Wednesday, January 30, 2002

DMV's credit card fee legal way to defray costs The "convenience fee", a legal way to defray costs of handling credit card transactions, was approved by the Legislature years ago. But now someone in power agrees that this is not a good idea. Assemblyman Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, is sponsoring a bill to end the $4 fee for electronic transactions. He recently told the Marin Independent Journal that the state should promote e-commerce and that the surcharge "is exactly the wrong message to send." The fee has raised nearly $1.7 million for the state in two years. [San Jose Mercury News] I railed on how stupid this fee was last year. You can use your credit card for an electronic transaction from the DMV website and get charged an additional $4.00 for the convenience. Or you can mail a check for $0.34, and let someone at DMV, open your letter, extract the check, process it, etc. I am guessing that the later costs more than $4.00. 9:07:05 AM     Comment []

Candidates take on San Jose issues FORUM DRAWS MAYORAL, COUNCIL HOPEFULS San Jose's first local forum of the political season Tuesday night generated few arguments but gave audience members a chance to hear how the candidates would handle difficult issues facing City Hall. [San Jose Mercury News] -You read about it here first, last night! 7:42:28 AM     Comment []

FileMaker offers discounts for non-profit organizations [MacCentral] While this sounds nice, the discounts only apply to purchases of ten or more. Most of the non-profits I work with would have trouble scrapping together the amount for one discounted copy. Now if they really wanted to help non-profits, they would provide a discount on the developer addition, so we could produce database products that we can distribute to our members. 7:32:01 AM     Comment []