Ordinary Nothing

Hello everybody (This being the one post nobody will probably read, as this blog is brand new, and I’m not linking out of this post, saying everybody might be a bit too much. But Hello nobody won’t be proper in case someone do come in, so there). I have now officially joined the (small but oh, so very loud) ranks of the blogging masses. Not quite sure what I think about it, but I suppose my overall attitude has to be positive, or I wouldn’t have done it. Makes sense. Question is if I do. So let’s go over some technical details. Individual archives for all posts. I really Hate Don’t like those multiple posts in one page. Makes it very hard to find something, or to link to something. Named anchors are a wonderful concept, but regularly seem to fail miserably on the real world. Comments would be open for all posts. Of course part of the reason is that I don’t expect much, so can leave the possibility open. Even was it otherwise, I would still try to leave comments open. If someone wants to… well… comment, then they should be able to. I do reserve the right, however, to change my mind at the future if for some inexplicable reason I find my posts pulling in comment spam or flame wars. Shouldn’t happen in the foreseeable future, though. No explicit spellchecking will be done on posts, unless I catch myself in some dreadfully embarrassing mistakes, or unless someone else complains. Meaning I won’t take the whole post and run it through a spellchecker. I would however not insert spelling mistakes on purpose. I would also try to read posts at least once before posting, so I have a decent chance of catching glaringly obvious errors. Or not. Although I probably will change my opinion on this one if I actually get readers. It’s just not worth the effort when only I read it. Feed will contain full text of posts. I don’t expect any serious bandwidth problems anytime soon… ;-) As for what I’ll be posting about… I don’t have any clear ideas except for the next few posts. Those however should not be taken as thematically representative, just as some things I want to get off my chest about now. I hope in time I’ll find myself either focusing better, or not focusing but not caring about it. Time will tell. That’s it for now.

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

Among my various email addresses, I also have an account at Yahoo!. Overall quite good as far as webmail interfaces go, nice mailbox size, and certainly more than worth every penny I pay for it (which is 0 for the free account, but still).
And they have this unbelievable customer support service. Literally. Had several past interactions with them in the past, and I still can’t believe it.
The latest and newest experience has been so amazing, that I figured I just have to share.

To start with, I had a problem. I sent myself a message, from my own Yahoo account, through Yahoo!’s web interface, to the selfsame yahoo address. Just emailed myself a URL to look at later, so the body contained nothing but the URL, and the subject was short.
The message arrived at my Bulk mail folder, and not to my inbox. Personally I believe messages I send to myself should not be spam, but in any case they clearly state that messages sent from someone at the address book will never be tagged as spam. Well, my Yahoo! mail address is IN my address book. So certainly there’s a problem there. When I entered the message, it even offered a link to the AB entry.

There isn’t a direct "email our tech support" link on the site. What they have is this help system containing a hierarchy of subjects and questions, with prepared answers and info about the system. Makes sense, and does contain all the basic explanations. No complaints from me here up to this point. If you want something beyond that, each item has at the end a Was this information enough? sort of question at the bottom, with Yes and No buttons. Press "NO", and you go to a page where you can fill a form with your question, which will be directed to customer support. Just what I wanted.

Ahem. Problem one. All these "No" buttons under subjects relating to spam send you to a form used to complain about a spam message that got to your inbox. Not quite relevant. Actually, if you go to the question of What do I do if I receive solicited mail in my bulk mail folder?, and answer Is this enough information? with "No", you’ll get to a page letting you report a spam message. Highly relevant indeed.

So I decided to get smart, and went to the AB section, to a topic with a text telling me that messages from people in my AB will not be directed to the Bulk folder. Right.
Pressed the nice "No" button, and reported the following (email address posted here is not the real one I used):

I’ve recently sent an email message to myself (ment as a short note), that arrived to the bulk mail folder.

The message was sent through the yahoo web interface, from this yahoo account I’m using (me@yahoo.com), to the exact same account, and selected by the autocomplete feature.

The address was of course correct, since the message did arrive.

The address is in the address book, and once I moved the message from the Bulk folder to the Inbox folder, it showed the rolodex icon.

Yet despite the sender being:
A. Me, same address as the recipient.
B. In my (the recipient) address book.
C. Obviously not spoofed since the mesasge was sent through the Yahoo web interface.
it was still directed to the Bulk folder.

Please check your spam detection method, since B is officially stated as a way to make sure messages won’t be tagged as spam, and it makes a lot of sense for A+B to serve a similar purpose.

Should be clear enough, I think. Enough info to get the main points. At least IMHO.
Well… Not quite. Got a lovely email in return, which I won’t entirely quote due to size limitation. The email consisted of several texts copied nearly verbatim from the help system (The same one that didn’t help me). Best parts were:

If you believe a message that has been delivered to your Bulk Mail Folder is more appropriately delivered to your Inbox, please open the message, and click the "Not spam" button.
By sending examples of "spam" and messages you feel are "not spam" to Yahoo! for review, it will  increase the effectiveness of SpamGuard, Yahoo! Mail’s filtering system. Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the SpamGuard technology.

If you demand even greater Spam prevention [...]

The rolodex icon appears next to messages that are from people in your Yahoo! Address Book. This feature allows you to quickly identify messages that you wish to receive. Messages from your contacts will always be delivered to your Inbox, unless you set up a filter to deliver it elsewhere. 

So I can send them my message for review, and let them or their system decide if they want to recognize myself, or a random link I send myself, as not spam.
And I got long explanation about how to get better spam protection, since let’s face it, my problam was exactly getting too much spam…. Or not.
And the best thing, I don’t really have this problem, since message from people in my AB will always be delivered to my inbox.

Seems that an automated process parsed my message, found words it liked, and sent the appropriate texts that I already said didn’t help me.
Cool. Can it get any better than that?
[Dramatic pause]
Sure it can. In the meantime, as a side note, message was signed by Clarence. Nice to know a person gave his name to this mild drivel.

Well, I’m not the one to be deterred by being ignored once. So on I go, pretending for the moment that maybe Clarence is actually a person, and can understand English, despite evidance to the contrary.

Thank you for automatically replying to me with standard stock texts without actually bothering to read what I asked about.

The text you quote here however is demonstratebly incorrect / false / erronous / etc…

A message from someone IN MY ADRESSESBOOK, next to which the rolodex icon DID SHOW, was delivered NOT to my inbox, but rather to the BULK folder.
This is in strict contrast to your statement that "Messages from your contacts will always be delivered
to your Inbox".
This is why I asked that you check the work of your filters.
It does not work as it should be.

I find the fact that the same contact (which is IN MY ADDRESSBOOK) is actually me, using the exact same Yahoo email address, to be more bothersome, but there’s nothing about that in your stock texts, so I won’t bother to comment on it again.

I do not need to send to your spam review messages sent by me, by someone in my addressbook. These should go to the inbox, regardless of content. Always.

Additionally, on a different matter, don’t quote these stock texts to people. The texts are already published on your help site. I read through the text before being able to get to the form used to sent this
message, and obviously it wasn’t relevant or helpful, so why give it back again?

Yes, yes, I’m a nice, kind and polite person. Always has been.
On my defence, as I already written, this is not exactly my first time trying to get something out of their customer support. The last times however were a "How can I…" and a "Can I…" questions, so I gave up once I got the answer is no.

Anyway, I got a reply right back.
Again, edited for highlights:

Filters automatically sort your incoming messages into the folders of your choice, according to rules that you set up. [... tons of info about setting up filters/rules, copied from the pages in help system, of course ...]

Yahoo! Mail automatically blocks unsolicited email (commonly known as "spam") from known bulk emailers. This service doesn’t guarantee that we can catch all unsolicited email, but we’ll sure try.

Are they trying to say the message got to my Bulk folder because I set a filter directing it there?
‘Cause I didn’t. I even double checked, just to be on the safe side (and avoid slander lawsuits).
Or are they saying I need to set a filter directing messages from myself to go to my Inbox, depsite myself being in the AB? Doesn’t make that much sense either.

And it’s really great at this point to know that maybe they believe the problem to be that my email address is a known bulk emailer. Yep, this must be it. What I should do is not complain that my message got to the Bulk folder, but that they let a bulk emailer use their services freely without terminating my account for breach of the terms of service… On second thought, this didn’t strike me as too sensible either.

So are we dealing with an automated system, or with outsourcing to persons that don’t speak English but can recognize key words and copy texts?
This new message, BTW, was signed by a different "person", called Lewis, so either they don’t believe in letting one person stay on an open issue, or I got higher up the hierarchy. Riiight.

