Kip Esquire has all the details from a New York Times article about changes in the 10021 zip code written by Sam Roberts, who warns us that "ZIP codes may not have the cachet they once did."

Roberts recounts a few reactions:

“The truth is, there are some people whose whole identity is their ZIP code,” said Michele Kleier, the president of the real estate brokerage Gumley Haft Kleier.

“I don’t think everybody is going to move out of 80th Street, but obviously this is the most famous and most desired ZIP code in the city and in America,” she said.

[Author Gay] Talese said, “The first thing you think of is your stationery.”

“But it’s not like an elite number and now you’ve been demoted,” he said. “We still have the 212 area code, don’t we?”

This is some sort of New York inside joke, right? I mean, New Yorkers are supposed to be more sophisticated than us midwesterners...there's no way they'd really be this vain and shallow, right?

I am popular with the ladies this week. First there was 17-year old Sammi who likes my photography but thinks I'm creepy. Then, late last night I got some email from a young lady:

Hello!

Yes, this is strange, I've never emailed a random blogger before.

Let me just interrupt and say that I get a lot of messages (especially on my MySpace account) from young ladies that start with an "I've never done this before" declaration. All of them say I seem like a really cool person in my profile and maybe we should get to know each other better so why don't I check out their webcam? Oh, and by the way, they're using their friend's account and I should email them back at a different email address. (That last bit means they've stolen the account they're sending from or spoofed the email system.) All it takes to get into that business is some pictures of a hot babe and some spam generating software...I almost deleted it without reading any further.

But I digress...

Hello!

Yes, this is strange, I've never emailed a random blogger before. But I wonder...maybe I could ask your thoughts. By your blog I gathered that you are very politically conscious.

Well, I'm in a bit of a pickle. For my Political Science class my big assignment is to write a proposal on a current issue. I have been researching all the main issues, from the immigration bill, to the phone tap issue, and it's all been so tedious. While I find all the issues I've researched gripping, I just can't decide on which one. I also don't want to write on the "hottest" topic that probably a lot of my classmates will be writing on. Anyway, I feel like I've been hitting my head against the wall for two weeks now. So, I'm asking you...what is the one or two topic(s) that makes your blood boil? I might just base my paper around your viewpoint...or the opposing one...if your argument is convincing, or intriguing enough. That is, if you wouldn't mind. :) Thank you.

Respectfully yours,

Deserae

I Googled around a bit to make sure this wasn't some new kind of spam I hadn't seen before. It turns out Deserae is a 27-year old just-starting-out music promoter in Salt Lake City. [Insert lame joke about Utah club scene here] She also has a blog where she posts as FreeSpiritGal on which she mentions her PoliSci assignment. As a blogger, she's the anti-me. I'm irreverent and swear a lot, she's religious and pleasant. I'm angry and analytical, she's hopeful and writes half her posts as prose poems.

But the important thing is that after years of ranting about all these important issues to my friends and my family and anybody who reads this blog, someone has finally come up to me and said "Mark, what's going on in the world that pisses you off?"

Well, let me tell you...

Deserae is in college, so she might want to explore the impact of the Higher Education Act's provision that permanently takes away financial aid from any college student convicted of possessing drugs. Wealthy students don't need financial aid, and students whose grades suffer because they abuse drugs will lose their financial aid anyway, and students who lie on their financial aid application won't get caught, so this law mostly just affects poor students with good grades who answer honestly. By the way, student shoplifters, robbers, and rapists are still able to get financial aid as soon as they get out of prison.

Or maybe Deserae should mine her music background for topics. How about the way law enforcement agencies are conducting military-style raids on concerts because some people there are using drugs? People use drugs at football games too, but you don't see swarms of cops raiding the stadium and stopping the game so they can search everybody. Decades ago, they used to raid rock concerts, and before that it was jazz clubs. Nowadays it's raves and electronica. It's not about the drugs, it's about a music and a culture that they don't like and don't understand. (By the way, the incident I linked to happened in Deserae's home state of Utah.)

Continuing the Drug War theme, what about the recent law enforcement crackdown on pain medication? The most famous example is radio host Rush Limbaugh, who was caught illegally buying hydrocodone and oxycodone without a prescription. He has by now admitted his addiction and sought treatment for it, and it looks like he's not going to be prosecuted.

No such luck for Richard Paey, who has multiple sclerosis and a serious back injury and requires a wheelchair. When he moved to Florida, he couldn't find a new doctor that would prescribe enough painkillers for him, so rather than spending his days in unbearable pain, he created fake prescriptions for his meds. He got caught and was prosecuted and is now serving a 25-year prison term.

They're going after doctors too. Pennsylvania prosecuted Doctor Paul Heberle for over-prescribing painkillers after one of his patients overdosed on fentanyl. A jury acquitted him of all charges last week. But while his practice was disrupted during the prosecution, six of his patients tried to kill themselves (one succeeded).

These are people in so much pain that some of them are on the brink of suicide, and rather than trying to help them, the government is investigating them to see if they're abusing drugs. I'm ashamed that these prosecutors are my fellow countrymen.

How about Zero Tolerance Zealotry in our schools? There's the 12-year old boy who was charged with a drug felony for pretending to have cocaine. Or the 17-year old arrested for conspiracy to start a food fight? Or all the students facing disciplinary action for things they wrote on their blog.

