Maybe its art, music, technology, or something community-oriented.

I recently joined the Awesome Foundation as a Micro-Trustee. We’re giving away $1000USD each month to people who want to do something awesome. It’s not an ‘investment’. We don’t want the money back. There is no catch.

Go apply. Do something awesome.

Better yet, do you want to encourage Awesome? Contact us information on starting your own Awesome Foundation spinoff.

A few quick facts about my current reach:

• This blog sees around 5000 pageviews/month, with around 3,400 visits. It has approximately 70 people viewing it daily via their RSS readers (Feedburner).
• I have just short of 1,900 followers on Twitter. I’ve made around 7,200 updates and 1,200 DMs. There’s much bigger people on Twitter, but I don’t follow back too much anymore and I’m not really trying to grow much.
• I have about 120 people on Flickr that call me a “contact” or friend. On Flickr I’ve had around 100,000 views of my photos at the current rate of around 200/day on average
• My YouTube channel gets around 80 views/day on average. I’ve had around 40,000-50,000 views on my videos (I deleted some that I didn’t like, so a few numbers are screwy)
• I’ve had my Slashdot account for around 8 years now. It’s sad that I lurked for so long or I could have easily had a 4 or 5 digit UID. I can’t find where it has the total number of comments, but I think I’ve made over 700.
• On GearSlutz, which is my Forum of Choice when it comes to music things, I think I’ve been registered since 2004 and have made around 4,000 posts. People on there seem to know me pretty well now.
• And on my Tumblr, I have a grand 7 people following me

This isn’t bragging. People have much bigger footprints nonstop, but I’d never taken the time to really put them all in one place. I’m sure this will be fun to look back on in 5 or 10 years and grin at. I occasionally find something that I posted 10 or 15 years ago online and it’s always too funny. Even looking back in my Slashdot journal its cute to see what I said 7 years ago.

MegaBus subcontracts out to Dattco Bus Company for some of its routes, including the Boston/NYC one. These buses however have no wifi, in spite of MegaBus’s advertisement that their buses have wifi. While I’m sure company representatives will say something about there being no guarantee of wifi on any given bus, I feel this is a case of Bait and Switch. They advertise on the basis of cheap tickets and wifi. Rarely do you get a ticket as cheap as they advertise and rarely do you get wifi. Worse, when you ask the drivers on the Dattco buses about the wifi, they are kinda assholes about it.

I’m not saying to “not” take MegaBus, but if you’ve got something online that you must do, then there’s a significant chance that you won’t be doing it on the Megabus. My recommendation is to try for the Bolt Bus, as their wifi is much more stable and actually exists on all of the buses.

Tomorrow the second season is coming to a close and I’m excited and next month the newest installment in the movie series Terminator: Salavation will be released. In general the TV show is one of mystery more than the action/suspense of the films. It’s made in part by JJ Abrams so why can you expect eh? Lots of speculation is going on for what is happening and there’s a good summary of what’s happened so far available as well.

Just to throw what I’ve observed into the pack (although I’ve realized that the way these shows are written, it is completely impossible to guess what’s going to happen realistically), here are a few of my theories

Sarah Connor

Sarah got arrested at the end of the last show. While my first reaction was to think that between the cancer and getting arrested that they were finding a way to take her out of the show. But with Derrick getting killed, that would leave the only characters left as Summer and John. Then there’s of course Weaver and Ellison, but they don’t like to show too much about them at any one point. So I’m guessing that Sarah will be around still. John by himself is a bit too complacent and is normally just as happy staying at home as he is going on his mother’s wild goose chases.

I’m guessing she gets out, or someone goes in to get her. We haven’t seen the last of her.

Catherine Weaver

Weaver seems to be a good guy. I don’t think this was fully solidified for me until the last episode where another Terminator came after her daughter. I’m guessing that the Terminators in the future don’t know that she’s a machine herself, or they wouldn’t have tried to come after her daughter and would have just assumed that she would have left her die.

