The bat­tery in my digi­cam is get­ting tired. After tak­ing only a cou­ple dozen expo­sures it is start­ing to shut down and it has always been doing 2–3 times bet­ter than that. Yes­ter­day, some­where in Mary­land, after strik­ing out in a Radio Shack and a cam­era store, we ended up at a Best Buy. They didn’t have a Kodak labeled bat­tery, but they did have a generic. For $20.99 I was out the door.

When we stopped last night I opened, with great dif­fi­culty, the plas­tic oys­ter shell and put the bat­tery in the cam­era. All three lights on top of the cam­era started blink­ing, mean­ing that the bat­tery was fully dis­charged and would be a while before it would be ready for use. In the morn­ing all three lights were still blink­ing. Bad news.

Today on arrival in New Britain, Donna wanted to got to Friendly’s and I wanted to go to Best Buy. My brother knew just where to go, a shop­ping cen­ter on the Berlin Turn­pike. We started at Friendly’s where we were seated and promptly ignored. After wait­ing 5–6 min­utes and no one even acknowl­edged our pres­ence, we walked out.

In Best Buy I went over to the Ser­vice Desk and explained that I pur­chased this bat­tery at a dif­fer­ent store in a dif­fer­ent state and that it wouldn’t charge. The CSR started enter­ing stuff in a ter­mi­nal from my receipt, mid type another employee walked up with a phone and handed it to my CSR say­ing, “This per­son wants to speak to some­one in cus­tomer ser­vice.” The CSR stops what he’s doing and starts to talk on the phone. After a half minute or so when it is appar­ent he isn’t wrap­ping up the con­ver­sa­tion, Donna looks at him and says, “We were here first.” He takes the hint and tells the per­son on the phone to hold on a sec­ond. More typ­ing and then he hands me a paper voucher and says go to the cashier and they will give me my refund.

The cashier takes one look at the papers and says, “I’m not nor­mally at a reg­is­ter, I don’t know how to do this.” She gets on her radio and asks for help. After some non essen­tial chat­ter we finally see another CSR head our way. She tells our cashier this is how you han­dle a sus­pended trans­ac­tion and pro­ceeds to hit an 8 or 10 sequence of keys so fast I don’t know if any­one could fol­low. When she gets to the end, she goes, “Uh-oh. Did you buy this in another state?” “Yep,” I tell her. “Must be the tax mess­ing it up.” Off she goes with our cashier in tow.

After another cou­ple min­utes the orig­i­nal CSR walks over and hands me $21. I guess the extra penny was because I had to wait so long.

This is the sun com­ing up over Man­hat­tan as seen from the 8th floor of the Newark Air­port Mar­riot was pretty much the bright spot of the day (if you don’t count the fact that the guest laun­dry is free.)

The church ser­vice for Donna’s Aunt Mary was today, but the inter­ment had to be can­celed. Cousin Lau­rie (the one in SC that we visit) was bring­ing the ashes, but her hus­band had some med­ical issues and had to be rushed to the hos­pi­tal in Har­ris­burg, PA. The repast still went on, just with two empty chairs.

I would love to write some more. but this inter­net con­nec­tion keeps drop­ping and it is frus­trat­ing. To only way to restart it is to crawl under the desk and “reboot” the modem/router by unplug­ging it, count­ing back­wards from 100 by six­teens and replug­ging it back in.

Time is run­ning out for US based inde­pen­dent web radio streams. From the savenetradio.org website:

On March 2, 2007 the Copy­right Roy­alty Board (CRB), which over­sees sound record­ing roy­al­ties paid by Inter­net radio ser­vices, increased Inter­net radio’s roy­alty bur­den between 300 and 1200 per­cent and thereby jeop­ar­dized the industry’s future.

At the request of the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica, the CRB ignored the fact that Inter­net radio roy­al­ties were already dou­ble what satel­lite radio pays, and mul­ti­plied the roy­al­ties even fur­ther. The 2005 roy­alty rate was 7/100 of a penny per song streamed; the 2010 rate will be 19/100 of a penny per song streamed. And for small web­cast­ers that were able to cal­cu­late roy­al­ties as a per­cent­age of rev­enue in 2005 – that option was quashed by the CRB, so small web­cast­ers’ roy­al­ties will grow exponentially!

These exor­bi­tant rates go into effect on May 15 (retroac­tive to Jan 1, 2006!). With­out Con­gres­sional action the major­ity of web­cast­ers will go bank­rupt and silent on this date. We need your help. Please take a moment to send a let­ter to your mem­ber of Con­gress to keep Net radio from being silenced.

Go to the Act Now! page on the Savenetradio.org and fill out the form to email your leg­is­la­tors and ask them to stop this huge rate increase on web­cast­ers. Don’t know who your rep­re­sen­ta­tives are? Nei­ther did I, but by fill­ing out your address infor­ma­tion you will get their names and a mugshot so you can rec­og­nize them on the street or CSPAN.