I must have been on a tear with coding a couple years ago. Three old domains for three experimental web services are expiring. One was to deliver email on a Kindle, another was a URL shortener, and the last was a OpenID service. Three duds in a row.

Recently, I saw an ad on Craigslist that described a job, and stated that they would not accept telecommuters, all work was on-site, and "independent contractor." This ad might have been illegal, because there are laws about what defines an independent contractor and what defines an employee. Small businesses that misclassify workers can get an unfriendly visit from the tax man.

(I’m not an expert in this.)  Here’s some info about the computer junk universe.

This is a good 10 minute presentation about how to use social media. I got it from a podcast I listen to.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4834.html

Takeaway points:

I'm a little addicted to the GasBuddy app on Android.

This is a summary of articles found during cursory Internet searches regarding impulse buying and ecommerce.

A more attractive printable version is posted here at Docstoc.

Most of these are “newbie” articles because I lack marketing experience. This list has been filtered in based on quality. Star ratings ranging from 1 to 3 indicate perceived quality.

Citi contacted Doug Henwood of LBO demanding that a memo from early 2009 be taken off his site. They cited the DMCA. Econ blogger Bradford DeLong argues that the document is part of the historical record, of how Citi perceived the government's response to the economic crisis.

Attached to this blog post is another copy of this memo. It basically says the Citi analysts thought the government was going pretty easy on banks, and that they were predicting high unemployment in 2009 and 2010, along with huge price declines in house prices. So, they knew what was happening all along.

Andrew Leonard at Salon has an enriched telling of the story.

Update April 3, 2011: Citibank has sent a takedown notice (a DMCA thing). So to avoid a lawsuit, I'm going to comply. I'll post more information about the specifics of the takedown later. Hopefully, someone else has a copy of this document to share.

I just made my first torrents, and made a few mistakes. The torrents were split up archives of all the video files from LA Indymedia, which we host.

One of the fastest spreading ideas in the past decades has been the idea of "free open source software" and the related idea of the Creative Commons.

This is a mini site about taxes. If you're not familiar with taxes, there's some basic information here. The articles at the top are essays, and the articles toward the bottom are a glossary of sorts. For the most part, this site is for residents of California.

I'm not a tax professional or an accountant, or even a bookkeeper. I just like to do my own taxes.

A tax-exempt savings account is just like a savings account at a bank, except that any money put into it isn't taxed, and the money can be spent only for specific, eligible expenses.

The progressive income tax divides your income into ranges, called brackets.

The terms progressive tax and regressive tax describe taxes that affect different levels of income differently. They don't refer to political ideology.

When someone works as an independent contractor or on odd jobs, they have to pay self-employment tax in addition to regular income tax.