Rebate redux...

From the point of view of manufacturers, I am very nearly the ideal rebate customer: I often miss the deadline for sending in the paperwork, or will lose some critical piece of paper that's required to claim the thing. As a result, whatever savings I experience for products comes vicariously at the checkout, as I imagine that whatever it is I'm buying actually costs $15 or whatever sum less than what I am actually paying for it.

At the urging of our CPA, I upgraded the store's copy of QuickBooks last July. Fortuitously, Fry's in Houston was promoting a $100 rebate on the upgrade product, with an additional $79 rebate (full price) on something called Customer Manager. The checkout guy at Fry's helped set me up for sending in the rebate by providing additional rebate receipts and actually stapling them to the rebate forms.

Then life intervened and the forms lay around in my drawer for a while. I lost track of the software boxes for a bit, between trips to Baikonur, but recovered them and put the boxes together with the forms in a folder that hung on the wall in front of my face. A few weeks ago, I did make a note that the rebates had to be postmarked by, um, today, so about a week ago, I sat down to go through the process.

First off the bat, I had forgotten that I had bought an upgrade, so I was a little surprised when I had to come up with one of four specific "proof of ownership" gizmos showing that I had a previous version of the program. So, the paperwork went undone while I searched for my original QuickBooks CD for the previous version that I own. That took a few days, albeit of course, not of continuous effort.

Then I sat down yesterday to positively, absolutely send off the materials, when it turned out that the rebate reciepts stapled to the rebate forms didn't show the prices I paid for the software! I've read enough to have learned that rebate folks get mighty picky about what distinguishes a valid from an invalid rebate application: the basic rule is pretty simple, i.e., follow the instructions on the form exactly.

So, I looked around for my original Fry's receipt (the one with the prices), and... mirabile dictu!... I found the thing after only a little bit of looking!

So this morning, I went into the store and sent off the rebates, in the nick of time!

And you know what's funny? The best part about this story is not that I was able to send off the rebates, but that I was able to find a receipt more than a few hours old!

Cheers...

Serendipity...

I'm translating some quickies for my best client and in one of them, a technical email, the Russian author adds a personal postscript that, um, quotes Pushkin. (C'mon, be honest, when was the last time someone quoted, say, Shakespeare at you in an email?)

The line:

Полезен русскому здоровью, наш укрепляющий мороз.

My try:

Salubrious to Russian health is our invigorating frost.

Try? Heck, I don't have time to polish it. The meaning is there, and so - as it happens - is the meter.

That's a wrap! (Here's hoping the editor doesn't change it!)

Cheers...

Playing with "fair use"...

I have always understood the "fair use" provision of the copyright law to be what one might call an "objective standard," in the sense that, if making one copy of something for personal use is considered "fair use," then making one copy for personal use of anything that's copyrighted conforms to the law.

Via the EFF web site, it turns out that RIAA and its cohort believe that, on the contrary, fair use is something that the copyright holder can grant or withhold, at whim. In a filing on DMCA rule-making, the RIAA states:

Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization.

Wow. Apparently, if a copyright owner deemed that ripping a CD to an iPod was not fair use, you couldn't legally do it. (In that case, of course, I suppose you'd have no choice but to buy another version of the cuts you had already bought on the CD, cuts that have been officially blessed for use on an iPod, and specifically your iPod.)

Makes sense, given the bloodsucking nature of industry higher-ups. In the past, we've seen blanket surcharges imposed for the benefit of the entertainment industry on the cost of audio and video tape cassettes to "compensate" said industry for the use of such media to store copyrighted material, whether it is actually used for that purpose or not, and I seem to recall there are some jurisdications today in which citizens pay a similar premium whenever they buy storage media such as hard drives.

I get the feeling that all of this labyrinthine maneuvering about copyright could be avoided, and a great deal of trouble saved, simply by decreeing that the recording industry can take any amount of money, from anyone, at any time, for any reason. (In addition, it really must be embarrassing for the Senators and Representatives representing the entertainment industry in Congress to have to repeatedly employ tactics such as amendments to emergency spending bills in order to sneak the "broadcast flag" into law.)

But even if my suggestion were to come to pass, I'm not at all sure the entertainment industry would be satisfied with such constraints.

Cheers...

Wiki warmth...

I notice that a lot of sites now have a wiki adjunct, which is far superior (in my arrogant opinion) to those same-old-same-old threaded discussion groups you can find on 16-inch centers just about anywhere. If you've followed my key-tappings, you know I'm a fan of wikis.

I've been fortunate enough to be able to set up wikis on various sites, here and there. My first attempt was with something called TWiki, which was a little like starting swimming lessons by marching off to the deep end of the pool, tying a heavy weight around your waist, and jumping in. TWiki has a heck of a lot of features, but just too many for the "average" candidate to have to worry about, including me.

I then experimented with WackoWiki and MediaWiki. The former has an unfortunate name; the result, I suppose, of having been developed by folks in Russia (and who therefore were not guided by any marketing considerations). On the plus side, however, WackoWiki had a very well developed access control mechanism in place, which is why I use it for my work web site, so I can have individual pages that only I and my various clients can access.

As far as MediaWiki is concerned, I really, really wanted to like it, but when the comment spammers started to post their offal faster than I could delete it, I was put in the unfortunate position of having to either surrender to their automated sewage, or to make the site one for users-only. And since I was the only user, well...

Have I mentioned how hard it is to get people to buy into the wiki concept?

It is not easy, but that's grist for another post.

Anyway, the other day, I was surfing the Usual Web Sites™ and ran across a site that creates wikis on demand for anyone who happens by, PBwiki.com. Just to ornery, I hit the registration button, and with less fuss than you'd expect when applying for a throwaway email address, these guys had set up a wiki for me, which currently goes by the (semi-)ambiguous name of Pagosa.

I really would like to get some of the computer-savvy folks around here - here being Pagosa Springs and particularly the hams - involved in wikis.

In this wiki.

I think my approach to date - which has been to try to create a kernel of content that will "inspire" others to build on it - is just not the way to go about building a viable wiki. If there's any inspiring to be done, I need to get people to create their own content that will spur them to a kind of self-sustaining inertia.

As I said, grist for another post.

In any event, as opposed to some wikis I've seen, the default offered by the folks at pbwiki.com is a nice starting point, and it sure is convenient not to have to worry about the really basic stuff.

Cheers...