Depressed about democracy

In the US, representative democracy just means that the more money you have, the more your special interest get represented. Is there still room for regular people to have a say?

UPDATE: I understand that voting is important. But the problem goes beyond people not voting. At what point do we realize that the 2-party system is broken. This post by a friend pretty much sums it up.

Here we go again...

It's time to put at little oil into the ol' blogging machine, pull the cord a few times, and hope she starts up again. I've gotten so rusty at this I really don't have anything to say. We released eduCommons 2.1.0 at work, and since then my brain has pretty much been fried. [insert witty closing comment here] G'night.

Putting the "Pay" in PayPal

Have you ever stopped and wondered about how PayPal makes their money? Let's review: With PayPal Personal you can send and receive money electronically to and from other PayPal accounts for free. You can also transfer money to and from your regular bank account at no charge. Sign me up! The other account type is PayPal Premier. With this this type of account PayPal charges a fee, $0.30 plus 2.9% of each and every dollar received. So why would anyone sign up for a PayPal Premier account when they can have a PayPal Personal account which can send and receive funds for free? This is where they have done something clever. It's actually kind of boring, really, which is why few people have noticed the fact that since buying PayPal, eBay has nearly doubled it's revenue for each auction that uses PayPal.

Here's an example scenario: Joe Blow puts his old laptop up for auction on eBay. The high bid is $450, which costs Joe around $18 in eBay fees. But Joe has taken eBay's advice and listed his laptop auction as PayPal preferred. So when the high bidder pays for the item, she of course transfers money through PayPal. Well, because PayPal encourages its users to pay through PayPal using a credit card, that is what most people do. (That is the dafault funding source, if you've noticed. You even get a warning if you try to change it to a bank transfer.)

Well, guess what? You have to pay a fee to receive credit card transfers through PayPal. Actually, if it was just a question of paying a fee for that one transaction I could live with that. No such luck. You can't receive credit card funds at all unless you "upgrade" your free, PayPal Personal account to a Premier account. And once you switch to Premier you have to pay that same fee ($0.30 + 2.9%) for ANY type of transfer into your PayPal account. Oh, and by the way, you can't go back to the free PayPal Personal account.

I told you it was boring. Billions of dollars worth of boring. And the only people who seem to notice are the eBay sellers who are forced into PayPal Premier. Someone in their marketing department deserves a big raise for putting the "pay" in PayPal.

Why I like my job...

I work as a quality assurance analyst for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) and as an instructional designer for the Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching (FACT). In the afternoons I am at COSL, and I test software that is used to publish university courses online for all to see and use. Being part of the OpenCourseWare movement and getting paid to do it is a pretty sweet deal by itself, but last week something happened that was cool enough to make me want to stop and blog about why I like my job.

One of the features in our eduCommons software is the ability to track whether or not course content has been cleared for copyright. It’s just a check box that you can click as you create course content. The only problem is until last week there was no easy way to view this for all your content at once. You had to click on each item to check copyright. So on Thursday I suggested displaying a copyright symbol or a check mark next to each item when viewing the contents of a course. And Friday morning Brent shows me the new version of eduCommons with the copyright symbol idea implemented. He had also added an “M” flag as well to show which course content items had metadata entered. This is the kind of software development you don’t see every day. A suggestion for the QA guy gets implemented in less than 24 hours. Sweet.

Video iPods and Blockbuster

iPod video rentals at Blockbuster? It's not as crazy as it sounds. As Bob Cringley explains his idea in a recent PBS article, Blockbuster's chain of neighborhood video stores is just what Apple needs to reach millions of new customers who don't have high-speed Internet (or iPods, for that matter). Since they can't rent movies online, these folks will show up at their local Blockbuster, dock their shiny new video iPods, select their movies, and swipe their credit card. Then they can take their rentals home, plug into a TV, and enjoy them for a week or 5 days or until they expire. No returns. No late fees. Beautiful. And Apple gets to push it's music and video distribution empire beyond the limits of the high-speed Internet world. Don't forget that Blockbuster is taking a pounding from NetFlix. They need a new business model to survive. They'll do it. And we'll all go home, happily ever after...

Kids, movies, and norms

Last night my wife and I went to see Narnia at a movie theater in Logan, Utah. I know it's based on a children's novel so I expected kids to be in the audience, especially at a 4:00 PM matinee. It ended up being one of my all-time worst movie experiences. Several parents brought their 2-year-old kids and let them run around the theater during the movie making all kinds of noise. It's been a while since I lived in Utah, so I need to ask, "Is this normal?"

At this point I should probably mention that I have three kids, and at one time we tried the "Let's all go to the movies together" idea. We went to see Polar Express, and I ended up walking around the theater lobby for an hour and a half with my restless baby. Lesson learned. Last night I watched two parents looking on as their toddlers ran right under the silver screen, yelping and squeaking. The parents finally scooped up their kids and stood in the lower aisle, determined to keep watching the movie. The kids eventually broke free and ran a few more laps around the theater. As a parent with young kids I am used to plenty of ambient noise, and I certainly don't expect any theater to be totally silent, but this was different. There seemed to be several parents who had come to the movie with the intention of letting their small children run and play while they watched a movie. Unbelievable.

I should also mention that I am not normally the type who makes a big deal about these kinds of situations. I usually wait until someone else says something, but the fact that no one was doing anything finally got to me. (Frankly, this little situation was more interesting to me than the movie anyway.) I ended up leaving the movie to talk to the management and ask for my money back. Even though that made me feel a bit better, I was still bothered by what happened. The theater manager said he would send someone to talk to the couple that was allowing their kids to run wild (I didn't see if that really happened). I went back in and watched the second half of the movie, partly just to see what would happen with this situation. The end of the movie wound up being just as noisy as the first half. Kids were still running under the screen with no parent anywhere in sight.

So the main thing I learned from this experience is that a majority Utah/LDS crowd will tolerate kids ANYWHERE. As far as I could tell I was the only one who was bothered enough to request a refund. I also learned that it's NOT a good idea to go to the last matinee of the day. There seem to be quite a few people who want to save a couple bucks on tickets this way. These are apparently the same ones who are too cheap to spend money on a babysitter, even if it means ruining the experience for a few hundred people. Hopefully this wouldn't have happened at a later showing. I don't think it would have been tolerated for an entire movie in any other state. In any event, I found another reason to be confused by "Utah Mormon" culture last night. (I know I am generalizing here, so if this happens in other places/cultures I would like to hear about it. If so, please ignore this last paragraph.)

7150 Project: School IT Security Wiki

Well, the commercial blogging thing wasn't really working out. Then, a few weeks ago, I wrote some content for a CURI grant Brett Shelton is doing on IT security, or the lack of it, in our public schools. I kept thinking about school IT security, and finally decided to make it the topic of my 7150 (Learning Objects) class project. I've been working on it alot over the past few days, and right now I am wishing I was sitting in a more comfortable chair. Anyway, here's the link to my wiki.