Mexico and the Golden State

Posted by Richard on

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the action that ended the war between the United States and Mexico, was signed on February 2, 1848.

Not only did it give the still fledgling United States a new border that extended to the Pacific Ocean and granted 525,000 square miles of territory that included present-day Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, but it absolved $3 million of claims made against Mexico by US citizens. All that for the paltry sum of $15 million.

More importantly, the treaty brought in an entirely different legal system to the region. Mexico had been a territorial possession of Spain for more than three hundred years, and had adopted Spanish civil law. Under Spanish law, all land was owned by the King of Spain. In contrast, the United States’ legal system was inherited from English common law, which allowed that real property could be owned by individuals. Any land not already claimed by settlers became the property of the federal government.

The treaty was signed February 2 — nine days after gold was discovered in Coloma — making the land upon which gold was found owned by both private individuals and the United States government.

The timing intrigues me. I wonder if either the Mexican or United States governments knew of the discovery and, if so, whether or not it had any impact on the treaty. Food for thought.

An Expensive, Worthless, Empty Lot

Posted by Richard on

Crack! The gavel banged on the county supervisor’s desk.

“Lot number 16. Sold for $10,200 to the man in the striped shirt!”

I was not the man in the striped shirt, and glad of it. I had made another trip to El Dorado County to attend their annual tax sale. Properties owned by taxpayers who failed to make the required annual installments for periods of longer than five to seven years lose their homes and investments to the highest bidder.

At the beginning of the proceedings, the county tax collector goes over the rules, reads the mandatory legalese required by state law, and utters the caution of “caveat emptor” to the packed room of bidders. Payment is immediate, in cash or negotiable paper, and there are no refunds, no exchanges. The room was so full, I had to stand out in the adjacent hallway, six people deep.

Some year very soon I may stop going altogether. It’s a lot of work to do the research, even on those few occasions when I can do some of the work online at home. Traveling from property to property across an entire county can be time-consuming and tiring — not to mention a bit confusing trying to find every unmarked piece of land. Worse yet is that the auctions have become a circus with every moron within 25 miles in attendance.

This isn’t rocket science, guys. But you gotta spend the time to do your homework.

Remember the guy in the striped shirt? The one who purchased lot number 16 for $10,200? The corresponding parcel number was 026-040-06-100, a lot just a few hundred yards from the gorgeous, near-pristine Lake Tahoe.

Sounds great!

Imagine his surprise when he found out that the piece of land he purchased for $10,200 was worthless — a one-foot by 20-something-foot strip of dirt worth a whopping $36. My guess was that he misread the assessor’s maps and assumed he was bidding on a neighboring parcel, one likely 6,000 to 10,000 square feet in size.

Oops.

Update (2012)

During a website revamp in late 2012, I re-researched this parcel to see if there had been any additional activity or transfers. I was surprised to find that the lot had been advertised in local newspapers as having gone back up for auction in both November 2004 and July 2012.

Since California Revenue and Taxation Code requires that the property be in default for a minimum of five years before the county is permitted to auction it off, and the legal filings indicated the same assessee name in both notices, it is almost certain that “striped shirt” realized his mistake prior to losing his striped shirt and backed out of paying the full $10,200 bid.

Fixing the Qttask.exe “No Disk” Error

Posted by Richard on

Every now and then when I am sitting at my Windows XP system, an annoying error message just pops up out of nowhere. The title bar is a seemingly random four-digit hexadecimal value followed by “qttask.exe – No Disk”. The text of the message says “There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive XX:.” At the bottom is the typical Cancel, Try Again, and Continue buttons.

The most annoying thing is that none of the button choices do anything to actual remove the error. The error message cycles back and forth showing an error message first for drive XX:, then for drive YY:, back and forth, over and over, at least 16 times.

Yes, that’s right — 16 times!!

That’s when I decided to do something about it.

But before I destroyed it, I had to find out more about it.

The qttask.exe program is a simple program that lets Apple’s QuickTime software (often bundled with iTunes) show up in the Windows taskbar. To me, the taskbar only needs to store the system’s volume control and be a place where I get a visual indication when I get mail. To hëll with everything else!

You’ll find solutions all over the ‘net that tell you (1) which registry entry to edit to stop qttask; (2) what option in the Control Panel to set; (3) to deselect the checkbox within the QuickTime software that says to display the control in the toolbar; (4) to remove and reinstall. None of that advice really matters or works. You think simply deselecting the checkbox will actually stop it from running in stealth mode?! Ha! Sooner or later, just like that bad apple MSN Messenger (that uses Microsoft’s own questionable sticky tactics), qttask will also eventually pop back.

The solution: Use the Task Manager to end the qttask process. Rename the qttask.exe file in your QuickTime directory to something else; you can even delete it as it is not used to play or view any QuickTime-associated data. Reboot. Simple!