One-way to Vegas, still $27.69

By Reed Fujii | Published: February 4, 2010 | 0 Comments

If you missed the opportunity to fly to Las Vegas for a base fare of $9.99, you’ve got another chance.  Allegiant Air, the discount, leisure travel airline that emphasizes travel packages including hotel rooms, casino shows and car rentals, is offering that price on two dates later this month.

As noted in my previous post, it’s challenging to get through the airline’s Web site while avoiding extra charges for seat preference, checked luggage and other add-ons. Still, real bargains are available. This may be the last chance, however, as currently posted prices on flights in March and beyond start at just under $40.

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How low can they go?

By Reed Fujii | Published: January 8, 2010 | 0 Comments

Don’t blink or you might miss it, but Allegiant Air — the low-fare leisure airline flying between Stockton and Las Vegas — is offering $9.99 one-way fares on a couple days later this month.

Negotiating airline’s Web site at www.allegiantair.com is challenging. You have to scroll through pages of check boxes and diagrams to make sure you remove the charges for the shuttle bus service ($14.50), as well as seat selection ($12), preferred boarding($5), one checked bag ($15) and tripflex($16), all which are automatically included. That’s not to mention clicking past offers for hotel packages, rental cards and casino shows.  But hey, you can’t fault them for trying to make a profit.

If you can manage to get past all that, and are willing to travel to Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jan. 20, and return Friday, Jan. 29, you can score a round trip to Sin City for all of $55.38, taxes and fees included.  That’s probably less than the cost of shoe repair or replacement if you decided to walk to Vegas and back instead.  And you are really a penny pincher, go down to the airport during the few hours the ticket counter is open — just when flights are arriving or going out — and you can knock off another $14 from the price.

Those prices were available when I checked the Web site late Friday afternoon. Of course as soon as a few of you rush out to book those flights, the prices will start trickling up.  Allegiant raises fares on any given flight as the passenger count rises. It’s all about supply and demand.

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Nice work if you can get it

By Reed Fujii | Published: November 24, 2009 | 0 Comments

Diamond Foods Inc., the nut and snack-foods maker, plans its annual shareholders meeting  Jan. 15 at 333 Battery St.  While based in San Francisco, the former Diamond Walnut Growers cooperative still maintains its largest production and walnut processing facility in Stockton.  Its proxy statement details matters to be covered at the meeting, primarily the election of directors and appointment of the outside auditor.

But the statement also enumerates compensation for the company’s top executives.

Michael Mendes, president and chief executive, pulls down a base salary of more than $600,000, but performance bonuses, stock awards and other compensation push his total to over $3.7 million in fiscal 2009. That’s about the same he earned in 2008.

Steven Neil, executive VP and chief financial office, starts with a base salary of $415,000, but with stock and cash performance bonuses, received nearly $1.5 million in fiscal 2009.

From a starting salary of $350,000, Executive VP and Chief Sales Officer Lloyd Johnson (who joined the company in September 2008, a month into the 2009 fiscal year), added bonuses and stock awards to push his pay package to $1.3 million.

Andrew Burke, senior vice president of marketing, got total compensation of $859,000 for fiscal 2009, not a bad bump from his base salary of $256,000.

There’s lots more detail on Diamond’s executive and director compensation in the document online at the Diamond Foods Web site.

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New RSS Feed

By Site Admin | Published: October 14, 2009 | 0 Comments

A message from the Recordnet.com staff:

We’re in the process of upgrading the software behind our blogs, in large part
to add some new features and capabilities you’ll be experiencing soon. As part
of this process, we’ve changed the location of our RSS feeds. To receive
continuous updates when we update this blog, please update your feed readers to
point here. Or if updating the feed reader is cumbersome,
simply unsubscribe from the old feed and then add the new feed as a new subscription.

