What’s All This Then!

Yesterday, I finally received Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium Version 11. I bought it for two reasons. I had a version 9 and, for the most part, it worked very well in composing my thoughts. The second reason and the most important is to keep the tax man from getting my money when I file this year’s taxes.

As some of you may know, I make a couple of dollars writing entries on my other blogs. If I’m lucky, I might earn as much as $10 a week (about two dollars an hour). In my state, if you make more than $600 a year, it becomes taxable income. So with the purchase of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, not only do I get a new toy, but any money that I make this year will make the effort of blogging-for-dollars worthwhile.

Fortunately, I do not live in Philadelphia. There, in the city of brotherly love (of taxpayer dollars apparently), the powers-that-be have decided to extort a $300 business license from the citizens who are bloggers. Take a look at this article to get an idea of how greedy our bloated and inefficient governments have become.

By the way, after a five-minute training session with this latest DNS version, I was able to dictate this entry directly into WordPress. Aside from a few minor hiccups, this post only took a few moments.

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Today, the last part of federal legislation concerning credit card interest rates and fees went into effect.  One item that has me more excited than Christmas morning is what credit card companies can do about your interest rate.   If they raise your interest rates, they now have to tell you why they did so.  Hopefully, their reasoning will be better than ‘our CEO has a new Lamborghini payment to make.” But here’s the best part – if they raise your rate, the credit card company has to reevaluate that increase every six months. If you deserve to have it lowered, then they must do so within 45 days of that evaluation!   Gone are those good old days  when you got raked over the financial coals for no reason other than greed….  at least,  I hope so. 

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This is my test of Microsoft’s Live Writer.  Can I create a post and have it add to this blog without signing in?  

Unlike when I use Word Press to create a post, I can preview this entry.  Word Press just throws up lots of errors and head aches.  Score one for Microsoft.

As a test of ‘insert’ functions, here is the latest Dilbert cartoon that, once again, shows how Scott Adams has surveillance equipment hidden around my work place.  I do need to point out that Mr.. Adams’ embellished this incident.  At work, management just assumed that ‘ship the product’ was spoken.  If there are any problems, “that’s why we have customers – free testing.”  Score two for Microsoft’s insert functions, and minus 10 billion for my work place management.

Spell checking works very well.  Score three for Microsoft.

Posting went very well.  I may have a new blogging tool!!!

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From the state that brought you gangsters, rampant bribery, and corrupt politicians, now comes proposed legislation to arrest you for … rolling your eyes??? Oh sure, I could see someone plucking out their false eye during a city council meeting and tossing down the aisle to protest bureaucratic stupidity. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first one retching into my neighbor’s lap … before and after. Still, should such anti-free speech laws be allowed to pass? Maybe we should start with banning the needless and pretentious rolling of R’s before we tackle I’s.

In second grade, I was taught by a nun who had a glass eye. I remember the girl next to me disrupting the class to the point that this large nun took out her ocular prosthetic, touched it to the girl and said, “I’m keeping my eye on you if you don’t act right!” The girl turned whiter than a frozen albino and never spoke again. To this day, I wonder if she had to undergo therapy.

Maybe we need to roll our eyes a little more often at the abuse of power and the waste of our money. How did these idiots get into office in the first place? Oh wait, YOU voted them in …

“They see me rollin’, they be hatin’”

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Some people live only to create problems where none exists. That’s where their power and money come from. So if you only listen to popular news, you wouldn’t be expecting this type of news conference where other people have to address one of those unnecessarily created problems. Just wanted to broaden your horizons.

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So I leave this blog alone for two weeks so it could play on the Internet with all of you and what happens? I return to find 600 messages awaiting my attention! Most of them I could tell were the spammy kind, the ones you can’t introduce to your mom or sisters. Others I wasn’t so sure of. If you’ve posted a sincere comment, you might wanted to try again.

As a result, I’ve added a anti-captcha plug-in to catch all of the stupid sites that aren’t playing nice with my blog. If you are a spammer who can read this, I hope your fingers rot and your eyeballs exploded … and I mean that in a good way.

For the rest of you, I have several hopefully entertaining posts lined up.

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