Ordinary Nothing

As of today it’s mandatory to turn on car headlights during the daytime. The days didn’t become any more cloudy, and visibility isn’t actually reduced, but then again it’s been a long time since I expected these sort of laws to make sense.
It was interesting, when driving to work this morning, to see how many people didn’t hear. A somewhat larger percentage of cars than I expected did not turn on their lights.

Not that enforcement is too serious just yet. I also saw two police cars on the way. One was MP, and their lights were on. The other was Traffic Police. Anyone wants to hazard a guess? That’s right, no headlights.
Which legally doesn’t stop them from stopping anyone else on this, naturally. But still amusing to notice.

Oh, well, it’s also been a long time since I expected our traffic cops to lead by example…

Fine, another traffic cops story to justify this derogatory claim.

An acquaintance of mine was driving along a straight out-of-city road at an extremely high speed. Much faster than allowed by law. Frankly, much faster than was safe. I usually file these things as Evolution in Action, but he survived the experience well enough to tell me about it later.
In any case, during this wild drive, a traffic police car gets behind him, turns on the flashing lights and sirens, and starts to blink with the headlights. Quite naturally he made the assumption that they wanted him to pull over to the side of the road and write him a ticket. So he switched lanes, slowed down, and started to mentally prepare for a hefty fine… Only to see the police car turn off the lights and siren, and speed along into the sunset (literally, I think, but it works either way ;-) ).
You see, they didn’t want him to stop and get a ticket for driving too fast. They wanted him to get out of the way since he was slowing them down.
Also not surprisingly, the guy did not see the error of his ways, and did not alter his usual driving speeds downwards. Why should he with that example?

Not of course that they’re all like that. I suppose most traffic cops take their jobs seriously, and pay attention to the rules. But you only ever hear about that ones that don’t, since those are the interesting case. Nobody would much care to hear about, or bother to notice themselves, a police car driving at normal speed, stopping at red lights, signaling before switching lanes, and so on.
But still…

There’s a lot of merriment, and many a chuckle, about the very unhelpful assessment presented by the Israeli chief of Military Intelligence (BTW, as a totally unrelated side note, but from personal experience, it is an oxymoron usually) about the health of Yasser Arafat.

Like this article:

Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, did little to clear things up. He told a Cabinet meeting Sunday that Arafat’s “situation is between full recovery and death,” said an Israeli official who briefed reporters on the meeting.

Or this one:

“According to our intelligence assessment, Arafat’s chances of recovery range between full recovery and death. All options are open, General Aaaron Zeevi said in a Sunday briefing on the ailing Palestinian leader’s health.
His comments were greeted on Monday with derisory headlines, with the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper declaring: “They haven’t a clue”.
“With all due respect, we don’t need an IDF (army) intelligence branch director for that,” one unnamed minister said after the meeting.

But here’s the thing. It’s not as silly as it sounds. I mean, of course it’s not very informative. And of course you don’t need a full fledged intelligence branch to get this answer. But so what?
That’s the answer he had to give. I’m certain he didn’t volunteer the info of his own accord. He didn’t came over saying “Listen ye’all, we have just gotten some new and very important news!” and then went on with that statement.
Rather, he was specifically asked to give an assessment about the chances of recovery. Not being able to provide any exact assessment, but being forced to provide some answer, he said what he could. He could have said “We don’t know”, or he could have stated that all the options are possible. He chose the latter. It’s not that bad. A tad ass-covering I-did-provide-for-all-the-possibilities one, but a legitimate answer all the same.

Making that statement was not a problem.

Was not having a good assessment a problem? Maybe, but maybe not. There are actually several options here.

The first, and the obvious one, is that he didn’t know. If he didn’t, and was supposed to, then it’s a problem. But was he supposed to? Was it so expected that he, that our intelligence branch, know this, that not knowing it is a reason for ridicule?
Consider that the amount of people who had actual certain knowledge about the exact condition of Arafat was extremely small, if at all. It’s possible even the doctors didn’t know. Even if they did, the list was then limited to a very small percentage of the hospital personal. And possibly a few high ranking Palestinian officials who were notified. Not a lot of people, and not a lot of places to get the info. It’s not rational to expect an intelligence service to be able to very quickly gain that information. So if they didn’t, that’s nothing to deride them about.
Then there is the other option. That he did know. Assume the Israeli intelligence branch has managed to get exact details about the condition of Arafat. Details which are known to very few people, are written in very few places, and were transmitted on very few channels. Should he actually admit that?