Every other robot so far that’s gone into the past has had a pretty clear mission (or at least side mission/directive) to kill John Connor as fast as possible. Weaver acts like she doesn’t even want to see Sarah, and she seems unconcerned about John’s existence. I’m guessing that she knows they exist and that they will come to her if anything.

Additionally, I think manpower wise, she has to be a good guy in general. Cameron is strong, but the body that is now John Henry was easily her equal if not her better power wise. Throw in Weaver and I’m pretty sure that Cameron would be a pile of metal in seconds.

I find it very likely that John sent Weaver back in time to assist in her own way and research AI. Weaver has some interesting behaviors in that she doesn’t seem to know everything about the future in the same way (doesn’t have a database in her head on everything about AI possible already) and she also constantly uses an external computer. I have to wonder if the liquid models are smart, but perhaps don’t have the same storage capacity as more traditional models or at least the same interfacing abilities.

One thing that’s unsure is if Weaver is the same liquid model that was seen in the submarine and also how many liquids there are in the future. It seems that in most depictions of the future that the liquid models aren’t the ones running around the battlefield most of the time and are rare at best.

John Henry

Weaver is teaching John Henry to be good, and already John is learning things that no other Terminator has ever expressed. Just them learning overall seems to be slow or nearly impossible. He has flaws, but in doing so is very human like. I think that John perhaps sent Weaver back to build an AI system that would be able to fight against the Terminators/Skynet.

John Connor

John really doesn’t “do” much in the shows, but more acts as the center of things. I think he’s slowly coming into his own for this and I’m waiting to see what decisions he makes at the start of the next show. Do they go to get his mother (as they did in T2), or do they go after Weaver/John Henry and then perhaps have trust issues with Weaver if she tries to stop him?

Cameron

Cameron’s character has been the subject of a lot of red herrings in this show. I think John trusts her now fully, despite any failings. I don’t think she’s going to go off the deep end again anytime soon as we’ve already played that one out. My question however is this: Is she the one that we’ve seen in the future (and then gets sent back) or does this Cameron make it to the future, and then is with John there?

John definitely has grown the trust of the machines. It seems that few people in the future actually see or interact with John anymore and that Cameron acts as his buffer. I can’t see him giving that buffer up, just to send her back. Or would he?

Skynet

John Henry’s brother I think will be the target for Season 3. Actual preparation and fighting for the future. There needs to be a new ‘bigger’ target at the end of this next show. Something that the main characters right now can’t easily attack. Maybe Judgement day has changed. The company that made the HKs and that had the factory (which Weaver wanted to destroy just as Sarah did, so they had similar goals) is definitely mysterious. All along its been alluded to that this is probably partially government contracting/military and not just a single company building the stuff. Wasn’t part of the original plot something to do with a global missile defense network?

I guess we’ll see tomorrow!

Update (April 11, 2009):

Last night I watched the new episode and it seems that I was mostly right in my ideas. Cameron went in to get Sarah (successfully). Weaver did build John Henry in an attempt to help John. I didn’t foresee Cameron giving over her chip and uploading it into John Henry (don’t think anyone could have seen that coming), and it seems now that Skynet is the target. I think I made a lot conservative decisions. It was interesting to see Weaver do quickly destroy that Terminator. She could have ruined Cameron before she blinked.

Now of course there are new questions. John runs into Reese in the future, but Reese doesn’t know who John Connor is (so it seems that John hasn’t come to power as a leader of the resistence yet, giving us some idea of timeline). John also meets Kyle (his father), and shockingly meets Cameron, or rather Allison Young. Surely this is going to mess up stuff a bit, as John is going to mix up all sorts of feelings for her (probably making some bad decisions), and he knows that she’ll be killed by the machines in the process of making Cameron. Twisted

It also seems that Elliot knew about Weaver, as he wasn’t shocked at all to see Weaver to be a machine. I’m still scratching my head over the HK crashing into the building. I don’t get the purpose, or where it came from. Seems to have been a random move.

