I hate taxes. They are needlessly complicated, and cause me much anguish each year. They are difficult to plan for, always more confusing, and seem to favor the super rich who can afford big time accountants and lawyers to do their taxes for them. Enter a crazy plan:

His bill would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the many billions of tax forms it sends out and receives. He would erase the federal income tax system -- personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax, and the earned-income tax credit -- and replace all that with a 23 percent national sales tax on personal consumption.

[ The Tax Plan To Kill K Street ]

I have no idea if this plan could ever work, or if it is good, or bad, or crazy, or impossible. But the dream of not filling out any personal income tax is just too great to not ignore this. To the best of my knowledge no other country forces this degree of law, accounting, math, and grief on it's population, so why should we?

David Kearns III thinks so:

It appears that what Apple has done is to take meaningful, desirable third-party services and applications and "roll their own" inside the operating system, thus presenting users with a fuller package of features. Of course, the third parties that had been providing these services as add-ons now are left out in the cold.

When Microsoft does this, it's denounced as a predator and a monopolist. When Apple does it, it's praised as an innovator. Still, if Microsoft didn't have Apple to point to as "competition," there might be more calls for government regulation of monopoly operating systems. We certainly don't want government bureaucrats designing our server and desktop environments.

[ Apple: Predator or protagonist? ]

And I have to agree. Of course I have little choice being focused on Microsoft development tools. Even if someone gave me a Mac to replace every PC in my network, I couldn't use them to deliver Microsoft solutions, and I have to relearn my staff in the ways of PHP and Java (instead of the ColdFusion and .NET that we use now). Still resulting in a loss.

That may be true, but apparently so are coffee devices. After a bowl of the yummiest mac & cheese around from Wolfgang Puck Express, we headed over to the Sur La Table to check out some kitcheney stuff. Nestlé has just come out with a new entry to their pod-based espresso machine line, the Nespresso D90:

Nespresso has created a hermetically sealed capsule which contains the precise amount of freshly roasted and ground coffee. All of the coffee aromas are preserved perfectly until the espresso is ready for drinking. Nespresso offers a range of 9 premium coffee blends

[ Nespresso D90 Essenza Metallic Gray Manual Espresso Machine D 90 S ]

As I was hovering around the coffee section, a nice british woman (who just happend to work there) asked if there was anything she could help with. I had to ask if they did taste testing of the Nespresso system. She replied it would be no problem, just let her fetch some pods from the back. Oooo goody, I do love coffee.

Suffice to say the Nespresso system delivers the best coffee I have ever had from any automated coffee system. Their newest machine is only $179 retail, and the pods run about 48 cents a shot. This could truly break me of the Starbucks grip forever. Philips Senseo has dropped me from a 2 Starbucks a day habit to just one, this could drop me to zero.

Metro-city populations are such a fascinating topic. However at the rate the mid-atlatic and northeast US are growing, I think there will soon be a #1 city of Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia-Delaware-Patterson-Newark-New York-Boston area with a population of 41,100,000. And of course it will be known as The Sprawl (eventually extending southward to Atlanta, but I think that will take a while longer...).

This page lists the 101 largest metropolitan areas of the world by population. This is a controversial issue rather difficult to quantify. These figures include suburban areas immediately surrounding a major city and sometimes multiple major cities which may be close enough together to function essentially as one area (e.g. Washington-Baltimore).

[ List of metropolitan areas by population: Information From Answers.com ]

And for me personally the largest metro area in the world that I had never heard of before reading this is Kolkata-Howrah in the Indian state of West Bengal. Apparently the 3 most populous countries that I know very little about are China, India, and Brazil. All of the areas that I'd never heard of reside in these countries. Which also explains how Bengali and Portuguese get so high on the list of spoken languages of the world.

Update: Once I said Kolkata out loud, I realized it is Calcutta. So Tianjin in China is largest city I've never heard of.

Or even better, pay me? Clearly some people have figured out how to do this:

Consumers will be able to purchase the software in the United States for 129 dollars and in Europe for 129 euros.

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox said Tiger puts Apple ahead of Microsoft in technology for PC operating systems.

[ Apple's "Tiger" aims to take a bite out of Microsoft, "Longhorn" - Yahoo! News ]

Exactly how am I going to run Tiger on my Wintel boxes? Or does Joe think I am ready to sell or dump all of my Windows based infrastructure and buy all apples for everything. This may make Apples increase in sales due to it being a more attractive purchase than previously, but their market share is so tiny that Microsoft won't be worried about Tiger at all.

Linux advocates, however, should be worried...

Certainly I doubt they'll get much retaliation for this:

Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin'
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and The Crips and the KKK

[ Black Eyed Peas Lyrics - Where Is The Love? ]

But you have to wonder if picking a fight with the CIA, Bloods, Crips, and the KKK is the smartest thing to do in an internationally released single.

The strange conversations that Iman and I have in the elevator must amuse our neighbors. Today we've learned the plural of chrysalis:

chrysalis: [ krĭs´ə-lĭs ] n. pl. chrysalises or chrysalides [ krĭ-sǎl´ĭ-dēz' ]

1. A pupa, especially of a moth or butterfly, enclosed in a firm case or cocoon.
2. A protected stage of development.

[Latin chrysallis, from Greek khrusallis, khrusallid-, gold-colored pupa of a butterfly, from khrusos, gold ; see chryso-.]

