Flash!

I didn’t think you could get them anymore. When I was hunting around for heatwraps, I stumbled upon what I thought was an extinct species: low-capacity flash memory cards. And they’re cheap!

I found 64MB compact flash cards at Pharma Plus for $7.50. Perfect for the Quickpad. They’ve got bigger sizes too, but you’re probably better off going someplace like Canada Computers for those.

They’ve got smaller xD (only Type M at the Shoppers I checked) and SD cards too, of course. Those might be useful for something.

I’d have never thought to look in drug stores. But it makes sense. My dad’s pharmacy always did photo processing and stuff. So it makes sense.

I just picked up my old 2 megapixel camera from home, and I’m using the 8MB card from that, but I think I might pick up one of the 64MB cards, just ‘cuz it might come in handy. I mean… $7.50! Sure the price per MB sucks compared to [the 4GB+ cards you can get these days](http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=013334&cid=990.437), but I don’t need that space.

Subscribing to The Record

I just noticed the other day that [The Record](http://www.therecord.com/) wasn’t forcing you to buy their full newspaper subscription when you didn’t actually want any paper. (You could generously donate your unwanted newsprint to local schools, if you wanted).

I was getting the Record in paper form for a while. The amount of paper they ship to your door over the course of a week is staggering. It nearly doubled the volume of trash I was leaving by the curb. I didn’t want that. Neither did I want to pay $14/month just to access a website.

When they put the paper behind a pay wall, I was pretty perturbed, so there was no way I was going for that deal anyway. They’ve since lowered the wall a bit, allowing you to view today’s news for free. No archive access, though. However, you can get access to archives and PDF versions of the paper for about $3/month.

Now $3/month is getting into the range I’m willing to spend on a web page. I donated $2/month to [b3ta](http://www.b3ta.com/) for years just because I liked the work they were doing. I’m currently donating to [TWiT](http://www.twit.tv/) for much the same reason. I can drop a similar amount on the local rag without feeling too bad about it, even if I don’t always agree with the editorial stance.

So I put in my online subscription request this morning. About four hours later, I got an email stating the following:

> Thank you for your email. To subscribe to the Record Insider please contact our
> Circulation department at 519-894-3000 to provide your credit card information.

God, I hate telephones. On second thought, I’m not going to subscribe to The Record today.

I know eCommerce is kinda hard (even if it’s been around for more than a decade), but haven’t these people heard of Paypal? Honestly.