May 4, 2007

There were 4 posts published on May 4, 2007 (this is page 1 of 1).

Rush Limbaugh Boasts Being Bamboozled By Bee Blurb

Last week Rush Limbaugh joined the bee brigade when he mentioned the bogus Einstein bee quote. To his credit, today he admitted to being fooled.

“There’s a line in the story about this mysterious bee disappearance that is attributed to Einstein, says if the bees went away, that humanity would expire in four to five years, that we couldn’t survive without them. And Einstein never said it. It’s one of the these popular myths that circulating. It might be true, but Einstein didn’t say it.”

“But I was totally taken in by it,” Limbaugh said. “Even I, the great El Rushbo was taken in. I apologize for that, too.”

Wow … Rush Limbaugh is capable of occasionally telling the truth!

(By the way, friends, this is the first and last Rush Limbaugh link you’ll ever see on MT.Net.)

Shutterbug

Inevitably whenever I’m out in public shooting pictures, a total stranger will walk up to me and try to hire me to shoot pictures at his or her event. Last night’s fundraiser at Ess Lounge was no exception. A woman asked if photography is “what I do,” and when I nodded she invited me to shoot at tomorrow night’s Derby Party. I had to tell her I was already booked, having plans to visit our friends the Naylors, but I did appreciate the offer. There will be lots of classily-dressed people at that party so shooting pictures is bound to be fun.

The hook of local mags Social and zSpotlight is publishing party pictures. I could easily do that, perhaps for my own website. That was the idea behind my Eventwire domain before I sold it to its current owner. Certainly I could make some money doing photography on the side.

It also would’ve been a great occasion to have my calling cards with me (no, not the ones that say BMF, the ones that say “photographer”). I keep a pack of them in my car but we took Kelly’s car to the event and I neglected to bring them along. Parties like that are really the reason I got them. Who knows how many photography gigs I might have lined up just from last night?

I caved in today and purchased an external flash for my Nikon D50: the new Nikon SB-400. Its compact, uses only TWO (!) AA batteries, and can handle bounce flash, too. Ken Rockwell loves his, and that was good enough for me.

It was also helpful to learn why my old Vivitar flash doesn’t work with the Nikon: CCDs are too shiny for the camera to judge proper lighting. The Internets are good for all kinds of information.

Cheap Thoughts: Flash Drive Receipts

Once again we’re faced with a pile of paper receipts from our purchases, and once again we’re facing tedious and error-prone data entry as we reconcile our checkbook.

It’s 2007. Why are we still dealing in paper receipts? Mechanical cash registers are so 1870s. Computerized ones have taken their place. Why not take advantage of these computers?

A digital receipt could be provided on a customer’s USB flash drive. Or it could go on their smartchip-enabled “customer appreciation card.” The customer would take home a full, digital inventory of their purchases which could be direcly imported into their favorite checkbook application. No more poring over receipts at the end of the month, trying to figure out what’s what.

The receipts also be fed into a shopping list application, providing an easy way of keeping track of your fridge’s contents and when you’re likely to need more.

Coupons could be copied to the drive as well and redeemed the same way.

You’d never again have to wait in line while the cashier fumbled with a new roll of paper for the printer. You’d never wait for the impossibly-long paper receipt to print something you’re likely to throw away anyway.

What’s better, the digital receipt could be cryptographically signed by the store, verifying that the purchases were legitimate. In this way, these receipts would be even more secure than the paper ones, which are more susceptible to forgery.

It wouldn’t take much to make this happen. Any system would have to be backwards-compatible with existing systems (at least, to begin with). This means a terminal would have a serial or parallel port in addition to a USB port (or smartcard reader). If some modern registers use USB printers, that makes things even easier. The terminal app would take the output from the register, sign it, and copy it to the USB drive, perhaps in a CSV, XML, or some other open format. The register would never know it didn’t print to paper.

Who knows? Someday USB drives or smartcards may one day take the place of credit cards entirely. Anything would be more secure than a flimsy piece of plastic with no inherent security features.

I think I’ll take a closer look at registers in the next few days and figure out how this might work.