DonXml's Grok This

Favorite New Facebook Group - I Don't care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass

2007-08-22T15:38:23Z

Man, the title of this Facbook Group says it all: I Don't care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass. 290,000+ members and counting.

Kevin Smith 37th Birthday Bash at the Count Basie Theater August 2nd

2007-05-03T11:06:20Z

I was at the first Evening With Kevin Smith at the Count Basie Theater, and wouldn't miss his return. Especially considering that it is his 37th birthday (all good Kevin Smith fans should know that 37 is Kevin's favorite number and he makes sure to included it in every movie). If you don't subscribe to the ViewAskew RSS feed, you should, and it is how I found out about the show. If this is the first you are hearing about this event, odds are good that the show is already sold out. But here's a direct link to the Count Basie Event page.

The first Evening With Kevin Smith at the Count Basie ran into the early morning hours (3AM), and then Kevin went over to the Secret Stash and signed autographs until 6:30AM. If you are a fan of Kevin Smith's films and like the Evening With DVDs, you will not want to miss this event. I happen to live in NJ, so I'm spoiled and get to travel down to the Secret Stash when I feel like it. But, if you are not from the area, you definitely have to come out to NJ and see the Stash (well, that and the Jersey Shore in summer isn't a bad thing either). You never know who you will bump into at the Stash. I hit the Stash one Sunday morning a couple years ago and had a Clerks moment. I got to the store one Sunday morning about 15 minutes after they were supposed to open (I think it opened at 11AM), only to find out that it was still closed. So Melissa and I just hung out a couple stores down and did a little window shopping. After about 15 minutes, here comes a guy with a pizza and a bunch of video tapes, who stops at the Stash and let's himself in. Hmm, a half hour late and shows up with pizza and video tapes? We gave him a couple minutes (didn't want to make it seem like we were waiting for the store to open) and go in. I find the guy, behind the counter, leaning back with his feet up, eating pizza and watching videos. I think to myself, man this guy sure knows how to play the part of Randall. I take a better look at him, and he does look familiar, but he isn't anyone I recognize from Clerks. One word out of his mouth, and sure, I got it, he must be Brian O'Halloran's younger brother (the guy who plays Dante Hicks). He looks a bit like Brian, but the voice, it is a dead ringer for Dante.

SciFi Book Review - The Android's Dream By John Scalzi

2006-11-28T22:45:00Z

I've blogged about sci-fi author and popular blogger. John Scalzi. before, but his latest SciFi book, The Android's Dream is a must have for any serious SciFi fan. OK, well maybe I shouldn't limit his audience to just SciFi fans, as it is less about SciFi, and more of a satirical look at politics (done in the best Monty Python's Flying Circus Meets Rory Blyth styled humor). If all you do is buy this book and read the first chapter, you get your money's worth of laughs, for sure. What SciFi or comedy fan wouldn't appreciate a plot where one of the main species upper class (the Nidu) communicates via smells, as well as verbal communication, and the author throws caution to the wind (literally) and writes in some great flatulence-related (aka potty) humor? Who wouldn't love that? The out and out side splitting laughs are (mostly) contained in the first chapter, but with plot lines that include a human female with Sheep DNA, a religious cult called the "Church of the Evolved Lamb", and a genetically engineered line of sheep known as "Android's Dream", the book definitely has plenty of jokes along the way. Android's Dream is a major departure from Scalzi's previous 2 military SciFi books, Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades (which are must reads on their own), and I think that is a good thing, as it shows Scalzi trying to stretch his boundaries a bit (well maybe in his case, mix his SciFi with his successful "Uncle John's Presents - Bathroom Reader series).

I've been a subscriber to John Scalzi's blog for a couple years now, and he has definitely rekindled my love affair with SciFi again, as he has mentioned a couple other authors in his blog that I've gone out and read and have been very happy with. There was a time when I thought that all the good SciFi had been written, and that most of the modern stuff was just plain garbage, but it turns out that I've been looking in the wrong place and just needed someone to show me the light. I've been traveling a lot lately, which usually means I've got a book along with me for the flight, etc. I've got about 4 or 5 new SciFi books that I've got to blog about and so, I'll create a new blog category, Science Fiction Book Reviews for all of the new (and old) posts.

Email Spoofing Of Amazon Associates (Smarter Spoofing?)

