ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

2012 July update: After months of not using Reliance, I tried it again for a few times this month and it seemed to work fine for a couple of times. But then, it failed again - after 5 minutes into the call, the audio got cut-off, but the connection was still alive. So this is still not usable, all that has changed is it takes longer for the audio to cut out.

Starting in the middle of 2011, the calling card from Reliance GlobalCall has been a disaster to use. Every time I connect from the US to some number in India using their local access numbers, the audio abruptly cuts out. And there is just silence on the call at my end, and lot of static at the other end. This happens anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes into the call. At peak times on weekends it is really bad and cuts off in under 10-30 seconds.

For years, using Reliance to call India from US worked fine. Starting sometime in 2011, it has been touch-and-go, most of the time the conversation gets cut off even though the line is still connected.

So Craigslist is making it hard to post ads for real posters who care about their privacy (Craigslist Wants Your Phone Number) and simultaneously letting very easy-to-spot scam postings totally fill their vacation rental pages!

New York, and London - just look at the vacation rental pages on craigslist. So easy to spot the scams - when you see the same pattern of ad repeated many times, it is a scam. In addition to scams, craigslist is now filled with useless Airbnb postings which are just noise and do not provide a contact email address or phone number. The Airbnb automated postings are for Airbnb members only - craigslist should not allow them, they are just ads for Airbnb.

There are many sites with information on scams: Rental Scams, and here's a guide to craigslist scams. And important to note that while it is easy to spot the scammers that are from out-of-town, there are also scams involving local people, as shown in NY Times - Renters Get Swindled and Scammed article.

The easy signs of a scam are poor English in the posting and in subsequent communication, too many postings that look the same with different rentals and different email addresses, "contract" does not contain dates (they want you to fill in dates which means they don't really care), you can change dates a lot and apartment will still be available, and sometimes - low prices (no way a NYC midtown 2-bedroom apartment is available for $200/day). And if you ask to see the apartment and the renting agent immediately (even just as a bait - ask this even if you are not in that town), they will make up a reason why that is not possible, and that indicates a scam.

[This posting applies to MA residential property only.]

Tax abatement for residential property is one of those topics where there are a large number of misunderstandings - some owners think they are paying too much (but they aren't) others think they may be paying too less (but in fact they may be paying more than necessary).

The most important thing to remember is the assessment - "Total Real Estate Value" on the MA Real Estate Tax form - has absolutely no relation to the market price of the property. It is simply a number used to calculate your property tax.

It does reflect the amounts assigned to similar properties - so all properties in your town that are largely similar to yours, will (should) have similar "Total Real Estate Value" amounts.
This makes sense since the goal is to spread the tax fairly, and as long as similar houses are valued the same, applying the percentage property tax means everyone is taxed fairly.

But - this is where things can get out of sync. The Board of Assessors in the town Tax Collector's office only has the actual real estate sales figures to go by. And it is very difficult to figure out what other "similar houses" exist in the area. So the assessment is made on recent sales, corrected for any information the assessors may have regarding similar property.

This system has a tendency to inflate property taxes for recent purchasers of property. Their house values are higher than the other similar houses that were bought way in the past. There are other reasons too why these values can drift apart, for both recent and past purchasers. This is where the tax abatement process comes in. Property owners can file for tax abatement - and as long as they provide concrete data regarding relative values of comparable properties - it becomes easy for the Board of Assessors to update the value of your property.

I had not used for craigslist to post classifieds for a long time and had never run into this problem. But looks like now any posting to craigslist requires a phone number where they send a code which has to be entered into the phone authentication page.

They now want a phone number for posting a $10 ad about selling old chairs? Why on earth?

If this is supposed to filter spam, it certainly won't - spammers will find it worth their time to provide a phone number. And it has not cut down on spam at all - the electronics section is so full of spam - it is mostly spam - with text not matching the title and a big image on the page displaying a web site to go to for "deals". And vacation section pages are full of people posting from other cities and completely useless for actually finding a place in the local city.

So, craigslist has just made life difficult for ordinary citizens, who no longer have a phone or don't want craigslist to know their phone number. Another site gone to the dark side, what happened to all the free speech principles that founder Craig Newmark seemed to have started off with in the early days of craigslist. Now all gone by the wayside ostensibly for spam prevention but probably more of a corporate strategy to get more information about the posters. So sad.

craigslist is now completely useless for posting any ads. Need to find other online classified site that can use automated means to weed out spammers, and don't penalize real users of the site by asking for unnecessary information such as private phone numbers.

Copyright law as it exists should have no validity given the technological advances of the past two decades.

Yet, we continue to apply old, inapplicable laws, resulting in quite absurd results.

A jury decided that a woman should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she is accused of illegally trading over the Kazaa Internet service. [:http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10268199-93.html Total damages: $1.92 million].
This itself is completely absurd, but all you have to do is to carry this to the logical next step - she was accused by RIAA of uploading 1700 songs. So the correct award should be $136 million.

