This blog has mostly been about personal technology issues, but occasionally there are other posts as well, such as this one on tax policy that David Frum linked to today. What links these together? Why not have a consistent theme?

What links these together is that I post things that I think might be interesting to the world at large. In a world of RSS feeds making it easy to skip posts that aren't of interest, I think this approach makes sense. It comes at a cost of some thematic disharmony and may turn off some readers, but that seems like an acceptable price to pay for having a single, convenient place to put ideas on the Internet where:

• They can be picked up by search engine spiders and brought to people who might be interested in them, but have never heard of this blog.
• Those with RSS readers can easily pick out some subset of posts that might interest them.
• I can refer to prior posts in posts on message boards, emails or the like.

I'm pretty sure this is isn't a way to develop a large following, but that's probably not worth the effort. Making some ideas available to everyone on the Internet is worth the fairly minimal effort.

I was sufficiently intruiged by the idea of leaving transcoding issues behind that I tried out Heywatch.com. It is a video transcoding service that will transcode between many video formats for files of less than 45 minutes at a cost of $0.10 per file. The price is reasonable enough that I would be tempted to use it for certain tasks in lieu of Vegas 5.0 (my current video editing software).

But after trying Heywatch, I have decided I won’t use it regularly without a couple of features:

1. The ability to do multiple uploads at once. Often I will want to transcode about 20 files at a time, e.g. videos taken with a digital camera.
2. The ability to download transcoded files via RSS feed. The Heycast function appears to do this for Quicktime files, but not for other end formats. Ideally each individual would be able to have multiple feeds for different sources.
3. —The ability to have Heywatch monitor an RSS feed for files and then automatically transcode them for me. For example I’d like to be able to have Heywatch monitor a video podcast feed, transcode whatever is fed, and then per my suggestion above, I would have the ability to pick it up from my own RSS feed.
4. FWIW, I’d also like the ability to transcode VOB files, although I certainly understand why that is not something they are undertaking: (i) it seems to be hard to translate VOBs that are designed to create problems for transcoding software; and (ii) these files are long and the bandwidth and processing cost is likely to be higher than their typical YouTube video.

I also posted this on the Heywatch suggestion board so there may be useful followup there.

A few thoughts from use and some surfing today:

• The Mogul seems faster than my PPC-6700
• Windows media player fast forward and rewind actually operates smoothly. With the WM5 version I had previously it was impossible to tell how far you advancing when using these functions.
• Windows Media Player also remembers what I was playing and where in the "song" I was. Windows Media Player on the PPC-6700 seldom did this.

I noticed a few good links relating to this device too:

• New features in Windows Mobile 6
• Why Windows Mobile doesn't close apps

A couple of days ago, I purchased the new HTC Mogul, which seems to be getting pretty good-- if not glowing reviews. One such informative review with which I agree a great deal is up at PDAPhoneHome.com.

I have had its predecessor, the PPC-6700 for about 18 months and the battery felt like it was going to need to be replaced soon. I figured rather than spring for a new battery, I would upgrade the phone instead. I was generally satisfied with the PPC6700, so absent the release of the Mogul, I would have just purchased a new battery.

The phone arrived the day after it was ordered and the 2GB microSD card arrived two days later (today). That was enough to get me to set up the phone this evening, which went surprisingly quickly. The microSD card was surprisingly inexpensive-- less that $30 for a 2GB Sandisk card, with adapter, shipped priority mail.

The Vista Sync Center recognized the phone without incident. Likewise I installed two of the applications I use a lot (ListPro 4.1; and NewsGatorGo) without any problem. The new phone sync'd to the same directory as my old PPC-6700. The provisioning of wireless services was handled with a quick call to Sprint and was effective about 20 minutes later. If only the WSUS 3.0 had been this easy!

Things I like:

• The smaller size.
• Bluetooth 2.0. (Which corresponds to the recent US release of the Blue Trek ST1 Headphones I have had my eye on since CES.
• Lights on the keyboard that indicate when capslock or numlock is active.
• Number keys on the keypad arranged in a keypad array rather than sequentially across the top.
• Lots of free memory (over 140MB!). This will certainly go down as I open email attachments and cache Internet pages, but it is over triple the initial free memory of the PPC-6700.
• Java, which hopefully will make more web sites usable.

Things I don't like are pretty well covered in the review I mentioned above, but it's nothing major.