2006-09-26T19:29:48Z

Most experienced web users have become accustom to Email Spoofs for eBay, PayPal and most of the big banks (see eBay's Spoof Tutorial if you don't know what I mean), but today I ran into a first, email spoofing of Amazon Associates. I only received the spoof email to my main email account (which I don't use for things like Paypal or Amazon), so I knew it was a spoof, but it got me thinking. Since it would be relatively easy to spider the web looking for links to Amazon that contain Amazon Associates IDs, I wonder if the spoofing was a little more directed. They could easily find sites that have links with Amazon Associate links, and then spider the site looking for email address. Am I giving these folks a little too much credit? I haven't received any spoofed Amazon emails to other email addresses. Hmm, I wonder what is next? Google Adsense Spoof emails? Thankfully, I am carefull not to use one email address, and have a separate email account just for my purchases.

Clerks 2 - July 21st, 2006

2006-07-20T02:18:00Z

I'm going to be out of town on July 21st, but you know as soon as I get back I'll be heading off to the local movie theater to see this movie. When Jay & Sient Bob Strikes Back came out, I made the first showing (11:30AM) an event for my develeopment team (that was one great group of guys), and we were just about the only people in the theater. This time around, I don't have a team that would really appreciate this type of movie (and not much of a team, since I've been working on a number of projects), so it will just be me, the wife and probably my oldest daughter (who is 16, which does feel sort of strange). I was hoping to make it to the Portland Code Camp, and go out to see Clerks 2 with them, but they will have to do that without me.

Cat Chases Bear Up a Tree

2006-06-10T16:55:00Z

I live in north-western Morris County, NJ, and it is bear country. When I tell folks from out of state this, they look at me like I’m crazy. Our schools have bear drills along with fire drills (the kids need to know not to run away from the bear when they see one on the playgorund). At our softball and baseball games we have bear delays, along with rain delays (the kids have to go into the safety of the cars). But when I saw this article about a cat chasing a bear up a tree (not once but twice) in a town not far from mine, well Jerseyans are known to be a tough crowd, but who know it included the cats! Odds are that bear was from New York or Penn., since he didn’t already know that turf was already claimed.

We had 2 bears in our backyard in April, during the day. I don’t normally bring out the garbage until the morning (I don’t want to encourage the bears to hang in our neighborhood, and when I do bring them out, I usually pour a little ammonia on a paper towel and put that on top of the garbage in the can.

Status Update

2006-02-19T19:02:00Z

Wow, it has been a couple days since I blogged last. Last week was incredibly busy, and I have a lot of stuff to blog about, so expect lots new entries, with one big scoop that is pretty exciting.

Quick summary of last week. Tuesday night I did my first presentation of the Guidance Automation Toolkit at the N3UG meeting and they even recorded it. Unfortunately, my voice was shot, so I don’t know how that turned out. Plus, because they were recording it (and it was Valentine’s Day) I kept the presentation to 1 hour, which means a lot of material was not covered. But, if you happen to be going to the NYC .Net Code Camp, I will have a little more time, and I’ll have an updated version of the presentation finished. Plus, it looks like I’ll be giving a second session at the NYC Code Camp, Intro to Web Services.

Wednesday I traveled out to Redmond from NJ, and all I can say is “Flying Human Sardine Can”. Thursday and Friday I was in the SQL building working with some of the XML team on an article and some sample code that will be released in about a month. Can say exactly what, yet, but it will be some pretty cool XML stuff that we will add to the open source XML MVP project, so that others can enhance it even more. What I can say is that the XML team gets the concept of community. Oh, I did get to finally meet Erik Meijer, which was very cool. Thursday night, Don Smith went out to take in some of Seattle’s music scene, which is a blog post all on its own. Saturday I took the early flight back to NJ, but it still basically kills a whole day in travel.

Online Ticket Auctions – The Solution to Half Empty Professional Sporting Events?

2006-01-30T03:15:00Z

One of the things that really bug me is when owners of professional sporting team complain about half empty arenas. It doesn’t take an MBA degree to understand the simple laws of economics. In order to sell all of your inventory (aka the tickets) you will have to set the price at a level your customers are willing to pay. Set the price to high, and you have inventory left over. Set the prices too low, and a secondary market will develop reselling your inventory at a higher price (in this case ticket scalping). It seems to me that the owners of teams are stuck in the past and haven’t figured out that with the mass adoption of the internet, you no longer have to go with fixed prices for all your tickets. In the old world, the owners and managers needed to set the prices before the beginning of a season, and then hope for the best. With the internet and all the online services it offers, you no longer have to fix the prices for the whole season. I’m not saying to get rid of season tickets, just that there really isn’t much of a reason to stick with a constant price for tickets that are not part of some sort of package. Why not sell all the tickets that are not part of a package via StubHub like auctions? It would insure that every single ticket could actually be sold, at the current market value.