Well, a close look at the message headers reveals at least two interesting things:

• Received: from seanymph.cc.kana.corp.yahoo.com (seanymph.cc.kana.corp.yahoo.com [207.126.228.30]) …
• X-Mailer: KANA Response 7.0.1.116

Aha!
Who or what is Kana, then? Well, a quick search found a Kana site, that seemed close enough to the spot to be it, and to stop looking for more. If there’s more than one Kana doing the same things, I think they should start suing each other for trademark infringement or something.

A long PR Flash animation on the homepage, letting you know how much they can save you by automating customer service and provide knowledge base management. Then there is the KANA email response management page. Which goes (bold is mine):

KANA email response management delivers the proven solution to the email crisis. An extensive array of tools automates the handling of high volume email, Web form and chat, helping contact centers significantly reduce manual handling and response times. Uniquely, KANA blends email management with customer self-service to simultaneously maximize contact center efficiency and deliver a consistent, integrated inquiry resolution experience that increases everyone’s satisfaction.

E-Mail Response Management Highlights

Automated E-mail Management — Productivity tools minimize costly manual handling, reduce agent workload and increase the consistency and accuracy of response.

    * Automatically route messages to work queues, priority queues and department queues.
    * Automatically respond to or acknowledge emails.
    * Set up email management by department to reflect each department’s specific processes.
    * Escalate complex inquires to contact center case status with the click of a button.
    * Run real-time reports and use service analytics to identify ways to improve contact center operations.

Self Service Integration — With links to solutions in the knowledgebase included in e-mail responses, customers can resolve inquiries on their own, increasing their satisfaction while reducing the need for costly agent assistance.

    * Include links to specific articles in auto-acknowledgements and auto-responses.
    * Automatically close and remove cases resolved through self-service.
    * Allow customers to escalate unresolved inquiries to agents with the click of a button.

Seems like what I was getting, alright. Except that I didn’t get the ability to escalate unresolved inquiries to agents with the click of a button anywhere. Darn. Nor did I feal much accuracy. Lot’s of automated responses and text from the knowledge base, though. Half-truths in advertising? Shocking. How could I completly and totally trust another PR text ever again?!

But there may be a way to progress. I just need to push in words that may trigger the system to realizing that the customer is not happy and the problem is not resolved. Assuming Yahoo! actually bought the get-this-to-a-real-person-eventually module. Not such an obvious assumption, I’ll grant you.
Time to get mean. I was too kind and polite so far. I have proof.

Dear automatic Kana bot,
Could you please, just so I’d know where I’m standing on this, either:
A. Pass this to a real live actual person who will actually read what my problem was and answer
relevantly about the subject.
B. Just tell me that no one will ever bother to actaully read my message so I should give up and stop trying to get an answer.

Simple, short, elegant, and contain words like Kana, Bot, real, live, person, relevantly, bother, tell me, no one. Something have to get a hit. Well, in a sense, something did…

We are concerned about this problem that you experienced. If you continue to have problems with this issue, we would like to investigate in further detail.

For us to look into the problem you have encountered, it will be necessary for Yahoo! staff to enter your account and conduct some tests.
Please reply to this message, giving Yahoo! permission to enter your Yahoo! Mail account and take those steps necessary to pinpoint the cause of this problem and explore possible solutions.

If the problem you’re reporting is with a specific message or messages, please let us know the exact name that appears in the "Sender" column, the exact "Subject" of the message, and the exact folder the message(s) is/are located in.

Signed by Herbert in case you were wondering.
Now, asking me to give them the exact sender name is pointless, since they got it on my first message from my account name and sender name on the emails I send them. Apart from that, maybe finally someone want to check the issue.
That’s good.

Them getting into my mailbox with my permission, not so good. Of course they are technically capable of doing this without asking me, but they shouldn’t. And the problem is general and not with my accout, so there’s no reason for them to do this.

What I can do in order to be nice, is to provide more details about what exactly causes the problem.
So I went testing.
Turns out that the problem happens whenever the body of an email message, sent from a Yahoo! mail account (yep, sending the same message to Yahoo from a Hotmail address, for example, gets the message to the Inbox.), in which the body consists of a URL to anything under GeoCities, will get the message to the bulk folder.
I go to compose a message from the web intefrace, put whatever I want on the subject line, then put on the body one line with "http://www.geocities.com/whatever/", in which whatever can be about anything, and there can be anything under it ("http://www.geocities.com/whatever/there/is/here.html"). And send it to myself, picking myself out of the AB.
Wham. Message goes to the Bulk folder.
Maybe Yahoo have something against GeoCities. It must be run by a competitor company that they really hate, and used exclusively to send spam messages. Right? Right?
Could have been a marvelous idea. Except for the minor fact that Yahoo! owns GeoCities, it’s a Yahoo! site. Has been for years.
Oh, heck, there are days when I hate myself. I suppose a web services company can hate itself as well. No laws against that, AFAIK.

So let’s just let them know. By now I must be flagged to get to a real person (Is Herbert for real?), but just in case let’s make sure that the automated system doesn’t tell them to go search in my account. Have to be carefull with something too automated to even be considered as bright as a dumb moron.

NO. The problem is general, and NOT just with my account, so there is NO justification for you to see any of my mail or enter my account.

To make it clear: You do not have my permission to enter my account.

I can however provide you with enough details to reproduce the problem on any other account you want:

1. Compose a new message from Yahoo web interface.
2. make sure the body contains only a link of the form http://www.geocities.com/whatever/
3. As far as I can see, you can replace "whatever" with anything, and add any subdirectories or html
pages after it inside the link.
4. Write anything you want on the "Subject" field.
5. Send the message to a Yahoo recipient.

That’s it. The message gets inside the bulk folder of the recipient, even if the sender is in the address book.

Why do you have anything that filters messages with a higher priority than checking the AB for approved
senders is beyond me.
Certainly I don’t know why the need to block anything pointing to a geocities site, considering the owner…

But that’s it.

In my case, I sent the message from myself to myself, using this account, so I suppose (after I wrote that a few times already) you can get the exact "Sender" name used, without asking me for it…

Can’t get any more obvious than that. Can’t. Crystal clear. They just HAVE to get it now. Right? Right? Please?

And I got a response. One I didn’t quite expect, though I suppose I should have.

You can move the message back to your Inbox by doing the following:
1. Log into your Yahoo! Mail Account
2. Go to your "Trash" folder by clicking on the "Trash" link
[...]
Also, when marking the message as spam you may have inadvertently chosen to block the sender’s address.  We recommend checking this option and removing the sender’s email address from the "Blocked Addresses" list to be able to receive email messages from that particular sender in future.
[...]
To remove ("unblock") an address or domain from the list, do the following:
[...]
We hope this information helps you complete your request. If not, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

Signed by non other then Russell himself. Yep, another brand new name.
And here I was expecting someone may read my problem, or pay a bit of attention. It felt so close… So close…

They did ask to let them know if by some unforeseen way they did not manage to quite help me complete my request. Would only be polite to let them know.

Hello,
Not only did this did not help, but it completly ignores my actual problem and the information I sent to you about it.

There. Take that.
I’m getting tired of this. Broken and beaten. Very close to letting the matter lie in quiet and stop bothering the tech support staff computers.

I did get a reply, though.

We appreciate you following up with us and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

Please note that, our intent is to send solicited emails (those bulk messages you have requested) to your Inbox; however, we may occasionally send these messages to your Bulk Mail folder.

If this occurs, you can click on the "Not Spam" button, located in every message.  By sending examples of spam to Yahoo! for review, it will increase the effectiveness of Spamguard, Yahoo! Mail’s filtering system.
Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the Spamguard technology.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused to you and appreciate your patience and understanding.

This time sent by Tony. Welcome to the growing Yahoo! Customer Support team, Tony. I wonder if the name are chosen at random, or if they have a list and are purposefully trying to pick a new name every time.

Again they managed to miss the actual problem and events, though they did get the very general gist of a message going to the Bulk folder erronously.

They apologized however, and are sorry that they can’t help me. Would have warmed my heart if an actual person sent it or meant it (You know, at least it means someone tried).

I think that at least with that I can pretend that it’s not me giving up, but them. I beat them. They can’t help me, and have admitted it. Hurray for me!
Eh… wait… I still have a problem that wasn’t solved, and nobody knows about it…

Sigh.