When you get right down to classification of information, there are two things which are really secret, all the rest is people having fun playing cloak and dagger games. The important things are Capabilities and Sources.
You don’t expose a source, because if someone notices, you’ll lose it.
You don’t expose a capability (where applicable, obviously this is not usually a HumInt issue, but quite a serious SigInt one), because then you’ll lose all sources that rely on the capability.
If he provided the information, then it would have been easy to deduce we obtained it (genius level reasoning, surely). If we obtained it, we obtained it from someplace. And there was a very small number of places to get it from. Ergo, providing the detail would have nearly certainly burnt a source (An agent in the hospital? Someone high up on the Palestinian hierarchy? A microphone at a strategic office?) or exposed a capability (Tapping to the phone lines / satellite channel / whatever it was the information was relayed from the hospital on). You don’t do that. He didn’t.
And the beauty is that no one can be sure he’s actually protecting anything, since it’s even more possible he really didn’t know.

Claims that he shouldn’t have secrets from government and ministers are of course silly. You can see how what he reported did come out nice-’n-quick to the media, right? There’s no reason whatsoever to assume that exact information would have been kept secret.

So either he didn’t know, in which case the response was honest and legitimate, or he did know, in which case the response was necessary and legitimate.
I don’t see the problem here.

Unless someone just takes for granted that Israeli intelligence branch is so good, that we have to know everything anyway without anyone having a chance of finding out why. If you accept that premise, then indeed there was no point to keep a secret, so he really didn’t know, and no tknowing it’s so unlikely that it surely indicates someone have majorly screwed up… Personally, I can assure everyone that we are not that good. Nobody is.

So there.

I was driving quietly in my car with the radio on to provide background music. The channel I was listening to switched to commercials, so I switched channels.
And dropped right into this incredible conversation bit.

Mind you, this is much more amusing when you consider that the discussion was in Hebrew, except for the words I’ll italic (can I use this as a verb? Italic something? Never mind) which were in English.
Putting English words into Hebrew speech during an interview will usually be done either when referring to a technical/professional term, or when wanting to preserve some exact nuances which are not there in the Hebrew equivalent. I suppose it’s the same in most cases of inserting any individual words from a foreign language (those which are not so mainstreamed they’re practically co-opted into the base language).
This mean that I’d expect the words to be used in a most exact and clear manner, right? Well, not this time.

Also worth mentioning is that the interviewee is PolSci Professor Avraham Ben-Zvi, who (among other things) published a myriad of works regarding American policy in the middle east and Israel-America relations. The quote starts in the middle of his sentence, just when I tuned in:

“… must also pay attention to the undercurrents and to the subtext of the issue.”
“Just to be certain I understand this, by subtext you mean John Kerry, right?”
“Exactly. He has a lot of support in…”

I’m very grateful I was standing waiting for a traffic light to change. If I were actually driving the results might have been disastrous.
Nice to know a possible candidate for the presidency of the US is best described as subtext…

[update: Also sent the story to Stupid Security, considering that this blog have a very small amount of readers so far... In addition, there's a slight followup with my boss]

My building at work has a burglar alarm system. The alarm is controlled by a keypad, and when the office doors are opened (when the alarm was set and is working) a numerical code has to be entered in order to prevent it from going off.
So far so good, pretty ordinary and pretty much like what I have at home.

Another part of the burglar alarm service I have at home is that if the alarm goes off, but the code is entered to shut it down a few second afterward, we get a phone call by someone at the service to verify that it’s really us, and that we were just slightly delayed or mistyped the number by accident. In order to make sure it’s really us we are asked to provide a secret code word that we supplied the service in advance, and which no one else knows.
That’s also normal. As long as we keep this code word secret, and it’s not something easily guessable, we can trigger the alarm by mistake without causing too much havoc.