The big question in my mind is what will battery life be like. That was one of my biggest problems with the PPC-6700, I couldn't go through a 12-hour day of light use, but a lot of pushed emails, without the battery getting too low to use the device. I suspect (based on other posts I've read) that the Mogul's battery life is only marginally better, but I'll see for myself soon enough-- tomorrow I will have the phone set up to get push emails from my firm's Exchange server.

Yesterday I titled and filed all of my photos and home videos for the past year. I found that the Vista Photo Gallery was a surprisingly efficient method of doing this work. It allowed photos to be titled and adjusted in simple ways relatively easily. Changing filenames did not seem to require nearly as many keystrokes as it would have had I been using Windows XP's filmstrip view (which is the closest thing in Windows XP).

Of course, what I have not yet done is tag the photos. To date all of my photos have been tagged using J. River's Media Center, but its tags are not supported in Media Center (or any other application that I am aware of). I am tempted to start using the XML tagging used in Vista, Photoshop Elements and Microsoft's Digital Image Suite. But I am held back by a few of factors:

• Microsoft has now discontinued Digital Image Suite (no wonder I was able to pick it up for free with a rebate!)
• I would have to retag about 5000 existing photos
• I suspect that this system is inferior to the scheme used by J River's Media Center and the hierarchies of tags I can create
• The current approach of putting photos in a folder hierarchy actually seems to work ok for many types of photos (other types get lost in huge generic folders, however)

So I remain paralyzed with respect to tagging (at least for the moment).

I finally got around to trying another way to view video podcasts on my TVs-- which for me means viewing then on the Xbox 360. My fundamental problem is that the Xbox 360, acting as as Media Center Extended, has no good way to play QuickTime files (and QuickTime is used by some of my favorite video podcasts.)

Before moving Media Center to Vista, I was able to do this from within Media Center by running Transcode 360 on the Media Center PC to convert QuickTime videos on-the-fly allowing me to view them from the Xbox 360 acting as Media Center Extender. But as I've written before, the combination of Vista Media Center, Small Business Server 2003 and Transcode 360 wasn't working for me.

I experimented a little with Heywatch.com, but could not find a good way to have Heywatch grab new files automatically from RSS feeds and then provide transcoded files to me via another RSS feed. When in comes to transcoding to Windows Media format video, Heywatch appears best at one off transcoding.

Fortunately (if quirkily!) the Xbox 360 acting as a Windows Media Connect device from the dashboard will no play QuickTime files, so I tried setting up Windows Media Connect on my Media Center PC. Unfortunately I was unable to get the Xbox 360 to access the correct Windows Media Player library on the PC-- it would only access a library of one of the MCX users that had only seven songs associated with it, rather than the full library of the user I actually log onto the PC with.

So... I remembered that Orb 2.0 could be accessed from the Xbox 360 dashboard and decided to give that a try...

Success! (So far.)

I installed the latest build of Orb 2.0 (seemingly in permanent beta like Google products), which doesn't appear to have the problems that led me to uninstall it about six months ago. Instead, I am able to share my Media files without incident. Orb appears to the Xbox 360 as a Windows Media Connect UPnP server and serves up media files to the Xbox 360 via the dashboard.

Once again I can enjoy the 1Up Show.

My alma mater, Dartmouth College, send me and aother alumni and email this morning, which included as one of its items the news that "the Board [of Trustees] concluded that it would be useful to develop a statement for Dartmouth on governance and trustee responsibilities" and included this link to the statement.

It's not very long, so I suggest reading the whole thing to get a sense of why I found this so baffling: the first two of the three sections seemed so condescending and either unnecessary or useless that the whole release left me baffled.

Is it really necessary or useful to include in a formal policy expectations like:

• "Use your own judgment in voting versus following the lead of others."
• "Prepare for meetings by reading the agenda and supporting material and by keeping informed about Dartmouth and trends and issues in higher education."
• "Serve Dartmouth as a whole, rather than the interests of any constituency."

Even if these were necessary admonitions to people of the stature of those who sit on the Board (and maybe they are). Does anyone really believe that this public "statement" does anything to advance these goals-- as distinct from informal discussions among the members?

Or is this just laying the groundwork for some future actions that are not mentioned?

As I say, I am baffled.