A

AIG

B

Bailout

C

Credit Default Swaps

D

Defaults

E

Executive Compensation

F

Foreclosure

G

Gaussian copula model

H

Housing bubble

I

Inflation

J

Jim Cramer

K

KB Home

L

Layoff

M

Madoff

N

Northern Rock

O

Over-Leveraging

P

Private Jets

Q

Quick Money

R

Recession

S

Subprime Loans

T

Treasury Yields

U

Unemployment checks

V

Volatility

W

Washington Mutual

X

Stock IndeX

Y

You’re Fucked

Z

Zombie Bank

The four bus lines that I’ve had experience with recently are the MegaBus, Bolt Bus, Greyhound/Peter Pan and the Fung Wah/Chinatown bus. I can’t speak from personal experience on Limoliner, but I have hear good things about it and I intend to give it a shot sometime soon.

MegaBus

MegaBus is a relatively new option, with its closest competitor being Bolt Bus. They are owned and operated by Greyhound/Peter Pan. It offers tickets that vary in price depending on booking demand, but mostly being around $15 realistically. They have $5 ticket-change fees, and are now charging $5 extra for luggage over 50lbs (but I saw no scale for direct measurement, so I can assume it is just anything they seem as ‘heavy’). They advertise wifi access, but no power onboard. I have seen coaches of theirs that are very modern looking double-deck buses, but believe that those mainly run between NYC and Washington DC so I haven’t had the experience of taking them.

I have taken MegaBus twice. Once was a ‘MegaBus’ and once on a ‘Dattco‘ bus that they sub-contract out to run routes when they need. On the Megabus, the wifi worked ok but imposed content filters on bandwidth heavy or filesharing sites. That made sense in a lot of ways, but I was bummed that I couldn’t connect to Newzbin to queue up my server at home to start downloading some things, which wouldn’t have been bandwidth intensive at all. When it was a Dattco bus, there was no wifi at all. No apology was made for there being a change of bus, nor did they text/email/call me to notify me of this change. Certainly a bummer. The temperatures on the Megabus seem to be poorly controlled and its either blazingly hot, or freezing on the bus.

The drivers and staff are only mildly friendly, but they are all Americans and speak english well. In Boston the buses leave and arrive from South Station’s terminal which is nice. In New York however it is a totally different ballgame. You have to wait outside Penn Station in a line on the sidewalk. This isn’t that big of a deal 9 months of the year, but in the winter this outright sucks. The buses have a no food/drink policy, but they don’t pay all that close attention and you can probably sneak something small by them. The seats themselves are a bit cramped, and there is no arm between passenger seats so I found myself bumping into the person beside me too often. One other odd (or good) thing, is that they make a quick stop in Hartford, CT each way. Its annoying because generally no one boards, but if you’re going to/from Hartford then I suppose its useful. They also stop out in Newton at the end of the D-line. Between the two of these, it seems a bit much.

Overall, Megabus does an ok job. I’m honestly not sure why Greyhound now owns Greyhound buses, Peter Pan AND Megabus. The differences between them are minimal, except for the pickup locations, branding and occasional wifi on the Megabus. I’ll give them a C+ rating for bus travel. It gets you there.

Bolt Bus

Bolt Bus is also a relative newcomer to the Boston/NYC route. They advertise inexpensive fares, wifi, and power outlets. The buses seem newer, and the seats are a bit more spread apart. On a Megabus I took, my 17″ Macbook Pro did not have space to open, but there is certainly space for your desktop replacement laptops on the Bolt Bus. The drivers and staff seem very friendly, if not outright funny at times. They offered everyone the option of having the bus go directly express to NYC, or stopping for a break. We voted express.

There are power outlets on the back of the seats, which work ok. My Macbook Pro’s square power adaptor initially kept falling out with the bus’s movement. If I had someone sitting beside me I could see the cable being a bit annoying and placement of it wasn’t great. The internet was excessively sporadic. The driver allowed us to reset the modem and wifi router once or twice, but it seemed to be a signal issue more than anything. I had ping times ranging from 200ms to 20000ms, with dropped packets galore. I was able to check my email, but found it less frustrating to just use my iPhone to do the same. Whatever technology they are using is considerably less stable than tethering a 3G, or even older phone like a Treo 650. I’ve spoken to others and this seems to be a common problem.