The service at the office is somewhat similar, but there’s another feature that my boss decided to use. They also call in case the doors are opened and the alarm is turned off properly using the numerical code, if the time is suspect. The idea is that while it’s expected for someone to turn off the alarm in the morning of a workday, and set it at night, it’s not normal to turn it off at night or during the weekend, so they should make sure it’s not a burglar that waited until the office is empty.
Makes sense. The burglar is not supposed to know the numerical code, but the keypad is probably not too sophisticated, so this makes it complicated to just bypass it or hack it in some way.

The problem is that this service apparently does not quite get the idea of a secret code. A few months ago I left the office last, set the alarm, locked the doors, and then remembered that I forgot something in the office. I went back, opened the door, entered the alarm code, took whatever it was I forgot, and as I was ready to go out again, the phone rang.
A lady on the line identified herself as calling from the security company, and asked for the secret code. I was not aware of any secret code, and told her that. I then added that if she can wait a moment I’ll get my boss on his cellular and ask him.
To which she replied that it’s alright, the code is his cellular phone number, so I can just give her that. I gave her the number, and that was that. Seemed very silly, since it’s basically security by obscurity (You need to know that the code is the number). And security by obscurity as a rule doesn’t work. In the time it took me to search for his cellular phone number, anyone else could have found it either. There are various business cards, and papers with company stationary, in the office.
I assumed, however, that I was only told that I need to provide the number since I already said I knew it.

Until today. I left the office, and then noticed I forgot my cellular phone inside. So I got back, opened the building, and turned off the alarm. About a minute and a half later the phone rang. The delay itself was a problem, since if I didn’t expect the call, I could have easily picked my cell and lock everything out again before they called, causing them to believe there was an illegal entry. But I waited for the phone this time, so this was not a problem.
There was another problem, though. The girl on the phone asked for the code. I mumbled something like "sure… give me a sec…" and searched my phone book. She apparently understood that I wasn’t sure what the password is, and decided to be helpful. She told me I need to give the phone number of my boss (By his name, of course, not by saying he’s my boss). And this time I didn’t give any previous indication I knew it, or him. I could have just been stalling, or panicking, or whatever.
Naturally, after being told that I need the number, there was no problem to find it in the office. Not for me, but also not for anyone else

So we have a secret code which is a phone number easily found on the premise. The only hindrance to finding it is protection by obscurity, namely that one needs to know that the code is this phone number. But the nice and helpful people from the security service tell the unknown person answering them that it is so, thereby removing any last bit of obscurity. (which is also why I feel comfortable stating it here. It’s not a secret apparently).

I don’t quite get how is this supposed to do anything beside rendering the alarm moot… Surely that can’t be the desired effect, right? Unless they use this as a way to avoid work, knowing they can claim the person answering knew the code so it’s not their fault… Hmm…

Update: I’ve spoken with my boss about this, telling him how bad the whole cellphone number as code idea is. He was surprised. It turns out that actually there is a secret code word. Which is not the phone number. The security company apparently decided the phone is good enough without agreeing on it with him, or letting him know. I expect there will be some very loud phone calls between him and them ;-)

I’ve recently made another order of several CDs from CD Baby.

This latest order arrived with a few problems: one of the CDs was missing¹, and two were cracked.
The missing CD was clearly their fault, so I wouldn’t have expected problems from anyone. But in this case they also made no problem at all about sending replacements for the cracked CDs.
They didn’t demand that I’ll mail them the defective CDs back. They didn’t say it was a problem in shipment, or my own fault for asking the CDs without the plastic jewel-box. They just emailed back that they’re sorry, and shipped a new package straight off.

This is the proper way to do it.
I can get the stores that demand returning the original, they’re probably worried about fraud. But from the consumer POV it would create a very bad experience, and anyone demanding I’ll ship something back internationally would have probably lost a customer, especially considering it’s not a repeated occurrence.