Heard a wonderful radio commercial recently. They were trying to sell a certain new book (surprising by itself, I don’t hear much book commercials on the radio), and to use one of the old tried and tested concept of telling you that the product must be good since so many people buy it. A One billion flies can’t be wrong! Eat s–t. sort of thing. And the more sweeping the demand for the product is, the better it must be, of course. So if it has a huge demand in even some tiny and remote off-the-charts places, the product just has to be really great. Stands to reason. Imagine my surprise then, between the lines about how amazing a book it is, fascinating, gripping, and so on and so forth, to hear, in a voice quivering with excitement, the equivalent of Over one million copies sold in the United States alone!. I mean, if the tiny population of the US managed to create enough demand to buy one whole million copies of the book, why, it must be a smashing success. Imagine how many copies they buy in the medium or even large countries. The numbers must be staggering.

Yet another interesting radio commercial. This time for a local bank. Started out interesting. They were talking about how complicated it is to do many banking operations, with lots of forms to fill, and things you need to remember to do. Creating a clear expectation to hear that they have done perhaps some serious workflow changes at their bank, making all your banking operations simpler and easier. Then they started to detail exactly what is it that has become simpler and hassle free:

1. When you transfer your account to them from another bank, they handle all the details for you. You need hardly do anything. Just sign for the transfer, and it’s done.

Yes. That’s it. Unlike other banks, it’s easy to transfer to them. Naturally they didn’t feel any need to tell you why is their bank any better at other banking services. Because usually what most bank customers do most of the time is transfer to another bank. Maybe they’re trying to go for the multitude of people that really hate their bank, but don’t particularly prefer any other one, so that if one saves them a hassle, it’ll be chosen…

I received an email message from Amazon UK, of the usual “Since you bought A you may like B” type. I looked at the prices, and something seemed a bit strange… The List Price clearly states £10.00, while the Our Price is a whooping £14.99. Followed by the statement You Save:, which obviously should be You Get Ripped Of:. Nearly took a screen shot and sent it to the appropriate places like NTK’s Doh, The Humanity! or BBSpot’s BBloopers. Instead I decided to check the website first. And lo and behold! the List Price is £19.99. Off I went back to the message, and checked the actual message text, and true enough, the price was £19.99. The message was sent as HTML, and contained it’s own formatting and font definitions. So in this lovely small font, the 9, after being covered by the strike-through style, looked exactly like a 0. Is this then not a bad mistake, since they didn’t in fact present a negative discount? Or is this even more of a mistake since customers thought they were getting a negative discount when the system was working properly? I tend towards the latter. Design should not hurt customer experience when everything else is fine, especially not when probably a lot of time and money where invested in selfsame design. Lesson: If you’re going to play with the way the text looks, make sure to check how the text actually looks.

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

I did some more checking about the problem with Yahoo! Mail’s spam filter, from the post in which I complained about the horrible customer support experience with Yahoo and Kana.

Since I can’t seem to actually get any info to them, I’ll try posting it here. The behaviour is very peculiar.

First of all, those messages get to the Bulk folder only when the sender and the recipient are the same. I made attempts with several different Yahoo mailboxes (real ones, of friends. Creating fake addresses just for this seemed a bit too much).
Messages of the problematical format sent between different addresses arrived to the Inbox (Again, this is where ALL senders are in the address book, so unless there are user filters, they have to go to the Inbox and not the Bulk folder).
Messages in the problematical format sent from an address to the same address, arrived in the Bulk folder, even when the address is inside the address book.
The only way this would make sense is if messages where the sender and the recipient are identical are somehow more suspicious. But people do send emails to themselves, and in all my tests the messages where sent from the Yahoo! Mail web interface, and I assume they can know that, which makes the likelihood of the address being spoofed rather low.

And what about the problematical format?

All I tested where text (i.e. non-HTML) messages.
Anything on the Subject field didn’t matter, only the message Body.

The problems occurred when the body of the message consisted of a URL.
Only URLs pointing to anywhere under the http://www.geocities.com/ address caused the problem. Links to any other domain I tried in any other format, went to the Inbox as they should. This includes both random real domains, bogus domains, and other Yahoo! domains.
For the GeoCities URL, the main domain alone ( http://www.geocities.com ) does not  cause the problem. But put anything at all under it, and it will. All of these went to the Bulk folder:

• http://www.geocities.com/whatever
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/page.html
• http://www.geocities.com/somepage.html

Also, if the URL started with http://geocities.com , there was no problem.

What about other things in the message body?
Putting even a single line of text after the URL resulted in the message getting safely to the Inbox. Putting just empty lines however resulted in the message being sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting a single line of text before the URL, with several different texts, still got the message sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting more than one line of text before the URL got it properly to the Inbox.

Strange… Very strange…

Anyway, I do hope someone from Yahoo! Mail will somehow notice this post. This is a problem, even though not a major one (Well, not major in the sense that not many people email themselves geocities links. Major in the sense that whatever is causing this problem may have other side effects, that may bite someone at a different time and context, and that that they have a system behaving differently than it should). It’s broken. They need to fix it.

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

This one is also to continue on my horrible customer support experience with Yahoo and Kana post.

The email messages’ exchange that occurred there had an amusing aspect, each message (and all seemed totally, or nearly so, machine generated) was signed with a different name of a "person" in the Yahoo! Customer Care department.

As a reminder, by order of appearance, we had:

1. Clarence
2. Lewis
3. Herbert
4. Russell
5. Tony

Out of curiosity, I decided to check my previous correspondences with Yahoo! Customer Care. Yes, I kept the messages.
This is from three separate issues, by order of appearance:

1. Frederick
2. Clarence
3. Herbert

1. Edward
2. Bridget

1. Message admitting to being automated
2. Betty
3. Henry

Each incident was on a different topic, and the first one was indeed on the same general subject matter as my latest issue.

So unless the system is designed to generate different fake names for different departments, and to make extra efforts to pretend some messages are automatic and some are human, we may actually be dealing with real live humans handling customer care.

This makes me very sad.
Having bots manage to so grossly misinterpret my problem is highly annoying, but not at all unexpected.
Having people manage to so grossly misinterpret what I write to them, and answer me by copying pre-made text clips, which are irrelevant, and which I already specified didn’t help, is very sad.
Kana and Yahoo can take real people, and make them do what an automated script can. That’s +1 brownie point for helping solve the unemployment problem, but it does not quite cover for the dumbing people down act.

Of course, the other option is that the people are not dumb, just don’t speak English. And they weren’t quite born with the names mentioned here. Maybe even aren’t called that way now and the machine assigns semi-random names to other real people.
Doesn’t make me feel much better, for some reason.

Being the most communicative guys there, you have anything to say Clarence or Herbert?

So Download.com are running a poll about switching to FireFox. And people seem surprised about the high percentage of people claiming to have already switched.

I use FireFox myself. That’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the poll is… well… not relevant. For pretty much the same reasons most online polls aren’t, but not just.

The result are already skewed by self selection of participants. Even assuming the crowd that goes to the site, download.com, is representative of the global Internet users population, not everyone will answer the poll.
And those that answer are not randomly distributed. Most users won’t answer the poll unless they give a damn about what it’s about.
Many FireFox users today probably do, or they wouldn’t be using it. Most IE users, on the other hand, may not really have a clue what FireFox is, or what it means to them, and so have no opinion. This means that even if the poll had a FireFox?! What’s that? option, which it doesn’t, they wouldn’t bother answering.
An interesting extra data item could be the number of page hits that didn’t access the poll. But that doesn’t mean much by itself as well, since it includes people that didn’t scroll down enough, and the like.
Not to mention repeat hits, automatic scripts, and all the nice other things that usually tend to come up when someone actually pretends to take a poll seriously

In addition to that, you have various blogs and sources sending people to take the poll, such as Spread FireFox. And in fact the large majority of them (I’d say all, but I don’t have the time for a really thorough check, and one may always crop up) are very FireFox friendly. I wager you won’t catch too many Stick with IE sites telling people they can go and vote to switch to FireFox only When heck freezes over.

