. If it’s a constant barrage of misapplied apostrophes, I won’t go there. I know it’s a disease but I’m okay with it. It’s the pedant in me (my wife would point to this as one of my many autistic tendencies).

So, go read Lifehacker and add it to your feed reader right now (add kirkwalsh.com while you are at it).

On my post “Shutting off the Student Loan Sharks“,  a poster known as CollegeLoanSearch, who runs a blogspot blog of the same name, left the following comment.

Yes, it is annoying, but lender access to NSLDS is not the impetus to all the solicitions you get. NSLDS does not yield your address, phone number, or email to the lenders. You’re targeted by lenders who use your credit bureau record for prospecting.

The temporary shutdown to NSLDS is affecting the student borrower more than any of the lenders.

I was not aware of that. I was going by the US News and World Report article that said that the database was shut down due to marketing activities and I made an assumption. Looks like it won’t shut the sharks down (and hasn’t).

On my post “The Revolutionary HP Printer No One Can Buy” poster Phil left the following comment:

Over the past 5 years we have seen the number of printer produced by the major manufacturers go through the roof. It appears that a new model is launched and discontinued within a time span ranging only a few months. Why is their a need for so many models that all appear to need a slightly different ink cartridge? We are all being taken for fools and it’s about time someone did something about it. The production of all these plastic entities is an environmental scourge and it appears that everyone is oblivious to the fact. I can remember when products lasted you for years not months - are we all going mad? or just brainwashed by a huge marketing machine?

Phil has a point that I never considered. The environmental impact of the constant waste of cartridges is immense. Most people don’t take their cartridges to be “recycled” (btw, the store turns them back to the manufacturer that simply reuses the container and saves themselves the cost of manufacturing one) so all of that plastic ends up in dumps. The constant turnover of model numbers has more to do with marketing (gotta have the newest machine!) than anything else.

I agree with Phil that I hope the Kodaks and the Walgreens of the world take back the printer industry from this razor and blade model, but I’m not holding my breath.

Today, my article Debunking the Blagojevich Tax Plan is up at the Carnival of Taxes over at Don’t Mess with Taxes.

Today is the last of the pre tax day Carnivals and like all good accountants the Carnival is taking a month off after mid-April. Go check out all of the posts including a tax limerick (who can pass up that!?).

Today, I just have two quick, fun links.

• An interview with Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) where he answers 10 questions from fans about the strip.
• Engadget’s (annual?) cake baking contest where geeks show off their mad baking skills for prizes.

My post Who Really Pays Business Taxes? is in two Carnivals this week.

First, the Carnival of Taxes hosted by Don’t Mess with Taxes features a special off week edition to celebrate the nearing of the end of tax season.

The other is the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted at No Credit Needed.

Go read all of the entries at both Carnivals.

I won’t be doing any lame April Fool’s jokes. Among tech sites, it’s almost a given that they will be rolling out some sort of joke on April 1. Google has had several classic ones, and TiSP this year is another in that list. (Of course, their best April 1 announcement was Gmail, which no one believed because of their history of pranks).

TiSP works via fiber optic lines that run through your commode. It’s a free high speed internet service that serves ads (and this is the classic part)

To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward. Google also offers premium levels of service for a monthly fee (see below).

Note: We take your privacy very seriously. So we treat all TiSP users’ waste-related personal information with tremendous discretion, in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Of course this is a little dig at the information that Google collects that has several privacy groups up in arms and led to the current BusinessWeek cover story. The Privacy Policy has not been rewritten for the service, which shocks me as that is a detail I expect of Google. Though, clicking on several links brings up a 404 page that does amuse.

The requested URL was not found on this server. There are so many reasons that this might have happened we can scarcely bring ourselves to type them all out. You might have typed the URL incorrectly, for instance. Or (less likely but certainly plausible) we might have coded the URL incorrectly. Or (far less plausible, but theoretically possible, depending on which ill-defined Grand Unifying Theory of physics one subscribes to), some random fluctuation in the space-time continuum might have produced a shatteringly brief but nonetheless real electromagnetic discombobulation which caused this error page to appear. Or (and truth be told, this is by far the most likely scenario) you might have reached a page that we meant to create but didn’t get around to it, since this year’s April Fool’s joke got hacked together at the last minute, more or less the same way this one did. And this one. And this one, and this one, and this one…

Ha! Good job, Google. The diagram with the Ph.D. sitting in the sewers is pretty good as well. No one believes this joke, which may be the best indicator of a great prank (see TechCrunch buying F’dCompany [language warning] for instance) but it’s a subtle dig at Google’s critics while keeping up their tradition of amusing April 1st antics.

That’s not all Google has in store, so GMail users should find out about their newest archiving service and blog writers should check out their writing service.

My post Blackstone IPO? Not So Fast was included in two carnivals this week.

The first is the Carnival of the Capitalists, a Carnival focused on everything having to do with capitalism. This week’s Carnival was hosted by Political Calculations, a blog that I quickly added to my RSS feeder.

The second was in the Carnival of Personal Finance, a Carnival I have participated in many times before and even hosted which focuses on all areas of personal finance. The Carnival was hosted by Tired but Happy, a blog I subscribe to via the PFBlogs website.

Go check out both Carnivals and thank the hosts for all of their hard work.

There are certain truths in the universe. The Cubs will suck. The Sun rises in the East. Google has a stark white home page. Well, Cubs fans have a little hope this year.

The Google personalized home page has a little color to it now. You can apply several set themes to your personalized homepage. Not only does it change the heading, but the text will change color and font depending on the theme that you choose.

The beach theme even tracks the movement of the Sun and Moon to your location. While I can’t see the Sun today, I’d know the approximate location by checking my Google homepage. That is if I’d care. But it’s a cool little feature that few other companies would even think of much less implement.

It’s rare that a simple skin selection would make news, but I’d bet you see a lot of pixels spilled on Google’s small change.

My article You, Me, and the AMT is up at the Carnival of Taxes today. The Carnival is hosted by the Keeper of the Carnival, Don’t Mess with Taxes.

She’s presented the Carnival as an article per day through April 15th. Go read today’s article “Taxes and the Three Martini Lunch“. Bookmark the site and read the article of the day and you might learn something.

I want the help of my readership to find new music podcasts. I currently subscribe to IndieFeed’s Alternative/Modern Rock and Blues podcasts. I’m looking for additional podcasts in the Alt Rock, Blues, and Jazz genres (please no bubblegum pop). Accessible via iTunes would be great, but I use an RSS reader so even I have to download them manually, I can.

You will, of course, be given credit and I will post all the suggestions I get.