While I’m at it, some other (good) things about CD Baby:

1. They have a very wide selection of artists, some extremely good, and all from RIAA-free independent labels (So if you care, there’s no need to go check the RIAA Radar before purchasing).
2. The you-may-also-like recommendations made overall much more sense than what I’m used to in other places like Amazon. I’m not sure why, since I suppose both are based on purchase statistics and recommendation of real people, but that’s the way it is.
3. For returning customers, they send an extra surprise CD in each shipment. From my experience (In the cases where it wasn’t a collection, of course) the match for my taste wasn’t perfect, but still good. And they might have done better if I’d bought in smaller batches, since the obvious matches they had - I already saw and bought.
4. They are willing to send CDs without the plastic boxes. This both reduces the original shipment charges (less weight/volume), and drastically reduces the chances that someone in border customs will open the package (it being small. You can fit about 10 CDs in the volume of one plastic CD box)). Of course it can result in cases where rough handling will damage the CDs, but this is the only case it happened to me so far, over several purchases. And I’m still not sure this is why these CDs were cracked, considering the cracked ones were inside the package surrounded by perfectly whole CDs.
5. Samples for audio tracks are usually available for most tracks, are long, and are in MP3.

Certainly, unless I want a specific artist which they don’t sell, they remain my preferred audio CDs store.

¹ For which I noticed they have a sort of an excuse. The band changed the name, and reissued the CD with a new cover and track order. Possibly there was someone that didn’t find the requested CD, and another person that knew there is no problem and they have it in stock…

Driving to work today, stopping at a traffic light, I looked a bit at the cars around…
Directly on my left there was a car with a 50+ years old driver, with tattoos on his arms and back, lots of body hair, a major pot belly, serious lack of muscles, and a more serious lack of shirt.

If I were going to the beach, I’d expect to see these things. But on the road ?! On a highway ?! Not something I ever saw or expect to. I guess there really is a first time for everything.

I only hope the only thing he was missing was a shirt (and a diet, and some physical workout, but that’s beside the point). I couldn’t, and did not try to, see more.

It’s somewhat old news, but I only recently went over the two latest issues of World Wide Words, and saw this lovely bit. I probably wouldn’t have picked on this one if it didn’t involve the Marines, but having a friend who’s a JAG addict, and so turning from a sporadic to a regular viewer myself, I tend to pick on anything amusing involving the US Navy or Marines…

This is an official Marine Corps release announcing a training mission on Wake Island.
And there are several problems with it…

According to the Marines, Wake island is uninhibited. Although maybe they got confused and meant uninhabited. Could be. If you want to run training with missiles and explosives, and choose a small island with nothing much but and old and abandoned military base, it makes sense. Except that the island have about 200 residents¹, civilian contractors for the US military. That doesn’t quite fit the definition of uninhabited. I’m sure if during training a Stinger missile kills some of these people, a claim of "They weren’t there. The island is uninhabited." won’t convince anyone…
But then again, they couldn’t have meant uninhibited as well. It’s not as if the people there run around naked and have wild orgies all day, or whatever. It’s not even some indigenous tribe. They’re Americans brought there by the USAF years ago. And have reportedly not descended into barbarism…

And if this poor choice of words isn’t bad enough, according to one Maj. Tracy L. Peacock “The importance of this training cannot be understated”. Which should make about anyone wonder why bother, no?

Maybe the Marines should supply their forces a few less Stingers and a few more dictionaries. At least to those who are expected to interact with the media…

¹. Which is agreed upon not only by those residents, but also by the official CIA world factbook, and the Wikipedia entry. Which I only bother mentioning because, well, if you’re the sort of person who really doesn’t trust governments, but do trust "the people", don’t bother, as the relevant part from Wikipedia seems directly copied from the CIA. Or at least I assume it’s not the other way around ;-)

I was looking at my referrer logs (currently not yet a time consuming task, if anyone wonders), and saw that someone decided to ask Jeeves how to "stop customers switching from margarine to butter".

I guess the reference was due to this entry re trans fats (although as usually happens they got to the home page, much after the relevant post was no longer there).