“What’s an RSS feed” you ask? RSS stands for Really Simple
Syndication. RSS allows sites to easily distribute content in a format that is
accessible for many uses — not the least of which is that they can be
subscribed to via feed readers (Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, and many
others), or added to customizable portals like iGoogle, My Yahoo!, My MSN, and
more. When a site with RSS feeds updates its content, the RSS feed for that
content is automatically updated, and so, too, are all the programs that have
subscribed to it.

In addition to the feed for this blog, we have many others available at www.recordnet.com/rss. Give
them a try, and let us know what you think.

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Taxes, taxes, who’s got the taxes?

By Reed Fujii | Published: September 1, 2009 | 0 Comments

A Stockton and a Tracy company are among the California’s
top 250 sales tax debtors, the state Board of Equalization reports.

Naturally, the recently updated list catches an editor’s
eye, prompting him to ask:

“Is this worth a story?”

Let’s see.

A little over half way down the list is Auto Center
Enterprises Inc., better known as Stockton Mazda and Stockton Volkswagen, which
went on the board’s bad-boy list on March 11, 1998, owing the state $858,584 in
back sales taxes.

That’s the same year that company went into bankruptcy
and was sold to another auto dealer, according to a story in The Stockton
Record.

A similar narrative seems to apply to Five Star Supply Inc., a
plumbing supply company at 984 Cobalt Drive, Tracy. It got on the state’s tax
list on May 18, 2005 in arrears $643,809.55, putting it about three-quarters of
the way down the list.

There’s no reference to Five Star in The Record’s
archives and no such company appears in the current Tracy phone book. A
telephone number I found on the Web was “disconnected or is no longer in
service.”

So the state tax collectors have come up empty after working
on these cases for 11 years and four years, respectively. Dinging them in a
newspaper article would probably have little effect at this point.

Readers interested in checking out the full list for themselves can click on this link: Board of Equalization.

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Improving public access to court records

By Reed Fujii | Published: August 14, 2009 | 0 Comments

If you’ve ever needed to find federal court documents online, you’re probably familiar with PACER, (Public Access to Court Electronic Records).

It’s very useful, granting access to documents filed in federal district and bankruptcy courts. It can also be clumsy to operate and you need to pay to get digital files — 8 cents a page — although you are not charged until you rack up more than $10 in individual fees during any calendar year.

Now, for Firefox users, there is a new extension that should give free access to many more documents.

Developed by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, the extension is called
Recap. When a Recap user downloads a document for
the first time from PACER they are charged for it, but Recap also uploads a copy onto
an public archive server. From then on, that user and other Recap users can
download the document for free from the archive. This is legal because court
documents are public documents and not regarded as intellectual property.

Check out
the extension at the Recap Web site, launched Friday.

There’s also an
interesting article about Recap at Ars Technica.

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What’s in a (map) name?

By Reed Fujii | Published: March 14, 2009 | 0 Comments

The California Public Utilities Commission gave out grants this week to help AT&T extend improved high-speed Internet service to San Joaquin County communities identified in the press release as Lodi and Oakdale. But a closer look reveals the proposed projects are outside — in some cases waaaaay outside — the named communities.  You’d have to guess something was awry, since Oakdale proper is in Stanislaus County.

If you visit the CPUC document at http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/Published/Agenda_resolution/98396.htm you’ll find the red outlines identifying the “Lodi” project circle areas out in the San Joaquin Delta, apparently to serve the marina dwellers at Terminous and an area in the southwest corner of McDonald Island and western Roberts Island, where there is also a marina (Tiki Lagun).

There’s also a map for the Oakdale project. It shows a red outline on one area north of Valley Home off Valley Home Road near Victory Avenue. And another, a couple miles east of Collegeville, where lies a rural subdivision of homes scattered along Nelson Road, Frick Road, Amerigo Road, East Oakwood Road and Munro Avenue, to name a few.

While it is difficult to put a simple geographic label on such scattered rural outposts, I suspect the folks living in the middle of the Delta don’t see Lodi as their home and that that spot near Collegeville looks a lot closer to Stockton than Oakdale.