A friend told me recently that the 3G reception with all wireless cards between NYC and Boston is kinda screwy, even with personal/consumer devices. This is shocking to me, since it’s an incredibly dense population area that in my mind would have relatively few deadspots. So maybe this isn’t all Bolt’s fault.

Bolt Bus departs from South Station in Boston and drops off (and picks up) on 34th Street near Penn Station. I do wish too that they would invest on some type of cover at least for patrons to wait under for the bus.

One other really cool thing about Bolt Bus is that you can simply flash them your ticket confirmation number on your iPhone or other smart device. No printing required. Apparently about 30% of people getting on the bus do this and they don’t think its odd at all. I can only imagine that other bus services might not take so kindly in the same way just based on their overall customer service attitude. I could be wrong.

Overall, Bolt is my preferred option. Their ticket prices also operating on a sliding scale, but generally book up quickly. I was shocked that the trip I took was only about 10% full (although tickets were full price), but generally this isn’t the bus line that you’ll take if its a last minute trip. I’ll give it a solid B+. If the seats were nicer and the wifi worked all the time, I’d push it up even more.

Greyhound/Peter Pan

Greyhound/Peter Pan is like the Dominos Pizza of bus travel. It is utter crap, but you know exactly how the crap will taste and have done it before. The standard fares are the most expensive of the four services discussed here. If you log on their website and just look up the ticket, it will be $35/direction. If you buy it online, it goes down to $20. If you buy it at the counter, it is $35. If you step away from the counter and buy it using your laptop/phone, and then pick it up at the counter it is $20. The people working at the ticket counter are almost always slow, rude and rarely helpful or sympathetic. They profit from people not knowing how to get the ticket cheaper and disclose no information about how to get a ticket at the discounted online rate.

Also they really care about seeing your ID and getting your info off of it as well. Why I can’t anonymously take a bus is beyond me. Greyhound travels between South Station and Port Authority. While its location can be nice, and it is indoor to indoor travel, Port Authority is one of the sketchiest places in Midtown and harkens back to the feel of Times Square in the early 80’s. Homeless, vagrants, drug users and weirdos abound in addition to a funny smell that you can never place your finger on. Greyhound recently implemented a ’skip the line’ option for $5 more, which is nice because otherwise there are often long and winding lines that I have stood in for 2-3 hours waiting for a bus during busy traveled holidays.

There is no wifi, there is no power. The seats are cramped. The drivers are annoying and the buses are nearly always full. Occasionally the driver will feel the need to put on a movie that no one wants to watch, and crank the volume. They make stops halfway through the trip, and occasionally stop in Newton. Beware, because there are Boston/NYC routes that are up to seven hours long due to making 5-10 stops along the way. Do not book that route! Most of the buses are older and it just really isn’t a fun experience.

Between having more pricing options than Windows Vista, unfriendly employes, no amenities, and old buses I’m going to give them a C-. It could be worse, but it sure could be a lot better too. The only upsides are traveling between indoors locations (although I’d rather be outside than in Port Authority late at night) and that they run buses until very late at night and almost hourly.

Fung Wah/Chinatown

The Fung Wah now operates out of South Station, and drops off in Chinatown near the Brooklyn Bridge. The bus’s line has a history of being unsafe, potentially operating outside the boundaries of fully legal and is rumored to be poorly insured. The main rumor I’ve heard is that they used to operate as a “tour bus” to keep insurance and other requirements lower with less restrictions. Either way, taking the Fung Wah is an experience. The pricing used to be the lowest out there, but now with Mega and Bolt offering as low as $1 tickets, this is no longer the case.

The bus used to run from Chinatown Boston to Chinatown NYC, both being outdoor locations. The people working for the bus line speak English very poorly and don’t attempt to understand you or make themselves understandable. I’m sure it is incredibly insensitive of me, but I’m still shocked how long people can live in a country and not pick up the language.