Besides, they can check (well, try to. Changing the user agent string and the likes is far from impossible) what browser the users used. If someone already uses FireFox, they don’t really need to vote…
Well, if someone uses IE5 they probably don’t need to vote as well ;-)

And then of course, even if the result was both reliable and representative (instead of 0 out of 2), this specific poll is still pretty pointless. It doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t have a clear purpose.
It’s not asking what browser people are using, apart from one answer saying FireFox, and several others saying Not FireFox.
It’s not asking what features are wanted before switching to FireFox, apart from just one answer mentioning security testing (and yes, it is an issue. Of course more problems are found more frequently on IE, but Mozilla/FireFox do have their share. Am I more worried about watching a JPEG on my browser, or about watching a BMP on it? Though call…). Other reasons aren’t mentioned, so it doesn’t help any of the developers, any of the competitors, or anyone else trying to find trends..
I just can’t seem to find a good reason for the poll at all. The survey result teaches us nothing. No, wait, scrap that, it probably teaches us that CNet are about to cut some staff, since apparently they have some poll writers on the payroll with nothing to do on their hand. Interesting idea, running a poll instead of running a press release and being done with it…

And yes, I voted. What better way to see if the silly results are really like all the comments claimed?

Last night there were several terrorist attacks in Sinai, the major one practically demolishing the Hilton hotel in Taba. There were many dead and wounded. I’m not about to talk of the incident itself in here

What seems to me very odd are the complaints that Egypt delayed the rescue forces from Israel, and the accusations that more lives might have been save if the people and equipment were allowed to get there sooner.

Is this factually correct, and did the Egyptians delay the Israeli rescue efforts? I don’t know, but it seems quite plausible.
Is this a cause to attack them, blame them, or anything of the sort? Of course not! That’s totally absurd.

Sure, from the point of view of a common Israeli person, Israel is nice and honorable, and much better equipped, with more well trained rescue personal. So if there’s such an incident, involving Israelis, it seems elementary that Israel should send forces to the rescue.
And if the Egyptians don’t let us, and keep their less trained and hardly equipped personal dealing with it alone, then they must be doing so in purpose, and be guilty of whatever the delays cause.
But that’s hardly a point of view that Egypt would share. Israel and Egypt are officially at peace, but that hardly implies close friendship and trust. To expect the Egyptians to allow Israeli military personal to enter Sinai at all, that’s quite a lot as it is. If they indeed took four whole hours to do so, the amazing thing is that they agreed so quickly.

Probably, had the infrastructure in Taba better, and they could handle it with their own resources, they wouldn’t have at all. And that would have been… normal. What sovereign state would allow a neighboring country, with which it has a strenuous relationship at best, to send military forces inside its borders, without giving the matter some consideration?
Israel knows it’s only sending rescue forces, and has no intention to do anything else. Egypt can’t know that, only agree to assume that for the time being. That takes some faith. And time to realise that they’re really not equipped to handle the problem as well, and that they want to handle the problem (Not doing so would be a PR nightmare, even if someone assumes that they don’t care at all about the city or the people hurt. Personally I don’t think it’s a likely assumption, but sadly enough some people do)

Imagine a similar condition, where a hotel in Eilat is bombed, and a lot of Egyptian tourists are hurt. Now imagine that Egypt requests permission to send in military and rescue crews to assist…
I’d be shocked and amazed if Israel would say yes. I’d be shocked and amazed if the population of Israel wouldn’t be shocked and amazed in case the government said yes.
Letting Egypt insert forces and heavy equipment into a city in Israel seems like a preposterous and ridiculous idea. Why should letting Israel insert forces and heavy equipment to a city in Egypt seem so much saner?

I’m not so sure most people in Egypt realize that Israel is the good and peaceful guy, and that they are the bad guy with militant intentions that cannot be trusted. I’m sure once someone tells them, they’ll see it as clearly as we Israelis do. That should help sort matters out. I wonder why no one thought to tell them sooner… OK, that’s enough sarcasm…

The login page to Hotmail has, beside the required address and password fields, various links to other content from other MSN services. Usually written as supposedly catchy phrases some PR flunky came up with to draw click-throughs.
And when you put a commercial, even if it’s a commercial to yourself, on a page that lots of people go to, you usually try to get them right. I bet they use a spell checker all the time. Making a spelling error would look really bad, after all.
The problem with spell checkers is that they find misspelled words (Well, that’s also the point of spell checkers, true. Maybe the problem is that sometime people forget that this is all what a spell checker does). They do not find wrong words which are properly spelled.

For example suppose you had an article or, a bunch of articles, like Hotmail had today, talking about various real-estate issues. What sort of text would you use to link to it? Maybe if you work for MSN, you’d like to write something like (And I’m just guessing here) 10 must-know real estate terms. Possible, no? Especially if the page linked to at the time doesn’t mention anything about real estate terms but does offer content like 7 Ways to save for your… and 8 Tips for and so on.
Well, making such a link, talking about an actual service you don’t provide, but pointing to other content in the same general area, may not be something you or I would do. That would be a misleading advertisement of sort, perhaps. Decent companies don’t do that.
What decent companies, like Microsoft, would do, is create a link to
10 most-know real estate terms
Stands to reason, no? I mean, you’ve got various 10 most-wanted lists, so it makes sense to have a 10 most know list. Nothing strange there at all. Nobody who gets paid to write these things can be expected to notice that something is slightly off there, now can they?

And maybe it also means that nobody on their payroll bothers to read those links when if they log in to the Hotmail accounts? I saw the same link with the same text there for hours. They should perhaps take this like a focus group result, or usability review, and cancel the whole thing… Saves everyone time and money…

I’m apparently a very bad worker. I saw my work hours for the last month and it turns out I had one very unproductive day in which I managed to do -11 (yes, that’s minus eleven) hours of work.

I don’t get paid by the hour, but my boss likes to feel on top of things, and prefer that we’d sign in and out of the office each day. The results are not that accurate, since I do tend to forget and later on enter approximate times (not a biggie for either of us, since money is not directly involved), but they’re generally representative.
Then all the start and end times are typed by our company’s secretary manager’s assistant into an Excel sheet, which has pre-made formulas to calculate total work time. (And just to emphasize, I did not design the thing, or was involved in it’s making in any way whatsoever. It predates me)

So how does one get such a wonderfully effective workday as I did, you ask? Simple. When entering the data to the Excel page, the start hour (approx 11:00) was dutifully copied to the Excel page. The end hour was not (Or was, but was later accidentally deleted by someone, NM). Hmmm… An empty hour field… It needs a default value… How about 00:00 ? Yes! Great!
How are the working hours calculated? By the most basic and foolproof system possible.
WorkHours = EndTime - StartTime
So if I’d come in at 11:05 at left at 21:35, I’d have 10:30 total hours of work. And if I’d come in at 11:05, and left at… say… 00:00… I’d have -11:05 hours of work. Which of course tally up into the monthly work hours, those being logically enough a simple sum of the daily work hours.
Thank goodness I don’t get pay by the hour! that could have been around two uncompensated work days , or even a bit more (The day in which I got the negative hour count, and another 11 actual hours of work to even in out).

Naturally the spreadsheet page contained no sanity checks. What errors could possibly creep up on such a simple and straightforward calculation? It’s foolproof I tell you, foolproof! And designed by someone that forgot there’s always a bigger fool.
Not that it’s that simple, mind you. What would you suggest, setting the default leaving hour to 24:00 ? We rarely leave the office that late, so the costs may be incurred by the wrong side…
Oh, wait, it’s actually quite fortunate we rarely leave the office after midnight. I mean, that would legitimately and correctly place us doing things like coming in at 9:00 and leaving at 3:00, for a total net time of -6 hours for the day… Not that bad considering we could cover most of our losses the next day and even get some actual hours of work out of it…

Then it gets funnier (sadder?). See, the same ingeniously design spreadsheet also calculates overtime hours. (No, I don’t get paid by hours, so I certainly don’t get overtime hours. Is that a reason not to bother calculating them? You think?). The formula for that is also quite simple:
OverTime = WorkHours - 9.1
Yep, 9.1 was arbitrarily decided to be the daily work hours. Can’t see why I should mind either way, considering it doesn’t effect my pay in any way, so why not?
Now can someone guess what the total productivity for this day has been for me? Let’s see: -11 - 9.1 = -20.1
Wow! What a day, eh? I must really be something special.

Makes me so sorry I don’t come to work as late as 15:00. Now that have been really something. Not everyone can work less than minus 24 hours a day…

Another serious goof on the Hotmail / MSN site. They’re getting good at that lately
They are posting links to their own shopping site, with a nice Shop pink! (And raise breast cancer awareness) link. That’s good.
But on some pages, the area they reserve for their sidebar with the links is a bit smaller. OK, so it does not seem smaller, and has the same width, but the pictures may be larger resulting in smaller area of text per item. To solve that they have those wonderful automated scripts that just clip the end of long sentences and replace them with ellipses. Saves space. Problem is, if the object the sentence is right at the end, it might get a bit… lost.
So on the main login page, everything is fine, when seeing various other hotmail pages everything is fine. When sending a message however, that nice clipping thingy starts to work…

End result? MSN encourages everyone to help raise breast cancer

Hmmm… Should increase their sales of related products and medicines. But I’m not sure overall it’s such a good idea for everyone. Don’t do anything MSN tells you to without thinking about it first.

