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Born April 13, 2005

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Iraqi Blogs

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© Copyright 2005, IRED.com, Inc.

^{2005 January 30}
Iraqi Election Day: We are now about 4 hours into voting in Iraq and I have been channel hopping among Fox News, CNN and MSNBC for at least that long. It is inspiring to see the first time voters, the emotional broadcasters, and the many Iraqis who refuse to be intimidated by terrorism and take their lives in hand to vote for a democratic government.

My nephew, Jon, is somewhere in Al Anbar Province. We have not heard from him directly for a couple of weeks, so our personal interest in Fallujah and the surrounding area is very high. May God bless the Iraqis today as they cast their votes, and the coalition forces as they do their best to make the environment as safe as possible to make the election possible. And a special prayer for Jon. (Personal to Jon, and all his compadres: Call home as soon as you get a break!)

There are many links to Iraqi and Military blogs (start with the links to the left), but right now one of the most compelling is Friends of Democracy. While Jeff Jarvis' ego has lately overshadowed what was once an excellent general blog, he does have an outstanding summary of election blogs today.

Don't miss this from Hammorabi:

The New Democratic Iraq Born!

Our voting is:
No to the terrorists!
No to the dictatorships!
No to hate and racism!
No to the fascists!
No to the Nazis!
No to the mentally retarded tyrants!
No to the ossified, narrow-minded and intolerants!
...
Welcome New Iraq.
Welcome freedom and democracy.
Welcome peace and prosperity for all nations with out exception but terrorists!

Becky | |

^{2005 January 29}
How does you web site look to your colorblind customer?: Visicheck offers a handy, free, online tool so you can see for yourself just by entering your url and waiting a minute or less for the page to display in an approximation of how it appears to to the 8% of the male population (.4% of females) who are colorblind. My father was red/green colorblind, which often left me wondering how he really saw the world. Visicheck gives me the best sense of how color must really have appeared to him.

Yesterday, the 28th, was our 44th wedding anniversary. Not only is it impossible to imagine having been wed for that long to one man, I can't even imagine being that old! What happened to the teenaged me? I know she's still in here somewhere, but she doesn't move so fast anymore! Jim, on the other hand, just gets younger.

Becky | |

^{2005 January 24}
Taxing Non-resident Aliens: A reader wants to know to cope with taxes when doing business in the US with people from overseas. We don't know much about taxes, but we know the web, and the IRS uses the web to our benefit.

You may print the IRS bulletin, "Withholding of Tax on Non-Resident Aliens and Foreign Entities" or probably pick up a paper copy at your local post office. Worst case, just call the IRS, but virtually any form or bulletin from the IRS is available at the IRS web site.

If this does not answer your question these are a few other sources that may help:

• IRS Publication 519, "U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens"
• IRS Publication 901, "Tax Treaties"
• IRS Tax Topic 851, "Resident and Nonresident Aliens"
• The IRS web site Digital Daily has a collection of information for the International Taxpayer The Digital Daily includes this " International Taxpayer" article which focuses on the taxation of capital gains of non-resident aliens

Becky | |

^{2005 January 24}
Got Maps?: A Hungarian map blog which I can't read, of course, appeals to me and in case you don't read Hungarian either, the links speak for themselves. Among those that caught my eye:

• The Inglehart map of cultural values
• Satellite images of the tsunami stricken areas, before and after
• Subway systems of the world

The Map Room is another blog about maps, this one in English which includes interesting comments and links.

Becky | |

^{2005 January 24}
Homebuying Season Approaches: HUD has a gift for Homebuyers. No, not money, tools: Wish List and Check List are .pdf files. Download and install the free Acrobat PDF viewer now if you don't already have it, then print these useful, time-saving forms before you go househunting. In a perfect world these, or something similar would be the first things provided by real estate agents, but that's rarely true, so you can demonstrate to prospective agents just how buying-savvy you are by getting them from HUD first. Print plenty of checklists to have one for each house you see, even the duds, since even they might have features you'll want to remember, perhaps to add to your Wish List, or simply for coctail conversation. ("Remember that house we saw with the red velvet walls and purple shag carpeting?"

Becky | |

^{2005 January 22}
Aid Ship or UN Hostel: Read a first hand account of US vs UN response to Asian crisis. Maybe it's time the US began to be a bit more stingy with resources, and let the UN international relief organizations figure out how to handle their own logistics.