I haven’t taken it in a few years, but I remember it being cramped, with an odd smell, poor seats, horrid customer service, and them driving faster than every other car on the road. I like going fast, but not that fast in a bus. Sure enough, there are plenty of Chinese who take the Chinatown bus (which I don’t mind of course) but it certainly is a different group of people than the 20 and 30-somethings that take the other bus lines. There are no amenities on the bus.

The worst time I had on the Fung Wah was when I went down to NYC for the day, and I bought a cello from a friend. It was an entry level instrument in a soft case. When I tried to board the Chinatown bus they told me to throw it under the bus in the luggage bin. This would have certainly resulted in the instrument being destroyed completely, but they just kept saying, “Put under bus, put under bus”. I asked if I could buy a second ticket for the seat beside me, and they said no since the bus was full. No refunds on my ticket either of course. I was luckily able to fit the cello behind the back seat on the bus, near the bathroom and out of harm’s way.

If you’re thinking of taking the Chinatown bus, ask yourself why? I give it a D-. It could be worse, but I’d have to get creative with ideas for how they could. Maybe its gotten better since they are now a bit more legit and operating out of South Station (perhaps authorities have pushed them a bit). But unless your final destination is Chinatown NYC, then I see little reason to take this bus line. There are a few other ‘Chinatown’ lines, but I don’t think any of them are any better, if not a bit worse.

Final Thoughts

No one expects bus travel to be a joyride. I have no idea what a bus costs, or what its licensing and operating costs are so I can’t say exactly what I expect out of each of these lines. Certainly some could improve on customer service (smiles are free!), as there are literally millions of people out there that need jobs and could work at ticket counters and could put forward a more customer friendly attitude. I can’t imagine that wifi setups are all that expensive for these buses, nor would putting power outlets in every bus. I would absolutely love to find a bus line that had seats as nice as coach on an airline even, but I might be asking for a bit much. I’ll give Limoliner a shot. Tickets are about $70 each way, but I’ve heard great things. Maybe in the seat, some of the bus lines can put in cupholders?

Happy travels.

Visa and Mastercard each explicitly state in their merchant account agreements that no minimums are to be allowed or posted: Mastercard “A merchant must not require, or post signs indicating that it requires, a minimum or maximum transaction amount to accept a valid MasterCard card.” or by Visa, “Visa merchants are not permitted to establish minimum transaction amounts, even on sale items. They also are not permitted to charge you a fee when you want to use your Visa card. They also are not permitted to charge you a fee when you want to use your Visa card. ”

Most merchants in this situation will claim that card fees eat too far into their margins in order to maintain a profitable business. It is true that there are fees associated which can go from around $0.05 to $0.50 in addition to a small percentage of the transaction total. I’ve had to set up merchant accounts with businesses prior, and I’ve found that you can always shop around, and that the competition out there is fierce if you’re smart and do your legwork. Yes, there are fees, but you should be able to find ones that aren’t too exorbitant for standard transactions. Fees do get a little steep for non-standard transactions (if you have to call in the transaction for example), but these shouldn’t happen too often.

Larger businesses such as WalMart, McDonalds and Starbucks have used their shear size to force and negotiate more favorable agreements with the credit card companies to reduce fees. Obviously not every mom and pop can do that, but it is worth noting that everything is up for negotiation. I was setting up card services a few years ago for a company and found that if I just pushed them a bit and got two or three vendors in a bidding war with each other prices suddenly came down drastically.

Maybe in some businesses, they have calculated their margin on average and found it to be a losing proposition to accept cards below a certain threshhold. However it seems to likely be a problem that effects all similar businesses so the market prices should reflect that cost.

The last time I was in NYC, I went into a small deli that had a $10 minimum and then a $2 fee on top of it, just to use your card. No card service charges a small business $2 on a $10 transaction, so it was clearly the business simply trying to get the best of consumers. Needless to say I used cash.

I personally feel (gut instinct only) that this behavior drives away customers and loses the company money in the end. Customers want to feel that a store is accessible and will serve their needs. I go into stores all the time and if they don’t take cards or have some silly minimum I leave.

Benefits of Accepting Cards

The benefits should be pretty easy to see.