Better be aware of things before you start to raise them, that’s what I always say. Mabye if they heard that, and had exhibited a tad more awareness, they wouldn’t raise anyone’s hackles…

I practically always send email messages in English. Most of the people I know send email messages in English. From my side, it’s part a natural aversion (Out of habit? Too much programming and dealing with software?) to seeing non-Latin letters on a computer screen, and part the appalling lack of standards to do otherwise.
(That’s technical standards, as in how mail servers and mail readers handle things like Hebrew text. Some don’t, some badly, some very well only there are several different ways to do so and they don’t quite match. The end result is that usually reading an Hebrew email message requires some, or a lot of, work on the recipient’s end, and even then success is not entirely guaranteed.)

In any case, when I send someone here an email in English, they usually tend to reply in English, regardless of whether they prefer to use Hebrew or English themselves. And if they put in a word in Hebrew, it’s usually done in Latin characters, but quoted to indicate so. Not that for most words it’s possible to misunderstand.

Most…

I got a reply message today from a certain M, who is a friend of my very good friend V. (And M, in the highly unlikely chance that you’re reading this, just to make it absolutely clear, I am NOT making fun of you here, I am making fun of me here).
The reply was of course, like my original message, in English. All the way.
and ended with (names truncated to protect the guilty):

Thanks again and dash to V

M

At which point I’ve gotten a bit confused. Oh, alright, more than a bit. I tried to imagine what could she possibly mean by that…
The first thing that came to mind is that I was requested to send V an email with a dash (i.e. the “-” character) in it. Which made very little sense. I toyed for a few seconds with the idea of sending a message like

Hi, V!
M asked me to say - for her
Yours,
   Yaron

But decided I’d just get myself severely beaten (Is very violent, my V), and rightfully so. Scrap that idea.

The second thing was that I’m expected to drop everything and run to visit V. But while I do get to see V quite a lot on some weeks, being told to dash to her sounds very odd, and the writing style M used didn’t match. If I hadn’t spoked to V yesterday evening I might have thought something important had happened, and that I really need to go quickly. But I did, so I didn’t (Don’t you just love it when a sentence like that can actually make sense?).

Next idea was that maybe M just intended to say that she cut the message at that point since she is directly going to see V. That would be bad syntax, but not unheard of. The time frame was all wrong for that, though, as they didn’t meet last night or this morning.

At which point I’ve gotten totally stumped. Was this some clever paraphrase of the “dashed to pieces” idea? I like this usage idea enough to try and use a variation myself someday, but it would have been totally out of context here. So that’s very unlikely, and again not at all in M’s writing style up to that point.

Starting to consider replying to the message and asking (which is a big no-no, since I either admit to being an idiot that can’t understand a sentence, or imply that M is an idiot that can’t write one), the truth finally hit me.
dash wasn’t a word in English. It was in Hebrew. But it seemed natural enough to M to use it instead of an English equivalent, and to not bother quoting it.
There’s an acronym in Hebrew, pronounced like dash is, with the general meaning of sending one’s regards. The sentence could have been “Thanks again and my regards to V“, or something of the sort.
Writing in Hebrew there couldn’t have been a mistake. Acronyms are always marked as such (e.g. you would never write AFAIK, but rather AFAI”K). On a spoken conversation there also couldn’t have been a mistake, since the only other word which is pronounced the same makes even less sense than all the English versions above, unless maybe you’re an insanely focused tailor.

Problem solved.
I’m not at all certain if I should feel stupid or not. This usage is after all very common in Hebrew. And I usually do very well in spotting English words, phrases and idioms used during conversations in Hebrew… Noticing that the reverse doesn’t hold true in all cases is, well, troubling.

Oh, well. I’ll just avoid writing Native Speaker for any language in my future CVs… ;-)

I followed a link to a news story on some AsiaOne site.
At the side of the page there was a very large flash ad, published by AsiaOne, for… Google AdWords.

Oh, I admit they couldn’t replace it with an AdWords ad, since they want a specific ad on their own site, and that’s not what AdWords does.
Still, I find the whole concept of placing one ad in one medium, in order to publish another ad service using a different medium, to be very amusing.
I mean, OK, you can’t use AdWords to publish AdWords on your site, but you can at least place a text ad and not a flash one. You are after all trying to convince viewers that text ads work, no?

Needless to say, their website contain many other adds. All I saw were either by themselves, or by DoubleClick. Not an AdWord in sight on any page.
I wonder if it’s because they think it’s good enough for their viewers but not for them, or if it’s because Google didn’t want them…

This AdWord is in Hebrew. Since that doesn’t quite make it a world-wide seller, and the site I was seeing this on, The Register, did not have anything else relating to Hebrew or Israel on the page, I assume it means the ad was selected by IP geolocating and not just by matching words…

Regardless of this, As you might have noticed, it didn’t come out particularly readable (Yes, there are other characters in Hebrew beside “?“. Honestly). Not that I’m surprised or anything. But even when I tried to manually change the page encoding to various Hebrew and Unicode formats, the ad retained its original appearance (Well, I shouldn’t expect these changes to propagate like that, should I ?).
Which made me wonder why bother? Someone paid good money to place that ad. Newsflash : Unintelligible text doesn’t sell, fellas. No one will click on the link out of idle curiosity.

Yes, the text is there. Yes, it’s just an encoding problem. But I need to work and waste time in order to read it, and quite frankly ads are meant for people that don’t already feel strongly enough about you to waste time and effort.

Hmm… Maybe it looks alright under some defaults with some versions of IE? I hope it at least looked alright on the computer of the marketing guy (or gal, I don’t discriminate. Idiotism is a cross-gender issue) that wrote the ad and bought it. I wonder how tweaked their system was for this.

English can be read everywhere in every browser on every Internet connected computer (I’m ignoring whatever modifications China may require, of course). Even if you look for a targeted audience, do stick to English. I probably won’t click on your ad anyway, but at least it will be because I know it doesn’t interest me, not because I’m not curious enough to waste time finding out if it does…

The nice people at The Register (Well, it’s very hard to catch them actually being nice, but in this specific case either they are, or their sarcasm is much subtler than usual) have published an article covering a new social-networking thingy called Yelp!.
The idea behind Yelp! seems to be that it lets you ask your friends for recommendations about places. And (This is the social-networking part, I suppose) then for them to go on asking their friends for you. All with less work and hassle, at least according to Yelp!.
Let’s look at the workflow, by the nice how-it-works from Yelp!’s site. Step one:

Ask Your Friends
When you want to find good local businesses you ask the people you trust. Yelp! makes that easy.
To get started, just enter what you’re looking for, together with your friends’ email addresses.

Quite amazing so far. I only need to write what I’m looking for, and my friends’ email addresses. Let’s compare to the other option, sending an email (since “Friends” here are more “people that won’t be too bothered by a query” than actually friends. Otherwise I might have been tempted to use the phone).

If I want to ask my friends something by email, I’ll need to enter all their email addresses, or pick them from the address-book.
Through Yelp! it’s pretty much the same things, except I don’t see an address book. Maybe once you register you get one with all the addresses you previously used.
If I want to ask in my email about something, I have to laboriously write it down in free text, having to come up with all that grammar and syntax needed to make my question sensible. I can’t just write someone with a line like “restaurant Foo city can’t cook” and have them understand. I’ll need to make a whole paragraph like “Hi. Listen, you know I can’t cook, and I’m getting hungry. So I was wondering if perhaps you know of a good restaurant someplace in the city of Foo? Thanks a bundle. Oh, and if you don’t know of any, mind asking around for me?“. That’s work, work, work. Very difficult. (I can BTW. Cook, I mean. And very well too. This is just a theoretical example. OK?)
With Yelp! on the other hand, you just fill in three boxes on a form, one for what you’re looking for, one for the city, and one for extra info. Then they can spare you all that sentence-building. No reason for you to actually want or need anything more when asking a friend for a recommendation.
OK, onward to step two:

Friends Make Recommendations
Friends will receive your request by email. Then, they recommend a business using Yelp! (sign up is not required).
If they can’t help, they can forward your request to one of their friends.