Margarine is bad and unhealthy. It’s to be expected that customer who switched to it from butter, mistakenly believing it’s the healthier alternative, will go back to the better tasting (and healthier) original. And yet there are those who want them to stay… I assume margarine sellers, since apart from greed there’s really no reason for anyone to so…
If this was before the US elections, it would have been worth checking whether the margarine industry supports Bush or Kerry…

Unless… Hmmm… There is another option for people who will want to keep everyone on the health-hazard alternative… Terrorists!
This must be it! I’m not sure if it should fall under bio-terrorism or under usage of chemical weapons. Maybe both.
Osama must be eating fresh butter, and laughing gleefully of all the westerns killing themselves with their margarine.
Listen customers! Switch from margarine to butter, or the terrorists win!

What a truly appalling idea. Sending ads to people’s cellphones when they come near a store, and charging a fee if the person (or at least their phone) enters the store.

Personally, receiving ads on my cellular phone would actually strongly discourage me from buying anything from the ad sponsor. I might, however, go in and out of the store repeatedly, just to make them pay (pun intended).

More than that, this idea has some serious technical problems which I don’t quite see as solvable.

If people receive the ad when they come close to a store, then any person intending in advance to shop there will receive it too. And when they get into the store, the store must then pay for a supposed ad-induced entry… Unlike a web click-through, there’s no good way to separate people that entered because of the ad from people that entered regardless (or despite) of it.

Just brilliant.

The comparison to web advertising would be more like placing an ad at the home page of a site, promoting that selfsame site, and having the owners pay for every viewer of the ad.
Or more realistically (if I must), it’s like tracking who saw an ad, and making a site owner pay when they go there, even if not by a click. Hey, since large ad provider actually track ad viewing today, they could implement it right now. Whenever you see an ad, they can check their cookie to see if you saw a previous ad for the site you’re browsing now. And if so, make the site owner pay. It’s the exact same model. Yet somehow I don’t see people paying for it… So why should it work better with brick-and-mortar?
Paying for anyone who shopped at your place, and who have also seen an ad, is not a good idea. The connection is too tenuous.

Not to mention, since some people are like me in the great love for being spammed with ads on their phone, would the ad service also offer a refund for people getting the ad and not going into the store? After all, the ad sponsor could claim that it was a potential customer who was lost due to the ad… The connection between seeing the ad and not going in, and seeing the ad and going in, is of about the same strength. If you accept one, you should accept the other, no?
Hmmm… This actually could catch up on the web. Anyone buying ads would love to get paid for ads that people saw without ever going into their site afterward. If an ad provider offered this, I’d consider buying ads from them myself…

Either Ask Jeeves have some bored new employees, or they officially have some serious concerns about they way people see them (Nice, but not too good in relevancy) and believe that their blog indexing abilities are somewhat lacking.

During the last day this not particularly popular blog of mine has gotten two hits from the ask.com domain. Both from a Bloglines subscriber running a search (a subscribed, repeated search. Not a one time search) there (and not in Ask Jeeves). Says something about how well they believe they index blogs.

One search was for "Ask Jeeves" and one for "Jeeves".
Since I have one entry (Hey, that’s two now) that mentioned Ask Jeeves, it was shown in both their search results. And despite it being very obviously not relevant (but then again, we did say that Jeeves had a relevancy problems with searches, no? Maybe it starts with the real humans and propagate to the engine from there?) they clicked through to read the full post.
And yes, the excerpt is enough to ascertain that the post does not talk about the search engine, but only mentioned in passing that it’s about the question that got into my referrer log.

Is this a good thing, that they show an interest about what people think about them? Or is that an indication that there are problems over there and they’re desperate for something to help?
And what should it mean that the team of a large search engine uses a different search engine to constantly monitor themselves? Is it OK since they don’t index blogs purposefully? Is it an indication that they just now decided blogs are important and are in fact working on it?

Or was it all just a bored employee that wants to know what people think about their company, and picked what they thought to be the best tool for the job? Still says something…

I find it amusing, in any case. Maybe Jeeves won’t.
At least this post is somewhat relevant, if they get here.

