I'm going to turn on Blogger's Comments method and get rid of the Doodle Board - I think it'll be better for discussion of specific topics (wishful thinking on my part). As always, this blog is under constant construction.

Printer Cartridge Scams: Normally when you hear the word 'scam' mentioned, you figure there's got to be a con artist somewhere in sight. You don't normally expect to hear this word used in association with a big corporation like Hewlett-Packard. But this is exactly the word being used on the web today by people who are pissed off about some of the business practices of HP. Besides the Yahoo article mentioning the lawsuit, more pages are showing up on this thread at Slashdot. Some of the articles as old as 2001. I guess that the practice of expiring inkjet cartridges isn't news after all. Well, in the sense of it being 'new', anyway. The lawsuit may just cause some changes to come about, but it may take a while. Some of those articles are good reading, like the one that talks about how different cartridges can be used in different printers with a little bit of hacking, to maximize your bang for the buck when buying ink.
As consumers, what we'd like is for someone to come out with an inkjet printer that welcomes refills. It could come with an interchangeable print cartridge and a cleaning kit that would help you keep it in optimum working condition. You could buy the refillable ink, and soak the cartridge overnight to help clear up any clogs in the ink delivery.
Sooner or later, your cartridge is going to clog though, so I understand at least part of what HP is trying to do in expiring their cartridges. But we are a nation, nay a world, of penny pinchers. The freedom to use something until its dying breath is something we hold dear. Imagine being told that your car is no longer usable after 150,000 miles. For many, that seems quite reasonable. But to the guy on the bridge trying to get to work late at 9:30AM Monday, as his odometer rolls over? It's a different story. Folks, this should be an engineering principle. Never design something that forces the consumer to take an action that would deny them the freedom to ignore your 'suggestion'. After all, when's the last time you changed your oil at the 3,000 mile mark?

Some time ago, I gave up my inkjet printer for a personal laser printer. I had gone to purchase some ink cartridges, and went home with the laser printer because buying a new printer was cheaper than buying the ink for the older printer. (I paid $99 for it) Competition is certainly needed in the ink cartridge business to bring prices down to a reasonable level. Either that, or the companies that design the printers need to make them refillable out of the box -
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! OMG! ROTFL! :)
Ok, that's never going to happen! The company that does that will be cutting off its nose to spite its future profits, after all...Of course, they could go in the complete opposite direction and purposefully force you to purchase their ink cartridges to continue using their printer. But would they? According to: Yahoo! News - Lawsuit Says HP Printer Cartridges Die Before Use a woman is suing HP because, as she claims, the cartridges for her printer "expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they are even installed in a printer". Now that's certainly one way to ensure future profit! I wonder what dumb, stupid, ignorant, son of a bitch thought up that one - and how soon he/she'll be fired.
Seriously, though, this is definitely an area where consumers need to force manufacturers to get in step with our needs. Hell, it's cheaper to buy a new printer FOR FREE!!!! from Tiger Direct after rebate than it is to refill the printer cartridges in your old one. How silly is it that we manufacture throw-away electronics? They're not only giving them away, but they have been for years! My first color printer was a free-after-rebate deal from CompUSA. Come on, people, there has got to be some economic common sense applied here. The economy isn't going to get better if we manufacture goods, ship them, support them, etc... and make no money doing it. And why? To make sure that you have to come back for more ink? Well, if your company gave me a printer for free, why wouldn't the other company give me a printer for free when yours runs out of ink? Don't you think that somewhere down the line someone's going to figure it all out? Why are we all so collectively stupid?

Meme of the Day: Shirt Folding - Just found a link to this shirt-folding video on the blog-verse (sorry, forgot which blog) - It's a really cool way to quickly fold your shirts so that they look neat and it's fast - really fast. I can only imagine that this might be a training video for some factory where they have professional shirt folders who do this all day long. In any case, if you ever have to fold laundry and want to shave off a few seconds, you should watch the video a few times and take heed.

