A couple news items on the VW Diesel Goodwill Package:

• I did get my 2.0L Goodwill package. It took about four weeks to arrive, and then I promptly used more than half of it on transmission service at VW. Sigh.
• They have announced a Goodwill Package for owners of 3.0L diesel engines. That program expires on 31 July 2016 – hurry up!
• There’s a hearing on the settlement package scheduled for 26 July 2016. If the judge approves it (highly likely), then the buyback/cash payments/other benefits will be available to TDI owners “in fall 2016.” See the announcements at vwdieselinfo.com.

I’m one of the “lucky ones”… A “proud” owner of a 2010 VW Jetta Diesel 2.0 Liter engine. I’m afraid to look at the loss of value in the Kelley Blue Book from a year ago.

I signed up today for the Goodwill Package. As partial compensation for the loss of value and hassle, VW provides a $500 prepaid card to spend anywhere, a $500 card to use at a VW dealership, plus three years of Roadside Assistance.

So I’m going to use the cards to pay for needed repairs to the Jetta: one at my local garage that I trust, and one for (still other) repairs at the local VW dealer. Regrettably, I don’t think either card will cover all the expense 🙁

But… I guess I am sort of lucky – I just squeaked by the deadline. The expiration for the Goodwill Package is the end of this month – 30 April 2016. All you Jetta owners – get on the stick! Go to https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/goodwill_package/ and type in your VIN.

I took a few interesting photos this year, and screwed up my courage to enter them into the Valley News Amateur Photo Contest.

Here are my two entries: Sunset, Post Pond, and Ice Flowers

I’ll find out at the 2016 HomeLife show in March whether either is selected.

We have been planning a trip to Iceland (mostly to see the aurora) next year. I am now looking into tours that go near the volcano at Bárðarbunga and Holuhraun as well.

I think that land tours (I would love to stand next to the lava front) are out of the question, since the authorities have closed the area for ~18 miles around.

But there appear to be a couple air tours flying from Akureyri to Bárðarbunga, Holuhraun, and over the Askja crater for a little more than US$300 per person. The view from the planes can been seen in these Youtube Videos… I’m psyched.

I have given out this tip in past years to people in Revels North who’re preparing for the Christmas Revels show…

I found this trick for memorization in a wonderful book, Don’t Shoot the Dog, The new art of teaching and training, by Karen Pryor. It talks about modifying behavior — yours and others. (One way of modifying behavior is shooting the dog. But she talks about lots of other—usually more appropriate—ways to change behavior.) She tells about coaching, teaching, and maybe even making things better in your life. And it’s a fun read…

But back to memorization: The trick is to learn the last verse first, then the next-to-last, and so on.

Why? Because the usual way of learning the verses sequentially is enormously dispiriting. You struggle to get the words of the first verse. After a lot of work, you begin to be comfortable with them, so you attack the second verse. But you’re back at sea. It feels like such hard work. After the second verse, you hit the wall of the third verse. You despair of learning the words at all.

Instead, learn the last verse first. Then start learning the previous verse. After you get the new verse down, you can keep on singing, but they’re words that you already know. You’re drawn along by the familiar material. You feel competent and confident. You feel good.

I’ve been following Rei, a blogger from Iceland, who is reporting on the Bárðarbunga/Holuhraun volcano as it continues to erupt. It’s way more impressive/scary than I originally thought. It’s huge, with fresh lava covering 37 square km, or about 2/3 the size of Manhattan, and the magma fountains are shooting 300 feet or more in the air.

Her recent posts have shown a lot of information about the volcano’s progress. The one from last Saturday contains the best view so far of the extent of the lava, and absolutely stunning views of the magma sloshing around. The video is second-to-last picture on this page.

See it here: Rei’s post with great volcano video

For a bit more context, you can read her earlier posts. This map shown on this link tells more of the story. The big volcano, called Bárðarbunga, is at the red dot in the big glacier. The magma has pushed about 70 km (45 miles!) beneath the surface to erupt at Holuhraun, labeled with “Eruption” below.

The good news is that the magma remained underground until it got to a flat sandy desolate location, instead of coming up under the ice and melting it (to make flood) or an ash volcano. The other good news is that the (poisonous) sulfur dioxide has mostly been blowing northeast, so it hasn’t seriously affected either Reykjavík or Akureyri.

I recently joined Lessig’s citizen-funded MAYDAY.US campaign, an ambitious experiment to win a Congress committed to ending corruption in 2016, and we did something amazing: We raised $1 million dollars in 12 days. That’s a ton of money, but it’s not enough.

The plan is to raise $12 million in 2014, and use it to make fundamental reform of campaign financing the major issue in five congressional races. Then we’ll apply what we learn from those races to 2016.

We’re raising $5 million more by July 4, and I’m asking my readers if you can help us get the rest of the way there. So my question is: will you help?

Visit Mayday.us

There’s a Whitehouse.gov petition posted about Net Neutrality. It’s a little bit of a rant, but I agree with its punchline: No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.

This relates to a comment from Philip Greenspun’s blog (How many times do we have to pay for the same internet service?) If I’m paying my Internet Service Provider (ISP) to provide bits from the Internet to my home, and content providers pay an ISP for getting their bits into the Internet, what’s the problem? Why do the ISPs ask to be paid more for certain content, say, from Netflix?

The problem is that most ISPs (cable company, DSL/phone company, etc.) seriously underprovision their facilities. If every home subscriber ever attempted to use the service (at 3 megabits/second or 7, or 15, or 100, or whatever) that the ISPs advertise, there would be dramatic slowdowns. The ISPs simply don’t have sufficient capacity in place. The “easy out” for the ISP is to brand Netflix and other content providers as “bandwidth hogs” and using “more than their share” of bandwidth.

Two questions come from this:

1. If, Netflix, say, did pay more, would my ISP promise to provide great service that didn’t slow down? (I wouldn’t bet on it. They don’t like to promise anything…)

2. Why shouldn’t we consumers treat these bandwidth claims as false advertising? ISPs take our money while promoting a service that they know they have no ability or intention of providing. Wouldn’t that be a fun class-action suit? 🙂

In any event, you can read and sign the Whitehouse.gov petition at http://wh.gov/lwhFt They got almost half the signatures they need in a week; they need another 60K signatures by 24 May to get an official response from the White House. The more publicity on this issue, the better.

Why can’t the IRS tell me how much has been reported? Various companies and entities forward the same information to me and to them. If only I could look at the IRS’ notion of what has been reported, I could avoid rummaging around for all those scraps of paper at tax time.

Well, now you can. The IRS Get Transcript site allows you to get a list of all the accounts, forms, etc. that have been filed in your name.

Go to the site, create an account in the obvious way. My confirmation arrived within seconds, the entire signup process took two minutes. Then you can browse your records, both for the current tax year and for previous years (including your past tax returns).

Hat tip to Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Philip Greenspun’s blog