My friends will receive the request by email, and can recommend a business. If they don’t have a clue, they can forward it onward.
Differences? If I send them an email, my friends have the burden of replying and writing a whole reply, and sending it back to me.
If on the other hand I use Yelp!, instead of the onerous task of pressing the reply button, they can easily click a Yelp! link. And put the reply there. Better yet, my dear friends could then fill in a form with all the required details in the proper fields, not being forced to do this whole free-text routine themselves. Heck, using Yelp! they don’t even have to register! (Oh, wait, same for replying to an email…)
Seems obvious I’ll get more replies if replying requires less work. All the hurdles of writing a line in an email is sure to discourage some people that would be perfectly happy to go to a website and fill up a proper form with fields and everything.
Stating they can reply to one of their friends is also quite wonderful. Prevents all that avalanche of chain letters I usually see when friends forward my questions to hundreds of people without any semblance of control… (OK, I’m probably just being petty here, I’m sure they didn’t really mean one. But I can’t be certain, can I?)
What’s next?

Return to Yelp!
When your friends respond, you get an email. Just return to Yelp! to see their recommendations.
Each recommendation includes contact details for the business, a map and your friend’s opinion.

If there are any replies, I get an email. Fine.
If I was just emailing my friends, this email would contain the address and details. And that would be that. Is it really fair to finish the fun so quickly? What will I do with the rest of my free time?!
Since I’m using Yelp!, however, there’s more for me to do. I can go to their website and see the reply, that my friend sent me, there. With whatever pretty colors they can put in their design, and not the dreary email text. Much better.
Ah, but I’m ignoring the really useful part. I’ll get:

• My friend’s opinion. What a novel idea to send me that. How did they think of that?
• Full contact details for the business. That’s good. If I want to call them and ask something I don’t need to open the phone book. And I get the exact business name instead of some sounds-like that my friend would have sent me from memory on the email.
• Map. So I know exactly what it is and how to get there, instead of opening one myself (or going to a mapping site and deciphering the location from the vague “one turn after the big tree” sort of things that my friend would have probably sent me on the email).

Just a slight problem with the last two items here. You might have noticed. The details have to come from someplace. Now, I won’t claim that there are only two options, but the number is limited:

1. The friend enters all the contact details, and exact address for their mapping service to find. This does spare me the work of finding these out. From my friend’s side, however, it forces him/her to do all the hard work. I’m getting a small favour, and require more instead of saying thanks.
2. Yelp! connect to external comprehensive maps and contact details providers. The friend use these and partial info to find the exact data. Potentially this can require less work from my friend. It’s still work that I’m the one who is supposed to be doing, since I’m the interested party. And I likely won’t need all the info, so it’s needless work. Incomplete date in their database for some possible businesses is of course not an option worth mentioning. Oops, I just did.

And that’s about it. Even Yelp! agree:

That’s It!
You’ve found what you were looking for. Best of all, recommendations are saved so you can share them with friends.
With Yelp! you’ll always be able to find the best local businesses.

Asking my friends about the best local businesses can sure help me find them. And yes, Yelp! is a way to do that. I’m not so sure about that always bit, and I’m not so sure Yelp! will help me more than plain old email or phone (IM too. I can ask my friends about local businesses on IM as well).
I’m also not so sure it won’t help me less, overall and all things considered.

Sharing is probably the main advantage, social-networking and all that, you know. They are not too detailed (read: doesn’t say anything last time I checked) on their website about the sharing part, and only slightly more about the questions forwarding part. So I’ll just go on assuming. They’re probably more imaginative than me over there, so I could be wrong, but then again I could be very wrong.
Suppose I ran a search about a business in a city. Suppose I even got an answer. Suppose the system even let me rank the answer (or answers) I get. Now a friend of mine runs the same search. Will it help him? Not likely, he may be using slightly different words, and that’s that. Just read their about page and you’ll see what I mean. Their CEO will run a search for cheap eats (at least you know they’re not spending money on salaries) and their CTO for high-end Mexican cuisine (or maybe they do, but on the IT people, as they should). If I were friends with them, this won’t help me at all, if for example I just want a “nice restaurant”.
And reliability is a major problem. Sure, friends won’t lie to me (Though the kind of “friends” that won’t find it strange I’m using some web service to talk to them instead of a phone or email, those might). But taste varies. A lot. Some questions I’ll ask certain friends just to know where to stay away from. On the first step, that’s not a problem, I just won’t list them. But on automatic searches to deeper levels of connections? The system can’t know who I trust and who is compatible with me on a new search.
Maybe it asks for any forwarding level. But in this case, it doesn’t help on networking. Choosing manually which people to forward a query to… is exactly what people would do if they got a regular email with the query.
One can only hope that even if it picks old recommendations automatically, it doesn’t automatically send queries to people. That could get very annoying very fast. Especially as you get further away from people you know.
And there is the privacy issue. Some people (myself included) don’t like their friends giving their name and address (email or other) to some company and websites. Doesn’t even matter if you agree, as long as you notice that some of your friends may. So you can’t use those friends when searching through Yelp! or they will send you back a scathing and not too helpful reply. They may know some good places too, though. So you have to send them an email. Well, while you’re sending emails anyway… You can just add some more names to the BCC line and be done with it.

Plus, I don’t like the name. Before today, if someone asked me to name five web sites that put an exclamation mark in their name, I would have very quickly answered “Yahoo!”. Then it would have taken me a lot longer to pick up another. And I probably would have broken down pretty quickly and picked “Yahoo! Mail” and the likes.
And now we have another highly self excited service, with an exclamation mark. And more, the name starts with a Y. Might be nice if they have a gigantic success. People may decide to shorten the name to Y!… Then the lawyers get it, and the fun really start.

Which reminds me, on an unrelated side note, some search engine really have to start indexing punctuation. I can’t run a search to find all places with a “!” character in the title!

This clinic, doing various eye surgeries for visual disturbances, have come up with a nice promotional material. They sent many ophthalmologists (Possibly other people as well, but I’ll stick to what I know) this small folded page to show clients/customers. On the outside a text instructs to Open the page, hold it in front of you with a stretched arm (about 40cm), and check your visual acuity. If you open the page, the inside have an almost standard visual acuity test page, with lines of text in decreasing sizes, each line marked by the visual acuity level matching the ability to see it clearly.
So far so good. You can look what is the smallest line you see clearly, and check if it’s the standard vision, or if you have a problem. And hopefully (from their POV), if you have a problem you’d notice their company logo and consider contacting them for treatment instead of buying glasses.
As a nice touch, it’s been the Jewish New Year recently, so the lines consist not of random numbers but of a text telling you to have a happy and successful (and so on and so forth) new year. Not good for a proper professional examination, but cute for this crude check.

If you go to an optometrist, or a doctor, to have your vision checked, you’d notice that there are two different checks. One is for distance vision, where you’ll usually sit in a chair a few meters from the test patterns you’ll need to try and read. The second is near vision, where you’d be given some card to hold in your hand at reading distance (about 20cm officially). The near vision of course you’ll only get if you’re over 40 years old, unless there’s a specific medical reason to consider a problem earlier. The important thing here is that there are two different systems, measuring two different problems. Well, not entirely separate of course, you’re using the same optical system after all. But the optical problems that glasses or laser surgeries address are commonly the result of different problems.
When looking to the distance (Infinity officially, but a couple of meters are close enough) you don’t focus your eyes, that is the lenses in the eyes are relaxed and stretched. The common optical problems are caused when light passing through the lens doesn’t focus on the retina, but either in front of it (Myopia - Nearsightedness. More common) or after it (Hypermetropia). This tend to change with age, since as you grow your eyes grow, resulting in light focusing in a larger distance from the front of the retina. That’s why usually glass numbers tend to grow, you need more correction to offset the distance. At about 24 years old, the body stops growing, and you no longer need to change your glasses.
Near vision, or reading, problems start at about the age of 40. In order to look at close objects the muscles around the lens need to push it. The closer the object, the more force needs to be applied in order to allow you to focus. With age the tissue of the lens becomes less flexible and it becomes harder to apply enough force. Then you need reading glasses to provide some of the optical correction. And unlike distance, using reading glasses increases the pace in which the problem grows, since the muscles become less exercised and weaken faster.
There are of course more problems, some also corrected by glasses, contact lenses, or these surgeries, but that’s not the issue here, so I won’t go into them.

