Just noticed that I subtitled the personal category "Personal Photos and Musings". Egads, the word musings has got to be one of the most abused and overused words in the, err, blogosphere. As such I have evicted it.

Saw a commercial for the "Q-Ray" on television earlier today, and it always grabs my interest it's so ridiculous ("oooh, an ionized bracelet!"). One thing that especially caught my eye this time was the scammy wording of several of the segments, for instance (and I'm paraphrasing, so take this as satire and go watch the commercial yourself if you care enough) "For $19.95 (+shipping and handling) get your Q-Ray 30-day trial only!". Now this little piece of braided wire seems to be a ripoff at $19.95, but their deceptive wording made my wife and I curious. So much so, that she dialed the 1-800 number, and we learned that it's $19.95 (+s&h), and if you don't return it within 30 days it's two more installments of $50+ (again, I didn't care enough to really catalog it in my braincells accurately, so call if you really want more specifics). I'm sure the return-within-30-days thing is about as easy as getting a rebate check, though the weak of mind that orders this sort of garbage will likely attribute every positive event in their life to the magical ionization, and thus happily fork over another $100 plus..

Speaking of ripoffs, what's the deal with instant rebates? I understand the concept behind mail-in rebates (which in a nutshell is that many customers don't bother to mail it in from the get go, and of those who do you can get rid of many of their claims just by ignoring them, conveniently losing material, and so on. Pretty clever use of fraud to compliment legitimate retail), but I fail to see who the winner is in a scheme where 100% of the customers get the savings immediately at check-out. What I suspect is that it's an accounting trick - sell a $200 item for $300 + $100 instant rebates, and then put a $300 sale on the books, and a $100 expense. Sales then are bloated, although the profit percentage has decreased. Corner stores should hop on this idea, selling chocolate bars for $10,000 - $9,999.01 rebates, chocking up record breaking sales quarter over quarter.

On the theme of lame adverts and sales techniques, another source of irritation are car leasing ads that put gigantic monthly leasing values ("$299/month. You read it right! $299!"), and then absurdly hide the down payment portion in tiny text at the bottom: The first value is pretty much meaningless without the second -- you could lease a Mercedes S600 for a pittance per month if you just put $120,000 down. Car companies think they're being clever with this sort of lowest-common-denominator advertising, but the end result is that all car ads become nothing but noise, with a bunch of meaningless, context-free random values on them.

This sticker is on my neighbour's eavestrough, and it cracks me up each time I see it. It reminds me of the mid-80s, when bags of Hostess Chips always came with some sort of enticement, such as stickers of wrestlers, stickers of bands like Honeymoon Suite, and so on. This subdivision was built in the first half of the 80s, so it could very well be a holdover from those days. Great stuff.

While I don't actively target the Linux platform, I have always been comforted by the Mono Project. That cross-platform-.NET project gives me a feeling that my .NET work could at least partially be ported to other targets if a need arose, removing the vendor lock-in to Windows when using the .NET platform (even though I have never had the need to use it, I pursue the same target when developing in C++). Every couple of months I install the latest incarnation of Mono on a Linux virtual machine, copy over an assembly (ensuring that it uses only features that exist in Mono), and run it, and it really is a little bit of magic when it runs successfully (and quickly I should say - the performance on Mono is spectacular).

The thing that I don't get, though, is the bubbling animosity Microsoft displays towards the Mono project, and the legal uncertainty some within Microsoft continually try to create around Mono. Don't you realize, Microsoft, that Mono is one of your greatest allies? That .NET has been sold within countless shops based upon the argument that it was "cross platform", courtesy of Mono, and that the worries of the executive that Linux needs to be considered are all taken care of, again courtesy of Mono? Microsoft really should be sending Manuel a big, fat commission check.

I can appreciate that Microsoft doesn't want anyone usurping their creation, but really - in virtually every rational situation Mono is a winner for Microsoft.

• It helps sell .NET as "cross-platform"
• It will always be one step behind, ensuring that Microsoft has the upper hand. Sure, it'll implement some technologies (such as vector graphics) more quickly than the Microsoft's .NET framework, but to most developers that is non-standard, and instead it'll "really" come out when Microsoft releases it (and Mono will then have to play catch up)
  
• It's training loads of Microsoft-hating OSS lovers in the ways of .NET, drawing them away from other superb environs like Python. A very large percentage of the people targeting Mono would have targeted Python or J2EE or C++ otherwise.
  
• It helps Microsoft compete on their "home turf"

Microsoft really needs to put down the gauntlet, embrace Mono, and remove the legal uncertainty around it.