Nevermind the fact that Google Maps Navigation has just made most of this obsolete, I was pretty happy with the service for now. After the 3-month free trial, it cost $50/year, or $100 for lifetime service. Figuring I would use the GPS for several years, and then my wife would use it for several more, I bought the $100 lifetime service in October.

So I was of course dismayed to get an email from them stating that the service would be discontinued in 2012, and that I would only get a pro-rated refund based on three years! Fuming, I searched my inbox for the TOS from when I signed up, and it said that “service was not guaranteed beyond January 1, 2014″! So they (at least implicitly) promised me two more years than what I was getting.

Not only did I buy a more expensive GPS that had the necessary (but soon useless) receiver for the service, I was getting swindled on the service too! With threats of a class action lawsuit on the tip of my tongue, I called their service department to give them a piece of my mind. I asked the very polite girl on the other end to explain the two-year difference in promised service and said I wanted to cancel now and get my money back instead of wait until 2012.

But apparently they were ready for this. She told me that yes, I can cancel now and get a refund (still prorated to three years), but that they will still let me keep the service until 2012! So I’m getting back around $98 of my $100 fee (all but about 1-1/2 months worth) and still get over a year of free service.

I’m still not very happy with Microsoft, but at least they made things right financially. So I have real-time updates on my GPS until January 2012, by which time I’ll surely have Android 2.0 (and Google Maps Navigation) on my Sprint Hero to get me where I’m going.

Now folks, this is just a stroke (pardon the pun) of brilliance. Faced with staff layoffs and crippling ad revenue declines, the Chicago Tribune knew that it had to somehow embrace this brave, new media world. And what’s a more fitting way to depict an obsolete, dying dinosaur like the Chicago Tribune than a confused-looking, disoriented old man wearing a hat made out of newspaper?

Intrigued, I did a bit more looking into Col. Tribune. He has his own page on the Tribune’s website, complete with links to his Facebook profile, Flickr feed, and Twitter page. It seems that the Colonel is quite the Web-2.0-savvy curmudgeon!

I checked out the Colonel’s Flickr feed and found to my horror that apparently wearing newspaper hats is now very hip in Chicago. These people look about as excited as someone who was forced to attend a boring company-sponsored after-hours party on a Friday night. Ahem…

So, welcome to the exciting world of the World Wide Web, Col. Tribune! I’m sure you’ll do your company proud as its public web ambassador while it continues its inevitable death spiral towards oblivion. Now get off my lawn.

Curious as to how exactly fertilizer can cut down on your water usage, I went to their website to find out more. Their site is very short on details, but the general gist is that a fertilized lawn will need less water to keep healthy than an unfertilized lawn. So their “Water Smart” fertilizer is just the same old stuff with a new, hip eco-friendly feel-good label!

Look, I’m all for taking common-sense steps to help the environment. Whether or not global warming turns out to be real, making the earth a better place can only be a good thing. But I guess it was inevitable that the whole thing would get commercialized ad nauseum.

So, thanks anyway Scotts, but I think I’ll have to pass on putting your corny Water Smart Pledge badge on my blog.

Jake was one of fewer than 200 government-certified rescue dogs. He bravely searched through dangerous, white-hot debris to find survivors, and was welcomed as a hero in NYC and elsewhere. He also helped train other rescue dogs and their owners.

Good boy, Jake.

One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered… in Baghdad, the capital, one in four has had a relative kidnapped…. But when asked whether they preferred life under Saddam, the dictator who was executed last December, or under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, most replied that things were better for them today.

Amazing. This poll was conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a “respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.”

“We’ve been polling in Iraq since 2005 and the finding that most surprised us was how many Iraqis expressed support for the present government,” said Johnny Heald, managing director of ORB. “Given the level of violence in Iraq, it shows an unexpected level of optimism.”

I’m still working on getting the theme set up and everything looking the way it should, so please let me know if anything is still broken!

Here is a story about a different group of parents that I doubt you’ll be hearing much about in the news. After their son Justin was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, Jan and Joe Johnson decided to make a perilous trip to Iraq to bring some closure to their son’s death, to find out why he died and what purpose his sacrifice served.

They traveled with several other parents to Iraq as guests of the Kurdish government. Everywhere they went, they were treated as heroes and thanked for their sacrifice.

One mother, Debra Bastian, who handed out wallet-sized photos of her son was brought to tears when she handed the photo to an Iraqi woman whose two sons and husband were killed during Saddam’s rule. The woman took the photo, tucket it into a framed picture of her husband and sons, and said "now your son is my son."

Bastian said of the trip, "I needed to make that trip. All of us were very, very disappointed in the media coverage over the war. I had so many avenues that were telling me different, that there were good things happening in Iraq, that they were just reporting the bomb of the day."

What was surprising to me was how much the national anti-Republican mood hurt us locally at the county level. I know I’m biased, but for the first time in the history of Clark County, the Republican party had a slate full of good, quality, experienced candidates, and every one of us were way better than what the Democrats offered. And we did everything right, from door-to-door events all year long to phone calls to holding the local Democrats’ flagrant disregard of election law to the minimum amount possible.

By any measure, we should have won some county-wide seats this year. Every Republican and Democrat I spoke with leading up to the election talked about how this was the beginning of the end of Democrat control on this county. Looking at the numbers, if this were a usual non-presidential election year, we would have indeed had a great showing. But, this was no normal election year.

I can’t say that the punishment of the national Republican party was undeserved. We certainly got away from our core values of fiscal conservatism and small government. And it looks like the Democrats have picked it up and are running with it for all it’s worth. Hopefully Republicans across the country take this as a much needed wake-up call to get back to what brought us to power in the first place.