It’s very easy for someone to say, “That’s against the law” or “You can’t do that.” That doesn’t make it so, no matter how common-sensical it seems.

Specifically, in 38 states you can record a conversation you have with someone else on the phone without telling them. (This is sometimes called “one-party consent.”) The other 12 states require that everyone in the conversation — usually two people, but possibly more — be aware that it’s being taped.

So if you’re in California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania or Washington — or calling someone in one of those states — you need consent of the other person.

But if you’re in any of the remaining 38 states, you can legally tape a conversation with someone who is also in one of those 38 states.

Just so you know.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has a great Web site with more info.

It recently took a letter almost a week to reach me in Roanoke from Columbus, Ohio — a distance that’s driveable in about seven hours. My address was handwritten in script (or “cursive,” if you prefer), which explains it.

So this got me thinking to an old seminar I had on how to speed up your mail delivery. It’s pretty simple.

Most addresses are read by the Postal Service’s rather sophisticated character-recognition system. The ones the system can’t read are done by hand, which slows them down. So the trick is to make your address as machine readable as possible.

Definitely avoid script or cursive. That almost certainly has to be human-read. Clear, block letters are best.

But here’s a better trick: Make sure to keep the city, state, and ZIP code on the same line, in all caps, without any punctuation.

Bad:
Roanoke, Va.
24015

Better:
Roanoke, VA 24015

Best:
ROANOKE VA 24015

And this applies whether you’re doing it by hand or using a computer. (If you’re using a PC, you can often add the Delivery Point Bar Code to an address automatically, which speeds it up even further.)

I’m sure there are other tricks, but I wanted to share at least the all-caps-no-punctuation one. (In fact, let me know if you have any others.)

I have been using a Macintosh at my new job for several weeks now, and I have no idea how Mac users survived.

This one is running MacOS (rhymes with “Bacos,” as far as I’m concerned) 9.2 — all these comments relate to pre-OSX Macs. Because OSX is just Unix with a darned nice interface, many if not all these complaints don’t apply.

But OSX is relatively new, and Mac users must have been suffering greatly before then.

It’s not a matter of anything huge; it’s a combination of lots of little annoyances that make it clear to me why A) 90+% of the world uses Windows, and B) Linux has surpassed the Mac on the desktop.

Further, I’m not talking about ‘religious’ issues — cases where I’m simply used to one way of doing something and the Mac is different. I accept that there is a learning curve between operating systems and I shouldn’t complain that a Mac uses different keystrokes. (Except, perhaps, for screen capture. On a PC, you hit “Print Screen” and you capture the screen to the Clipboard. On the Mac, you have to hold down FOUR keys to accomplish the same thing.)

First off, everything is slow, like it’s in goo. I’m not talking processor speed, I’m talking about the interface. On a Windows machine, you could make the mouse pointer move so fast you couldn’t control it. On the Mac, even the fastest setting makes scrolling repeatedly just to get from one side of the screen to the other.

Second, the one-button mouse is the dumbest idea ever. Heck, the first mouse ever made had three buttons! PCs now have at least two buttons plus a wheel for scrolling documents. Macs are still using a single button. Blech.

My friend Tommy once quipped to a Mac-using friend, “Do Macs even have keyboards.” Well, it’s not so much a joke. Sometimes it seems that everything requires the (slow) mouse.

For example, if I get a dialog box with “OK,” “Refresh,” and “Cancel,” on a PC I can usually hit the first letter of my choice — or at least use the arrow keys to change selections. On the Mac, I have to use the mouse; there are no keyboard shortcuts.

On a PC, if I want to select everything in a dialog box — the current URL in a Web browser, for example — two clicks will do it. On the Mac it’s at least three, and half the time I have to start over. It’s clunky at best.

On a PC, if I need to click a button on a page that’s not in focus, I just click on it. Period. On the Mac, first I have to click just to put the other page in focus, then I can click the button. It’s an extra step that gets really annoying.

I’m told that Mac OS9 has better memory management than Windows. Maybe so. But I’ve crashed the Mac several times, and I’ve crashed my PC several times. [shrug]

There’s more, like the few times there’s a keyboard shortcut you need to think about Shift, Control, Option, and Command keys (instead of just Control and Alt on the PC). You can’t assign different sounds to different events, like on a PC. There is one sound for all of them, unless a specific program has its own.

I’ve used OSX a couple of times, and the improvements are many. It looks like a great OS. But it strikes me as way too late. If Mac users had to put up with OS8 and 9 for this long, no wonder they’ve defected to Windows.

I await your flames.

In my August 12 column, I discussed a new technology for sending data at high speeds over long distances: BPL, or broadband over power lines.

A couple of people wrote to me to point out what has been a criticism of the technology — namely, that it can interfere with other radio signals, most notably ham radios.

Tom Pinner wrote:

BPL sounds like a life savior to people out in the boonies. A MAJOR drawback to the system is the interference to lawful users of those frequencies. I am an amateur radio operator (aka Ham radio) who has mobile and base units on frequencies that will be used by BPL.

Why does it interfere with our radios? Due to the fact it radiates massive signals due to unshielded power cables that BPL sends signals down. Unlike cable system whose wires are ‘covered’ with shielding, power lines are ‘bare antennas’.

I actually brought this up to the BPL folks I spoke with for the article. Ham radio operators (and, in fact, people with garage door openers) were concerned that these signals would interfere.

I was told that yes, this was a concern, but that the technology in use — being tested now — does not cause that interference.

This might be true. As I mentioned in the column, BPL technology originally sent the signal to individual homes — through the transformer and breaker box. Because those things degraded the signal, it had to be much stronger to get through.

The BPL tech I’m interested in uses the long-range, medium-voltage lines. Because it doesn’t require quite as strong a signal, there may be no interference.

We can only wait and see. That’s why it’s being tested.