Why the long explanations? To emphasize the point that checking near vision and checking distance vision are two different things.
And 40cm has a lot to do with near vision. Not entirely, that’s true, but enough. What you see from 40cm is not very relevant to your visual acuity for distance.
I tried to check myself with their test page. It was very interesting to see I get to 20/15. That’s wonderful! I didn’t see that well for more than 10 years… What an amazing improvement. Nowadays I’m actually more at the 20/20 or 20/30 range. Which is also good, but is normal good, not above normal good like 20/15 would be.

Which brings us to another alight problem with this test page, beside it being irrelevant and showing a clear lack of understanding about how visual acuity is checked (And I’m supposed to let these guys operate on my eyes after that?!). They had the Ft. scale and the 20/x scale. Would have been very nice for most Americans for example, that probably heard someplace you want to see 20/20. But around here the used system is 6/x mostly. Conversion is extremely trivial, but still it’s hard to believe someone around here would have come up with it. Which means they probably stole the idea from some American clinic doing the same thing…

These Y/X scales, if anyone wonders, are not at all complicated. The numbers say that what you see from Y meters an average person would see from X meters. So 20/20 means that you see from 20 meters what an average person would see from 20 meters. 20/40 would mean that what you see from 20 meters, an average person could see just as well from 40 meters. What matters is the ratio, so 20/20 is 6/6 is 5/5, and 20/40 is 6/12 is 5/10.
And these averages were measured a long while ago, and not extremely accurately. And they’re only averages, so seeing 6/7.5 (20/25) is perfectly fine and not reason to go buy glasses (or do some other things like this clinic sells).
Though IMNSHO the law here is a bit extreme, allowing people to drive if they see 6/12 in one eye. Putting a person with one blind eye (so having no stereoscopic vision, depth perception, at all), and another eye that needs to get to half the distance a normal person would in order to see a problem on the road, behind the wheel of a car, strikes me as not particularly safe. But maybe it’s just me, other people probably don’t need to see anything in order to drive safely.

Anyway, to get back on track, these people are using a scale which is rarely used in this country, and employ a meaningless method to do the check. And all that in a promotional material which is meant to attract customers who will pay them a lot of money to perform precise medical procedures on them.
I can’t see that happening.

I know that companies need, and like, to trademark things. But this is too much. Shouldn’t there be some law against trademarking phrases like “Happy Birthday” ?!
From the article:

The words “happy birthday” can no longer be legally used if the words are pinned to any other products, since a private Chinese company registered it as its trademark this month in 25 countries including the United States, Japan and European Union members

Totally absurd. Ridiculous. Insane. Preposterous. Ludicrous

Or at least that’s what I thought until I checked a bit. There is actually a rather large number of trademarks awarded for “Happy Birthday” according to a brief search in the USPTO. This specific one is only granted for

Goods and Services: IC 035. US 100 101 102. G & S: Retail store services featuring toys; chain of department stores services featuring a variety of goods
Mark Drawing Code: (5) WORDS, LETTERS, AND/OR NUMBERS IN STYLIZED FORM

[Update: I checked a bit more, and the same company also has one for "Toys for Animals". But then there are other ones, for other companies, on leather good, rings and bracelets, toilet water and perfumes, and so on.]
So there’s nothing too much to worry about. Unless of course you sell toys that come with Happy Birthday printed on them in stylized form during manufacturing.
I don’t. And it’s not listed in Israel as of now (unless of course our published government’s trademark list isn’t kept up to date… Naaa).

Not that I think it’s less silly, of course, but it’s not as bad as it could be.
So Mike, you can calm down a bit. And do more research next time, you usually do.

I took my car for the yearly test, required for the car license renewal.
The car isn’t actually mine, but is rather my father’s. He’s the official owner, and my mother is listed in the license as co-owner. I’m not. I just use it, fuel it, take it for repairs, and so on.
So after paying the exorbitant fee required for the new year’s license, I went to pass the car through the test.
To start with, I had to go to the admission counter, show the paid license, pay a bit more for the test, and get the form where the nice testers/mechanics list whatever is wrong during the test.
The nice lady at the counter looks at the new car license, and asks me for my ID / Driver’s-license. I show it to her, and she notices I’m not actually listed on the car license as the owner. To her credit she does notice the similarity in surnames.

“Is the car under your father’s name?“
“Yes”
“Have you brought his ID with you?“
“No”
“Did you perhaps bring your… mothers? ID?“
“No, I don’t have that either”
“You should have brought them, you know. You need the ID card of the car’s owner“
“I know, sorry. I didn’t bring it”
“<sigh> Oh, alright. I’ll accept it This time. But don’t come without their ID next time. Understand?“
“Sure. OK. Thanks”

That is, assuming that in one whole year:

1. I’ll still use the same old car
2. I’ll go to the same place to do the test in
3. She’ll still be working there
4. She’ll be the one sitting at the counter when I arrive
5. She’ll remember she told me all this one year, and thousand of clients, ago

Sure. That’s so going to happen. I just know it.

It took a lot of self control not to ask her what she needs the ID for, though. Had I remembered to bring it, I probably would have asked. But not being kicked away to come another day (or go someplace else) later, I decided not to push my luck by aggravating the lady. She probably couldn’t have given me a better answer than it’s the procedure anyway.
What is the owner’s ID good for? What should it symbolize? That I’m not taking someone else’s car, without their consent, paying the fee, and having it tested and licensed for another year?
I try to imagine someone stealing a car, and then going through the time and expense to do that… That would be some thief. Boggles the mind, actually. Seems like a totally ridiculous idea. So what can they be worried about?
The other option is that it’s done with the owner’s consent. Like in my case. Is there a problem with that? Do I need to bother carrying someone else’s ID back and forth, when it’s clear they’re in agreement?

I can’t come up with one problem that the requirement to present the owner’s ID would solve… And this time I don’t think it’s my lack of imagination…

A very good friend of mine has received wedding invitation from relatives living in Florida.
They seem to have spared little expenses. The place where the wedding will be held at is quite pricey. The events will go on for three days, with food and celebrations both on the day before and on the day after the actual wedding ceremony.
The invitation themselves were very elegantly printed on quality paper. And it was not just an invite. It also contained a larger note talking a bit about both families, and an RSVP note and (pre-stamped) envelope that can be used to confirm attendance and food preferance.
And of course the invitation itself, detailing the events of the three days (I changed the dates a I write here from the originals to the 12-14, to prevent the unlikely case that someone will make a connection. The actual selection I made is not entirely coincidental either <g>)
It talk about how on the 12th of November, the day before the ceremony, there will be a big lunch, and so on.
It states that on the 14th of November there will be a large celebratory breakfast.
And it mentiones that the ceremony itself will be held in the evening of the 13th of October.
…

Did you catch that? I did.
Unfortunately, before printing all those invitations, the happy couple didn’t.
Which naturally left my friend no alternative to returning the RSVP envelope with a note saying that they regret not being able to attend an event that took place before the invitation arrived (OK, so not, this friend have a much nicer sense of humor than I have. a pity).

I’d practically pay good money to see the look the happy couple had (will have? Surely someone must have told them by now?) on their faces when they found out… And no, I’m not being very mean. It’s terribly embarrassing, but not actually damaging. So it’s alright to enjoy it.
Those were really <chuckle> really very invested and expensive invitations…

The Bank of Israel has published a new press release (Hebrew only I’m afraid), announcing the completion of a project to backup it’s data systems in case of an emergency.
They built equivalent computer systems to their main site. On two different remote sites, one against their central computer, and a second against their networking and servers. I assume that the central server would be actual banking and monetary data, and the network servers are all the other documents, mail, files, and so on.

They talk about continuous data mirroring to the remote sites. So if they have continuous data mirroring, and identical/compatible computers at both ends, they probably mean they run Clustering.
Which is good. Properly arranged Clustering allows very rapid recovery in case something happens and a site goes down.
In this case, the rate of recovery seems to be 6 hours for the critical systems, and 3 days for the non-critical ones.
Hmmm… Is it just me, or is that way way way too much for this? If they just made remote backups of files and databases, I could understand the time it takes to install everything and get it online. But they have full high availability clustering. Or at least they should, since otherwise making “continuous data mirroring” to “equivalent computer arrays” (rough literal translation) is just a total and colossal waste of money, and bad design. Assuming of course that everything in the press release is accurate, and not phrased specifically to give wrong impressions.

Oh, well. So the recovery times suck. It’s not as if this is the central bank of the country, that all other banks depends on, and that is in charge of all the monetary policy of the country… Oh, wait, it is.