• Most Americans carry credit/debit cards.
• Almost everyone has more available to them via credit/debit card than they have cash in pocket.
• Customers think less about how much money they ‘really have’ if its not in their hand. Greater spending.
• Zero/no risk of robbery of plastic. This is important to storeowners and to consumers.
• Less money in the register means less risk. Less risk means cheaper insurance.
• Worry of employee theft of cash goes down.
• There are costs to dealing with cash. Over/Shorts are a problem. Accounting is a problem. Bank drops take time and cost money, etc.

Taxes and claiming income/sales

What? Taxes? Income? How does that have to do anything with credit cards?

Well, let’s take a look for a moment at businesses that do not take any credit cards. Think about that small Italian restraunt you last went to that was cash only. The bill was $120, and yet they are cash only. Was their margin so tight that $20 spaghetti that they couldn’t deal with card fees? Do none of their patrons except you carry plastic? Was it too cumbersome to set up a merchant account? No, No and No.

Most of these businesses don’t exactly keep perfect books. They basically look at their costs for a period of time, and then claim on their taxes that they a reasonable amount greater income than that. They probably made a great deal more than that, but there’s no record of it. Cash doesn’t exactly have a great papertrail (regardless of being made of paper).

So they might have had total real sales in a month of $50,000. Lets say their operating expenses were $15,000/month. They’ll claim that they brought in $25,000 that month. They are profiting reasonably enough for it not to be an obvious problem, and for the IRS these numbers have been consistent within a certain percentage with what they’ve done for the past 10 years. No one is the wiser. The owner takes the additional $25,000 and has a nice day. These numbers are probably a bit off, but you can see where I’m going here. They paid taxes on $10,000, not $35,000 and in the process probably saved a boatload.

The reciepts were probably just little things scribbled on pieces of paper so there’s no accurate record of exactly what the sales numbers were. The waiters are paid a minimum hourly rate (the rest of which are tips, also done in cash of course) so there’s no payroll tax discrepancy and everyone is pretty happy.

Umm, credit cards?

Oh right, what does this have to do with credit cards? The reason that your favorite North End spot doesn’t take credit cards, is because all of a sudden their sales will jump to the $50,000 that they actually were. After a year all of a sudden it seems that they had a HUGE jump in income that they can’t account for all that well. This normally will trigger an IRS audit, which isn’t a fun time at all. Even if it doesn’t, then its not just the card fees that are eating them, but paying taxes on the entire $35,000/month, instead of $10,000/month. They don’t like that, so they don’t do it.

More Cash Equals less to Declare

Overall small businesses like cash. Its far easier for them to keep track of the way they like. Frequently they will probably not keep great records. If money doesn’t hit the bank, then its probably not going to be declared.

The arguments which hold that its too expensive to deal with plastic, or that its not right for you business are often dishonest in some way, shape or form.

I totally sympathize with small business owners. Its tough. The economy sucks. Running a small business is never easy and paying fees to another organization doesn’t feel fun at all. Yet not allowing credit cards is really keeping your feet firmly planted in the past and ignoring the needs of your customers and violating your merchant agreements.

But there’s a problem, which is the cause for worry. I am terrified that they are making an action film and going to treat the novel as they would an action comic. Watchmen is not an action story! There are few action scenes, and those that do exist aren’t as big an bombastic as the filmmakers surely want it to be.

Watchmen is a story that’s very deep, political, multilayered and much more about person to person interaction than it is about any fight. The characters (with one main exception) don’t have super-powers. They are normal people dressed up in costumes. It never once in the story refers to them as super-heros. They are costumed heros. This isn’t the X-men or Spiderman, but I am afraid that it will be treated that way. Reading the Wikipedia it seems that they have already cut out some major portions of the plot, namely the Tales of the Black Freighter. I didn’t like it one bit when they cut out major portions of the Lord of the Rings, including the mysterious Tom Bombadil who I felt was essential to the pacing of the plot.

Anyway, enough ranting. They will still get my $12 at the theatre, so I guess that’s all the production company cares for. I’m just almost certain to be dissapointed to a certain degress.