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Buttons? We don’ t need no stinking buttons

By Reed Fujii | Published: March 11, 2009 | 0 Comments


Apple Inc. introduced Wednesday its third-generation iPod shuffle, a miniscule digital music player that is smaller, sleeker and more capacious (as well as more costly) than its previous model. While the company’s minimalist designs are usually well received, this shuffle is catching a great deal of criticism for what it lacks: namely any sort of volume or music selector button on the body itself.

The aluminum-encased iPod only has a single switch, which allows the user to select continuous play, shuffle play (random selections of the library) or off.  The volume and music selection controls have been moved to the cord of the earbuds included with each shuffle.

The change figures large for Jeremy Horwitz, editor at iLounge, who lists 10 surprises — half good and half bad — about the shuffle. He writes the on-cord controls means the new shuffle is the first iPod that won’t work with your home or car stereo (bad surprise No. 1) and won’t work with any non-Apple headphones (bad surprise No. 2).

CNET.com news Executive Editor David Carnoy calls the new shuffle a “disaster.” Writing in the Web site’s Crave section, he says, “I — and a lot of other people — simpl(y) can’t use or don’t like the
earbuds that ship with iPods. We want to use our own headphones,
particularly if we’re using the Shuffle as an “active” MP3 player. The
fact is the Apple buds just don’t stay in your ears when you’re running
with the Shuffle …”  He notes Apple will allow third-party manufacturers to sell their own headphones with built-in controls as well as adapters that will allow you to use other conventional headphones with the new shuffle. “But that would just add another
$15-$30 to the $79 price tag. So, thanks very much, Apple, but I’ll
stick with my second-generation Shuffle.”

And over at MacWorld.com, Dan Moren says the cord-mounted controls are a poor decision by Apple’s design team. “If you ask me, the war on buttons has gone too far. The new iPod
shuffle takes a step back in both the usability and compatibility
departments. … (T)he
changes make me wonder if Apple has placed too high a premium on the
product’s form over its function.”

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Giving it away

By Reed Fujii | Published: March 10, 2009 | 0 Comments

Phish fans can get free mp3 recordings of the jam band’s first performances since 2004 at livephish.com. It might seem like the band figures since roughly 7 zillion of its most fervent fans attended one, two or all three of this past weekend’s performances at Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, it’s not really giving anything away. But if 10 to 11 hours of mp3 recordings are not enough, it’s also pitching better-quality versions in FLAC (free audio lossless codec) for $12.95 and, for you old-school types, there are CDs available for $23.

There seems to be a market. According to the New York Times, the first night’s concert drew nearly 14,000 people and that most in attendance paid hundreds if not a thousand or so dollars for the tickets that were initially sold for less than $50.

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California tracks horse STD

By Reed Fujii | Published: February 25, 2009 | 0 Comments
A 12-year-old mare in Placer County is infected with a highly contagious but treatable disease that is transmitted during the breeding or artificial insemination of horses, the California Department of Food and Agriculture reported Tuesday. 
 
The mare is one of 35 in the state believed exposed to contagious equine metritis, which only affects horses but can cause fertility problems in mares. All are being held in quarantine and receiving antibiotics, which readily cure the infection.

Nationwide, the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service reports there are 614 stallions and mares in 45 states identified as having possible exposure to equine metritis. Again, all are in quarantine and being treated. Another nine animals thought to have been exposed are still being tracked down.  No origin for the outbreak has been identified, but investigations are focusing on breeding facilities in Kentucky and Wisconsin.

Stallions typically
show no symptoms, but both stallions and mares can become chronic carriers
of the disease. Transmission naturally occurs through mating, but
also through contaminated equipment or via
semen collected for artificial insemination.

Equine metritis is considered a foreign animal disease in the United States. It was was previously in this county in 1978, 1979 and 2006, all limited outbreaks that were quickly eradicated.

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