Capitalization

When I’m filling in album names and song titles I would get kind of confused on what words you capitalize and which you don’t. I found some tips on the internet somewhere that were very helpful:

Don’t capitalize:

a an the (articles)

at by for in of on to* up (2 or 3 letter prepositions)

as but if or nor (conjunctions)

except if it is first or last word

except in parallel with words that are capitalized: Homes In and Near Ohio

*do capitalize in infinitives: One Life To Live

Letter to CBS and Viacom

Today my satellite provider pulled the plug on Viacom stations including MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. Fortunately the Osbournes season was over, but I will miss The Daily Show. Although some CBS stations were pulled, the Atlanta station is still on. The disagreement stems from CBS charging Dish Network to carry their signal. Not only were they increasing the rate, but also requiring Dish Network to carry their Viacom stations which they also charge for. The end result is everyone pays more for their cable bill. But what bothers me the most is that they charge providers *anything* since they should be getting their revenue from advertisers. CBS makes these signals available free over the air but charge the cable providers to carry them. It makes no sense.

Dear CBS and Viacom,

If you didn’t run commercials on all of your programming then you should be able to charge whatever you want to cable companies to carry your signal just as HBO does. But because you burden your viewers with commericals (more than ever) you should not charge cable or satellite companies anything to carry your signal. Nor should they charge you to carry your signal since you need viewers and they can supply them. I blame CBS and Viacom for the constantly increasing cable and satellite bills. Dish Network on the other hand is trying to look out for its subscribers by resisting your attempts to extract more money from the viewers. I applaud Dish Network and their efforts to keep rates low. And I ask that CBS and Viacom not only go back to their old rates, but stop collecting fees from cable providers altogether and support your programming via the advertising that you subject us to. Until then I will continue to enjoy watching other networks and other programming and watching their commericials.

Thank you for your time,

iPod Battery Pack tests

I ran a test on my home-made iPod battery pack. Just running the iPod at 50% volume through a playlist and otherwise not touching it, it will last 7.8 hours. By using the battery pack to recharge the iPod when its battery meter goes down to 1 bar out of 4 and charging for an hour I was able to 4 charges plus part of a 5th charge. This gave me a total of 27.7 hours including the 4.5 hours of charging when I was playing it too.

Read all about the test and the battery pack

Gold, GOLD, GOOOOLLLDD!!!

I’m always looking for ways to invest. Lately gold has gone up a lot from $300 per oz a few years ago when all the countries were selling off their gold reserves up to $400 per oz now. So I was wondering how you can buy gold even though I’m not really seriously considering it (Motley Fool points out that if you bought $1 of gold in 1802 that today it would be worth $0.98 adjusted for inflation (however with the US on the gold standard, the value didn’t change by much until the 1970’s when the US finally let the currency float; it’s probably not fair to compare stocks and gold prior to 1971; US bonds would be worth $304; regular bonds $952; and stocks $599,605) but I wanted to know how it would work.

Continue reading “Gold, GOLD, GOOOOLLLDD!!!”

Atlanta Traffic Website

It’s not often there are any perks to working at DOT, but they are letting us test a new traffic website. It will be available to the public but right now it is at a temporary address:

http://168.28.129.35

It allows you to customize your view of traffic and add pictures from your favorite traffic cameras, show text from your favorite overhead message signs, and see what the average speed and travel times along interstates. It’s pretty neat. You set up an account and it remembers your settings just like My Yahoo does with news and stocks.

Eventually the current page will be upgraded to the existing site:

http://www.georgia-navigator.com</A