Gizmodo republished a photo from Reddit of a note that was left with a stack of unclaimed Yellow Pages.

The note reads, in part: “Dear Yellow Pages, see this big stack of unclaimed telephone books? NOBODY WANTS THEM. Please stop killing trees and GET A NEW BUSINESS MODEL.”

I agree entirely with the sentiment.

The hard copy of the Yellow Pages must surely be the biggest waste of advertising money and paper. It’s been over two years since I looked at Yellow Pages and I can’t imagine that I will ever do so again.

Just about everything I want to know about a business is now online and usually easy to find with Google.

On the rare occasions it isn’t online, such as maybe getting a tradesman or local professional, I’m more likely to search the local paper.

A huge pile of Yellow Pages went uncollected at our office for several weeks. The White Pages were picked up, and are sometimes useful, but their value is diminishing as well.

How often does anyone look up a person’s home number these days? Most individuals can be contacted online as well and the preferred phone number of choice is nearly always a mobile.

The Yellow Pages do serve some useful purposes. I like to elevate computer monitors with them. They also make handy door stops.

I’ve searched my inbox and can’t see any record of correspondence advising me of this. I had been an mBox customer since February 2004.

I received a fax from mBox on July 8. The next one on July 23 came from eFax.

Apart from the lack of notice, I was not given login details for eFax and had to request these using a “lost password” option.

As far as I can tell, eFax doesn’t provide a voicemail service, but they appear to have retained it in my case, albeit with an American accent and no option for me to personalise the message.

The monthly price with eFax is also dearer than it was with mBox. I’m yet to discover if they will honor the former pricing.

I don’t really have a problem with the service being transferred to another provider. Some communication would have been nice though.

There is nothing on the web to explain what happened. It must have been pretty sudden because mBox is still running Google ads.

Frankly, I no longer need a fax number, and if voicemail isn’t part of the package I will probably drop the account when it comes up for renewal.

Squiz Cards are small plastic cards that if dropped in a cup of coffee or put through the washing machine – they are still perfect. They have a trendy waterproof keyring dispenser.

Although I liked the idea, I couldn’t see a great personal need for the cards, so I ordered some for my eldest daughter with her name, email address and mobile number printed on them.

There were lots of designs to choose from.

They are smaller than business cards, so you can’t get as much text on them, but you will get enough details to let people know how to contact you.

The cards for Kathleen arrived just over a week after I ordered them online and they look great. Even the postage was free.

Given the quality of the product, the innovation and the good service I’m happy to recommend these cards.

The disclaimer, of course, is that I received a freebie.

Along with another failed company, Timbercorp, it owns a lot of land in the Green Triangle region of South East South Australia and Western Victoria.

I am angry with the failure of these companies and the lack of action from governments and authorities to investigate.

Again for the benefit of overseas readers, Great Southern and Timbercorp relied on Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) to buy land and plant trees.

Many investors were attracted to these schemes because they offered an immediate tax deduction and a long-term return.

A fascinating article in The Age today, cutely headlined “Once upon a time in the woods” makes some damning revelations.

These include the fact Great Southern’s harvest yields were lower than expected, but not disclosed to the market, and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission dismissed concerns about the Ponzi scheme nature of the company’s operations.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned.

It’s an apt description of how Great Southern operated, certainly in the last few years.

Who now will investigate the investigator, given that ASIC said there was “insufficient evidence” to substantiate the Ponzi scheme claims?

A couple of parliamentary inquiries are planning to examine some of the issues surrounding Great Southern, Timbercorp and MIS, but more is needed.

The Federal Government should establish a Royal Commission with wide-ranging terms of reference.

Without such an inquiry, I suspect the white-collar criminals who committed this fraud will walk away, many of them to get involved with dodgy schemes elsewhere.

It’s obscene the managers of Great Southern granted themselves significant pay rises months before the company collapsed and after they failed to achieve bonus targets.

ASIC appears to be saying that Great Southern’s behavior was not necessarily misleading or deceptive if the company had disclosed potential risks to investors.

It’s now known the company misled investors regarding the size of its harvest yields and its capacity to predict them.

Why do I feel so strongly?

Managed investment schemes have tied up significant amounts of land in this region and changed rural society immensely.

Fertile farming land was bought at inflated prices to plant trees. You can’t blame farmers for selling out, but with them went the fabric of small communities.

This year was meant to be the beginning of the bluegum harvest. With it was meant to come hundreds of jobs, better roads and an economic boom.

We were sold a lemon.

The global economic situation is being blamed at the moment for every business failure, sometimes unfairly.

Chances are Great Southern and Timbercorp would have failed anyway.

The National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI) is still proclaiming the virtue of MIS.

In a media statement this week NAFI said: “MIS plantation management companies that have diversified their business across a range of forest and timber activities, such as processing and other value adding projects as well as plantations, have insulated their company and investors from these events and will continue to expand as demand for timber increases.

“MIS taxation arrangements are key to the ongoing expansion of plantation forestry as they recognise the long-term nature of the investment – often 10 to 30 years – and provide tax deductibility for upfront costs in a similar way to other agricultural crops.”

Of course, plantation forestry became necessary because state governments reduced the area available for native forest logging.

But there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing tax deductions in advance. The system artificially attracts investment in a speculative endeavor.

Financial planners and accountants were getting kickbacks to entice investors.

Nobody can tell me they cared about the towns they bought up land around or the land itself.

