Bil

There are only two tracks in East Greenwich.

I was thinking a little bit about this, and in the end I guess it makes sense. The credit card processor is charging this fee, and the government is passing it on directly to those people (you and me and runawayjim) who benefit from it instead of sharing the cost across all taxpayers. Unlike commerce, there's no profit margin that can be cut into in the interest of increasing gross sales (which is the usual rationale behind paying a fee to accept cards). There's no cost savings to taking credit cards until the tax collector's office takes enough card payments to allow them to reduce staff or hours. For these reasons, it wouldn't surprise me if governments were exempt from rules about charging different "prices" for card transactions vs. cash. So it sucks for us, but I can see the logic.

Cue Cotuit on the tax bill for his car. My solution is to have a car too old to retain enough value to be taxed on But yeah, that's definitely a suck.

Did anyone go to the RINexus breakfast thing about workplaces of the future (or whatever they called it)? I wanted to go but my workplace of the present took precedence...

In 1997, I wrote an article for my school newspaper about the train station. I think it said something like "When I fly home from college next year the first change to Warwick I'll see is the new train station at TF Green being built..." Good times.

I think I was probably in a similar boat last year when I got my first Mac. If you're better than the average windows user, as I suspect you are, then I'd guess you're not going to be that impressed with OSX. It seems to me that a) most mac people haven't really used windows since at least Win98 and compare that experience to OSX b) if you're not one of those people who is constantly bombarded by viruses and junkware, then the huge advantages of OSX aren't really there. Also, get ready to curse every time you hit ctrl+c instead of command+c and don't get anything copied to the clipboard! I hate that. However, once you use expose and get your feet wet with quicksilver, it's hard to go back. If you can get parallels, definitely go that route rather than dual booting/boot camping. Parallels is just awesome.

Yeah, the Armistice Blvd trees are definitely gone. I was up there last month wondering the same thing. (And questioning my memory of whether or not there ever were trees up there...)

Good stuff MarkOne. Just wanted to add that it's "Providence's Own" Amie St.

My girlfriend has been working with some weather data from the past couple years, and she says that this "winter" we've been having this year is very similar to the winter of 97-98, which was the also the last el ni