The governor of Sicily is to stand trial for assisting the Mafia.
Although quite naturally he denies the charges:

"In the trial we will show that Cuffaro is not involved with assisting the Mafia", defence lawyer Claudio Gallina Montana was quoted as saying by the Apcom news agency

Clearly, innocent until proven guilty, and so on and so forth. And I assume proving connections to the Mafia can prove a bit… err… difficult.

Well, a TV crew for an Italian news program recorded him on his way to the trial. When out of the blue a nicely dressed person appears, notices him walking, comes over hurriedly, makes a very polite and deep bow of obeisance, and kiss his hand. All this while the governor tries to shoo him away, since he is aware he is being filmed.

Anyone who have seen any Mafia movie would have recognized something quite similar to a proper show of respect to a Mafia Don.

So did the Italian reporters, who supposedly don’t have to rely on American movies. They tried to speculate about the other reasons that there surely must be to explain the behaviour of the passerby. Because, noooo, surely the governor cannot be a Don, or involved in the Mafia. No way.
They would have sounded almost convincing if the overtones of sarcasm were not so obvious…

All in all, Italian TV news are surely fun for the whole family.

Like almost anyone with an email address these days, I’m quite used to getting the general Nigerians needing help to smuggle money, or offers to enlarge my… err… mortgage. These are all non targeted. The senders got the email address from someplace or tried it randomly.

Today I got a new message, offering me to help promote my website. They had the real website address on the subject line and message body. It was even a website I know. Only it wasn’t mine.

Sans images and other HTML bits:

Hi,

I visited http://stupidsecurity.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I would like to introduce to you an affordable service where we can help enhance your online presence globally.

Search engine submission is an integral part of the success of your web site. Building a web presence means more than just having the right keywords. We offer a star solution that will produce guaranteed results. Our unique search engine positioning technology helps submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

It takes only minutes to sign up for our service. We’ll do the rest! You’ll be surprised how simple it is to now reach out to an international market and increase the visibility of your website.

Do let me know how I may assist you better with workmiracle.com!

Best Regards,
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Sales and Marketing
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Not interested in our www.workmiracle.com service? To be taken off our mailing list, please follow the instructions here.

Now Stupid Security is an excellent and most interesting site, but it’s hardly mine. It is on my blog-roll here, and I have a link to it on some post, but it doesn’t justify deciding it’s mine. And I didn’t get other copies of these message regarding other sites I link to from this blog.

The other option is that they got my email address from there, which is possible since I do have an account there. This seems even more silly, though. Someone should harvest email addresses from a website about security, and then go to all the posters there and offer them to promote the site ?

Yet I find it very hard to believe this was random. The likelihood is too small…

It’s a very targeted message, only targeted at the wrong person, and they had to know that by the way they got the addresses. That would make them both clever and extremely stupid.

Or was this the brainless human engineering trick where I’m supposed to think I got it by mistake, and why not take advantage of the wonderful offer myself? Some people are dumb enough for this, but how many of the people that post on Stupid Security are?
It would take more than a miracle to work…  ;-)

The offer of being indexed in no less than 300,000 search engines is very tempting, though. Especially since an alt tag on an image linked to from the message (not posted here) reads "Guaranteed search engine submission promotion optimixation services".
Who can resist being optimixed on so many search engines, by such professionals, eh?

I have a friend who is studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Pol-Sci at TAU.

And one of their courses, passed by a lecturer who is not too good at teaching, introduces a new grading system. Nothing which isn’t widely used in some other types of degrees, but new for them. And the reactions of the students do not inspire too much confidence in the system.