As we are now discovering, the returns from Great Southern woodlots won’t be as high as the company promoted.

And at any stage in the growth cycle the trees could be burnt, or maybe someone will discover a rare parrot or frog in the plantation and logging will be prohibited.

Instead of producing food in the Green Triangle we’re growing trees. How does that benefit society?

There are fewer people living on the land, producing less, and the underground aquifer is being sucked dry.

This has been a wandering rant. It can be condensed to say:

• Investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of the collapse of Great Southern;
• End MIS and come up with a sustainable way of encouraging agricultural investment;
• Stop social engineering; disallow the purchase of farm land to grow trees.

None inspired me particularly, except Carolyn Creswell (pictured), who won my vote.

At age 18, Carolyn Creswell was, like many university students, working part time. She worked one day a week in a bakery specialising in handmade muesli, and was told that she was going to lose her job because the owners wanted to sell. So for $1000, Carolyn and the other employee decided to buy the tiny business together. Carman’s Fine Foods was born. Sixteen years later, and Carolyn now runs a thriving multinational company.

Here is a link to her business website. The philosophy is that “food should come from the kitchen and not the chemist”.

Carman’s Fine Foods stick by the philosophy of providing a product that is healthy and good tasting, with every product they release.

They use Qantas as a marketing tool to create greater brand exposure and awareness by testing new products with the airline. If the products are a success, they then move into the retail market.

When announced, she said the aim was to “increase the likelihood of successful, happy relationships in WA within the current resources boom”.

The website was to “provide a link between single men working on a fly in, fly out (FIFO) roster and single local women who are aware and accepting of the FIFO lifestyle.”

There are around 54,000 mining employees in Western Australia, so I think Angela is on a winner here. The sheila shortage is well documented and anything to hitch people up is sure to be popular.

And shoot me down in flames if I’m wrong, but there are plenty of gold diggers out there among the female of our species.

A handsome, witty, caring journalist earning $40,000 a year is no match in the matchmaking stakes for a bloke bringing home 200k.

Some sheilas might even see FIFO as an advantage, at least while they are unmarried and childless.

“Through Meet a Mining Man, single men with limited time to invest in seeking relationships can find women who are understanding of their FIFO schedules,” the PR states.

“Similarly, women who want the security of a relationship without sacrificing their freedom can do a simple online search for suitable and available men.”

I received an email from Angela at work today:

“I have just turned 24 and this is my first business venture. I am launching the site using creativity along with minimal resources. I believe Meet a Mining Man would interest many of your readers, as due to Perth’s geographical spread, many people find it hard to meet partners.

“From Monday May 19 I will have a temporary registration pre-launch site up where people can sign up for One Month Free Trial. The actual launch date, when the site becomes fully operational is May 30. This is when all the free trial memberships activate.”

Good luck to her!

• Link to media release

It always makes me feel a mixture of silly and peeved.

Silly that I didn’t read the fine print when I signed up for the service and peeved that I didn’t knowingly authorise it and wasn’t notified.

I’m talking big names here like McAfee and Ancestry.com.

Oh, I know they haven’t broken any laws and the automatic payment information is probably as prominent as other text on the sign-up page.

The lesson I’ve learned is to read all the subscription detail more thoroughly.

I really think though, they should make the automatic payment opt-in, rather than opt-out. There are plenty of other service providers who operate that way.

And they should certainly send the subscriber a reminder.

It uses Suse Linux and provides a limited number of programs with the free service. These include Firefox, Gaim, Evolution, Open Office Writer and Digikam.

There are options to install the virtual computer on a PC or USB memory stick. I’m currently testing it with an installation on my laptop’s hard drive. I’m effectively running a Linux system in parallel with Windows XP and I’m able to switch easily between the two.

It all appears to be very new. I signed up for the free service and received a login code on my mobile phone. There are two web sites, the other being here and seemingly more pitched at a youth audience. Neither has a support forum. I can’t tell if it’s only available in Australia and New Zealand at this stage or not.

Technical details are a little sketchy and the best I could find are here.

The business model appears to involve enticing users to upgrade to commercial accounts with more programs and greater data storage.

The free account has 20MB online storage and 10MB email, which isn’t much compared with Gmail for example.

Linux and Mac versions are said to be under development and there is a web launcher version which I haven’t yet tried.

I have found it to be a nifty and interesting tool. The idea of a secure personal area for online data storage has some appeal as a way to backup documents and photos. The company says it’s secure; just got to hope they don’t collapse like Veridas and take your documents with them.

At this early stage I would say it’s a good alternative to running portable applications on a USB stick. It’s also a good way to introduce newbies to Linux and open source.

On several occasions I’ve suffered hacker attacks and that’s never happened to me with other hosting providers. That’s not to say the others are safer, but maybe Site5 is a target because of its size and systems.

Most recently, all index files on all sites were replaced with hacker propaganda. This was extremely disruptive.

I know that backups are essential but like many others I was caught out on that front. Fortunately I’ve been able to restore all my sites except a couple, however it was rather time consuming. I still have to fix my family history site and a client’s business site.

I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade Word Press and SMF scripts, and on this site at least, to restore commenting.

However, a state funeral should be reserved for those who served in the public interest, instead of their own.

Despite the platitudes that Packer gave millions to charity, he almost certainly avoided taxes worth treble the amount that he donated.

Let’s recognise his achievements, but John Howard is wrong to acknowledge him as a servant of the nation.