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10.4.9 is like a rock!
For the most part, Mac OS X has been solid and reliable. However, there are times when I have to restart. Recently my machine wouldn't always wake from sleep requiring me to power cycle it; I don't shutdown my machine all that often, but opt to sleep it so it wakes faster. I saw this a lot under 10.4.8 and it also seemed to occur when I unplugged my machine from my external monitor, keyboard, etc. With 10.4.9, I'm quite happy to say that I haven't seen any of that. Some apps have crashed, but I haven't had to restart my machine.
Way to go, Apple! Hopefully this will keep up with Leopard, but there are supposed to be lots of changes, that we might be starting over with stability.
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Whoa...Sprint actually came through!
I'm now through a few billing cycles with Sprint after the guy at the Sprint store mucked with my account. As I posted before, I got 4 additional lines (and phones) and my bill was supposed to drop by about $20 per month. Low and behold, it actually has (it takes a few billing cycles to work out the plan changes)! So I have 4 phones sitting on the shelf doing nothing. I probably could get a few bucks more off per month (one discount I have wasn't applied to 4 lines), but I'm not going to sweat it. I would also have liked free mobile to mobile calling on all lines (there are 10 on my account and only 5 have mobile to mobile), but since we don't go over our minutes, it isn't a problem. I did have to sign up for another 2 year contract, but that's minor as I don't see switching off Sprint any time soon; coverage is good for me (and my family) and they finally have phones that I like (my wife and I have the Motorola Razr V3m). You might be asking why I have 10 lines on my account; 4 lines are idle (phones on my shelf), one used by me, 1 by my wife and the other 4 by my family members. They get a sweet deal piggybacking off my account, but I don't mind as long as we're under our allotted minutes.
For all my complaining about Sprint, this time I can really say, thanks for doing something right!
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Success with Amazon affiliates
When I started ReceiptWallet back in October, I thought that it was a good idea to become an Amazon Affiliate and point people to scanners and collect a little money off the referrals. It turns out I was right. While I can't retire off the 4-6% that Amazon pays me for each sale, it's still a little money in my pocket. The DocketPORT 465 is one of the top sellers as that's a scanner I recommend for ReceiptWallet. If I could sell the DocketPORT myself, I could make a little more money, but then I'd have to deal with inventory, returns, questions, etc. One problem with the affiliate system is that if I personally buy anything, I don't get credit for it which is understandable. Oh well.
So, if you want to order from Amazon, please use the search box on this page and start your purchase so that I can afford to feed the dog :-)
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Anti Spam Systems are Annoying
Recently I've had a number of customers contact me for support and when my automated system sent them confirmation, I received back a message that said I had to click a link (a challenge/response system). I have a strong objection to these systems (such as the one from SpamArrest) as they put the burden on me even though I didn't initiate the contact. After clicking the click, these systems now require me to enter a code seen in a graphic which wastes more of my time. In addition, these systems block legitimate email, such as when ordering stuff, signing up for newsletters, etc. Most people won't remember to white list every site they want to receive email from, so they'll miss email and get mad when they don't receive it. I tried a challenge/response system using procmail back in 1996 or 1997 and found that while it did reduce spam, it also almost caused me to lose important email from someone. Personally I've found that dspam is a quite effective, non-intrusive, system. When it catches spam, it quarantines it and then I look through the quarantine periodically.
Please people, stop using these stupid systems; they only cause you to lose mail and annoy me to no end. I've now put big warnings on my website that says I won't click on the links. While you might say that it isn't hard to click on a link, it is extremely annoying and I'm not going to play the game. My anti-spam system, that I've been using for about 2 years, I think, catches 95% of the spam that I get.