I recently purchased and played Shadowrun for the Xbox 360 and liked it. I liked it for reasons hat may be unique to the type of "gamer" I am: one with a job, a family and who was never that good even when I was younger.

This means that some of the keys to a game being fun for me are: (i) does it do something cool; (ii) is it easy to play and progress; (iii) can it be played in short spurts; and (iv) is it deep enough to be engaging, but should be enjoyable even without putting in a lot of time.

As an aside, I have been amused listening to the last two weeks' 1Up Yours podcasts feature discussions of how these game industry journalists really could not compete online against kids without jobs who could devote more time to becoming good at various games.

People have complained about Shadowrun being expensive given its number of maps and gameplay modes. That may be a fair criticism, but in my stage of life, I'm not that price sensitive if the game is one I want to play. Likewise, per Shawn Elliot's comments on the GFW podcast, I'm not sure I'd want to play in the PC.

Given the above, here's what I like about Shadowrun so far and why I would recommend it to the growing group of gamers like me:

• It had a training mode that let me play bot matches at an easy level at the end of each of the six stages. I go a 10 point achievement for winning the bot match at the end of each training level.
• It has cool features that set it apart from other FPS games I've played: flight, teleportation; creation of wall-like features; ability to create healing trees; etc.
• You can buy an ability that improves your aim. This is great for someone like me, whose skills are mediocre. Sure, it uses up one of my three slots for abilities, which may be a big deal for a better player, but not for me.
• Like the Battlefield games (of which I played a lot) and Counterstrike (of which I played very little) I am always part of a team that I can contribute to in some way. And my team might even win! The odds of my winning a slayer match in Halo or contributing in any way to the winning team in such a match are small.
• The game is very well balanced and feels like it may have scissors, paper rock quality to it where even with mediocre skills, if I am playing with scissors, I can be someone on the opposing team who is playing with paper.
• I have great hopes for Microsoft's Trueskill matching system. Hopefully it means I'll be playing with other people almost as bad as I am.
• The fact that this is multiplayer only may result in more players like me venturing online to play. With many games I figure I should wait to finish the single player before venturing online and I never finish the single player game. If other similarly situated gamers to the same, it results in online games skewed toward the very talented.

All this being said, I haven't played that much, so I really hope my good first impressions are sustained.

An editorial in the New Republic, prompted me to respond with a long comment, that I thought I would reprint here. The gist of the editorial and comments is that allowing hedge fund managers capital gins treatment for some of their income is some kind of crazy "welfare for billionaires" and a "loophole."

It may be wrong, but taxing capital gains at a lower rate than ordinary income is not as crazy as the article and commenters would have you believe. Nevertheless, the compensation in this case does seem to have more of the characteristics of ordinary income.

The fundamental problem is that we have an income tax rather than a consumption tax. To understand why that is a problem, one must first understand a couple of principles of the tax system:

First, any tax system that taxes anything other than consumption artificially reduces the incentive to invest over what that incentive would be in the absence of taxes. Such a system creates ARTIFICAL disincentives to investment.

Second, not taxing returns on an investment of money on which tax has already been paid is mathematically equivalent to providing a deduction for the initial investment and taxing the returns (assuming all the tax rates are the same).

Assuming no deduction for the initial investment, only a tax exemption for returns on investment would produce a system that did not artificially retard incentives to invest. The lower capital gains rate reflects a political compromise that IN THEORY decreases the artificial disincentive to invest rather than consume. Ideally, the capital gains rate would be 0% and a 0% rate would apply to other returns from investment such as interest.

I said "in theory" above because there is a big catch: it is very difficult to distinguish between returns on investment and returns on labor. As a result, (i) huge amounts of resources are wasted trying to get income classified as capital gain (gain from investment) rather than ordinary income (income from labor); and (ii) people are often successful in getting income that in theory should be ordinary income, classified as capital gain. The capital gains treatment of the carried interest of hedge fund managers seems to fit into this category. This isn't the result of a "loophole", it is jsut very hard to distinguish the two.

This problem is one that is inherent in a tax on income rather than on consumption. If consumption were taxed, no longer would people expend effort trying to reclassify income.

The consumption tax is not a panacea, with it you have issues of whether expenses are really consumption or whether they are investments-- some are both (e.g. a business lunch), but at least you then have issues with respect to a tax that is focused on what tax theorists agree should be the focus of the tax system, rather than an income tax-- which exists as it does for political, rather than economic reasons.