I remember being introduced to the library in our grammar school when I was a child. I remember it because I wanted to read all of those books. Growing up, as a teen, I thought to myself that the perfect life would be to be able to live in a library, to have the chance to just read and read and read the combined knowledge of man. I've even extended that dream into one where I own a used book store.
The Internet is like a library on LSD. You can read the writings of others, in real time, indexed or not (through Google or Yahoo, for example), and you can get lost in it. The only problem with this is that the web is becoming more and more self-referential. Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against the authors who have commented on the blogging phenomenon. But so much has been said about blogging - so many products and ideas support the phenomenon, that it's all becoming rather self-serving. There's programs where you can visit others blogs in return for having them visit your blog. There's comment software that allows you to obtain comments on your blog so that others can post comments and have links back to their blog, and so on and so on.
One thing that is the same as that visit to the library is the sense of over-abundance. There are simply too many books in a library or book store to be able to read them all in a lifetime. And there are simply too many programs and links on the Internet to follow them all. Too Much Information is more than just a witty saying; it is more a fact of life now. We are bombarded with media, opinions, left and right political agendas, self-referential writers patting themselves on the back, or media making fun of how liberal the media is!
Since I write a blog, I have been thinking, just what should my focus be? How should I concentrate my own writings on topics that are important to me, without getting caught up in the linking, referring, and cross-linking to other links that will lead you to other blogs, that will eventually lead you back here. Am I doing you a favor, or am I overloading you with information. Today, I signed up for several programs in the Blogverse - Blogazoo and Blogshares. As I thought of adding their links over in my 'Thanks' column, I visited other blogs through their links. I came across some that had reference/program links all over their page. And for every inch they had given up, their content was that much smaller. You have to wonder...is content king? If so, how much advertising is enough? Certainly there are bloggers out there who have overdone it. And do I really care if you visit my blog? After all, isn't just one of my hobbies?
Questions lead to more questions. Trying to find answers to all of this will drive me to read more. That reading will lead to more questions, and so on....welcome to my library. Good luck escaping.

The only thing better than something cool like the BrainGate Neural Interface is something even cooler Betterhumans >(Thinking Cap Lets Users Move). After reading about the first experiment, I went to the Internet, looking, frankly, for investor information about the company. While they may be a good investment, depending on their strategy and plans for the future, the second article points out that their 'new stuff' is already 'old hat' [pardon the pun]. An invasive brain implant would certainly be trumped by a 'brain wave hat'. This is some cool stuff, and along with this article about robotic limbs I first heard about from Mike's List, I would have to say that Christopher Reeve might certainly have been right about the chance of parapalegics to one day walk again.

Ho hum - I've yet to do my taxes - even though the government owes me money. Pretty silly for me to not rush out and get them done - but it just seems like such a pain in the butt. Interesting how we put off the things we could be done with, and end up enduring more stress because of it. Such is the life of the procrastinator.
I was just looking at the CompTIA Network+ exam - I thought maybe I'd go back and complete a couple of certifications. Then I saw that the exam costs $270 to sit for. Wow - that's a little bit steep for taking an exam! Especially an exam that wouldn't mean much to my career at this point. Should I have that much extra money sitting around, I don't think I'd spend it on that.

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Someone was looking for the ConnectionString for GoDaddy ASP.NET development. In my code, I use this:
myConnection = New OleDb.OleDbConnection(Application("connectString"))

And in the Global.asax, under Application_Start, I have this:
Application("connectString") = "Provider=SQLOLEDB; Server=myserver; Database=mydatabase; UID=myusername; PWD=mypass;"

Obviously, if you have GoDaddy's service, you have to create your database from your account page, and fill in your values for myserver, mydatabase, myusername and mypass. The myserver value is the fully qualified domain name (ending in secureserver.net) and mydatabase is probably of the form DB_XXXX.
So, if you were looking for help, there ya go (feel free to email me, too).

I put the connectString in as an Application variable so that it would be available from any page, since I need to connect from a variety of pages. ASP.NET has three different objects that are good for storing your variables, the Application object, the Session object and the ViewState object. To store values in any of these objects, you use Session("myvariable"), Application("myvariable") and/or ViewState("myvariable").
The ViewState is stored (and hashed) on the client as a hidden form field [ergo it's not secure, subject to client tampering], but has the added value of being able to store values over long periods of time.
The Session object begins with a user's first request to your ASP.NET application. The session is maintained through a session cookie that IIS exchanges with the client application. It's default timeout is 20 minutes. If the client does not accept session cookies, it won't work for your client. After 20 minutes of inactivity (no requests or form submissions by the client), anything you store in the Session will be thrown away. The Session object values is secure because it's stored on the server, but be aware that it is remotely possible for a user to hijack the session from someone else.
The Application object is good for storing what you might consider to be global values, such as application-wide definitions like a database connectionstring, etc. These types of values might be used in your application frequently, but storing them in an Application() object will allow you to change it in one place.

So, Is my Blog HOT or NOT? The people who brought you the original Hot Or Not have extended it to Blogs. If you like my blog (or not), feel free to rate it by clicking the link.