At a time when oil companies are being accused of colluding to artificially tighten the oil supply to increase profits, how about looking into the way many businesses have gotten local governments to tighten supplies for them? In Utah, for example, you need a license to be a Cosmetologist/Barber (which requires both a practical exam and an examination on Cosmetology/Barber theory), a nail technician, or an Esthetician (defined by statute as someone who does skin care procedures on the "head, face, neck, torso, abdomen, back, arms, hands, legs, feet, eyebrows, or eyelashes for cosmetic purposes and not for the treatment of medical, physical, or mental ailments" such as "cleansing, stimulating, manipulating, exercising, applying oils, antiseptics, clays, or masks, extraction, depilatories, waxes, tweezing, natural nail manicures or pedicures, or callous removal by buffing or filing," in case you wanted to know). Actually, Utah is pretty good compared to Louisiana, which requires licensing to sell flowers. (Follow that link and check out the map of "States that License Florists.")

Well, that's more than the two issues Deserae requested. Anybody who knows me knows there are lots of other things that make my blood boil, but these are some of the ones that I thought might make for an interesting classroom topic.

How's that, Deserae? I hope it helps. Now it's your turn: Anything you think I should blog about that people would be interested in reading? Anything you think I'm wrong about? Would you rather just see more pictures of cats? Let me know.

I just sent $865.96 of my hard-earned money to the United States Government. Then I sent $246.60 to the State of Illinois. I feel pretty stupid about it, but it has to be done. In fact, it has to be done several times a year.

I incorporated my software consulting business a few years ago, so I have to pay my own payroll taxes. It works like this: I do the work. People pay me with checks I deposit in the corporate bank account. Every now and then, I want to move some of that money from the corporate bank account to my personal bank account. I track both accounts on my computer using Intuit's Quicken and Quickbooks software, and both accounts are at the same bank. But when I want to move money from one account to the other, I have to send some of my money to the government.

When you work an ordinary job, all this happens behind the scenes. You get your paycheck and you see that some money has been taken out, withholding it's called, but there's still plenty of money for you. It's relatively painless.

But when you run an incorporated business, you see behind the scenes. That money that gets taken out of the paycheck? I have to do that myself. I issue myself paychecks, with deductions for federal and state income tax withholding and for social security and medicare (sometimes called FICA).

There are also amounts the employer has to pay but which aren't taken out of the paycheck. First, there's social security and medicare, where the employer has to match what the employee had to pay. This means the government gets twice what you see on your paycheck for these items. Then—and this just kills me—there's unemployment insurance. That's right, I had to set aside $206.52 for unemployment insurance in case I decide to lay myself off.

Then comes the hard part. I have to take all that money and send it to the government.

It hurts. It hurts a lot.

I haven't been posting anything because I've been having a rough week. My car's oil light lit up on Saturday just as I pulled up at a friend's house. There was plenty of oil according to the dipstick, so I decided to leave the car there until Monday then have it towed to the shop. The tow charge plus the repairs plus a new set of tires before winter added up to $800 that I hadn't been planning to spend.

Next, I've been upgrading my computer. I made a change which I thought would be simple, but between an IDE disk controller that was too old for my new disk drive and some bad RAM from Crucial, I spent most of the last two days untangling computer problems.

Then on Monday night my wife's computer developed a problem of its own. After a little time running, the computer would crash and not reboot, saying it couldn't access the disk drive. If I let it "rest" a while, it would all come back and run for maybe an hour before crashing again. I suspect the disk controller is flaky and acting up when it gets hot.

My wife's computer is a laptop, so I can't do much to fix it myself. We had to spend several hours power cycling her computer and copying off the important stuff to a portable USB hard drive. Then I packed it up and shipped it off to a computer repair place that supposedly fixes Toshiba laptops with a quick turnaround. It got there this morning, so we'll see. That's $140 just for shipping and diagnosis. Fixing it will cost more.

All this made me realize that a lot more of our lives are on the computers than ever before and (as usual) our backup strategy hasn't kept up. For several years, we've been using Iron Mountain's Connected Data Protector on-line service for backups. Every night, our most important 10 Gigabytes of data—personal and corporate financial data, email, various projects—are backed up to some remote site. The Connected Data Protector service is less expensive than its competition, but it's not cheap. Nevertheless, it's an excellent service that I highly recommend if you can afford it.

The plan was that if we ever lost a disk drive we could just re-install Windows and all the important software from scratch. It would only take a day or so. Then we download the critical data from Connected and we're back in business.

I realized now, however, that our computer usage has grown and changed a lot in the past year. My new digital photography hobby is chewing up a lot of disk space, and I don't want to lose those pictures. I have a lot more downloaded software than ever before. I could burn some of this stuff to optical media, but doing that on a regular basis would be tedious. We had to change our backup and disaster recovery strategy.

So I went out and bought a terabyte of disk storage.

One thousand gigabytes. One million megabytes.

Half of it was a pair of SATA drives which I set up as a 250GB RAID 1 (mirror) pair in my desktop computer to replace the 80GB IDE drive I had been using as a software/media library for stuff like downloaded programs, CD disk images, and all our pictures and music. Both drives have identical copies of the data. If either drive breaks, the other one still runs. If no problems develop with the RAID drives, I'll probably RAID the system disk as well. That should cover me for hardware failures.

The other half terabyte was a pair of push-button backup drives that connect to the USB ports and are sized to backup everything on both of our computers. I think pushing the button will be a lot less tedious than burning DVDs.

That covers us for hardware, software, and user error problems. In case of disaster—hurricanes seem to be in vogue these days—we'll still have all our most critical data stored off site, courtesy of Iron Mountain corporation.

Including disks, tools, and software, that's about $1200 I wasn't planning to spend.

Meanwhile, last night my wife's brand-new Casio Exilim digital camera broke in a non-warranty kind of way. We'll probably have to replace it. Crap.

Just in case some random multimillionaire is reading this and is moved by my heart-rending story—and is tired of donating to whining hurricane victims—the PayPal button is on the right.

Ah ha! I just found the income tax software I bought back in December. I've been looking for that.

Plenty of time. Plenty of time...