The reason why tickets are left unsold is the fact that the people have determined that the value of going to that particular event is less then the price of the ticket. If the owners of the teams think that a full house is that important, why not auction them off? This way every single ticket would be sold at a price equal to the perceived value. The software for auctions is out there and is proven, so the technical details are not the problem.

Part of the problem is that the owners do not want to raise the ire of the season ticket holders (which are most large corporations). If the owners charge $70 a ticket for a seat in a season ticket plan, but the average auction price is only $35, the season ticket holder will wonder why they are paying $70 a ticket. The extra money charged is really the extra value of knowing that you have the same seats to every game in that package. I really don’t think this will be an issue, but I’m sure some will disagree. One of the to temper an potential issue would be to let the season ticket holder resell the tickets they do not want thru the same auction system the owner is using (for a small fee). This way the owner get the guaranteed revenue via the season ticket holder, but for that risk, the ticket holder could recoup some of their costs by selling tickets for events they don’t wish to attend. There is no guarantee that the ticket will, sell, but that is part of the risk the season ticket holder assumed from the beginning.

A major side benefit of something like this would be all the data collected by this process. With it an owner could use it to better determine the prices for the season ticket packages for the next season, which visiting teams have the best (or worst) value, and what exactly the true value actually is. For the single ticket buyers the benefits would be just as great. You would be able to purchase tickets at true market value. But the most important benefit (in my eyes) would be if the owners sold their tickets directly, instead of thru Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster is a monopoly that needs to be taken out. All their extra fees are driving up the total cost of going to an event, and that is money out of the pockets of the owners. It is in the owners best interests to bypass Ticketmaster, and eliminate their stranglehold on the ticket selling business.

Technorati tags: ticketmaster tickets sporting events

20 Years Since the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

2006-01-27T18:21:00Z

I can't believe that is has been 20 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. Seems just like yesterday I was in college at Colorado School of Mines, and while eating a late breakfast (after some early classes) I happen to catch a glimpse of the video on a television in the lounge. Like a lot of folks, I got use to the idea of the shuttle flights, and treated them like airplane flights, never expecting a problem. Sort of shook me up and brought home the reality of how complex space flight really is. But, 13 years later, when the Columbia accident happened, I wasn’t any more prepared for something like that, either.

Growing up I always wanted to be an astronaut. It seemed such a cool job. It probably is, but it definitely a lot safer slinging code.

Advertising Optimization Update – Dropping Chitka

2006-01-23T23:28:00Z

It has been just over a month since I decided to try to optimize the advertising revenue for this site, and I’d have to say that overall it has been extremely successful. But, I know that I’m nowhere near being done (my goal is to have Steve Pavlina like growth for 2006). The optimization has three main parts:

Create good content
Find good advertising networks
Ad Location and format

Without #1, items 2 and 3 don’t really mean much. To that end, I’ve been busy working on all sorts of new content. From more music reviews for the music blog, to more controversial topics on the GrokThis blog, to better quality technical information on the AllThingsTechie blog, all these things make a very big difference for this site’s stats. I try to post every single day to at least one of the blogs, and the entry’s length needs to be at least 2 paragraphs. For a guy like me, where writing isn’t my thing, this can be extremely hard. It takes me a long time to write two paragraphs, but, I’ve noticed that since I started blogging about 3 years ago, the quality has gone up, and the effort has decreased (but both still need lots of improvements). I have a very difficult time deciding what is worthy of a blog entry, and then I can re-write an entry multiple times to get the tone correct. I’m not entirely happy with the tone of some of the recent blog entries, and will try to improve that aspect of the site. Controversial topic may bring lots of readers, but I need to pick and choose where and when to publish those, since they do affect the overall tone of the site (and can become overbearing).

I usually keep tabs on my stats one a monthly basis, but since I started mid Dec. I’ll try to adjust everything for you. Jan. 2005 I had about 8,500 unique visitors and 135,000 page views. Oct. 2005 I was up to 12,000 unique visitors and 240,000 page views (Nov. was down a bit from there, and Dec. back up ). For Jan. 2006, I’m tracking towards about 15,000 unique visitors, and 265,000 page views, which would be my best month, ever (with TechEd and PDC months usually getting the best stats, due to conference traffic). So, the extra (and hopefully better) content has seemed to have a good affect on the stats.