Clearly if someone broke a law, there should be some punishment. But having someone, who is most likely not very technologically adept, be accused by RIAA of high piracy, and have the RIAA win in court, shows that the jury award system is quite suspect. The law is the ass here, but will the Congress wake up and change it? No chance - from recent discussions in France and the EU, to the somewhat recent US Congress support for Mickey Mouse support laws, it is clear the all lawmakers are more inclined to listen to the rich lobbyists than to any rational reasoning. Will this absurd $1.92 million, which was really $132 million award bring some sense to the copyright laws? No hope from any law makers anywhere in the world (maybe China, India, or some other country will help here), so in the US, only the Supreme Court is the last hope, though that too is unlikely given the old, conservative heads there (just listen to Scalia protecting teenagers from words that are quite common in middle schools here, but now are illegal on broadcast TV).

Quicken is a package that works pretty well, but the manufacturer has a tendency to periodically block functionality.

For example, Quicken 2006 has been unable to download updated stock prices since April 2009. Quicken 2006 itself installs on even the latest Windows 10 (2016) just fine. [As an aside, it is just amazing that Windows 10 has kept compatibility alive for old software - Quicken 2006, as well as the SendKeys method used by the script below! Kudos to Microsoft!]

There is certainly no technical decision to disable automatic stock price updates - it is just a marketing push, so make people upgrade even if they do not desire to move to a new version.

Quicken does have a manual "Import Prices" command seen when viewing the Portfolio. Therefore, it is not too hard to write a script that will download current prices, and import them into Quicken.

It is a .WSF file, a Windows Shell Scripting program. It has been tested to work on Windows XP, Windows Vista as well as Windows 10 (2016), and is available in source code form.

The script looks up historical and current prices for a list of symbols, and stores the prices in the format Quicken needs. Optionally, it can automate the import of the prices in Quicken by using Windows automation SendKeys method.

Archive with script and readme: QImportP-0.6.0.zip [2015-04-09]
Previous release: QImportP-0.5.0.zip [2009]

And here are links to look at the key files: QImportP.wsf, the README, and the ChangeLog file.

Prices are looked up using the Yahoo Finance web site. Quicken manual import prices only accepts date and price for a symbol, it cannot import volume and other data.

Public Libraries in the US have now started offering audio book downloads. For example, in my local library, the books The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, The Dork of Cork, Candide, and many others are available for online borrowing as a MP3 download. There is a limit to the number of audio books checked-out and downloaded and each book is licensed for playback for a certain number of days only.

Visit your local library web site to see if they offer NetLibrary downloads. Available at most Public Libraries in the US and UK, and many other countries too.

These specific audio books are Microsoft DRM protected, so no Apple iPod support.

Audio books are a great invention given the amount of time spent commuting stuck in a car, or waiting at bus stations, train stations or airports. MP3 player user interfaces have not caught up well enough with this use, though. While it is great that books can be played on extremely tiny flash MP3 players, these players don't yet offer good bookmarking capabilities, only a single pause/resume capability is offered for all content on the MP3 device. Listening to books would be a much better experience with a multiple bookmarks capability per book...

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Read the First Chapter at New York Times. Throw out the Gaussian! In with the Power Law??
Excerpt:
The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars?

The book is written in a very confrontational style, as if the author was emailing text or posting on Usenet, very harsh tone at times towards economists, and others, and a very professorial tone in laying traps that the author uses to berate reviewers on missing his clues! But taken with a hint of humor (which may have been the original intent) it is quite entertaining. Ignoring all such exclamations, and the times when it seems that the author is taking things to the extreme to make a point (are people really that taken with the Gaussian?) the technical parts of the book are very illuminating, and the central premise of the existence of Black Swans is certainly important. The author certainly is an interesting character, in another article, the simple question of Street Charity is turned into long winded response bordering on the incomprehensible, in this Freakonomics - Street Charity Quorum!

The Dork of Cork
by Chet Raymo

With humor, the story describes the life of Frank Bois, a dwarf who is obsessed with all things beautiful. Reviews and Comments available at the Amazon.com web site.

The book starts with ‘Begin with beauty’, and continues with tales of interesting personalities and their travails. The ending though is a major let-down, completely different from the flow created by rest of the story.

Candide
by Voltaire

As I was listening to this book on my MP3 player, I was stunned at the story - seemed incredulous. Then I read the historical background to this story, and then it starts making sense, and it becomes a great, fantastic tale. A google search yields many reviews, many sites have the whole book online, here's one Literature Network - Candide.

Excerpts:

...
Master Pangloss ... "It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end.
...
"Now we are upon this subject," said Candide, "do you think that the earth was originally sea, as we read in that great book which belongs to the captain of the ship?"
"I believe nothing of it," replied Martin, "any more than I do of the many other chimeras which have been related to us for some time past."
"But then, to what end," said Candide, "was the world formed?"
"To make us mad," said Martin.
...

This book is also available in MP3 Audio Download format. Unfortunately, this is DRM protected and requires support for Microsoft DRM (so no Apple iPod support). Available at most Public Libraries in the US and UK. Visit your library web site to see if they offer NetLibrary downloads.