1 I for one would be happy to pay for my hosting!  Not that it's a drop in the bucket next to server costs, but still.  

2 Thanks Pam.

I bought one of the software packages today - it went up another $20 overnight.   It's a suite of graphing/charting/mapping modules in Flash.  By buying one developer license I can put it into Minx and all of mu.nu and mee.nu can use it.  It cost me €450 for the unlimited license, but the alternative is for each user who wanted to set up maps or graphs paying €85 themselves, so it makes a lot of sense for me to spend the money once.

Should show up in the next version of Minx.

3 One saving grace is that now that mee.nu is officially a business venture (we have a company, mee.nu pty ltd, and I'm a director), all my expenses are tax-deductible.  Saves me a small fortune!

4 Well, if you won’t let us contribute to expenses, how about putting up a wish list?

5 Shipping.

Online stores in Australia suck.  And international shipping on small items can be 2-3x the price of the item.

1 Spore?

2 That's what I'd bet on.

3 I got it working.

Not a bad game.  But EA appears to have put together a separate team of developers just to fuck things up once a games is finished and ready to ship.

Spore has copy protection (you must have the original disk in the drive to play it, and the software that controls this is essentially a rootkit), an activation code (you can only activate it three times - now increased to five), and you must register for an online account.

If something goes wrong with your online account, you get a message saying that an unknown error has occured.  If you click on the help button, you get thrown out of the game, and sent to a web page that doesn't exist.

Way to create a good first impression, guys.

4 Unfortunately at this point you've rewarded them for bad behavior. You bought their game even though you knew something like this was possible, even likely. Complaining about it now is futile. They have your money, and they aren't going to give it back. With the exception of MMOs, I haven't bought a PC game in (checking wikipedia...) 2 1/2 years (Oblivion) because of exactly this sort of problem. But I probably shouldn't really get started on this, or I'll tear out a Shamus-worthy rant on the subject, and if I'm going to do that, I really ought to get my own site for it.