News and Views

I got a Blu-ray player a couple of years ago for Christmas. The picture quality of Blu-ray is clearly better than DVD, especially on my big 65″ TV, but unless I think about it I don’t really notice it. But Blu-ray has one characteristic that makes it much inferior to DVD. When I insert a […]

[Read more →]

Verizon is still ranked number one for coverage in the US, but it’s becoming very expensive. We pay about $220 a month for 4 phones, one of which isn’t even “smart”. The rest of my family is going to stay with Verizon for now, but I’m in the process of jumping ship. I bought the […]

[Read more →]

Early on during the recent election it looked like Obama might win the Electoral vote while Romney might win the popular vote. It didn’t turn out that way, but it recently has (Bush-Gore, 2000). Every 4 years there are suggestions to change the way we select our president, either by abolishing the Electoral College or […]

[Read more →]

Consumer Reports just published the results of their car ownership survey, and for two years in a row the Chevy Volt has the highest rate of “Yes” answers to the question “Would you buy this car again?” 92% of Volt owners said “Yes!”, just nosing out the Corvette and Porsche 911 at 91%. I’m certainly […]

[Read more →]

Most of you have probably received phone calls from Rachel before, offering to lower your credit card bill. It’s the most famous and perhaps the most irritating of all the phone scams. “This is Rachel with Cardholder Services. There is nothing wrong with your credit card….” Well, the FTC has just announced that they have […]

[Read more →]

There was an article yesterday from Reuters saying that GM is losing up to $49,000 on each Volt that they sell, and that it costs about $89,000 to produce one. You have to read the article carefully to realize that they are including the development cost, over a billion dollars, in the price by dividing […]

[Read more →]

When the evening news comes on and the first half of the program discusses the shooting in Colorado, I find myself fast forwarding through it. I don’t want to know any more about it. A crazy person shot and killed 15 people, wounded 50 more. OK. That’s all I want to know. Let’s talk about […]

[Read more →]

That’s what this Supreme Court decision means to me: affordable health care, and complete coverage. It means that I can have coverage over my urinary tract, the whole of which is excluded by my current insurance because of a benign bladder polyp removed 12 years ago. As a 61-year old man with an excluded urinary […]

[Read more →]

Every summer we get ants in the house, especially in the kitchen where they like to harvest Apollo’s leftovers. We hate to spray insecticide around where Apollo and we eat, but hate having ants in the house too. Last year we found Ecosmart Ant and Roach Killer at Home Depot. The active ingredients are peppermint […]

[Read more →]

Just a couple of comments on solar power. I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on […]

[Read more →]