[ chrysalis - yourDictionary.com - American Heritage Dictionary ]

And reinforced the fact that a chrysalis isn't a cocoon but the stage of development of the critter inside the cocoon.

Before I even read the email telling me to upgrade my Rhapsody, G$ was all over the place telling everyone to upgrade:

Listen to the music you love on-demand, with the #1 rated digital music service, Rhapsody Unlimited. Rhapsody's ever-growing catalog of over 1 million songs comprises one of the largest collections of music anywhere. Play today’s hottest hits, find yesterday’s classics, and discover the new artists you'll love tomorrow. Just find the songs you want and hit 'Play', it's that easy

[ Rhapsody.com - Music Services ]

Why? 'cause it's hot!

That's hot.

[ Paris Hilton ]

And I agree. Better player, better quality sound, larger library, new free subscription, new to go subscription, now allows your local library and the Rhapsody library to combine, new personalized offering, and just plain cooler. Though I do keep blocking out the fact that they're owned by the evil empire.

I like to check out websites for upcoming games, and games I'm playing. Mostly I go looking for wallpapers to rotate across my desktop (I have dozens of dozens). What I don't understand is when such a good looking game has such a crappy website. If they can't hire a company to build a website to their standards, perhaps they have no standards and their game sucks...

Witness the crap that is:

Dive In

[ Psychonauts ]

Enter

[ Resident Evil 4]

Should I let the sites influence my opinion of the games? Sure I know that the website was probably built by some other company, and I know all the reasons that crappy websites get made, but I still can't stop these sites from making me think twice.

You would think that by now we would have a good technical solution to the question "when can you fit me in?". For my coworkers Exchange and Outlook work like a charm. Outlook even has the ability to post my free/busy data to the 'net via ftp, webdav, or locally. However only Outlook understands that file (even though it is part of the iCalendar standard).

I did find a few people at the fringes who deal with this sort of stuff. The most helpful was iFreeBusy.com, but they seem to have a good system for letting my Outlook know if someone who uses iCal is busy, and not for publishing my free/busy data to the web.

One guy who works for a church rolled his own solution, which is downloadable, but requires perl, which I didn't feel like messing with. Not to mention that it doesn't really detail what version of perl, or what modules are required.

Frustrated, I turned to the only possible solution left: hacking. Witness the newest page to davidkearns.com: free/busy. I simply set my outlook to publish my free/busy data to my website, and then load that file, parse it out, build the object, and render it all purty. Add a calendar to select which day, and voila. I spent less time on the solution than all the research that determined I needed to build it myself. Oh well, I now know quite a bit about standard calendar formats...

Update: iFreeBusy.com is already on top of a solution. Try subscribing to my calendar in Sunbird, or another Mozilla type jobby with the calendar add-on. (Though since Outlook can only publish automatically to one place, my homepage wins out and this data will get old).

Washington Post must read my page:

Crepes -- slender pancakes stuffed with fillings savory or sweet -- seemed perfect for a brunch. I could devise a menu that catered to different tastes, and my event would highlight the best aspect of the Gallic specialty: making and filling them.

[ Savory and Sweet Crepes ]

The Post also has some fine recipes, for those so inclined. The print edition also had a list of local places to savor tasty crepes:

• Cafe Bonaparte - 1522 Wisconsin Ave. NW - (202)333-8830
• La Creperie - 1201 S. Joyce St., Arlington - (703)415-0560
• L'Enfant - 2000 18th St. NW - (202)319-1800
• Original Pancake House - who cares? skip this one...
• Le Chat Noir - 4907 Wisconsin Ave. NW - (202)244-2044
• Couscous Cafe - 1195 20th St. NW - (202)689-1233

And the Couscous Cafe looks walkable from Doceus...

Earth Day just isn't what it used to be. Has someone come up with a 2nd Earth so that we can continue to trash this one? I think not.

The 35th anniversary of Earth Day is a sobering occasion. On previous anniversaries we have hailed this "new awakening" as millions around the world suddenly rose up and pledged their support for a new campaign to save the natural environment.

[ EARTH DAY ANNIVERSARY 2005 — A WAKE UP CALL ]

Perhaps if we all cared just a bit more, and we checked up on our representatives, and voted out the dead beats, we'd all have a better world to live in.

I've just checked, and in Virginia this coming Friday is Arbor day. I think I'll make an effort to plant a tree. Though I can't plant one in my apartment...

Of all of the culture shocks that one must deal with when traveling, the biggest one that still continues to shock me is what people eat for breakfast. Of course I don't mean shock like I'm appalled, but shock like you just can't believe it. When I travel internationally, though, I'm a big café breakfast kind of guy. I like anything that smacks of a French influence, it's where I gravitate for my first meal of the day.

Little did I know that all of America was squarely headed toward the coffee and something else quick for breakfast when we were all manipulated into changing our habits:

Bernays used his Uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas to help convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.

[ NPR : Freud's Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations ]

Absolutely fascinating story. I love food. I love history that all relates to each other. I love the fact that Freud's nephew's name sounds like Bearnaise. Maybe I should think of going back to school to become a Nutritional Anthropologist (but I hate homework).