As for good advertising networks, so far this has been limited to Google AdSense. I tried to get Chitka to work, but after a couple weeks on terrible results, I finally bailed on them. I loved the look and feel of Chitka’s ads, but the results just were not there, and with others having problems with them, I decided it was time to drop them. I also tried Yahoo’s Publisher Network, but dropped them after about a week. I replaced my Google Ads on the GrokThis blog with YPN ads, but from the start the ads selected for my site were absolutely terrible, and had little to do with my site. I even tried what I thought would be a cool feature the Google does have, Ad Targeting (where you give YPN a path, and choose the suggested Categories for that path, which YPN should use if their contextual engine can’t determine the content), but that didn’t seem to work. To make matters worse, the reports are only run daily, and the Ad Targeting changes take 24-72 hours to take effect. So in the end, YPN just isn’t there, yet. A few people suggested BlogAds.com but I do not think that this site is really ready for them yet.

Last, but certainly just as important as the first two items is the ad location and formats that you use. This is the easiest thing to play with, but is often over looked. I can’t tell you how may blog sites that I’ve been to and cringe at the formatting or location of the ads. The ads should blend into the layout of the site, and not draw attention to themselves. What, did I saw the ads shouldn’t draw attention to themselves? If the reader does not know it is an ad, there is a much better chance that they will read it, and hopefully, click thru. I’m not saying to deceive the reader, just make your content flow nicely into the ad. You would be surprised how quickly people learn to tune out blinking and flashing ads. On the other hand, if you just plain hide the ads on the right side of the page, or after all of the relevant information, then you might as well not even put ads on your page.

So what are the results (and that is the only thing that counts isn’t it)? Well, by making my ads blend into the page better, moving ads to better places, and adding some additional ads, the results are dramatic.

The total number of “impressions” (the number of ads displayed) doubled, but the click thru rate went up by about 400%, with the total money earned up by 300%. Not too shabby. From here on out, the majority of the increases should be directly related to the page views, but I’ll still tweak the ad location and format. Yes, the numbers sound great, but remember, the starting numbers averaged about 50 cents a day in revenue, so I still can’t go out and get a semi-dedicated server (at around $70 a month) and have the ad revenue pay for the hosting). I’m not anywhere near Steve Pavlina’s $100 a day in Google Ad Revenue, but that is my goal right now. I might never make it there with this blog, but I’m going all out and trying my best. The hardest part is trying not to alienate my tech readers with the growth of the other content. Thanks to the multi-blog style, I’m hoping that will be less of an issue, but I always go back and re-evaluate the site’s overall tone. There have been times recently where I’ve looked back at something and made the conscious effort to add content to make up for the tone of a previous entry.

Play the Telemarketer Bottleneck Game and Help Reduce Telemarketing

2006-01-19T18:51:00Z

In America, when there is a perceived problem, the government tries to jump in and legislate it away. With the scourge of telemarketing abusing the phone system, in the government’s infinity wisdom, they created the Do Not Call Registry. Instead of stopping telemarketers from calling your home, it just increases the cost of doing business for legitimate firms, and the rogue firms just figure out ways around the system.

What a lot of people of resorted to do to avoid telemarketing calls, is to get an unlisted telephone number, and purchase caller-id from their phone company. The idea is that if you don’t recognize the phone number, or if it is market anonymous, you would not answer the phone. That may help you out for now, but eventually, the telemarketers will get to you.

A better solution (and the one I’m pitching here) is a game I came up with that you can play with your kids, called the Telemarketer Bottleneck Game (TBG for short). They idea of the game is simple. When a phone call comes in from what looks like a telemarketing call, let one of the kids answer the phone. The game starts as soon the phone is answered, and the objective is to keep a human on the line for as long as possible, with minimal time on the phone by the kids. The idea is for your child to tell the telemarketer that they will get mommy (or daddy) and to please hold while they get their parent. What works best is a phone with a hold feature, and some sort of Hold indicator light on the phone. Try keeping the flashing hold light on for as long as possible, and the game is over once the light goes out. The total time on hold is your kid’s score, and the best score for the week (and/or month) will win some sort of prize. Kids are allowed to pick up the phone occasionally (even encouraged) and “play dumb” tell the telemarketer that they will go and get their parent (again). Tag teaming the telemarketer using other kids tends to keep the game going even longer.