Well, that’s the way it is. Me bitching about it won’t help much. At least they did all the project remarkably fast. It only took them 10 months… To purchase and install computers and EMC data storage devices, network the sites, buy and install proper clustering/backup software. I can see how it would take a month. Two, this being the public sector. More than that? Working with two outside contractors, which should be able to work fast once they get the purchase order? I’m not impressed. At all.

The project is reported to have been finished on March 2004. After an “intense” 10 months efforts. What’s the hurry, you ask? Well, it seems that this is the result of lessons learned from September 11th 2001. Let me see, finished 3/2004, means it started in 5/2003. So getting “one of the most important lessons from…” took only… err… slightly more than a year and a half? Cool. Good to know we have some fast thinkers there.
That is, assuming it has anything to do with it. Which I’d suspect not. But since everyone in the US now blames everything they do on September 11th, they must have felt they can too. I mean, it obvious you need a good excuse in order to create backups of critical infrastructure. Nobody does it otherwise. That is, if you expect people to ask why you decided to do it all out of a sudden, instead of expecting people to ask why the heck didn’t you do it year and years ago? The technology has been available from a lot earlier. I know it was. I used some of it, and it was still the 199Xs then.

They also claim they ran an experiment, simulating a disaster, and switching to work on the remote systems. They don’t quite specify which systems, but the sense is that it wasn’t an all-out case. This sense being supported by the fact that the recovery times I stated here are not measured, but rather estimated based on “mapping all the systems in the Bank of Israel in an attempt to determine the time duration requires for their recovery in case of a disaster, and the scope of the data that needs to be restored”. So they don’t know how long it would really take. And apparently are not restoring everything, even after those 6 hours or 3 days. Good to know. That’s exactly what experiments are for, people. Run a full one, and get an actual and reliable idea about recovery! Do they even know that recovery works?!

Well, at least now I can sleep safe at night.

During the last few years it has become a well known fact that trans fats (aka trans fatty acids) are evil. Nowadays, out of the long list of things you really shouldn’t be eating, trans fats probably take first place. Shocking news to all the people who replaced butter with margarine because they thought it was healthier, but that’s scientific progress for you. (While we’re at it, I’ll also take the opportunity to comment that eggs are healthy as well, so long as you don’t eat more than about 3 per day)

Knowledge about the dangers of trans fats is so well spread, that almost everyone have heard by now. Including the owners of a certain large bakery here. Only they must have heard it in conversation, not writing, and didn’t quite make the effort to check what all the fuss is about.
The one important thing they did notice is that it’s considered bad, so customers must be told they don’t get trans fats in their foods, or they’ll stop buying, and the bakery will lose revenue.
Ergo, I recently saw this label on bread packaging:

This bread does not contain the fatty acid “Trans”

They got the name right. Only it’s not a name, but a type.
Not sure if this label is really reassuring. Since they don’t know what they’re talking about, how reliable is their claim that they don’t use it?
Can I be sure it’s not just that the owner asked the baker “Say, are you using any acid fats by “Trans” company?”, got a reply that “We’re not putting in any acids at all in our fat, just plain margarine”, and decided everything is alright then?

The story itself is a couple of months old, but since the issue has just now came to a conclusion, this would be a legitimate time to post about it. And I do expect, and hope, that this ends whatever I have to post about my car for the foreseeable future.

I was standing at a red traffic light. The car has automatic gear, and my foot was pressing the brake pedal. There were about 2 or 3 cars ahead of me. This was a four-lanes road, the single leftmost used to turn left, the other three to keep going straight, I was standing at the third from the right (that’s second from the left).
Several cars started to queue up behind me, standing.
Then I feel a light bump from the rear.
After muttering some choice profanities to myself, I pulled the handbrake, set the gear to Park, shut down the engine, and got out of the car too take a look at the idiot that crashed into me.
Which turned out to be a 50+ years old women in a blue minivan. She opens the door, come out, look at me and at the two cars, and starts with a “What the hell are you doing driving in reverse, you idiot?!“
Riiight. Somehow I kept my temper, and toldl the nice lady that I was not in reverse, but was rather standing, and she moved her car forward and bumped into me.
(I assume her car was automatic, she didn’t pay attention, took her foot of the brakes, and the car moved. If I had done the same, I would have of course not bumped backwards into her. And it’s quite impossible to switch gears to reverse by mistake.)
So the nice lady uttered a lovely skeptical “ha!”, stepped forward, and inspected both cars. My rear bumper was twisted in, her front bumper looked alright. Different materials, different ages. She looked at me and said “Well, this is of course old damage! right? Not from now! this was just a small touch!”
To which I reply that my rear bumper was in a perfectly good condition half an hour ago when I entered my car, so the damage is certainly from this crash. And I of course got as a reply an “We’ll see. I’ll have my insurance company check that. I won’t be having you fixing your old damages on my account”. Which is quite fair, and naturally to be expected. There are some unscrupulous people out there. Having the insurance company check the claim is fine, and I said so.

So I asked to see her license and insurance details, and offered mine. To which she replied that of course she’ll want my details, but since we are blocking a main road (The traffic light has changed to green, of course, and the ever civil and polite people around where violently blowing their horns) we should perhaps cross the intersection and stop at the side of the road.
Sensible, really. As long as you don’t pay attention to the fact that there are some unscrupulous people out there. Which to my chagrin I didn’t. I said fine, entered into my car, started it, crossed the intersection, moved to the side of the road, stopped, and watched the nice lady cruising past.
Not being entirely naive, however, I did try to memorize her car’s license plate before leaving. So I promptly wrote it down, uttering some more choice expletives, only having an uncertainty about one digit which might have been either a 6 or an 8.

I kept on driving home, planning to stop by the local police station to place a complaint. About 15-20 minutes afterward, a bit before a large traffic circle, I suddenly spot a familiar looking car. I take a look at the license plate, and it matches nicely. Except the plate is somewhat smudged, so I also cannot ascertain if it’s an 8 or a 6. I switch lanes, and manipulate myself directly to the left of the car. And who is sitting behind the wheel, if not a surprising lookalike of my nice lady, one hand on a cellular phone, and another hand holding a cigarette and the steering wheel at the same time?
I honked. She looked to the side and saw me. We both opened our car windows. She had the nerve to ask me what I wanted. I replied that I wanted her registration and insurance details, which she forgot to give me after our little incident earlier. And received as a response an “I haven’t a clue who you are and what you’re talking about. I never saw you before“. She didn’t look particularly convincing, though. But then the cars ahead of us started to move, and she sped away and turned. Not in the direction I was supposed to go.
I considered doing something idiotic like crashing into her, and just following her, but decided it isn’t worth the bother. I can be too civilized sometimes, I suppose. So I kept on driving back to my city, and into the small police station.

There was a cop manning the front desk, talking with a couple of non-cop friends (well, they were not in uniform, and on the reception side of the desk). I came over, and after waiting a minutes, getting bored, and clearing my throat loudly a few times, he asked me what I wanted. I started to tell the story, at which point he stopped me, handed me a large form, and told me to fill it up.
The form did not actually have enough lines for the whole story, but I tried to be as accurate as possible. I also made sure to specify both options for the license plate number, assuming the police actually have the resources to check. The rest of the form was full of fields asking for a lot of not really relevant info, so I left most empty. I went back to the cop and returned the form. He looked at it, and informed me that I need to feel in all the info. Fine, seems pointless but mostly I could.
Except for things like “Draw the area where the incident occurred exactly and accurately“. Sure. Almost 40 minutes after the event, from a rather large junction, given my amazing photographic memory (which unfortunately I don’t have) and cartographic skill (which I also don’t have). I did know the street names, and specified in the text the lane I was in and the name of both streets in the junction. The police and municipal authorities should be able to figure out where they put all the traffic lights at, even without my help. But not according to the friendly cop. So I had to take the form home, go over a map while poring at my memory, and make a nice drawing. Stupid. Since it was late, it also meant I only came back to submit the form a day later.
I did however also contacted my insurance agency, which also said they’ll try to locate the car and owner.

Pass a little time, and my insurance agency found their insurance agency. Which promptly replied that they are not willing to take responsibility and pay for the car repairs.
I got the phone number of the nice lady’s insurance agent, and called him on the phone.
He started by telling me that she is indeed a very nice lady, and that they are insured by him for years now without any problems. I failed to see how this touches on her crashing into me.
then proceeded to tell me that:

1. Her car didn’t touch my car
2. We only touched