I got a couple of love letters in the mail to day from the North Texas Tollway Authority. It seems I dared to use one of their roads which used to be free back in 2008 and now I owe them money. I have until the end of the month to pay up or be subject to a $250 fine plus court costs, tolls, and fines. Naturally I'm going to pay. Doesn't it seem odd that they had 15 months to send me a bill for the $1.71 and 65¢ tolls, but I only get 24 days to make my payment -- or else?

The built-in iPhone app called 'Stocks' can be used to get current and historical exchange rates for various currencies. If you only enter one code it tells you the price in that currency for one US Dollar. The format is the three-character code for that currency followed by =X. So for Euros the code is EUR=X. If you want the reverse exchange rate add that code with your source currency code. For example EURUSD=X. Remember that your bank will use buy and sell amounts that are usually 3% on either side of this rate.

I recently switched from iPhoto to Aperture to manage images on my computer. The experience has been mixed. I am really not happy with the performance. I'm hoping that will get better. Another annoyance it the fact that importing images from my iPhone does not prompt me to delete those images off the phone like it does for my camera. It turns out there is a simple fix for that but its not in Aperture at all.

This season of Lost started out with a time paradox. The episodes so far have continued on these parallel time lines. This is similar to the 2002 movie Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow. In the end of that movie one time line "wins". Which time line will win for Lost?

You've seen the meme, if the auto industry were like the computer industry our cars would crash for no apparent reason, or something like that. I think there are some parallels to what's going on in the computer industry today when you compare it to the auto industry of yesteryear. At the turn of the century cars had already been around for twenty years. They started out as toys for the rich or the technically inclined. If you were rich you had to find a mechanic to keep the thing running. If something broke, you had to find someone who could fabricate a new part for you.

I've got a slightly used Getzen 700SP Trupet for sale complete with case, 2 mouth pieces, mute, buzz holder, 2 stands, music stand, music.

Acrobat Reader has grown from a simple portable document reader to a behemoth. Most of the time you just want to view a PDF. You don't need all the features of Acrobat when you already have a perfectly good PDF reader in Preview.app.

1. Make Preview.app your default PDF viewing application. To do this find a .PDF file and use the Get Info command. Choose Preview from the "Open with" section. Then press the "Change All…" button. The next time you open a .PDF it should open in Preview.

When it comes to web browser plug-ins I generally try to avoid them. I have to admit that I have four installed in my Safari browser at the moment. There are many reasons to avoid using plug-ins. If you experience problems its is most likely caused by a plug-in. I actively uninstall plug-ins like Adobe Acrobat in favor of built-in viewers. When it comes to Flash, its hard to surf some web sites without Flash. There's nothing worse than a web site that is all Flash or uses Flash for navigation. Flash is also used to track users with its own surreptitious cookie mechanism.

Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. That's what the new movie 2012 promises and delivers. This is an incredible movie in both scale and vision.

In philosophy there is a paradox called Buridan's Ass named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan. In this paradox there is an ass placed between two perfect stacks of hay. The ass is paralyzed without a way to choose one stack over the other and starves to death. This is obviously an extreme case but this happened in real life every day. People find themselves stuck between to nearly equal choices and end up paralyzed by the lack of decision.