What’s the purpose of this game (besides laughing at the crazy person on the other end waiting on hold)? Well, the most expensive and limiting resources for telemarketers are the actually humans on the other end of your call. The actual cost of the call, or the computer systems is peanuts compared to the people. By tying up a very valuable resource, you are in effect limiting how many people the telemarketing firm can effectively call an hour. The longer they are on hold, the less time they can actually spend on other calls. Eventually, if enough people play along, the cost of telemarketing becomes greater then the benefits and that will end yet another telemarketing campaign. Our families average score, 5 minutes, with about 20 minutes as the best score.

Caveats:

Train your kids to know the tell-tale signs of telemarketer call, the click and then delay before a real person replies (while the firm’s computer’s routes your call to a human) and always be around to monitor the situation.
Kids shouldn’t play this game without approval of their parents
This game doesn’t scale well to cell phones, since you may be paying for your air-time.
If you tie up your line too much, then you will not be able to get phone calls, which is a limited factor on playing the game. But like any good games, it gets boring if you play all the time.

The Freakonomics Affect and Toll Roads

2006-01-13T21:20:00Z

If you haven’t had the chance to read Freakonomics, I’d suggest that you add it to your shortlist of ready reading material (there is even a matching blog). What the author does is tie seemingly unrelated events to their effects (exposing hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior). There are lots of examples out there, just waiting to be revealed, and I have a bunch of my own that I’ve noticed over the years. Since people have been picking up on my rant against EZPass (Evils of EZPass and an Alternate Solution), I thought I’d throw another toll road related blog entry out there.

In NJ over the last couple years, there have been a noticeable increase in truck related fatalities on a stretch of road which was once a road seldom used by trucker, Route 31 (which is a north-south highway up the western side of NJ). It was so noticeable that the local towns complain to the state that something had to be done, and they quickly passed thru legislation to expand this former 2 lane rural highway into something that could handle all this truck traffic. The weird thing is that they couldn’t figure out why, seemingly overnight, all this truck traffic showed up using this road.

Well, there were 2 events that caused this. First, Route I-287 was finally completed thru NJ. This road had been around for a long time, but a chunk thru Morris and Passaic Counties was left unfinished for decades. Route I-287 is basically a circle highway around New York City (except that it isn’t a complete circle, since the Atlantic Ocean sort of gets in the way). I-287 and NJ State Highway 31 do not intersect, so most people familiar with one, are not users of the other (plus the western side of NJ is a lot less developed than the area along I-287).

The second event was the dramatic increase in toll rates for truckers on the NJ Turnpike. The increase was so much that the NJ Turnpike, which was designed for trucks, became a road less traveled by trucks. The NJ Turnpike is the road that most people use when traveling between the cities of the southeastern US, and the northeastern cities of New York and Boston. The problem truckers always had with using the NJ Turnpike was that it forced them to travel through the northern part of New York City, which cause significant delays if there final destination was something other then New York City or Long Island. But the alternative of going all the way around NJ via Pennsylvania and upstate New York took more time and cost more in fuel. So most of the truckers decided to use the NJ Turnpike.

Once the new tolls on the NJ Turnpike kicked in, truckers now had an incentive to search out an alternate route, and thanks to the recently finished I-287 they now had one. The problem was that the circle road around Philly (I-295) does not intersect I-287, but the little used NJ Rt. 31 happens to connect I-295 to another Interstate, I-80, which does intersect I-287. This route had a number of benefits, no tolls roads, it could be used to avoid NYC, and actually was faster (in time). Except for the fact that Rt. 31 wasn’t built for heavy truck traffic, this a perfect solution to the truckers’ problem.

So, by making it not cost efficient for truckers to use a highway designed for them, the state government had to spend money on upgrading a road so they could circumvent the toll increase that the state invoked. Now the state loses money in 2 separate cases, one all the expenditures to upgrade and maintain a new truck route, plus a decrease in revenue on the NJ Turnpike. Not to mention all the lives lost on Rt. 31 while the government was trying to figure out how to fix the problem. They could have just rolled back the toll increases, and save lives and money.

Side note: One of my coworkers lost his daughter to a big rig accident on Rt. 31, during this time period. The accident happened in the middle of the night with little non-truck traffic on the road. Which is one of the reasons why I actually became aware of this problem.