Becky | |

^{2005 January 18}
fiduciary: Merriam=Webster's Word of the Day for January 18 is:

fiduciary   \fih-DOO-shee-air-ee\   adjective
   : of, relating to, or involving a confidence or trust: as a : held or founded in trust or confidence b : holding in trust c : depending on public confidence for value or currency

Example sentence:
   "Real estate brokers ... act in a fiduciary capacity and must place the interests of their clients above their own and be fair to all parties." (_Barron's Real Estate Handbook_)

Did you know?
   Fiduciary relationships often concern money, but the word "fiduciary" does not, in and of itself, suggest financial matters. Rather, "fiduciary" applies to any situation in which one person justifiably places confidence and trust in someone else and seeks that person's help or advice in some matter. The attorney-client relationship is a fiduciary one, for example, because the client trusts the attorney to act in the best interest of the client at all times. "Fiduciary" can also be used as a noun for the person who acts in a fiduciary capacity, and "fiduciarily" or "fiducially" can be called upon if you are in need of an adverb. The words are all faithful to their origin -- Latin "fidere," which means "to trust."

Becky | |

^{2005 January 10}
: IRED has always been "stingy" with awards because we really intended to honor outstanding sites, not to cozy up to webmasters to get them to link back to IRED. Meanwhile the number of pseudo-awards multiplied exponentially to the point that I felt they had become the web equivalent of Beanie Babies, just another piece of junk to collect dust on a shelf.

Then there is the problem of the volatility of web sites. A site that is glorious today may become ingloriously trashy, or worse, abandoned to the p*orn trade, tomorrow, but our reviewers won't know until we get a complaint from an angry user! It takes over two years for our reviewers to work their way through every site listed on IRED in addition to routine maintenance and on-request reviews.

At various times in the past there have been a handful of site awards that actually did recognize quality of information, but few if any still exist. The cost of maintaining such a list is prohibitive (The Webby Awards, for instance, require an entry fee just to be considered, making the list of potential recipients self-selecting and, in my opinion, the award itself just a bigger beanie baby.)

Ten years ago IRED actually listed ALL real estate web sites with the ideal that we could continue to do so in order to guide consumers to the most useful. Hah. Certainly I never envisioned that the real estate industry and the mortgage industry would be right up with the aforementioned p*** industry in producing spam, pop-up, pop-unders, and assorted other nuisances that sometimes make the web, if not the entire internet virtually unusable. Do I sound annoyed? Yep. I have spent the past two weeks trying to find and get rid of a trojan horse that more than likely arrived on my computer via a real estate or mortgage web site or e-mail.

Becky | |

^{2005 January 5}
Update: An FBI warning about tsunami related scams reiterates what I alluded to yesterday, and includes some excellent tips I didn't think of. See the wire story here.

Becky | |

^{2005 January}
Give until it feels good: One reason for the tremendous outpouring of generosity on the part of the internet community to the victims of the Asian Tsunami is probably the ease of making donations online. No checks to mail. No door to door canvassing. Just click and indicate the amount you want to donate and it's done.

I began to wonder, however, how much of the money donated through Amazon, PayPal, online banks etc., is actually going to reach the charity for which it is intended. (How much then actually reaches the victims is another matter, and should be a factor in your choice of charitable foundations). Generous donors have, as of tonight, provided close to $15 Million dollars via Amazon alone. A bit of digging turns up this tidbit in the Amazon FAQ:

Does it cost me anything to use the Amazon Honor System?
No. There are no fees for making a payment to a participating Web site. To cover our administrative and processing costs, Web sites collecting money with the Honor System are assessed 2.9% of your payment plus a fixed cost of $0.30 per transaction.

(emphasis mine)

Command-Post.org is doing a fantastic job of maintaining an up-to-date catalog of ways and means of sending aid. Read the comments too, for more information. Give whatever you can afford, but keep in mind that not everyone is honest and caring. There are probably a record number of scams and scammers who are seeking to profit from this horrific tragedy. This is nothing new, of course, but the scale of the disaster just increases the scale of the malfactors.

It is truly heartening to hear the thousands of rescue stories, and the heroism of the many aid workers, but at the same time the rumors and first hand stories of villains taking advantage of the victims, especially of the abduction and abuse of the many orphaned children are truly sickening. I wish the world were made up of all "good" people, but that never was the case; it never will be

Becky | |

^{2004 December 31}
Window XP Ate My Homework: Am I the only one who really, really hates Windows XP? Nothing works the same in XP as it did in in Win 3.1, 98, NT or 2000. Hey, even DOS was more predictable. Now I get unexplained characters; I hit the delete key and my cursor moves to the top of the page; I scroll up or down a page I am editing and the cursor refuses to go to the beginning of the line unless I hit the Home key. I don't know what "drag and drop" is doing, but it sure isn't what I want it to do! This is just the beginning of my grief with XP.

Probably related also to XP, my wireless network connection periodically just vanishes in favor of a neighbor's unsecured, and very weak, wireless network! The only solution I have found for this anomoly so far is to delete my network connection and re-create it, complete with 15 character magic security key. Naturally I always mis-type one of more character and it takes many attempts to recreate the secure connection. I guess it is really, really secure, but what an annoyance.

Yes, Siblings (you know which ones you are), and all other Mac Lovers, I am sure that Mac users don't have these challenges, but much as I hate Windows, I hate learning curves worse; and I already have 7 Windows machines!

Becky | |

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