Technorati Tags: Freakonomics

Clerks 2 Teaser Now Available

2006-01-09T17:39:00Z

If you are reading this blog entry, it is obvious that you don’t already subscribe to Kevin Smith’s blog (My Boring Ass Life), otherwise you would already know this little tid bit of info. Kevin has released a 2 minute teaser for Clerks 2. Don’t worry, there isn’t any spoilers in the teaser, so just go ahead and watch the thing. There is very little in the way of actual dialog, with most of the 2 minutes taken up by some great visual teasers, with Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease blasting in the background (which I loved, BTW, fits with the theme, and great music too). Clerks 2 isn’t scheduled to be released until late 2006, so we have some time to wait until getting to see the flick, but this should wet your appetite.

Oh, if you haven’t checked out the rest of the Clerks 2 site, I highly recommend that too. There are lots of various Clerks 2 video posts of the behind the scenes variety.

Technorati tags: clerks 2 kevin smith Jay and Silent Bob

Evils of EZPass and an Alternate Solution

2006-01-06T18:27:00Z

EZPass is a toll collection system (for toll roads and bridges/tunnels) that is prominent in the northeastern United States, which I believe is just another way for Big Government to watch the average person. It sounds pretty harmless, and pitched as a time saver. Instead of having to stop to pay a toll, you can zoom on thru and pay electronically. There are 2 major downsides to this “convenience”:

Helps obscure the cost of each toll
One step closer to the government tracking everywhere you go.

As a libertarian, Big Government is viewed as the bane of freedom, so obviously #2 conflicts with my ideals. It wouldn’t surprise me that once the majority of residents are using EZPass, (aka the hook is set), that all of a sudden the government will decide to utilize this new found data to increase their revenues. Distances between toll booths is known to the inch, so with the simple equation of average speed = distance / time, it will be easy to determine who was speeding, and issue a summons, with absolutely no way to wrangle your way out of it. That is of course once the politicians make sure their EZPass accounts are hidden from this scrutiny. But speeding tickets would only be the start. Cross the EZPass data with a database of wanted persons, and all they have to do is to wait for you to use your EZPass, and snag you at will. Not worried because you are a model citizen? Did you forget to pay that parking ticket? Gotcha. Forgot to pay your vehicle registration, or get your car inspected. Gotcha again. Do some business in New York City and conveniently not pay NYC Income Tax on it (since there was no paper trail). Gotcha again, since now there is a paper trail.

But, even if you don’t agree with my opinion on the government watching everything you do, you can’t really argue with #1, obscuring the cost of each. I remember back in the 80’s when the Parkway wanted to up the tolls from 25 to 35 cents, and people spray painted their quarters red to let them know how they felt. With EZPass it is just too easy to bump up the toll, and unless you actually reviewed your monthly statement, you probably wouldn’t even notice. Do you review your monthly phone statements to see what it cost for each call, or do you just pay the bill? Odds are you are that unless the bill seemed a little high, you just pay it and never looked at the details. Would you treat your EZPass statement any different? I doubt it. And to make matters worse, they actually charge you a monthly “convenience” fee for not having to stop at toll. Yes, some of the road currently give discounts for using EZPass (the Garden State Parkway does not), but how long do you think that is going to last? It will last until they the make it so painful to go thru a toll that you’ll beg for EZPass, and that will be the end of the discounts.

Now, I’m all for getting rid of the toll booths, since they are pretty much just government overhead (we have all heard the stories of that it was impossible to get a job as a toll booth worker unless you have a relative that is in the state government). But if not EZPass, then what? Well, in Switzerland they use yearly tax stickers (called a 'vignette' pass ) is used instead of tolls, and if you get caught on the toll road without one, heavy fines are levied (minimum fines are 6 times the yearly tax, which will discourage most). The idea is to only sell yearly stickers, which keeps the administration costs down, meaning more of the toll money can go to supporting the road, and less to administering the total. In fact, in the United States there is already a form of this system in place already, just not for passenger cars. The states use it on those big 18 wheelers. Ever notice all those stickers on the gas tanks of the rig? They are called Weight-distance Tax stickers and most states have one, and believe me, a trucker will not travel thru a state without one. A yearly sticker would solve the toll booth problem, and eliminate the need for EZPass, without having to resort to tracking out every move. It might not be optimal for bridges and tunnels, but there is no reason why it couldn’t be used there too.

Technorati tags: ezpass port authority new jersey

It's Always Better In New Jersey Quiz

2005-12-20T05:41:00Z

I scored a 84% on the "how f***** JERSEY are you?" Quizie! What about you?

Some of the questions are pretty lame, but, hey, it is a Jersey thing.