This is from an IM chat with my friend, stripped of names and of interjected sentences that are not relevant to the subject, but not edited apart from that:

Yaron: How technical do they expect you to get?
Friend: very. Plus, since they are marking us on a curve as opposed to on the actual basis of merit, whoever gets the most intelligent person to do their homework for them gets the best mark!
Yaron: Youch!
Yaron: Don’t let the faculty dean or academic board catch you with that quote…
Friend: meaning???
Yaron: Grading on a curve is stupid. IMNSHO
Friend: yeah well, its their stupid system…. they have to take responsibility
Friend: and all people keep saying is:"I’m paying a PHD student to do mine, that way I definitely wont be in the bottom Part of the estimate…"
Yaron: That’s insane.
Friend: so….guess how much chance I have of getting a decent grade on my own…
Friend: but thats what happens when you add that element of competition to a bunch of deranged politics students
Yaron: Right. I forgot. PolSci. Where the subject material is used to bribe people…
Friend: see, i just figure its not fair if I try my best but get a 50 (or less) cause the rest of the class is paying a PHD student to do it for them. The exam is at least fair cause they cant cheat much on that
Yaron: If they know people are going THAT far out, they may decide to take the papers that don’t look like their students made, and disqualify them.
Yaron: It’s possible to differentiate between work made by BA students and work made by a PHD…
Friend: they wont. They cant prove it
Friend: plus, the lecturer would be flattered on his apparent teaching skills
Friend: This is why I hate political science this year…
Yaron: I can understand you, if this is the way things are going.
Yaron: Did I mention I think it’s insane?
Friend: I just dont feel confident in my ability to do a work that measures up to the "standard" if its going to be marked that way

We tried to figure out what may be good about the new system, but didn’t came up with much:

Yaron: There’s always the anonymous note option. Tell the lecturer, or someone higher up.
Friend: they dont care…
Friend: they just want money and jobs….
Friend: plus, the PHD students could do with the money at the moment….what with the taxes and all
Yaron: Trust you to find the moral justification. ;-)
Friend: ;)
Friend: its not their fault that people are taking advantage of the system!
Yaron: Maybe the university is doing it on purpose, as a community service.
Friend: exactly…

And in case it isn’t clear, a single student grumbling about paying someone to do a paper for them can usually be safely ignored, but when several start to exhibit this attitude it means they’re actually going to do it, and so are several more with enough intelligence to keep quiet about it.

That’s one way to show that even B.A. students serve mid-term papers at a level which wouldn’t shame a Ph.D. student elsewhere. It must be very impressive to show professors from other universities random sample papers from a B.A. class.

Oh, and just for the record, my friend did not pay anyone else to do the work. No one with, or studying for, a Ph.D. was involved.
I’ll know more about the actual grades in a couple of weeks.

This has to be about the most amusing thing I read in quite a while "Hours in front of a computer screen may increase the risk of glaucoma in people who are myopic or near-sighted, Japanese scientists said Tuesday".

Glaucoma is high intra-ocular pressure (There are cases of "Normal Pressure Glaucoma", but since reducing the pressure even further helps in those cases, it says something…). It is not "caused by damage to the optic nerve" as stated in the article, it causes it.

It does cause visual field defects. The effects of the increased pressure starts to destroy nerve fibers from the outside in. Most people who do not go for regular medical examinations usually only notice they have Glaucoma after getting to a state of nearly tunnel-vision. The process is slow and gradual however, which is why it takes years for the effects to be noticeable.

For most people (without hereditary background), the time to start yearly checkups is at the age of 40 where it is most likely to start. The average age of people checked in this article is 43, and so without knowing the distribution there’s no way to know if the results are high or low. If they were all 43, the percentage of people with visual field problems with "suspected" glaucoma, about 1.66%, is not above the normal percentage in the population.
Now if the average age where 25 or 30, they would have had a strong case, as the percentage of glaucoma at these ages is very very small…

The whole "suspected" glaucoma thing is pretty suspicious as well. Checking intra-ocular pressure by an eye doctor takes about a minute, usually less. There are also simpler screening devices which are less accurate but can be used by anyone, and can get a pretty good idea if people have glaucoma or not. Unless they think all of the cases are caused by rare normal pressure glaucoma, of course… This would be harder to check, but is very unlikely and is not explained here…

So we have 5 percent of people with visual field problems, probably many of them above the age where these problems crop up anyway. About a third of these visual field problem may, or may not, be related to glaucoma (Which is considered the #1 reason for blindness overall, and so could likely account for more that 30% of all visual field problems even without any other factors included). If all of them are indeed suffering from glaucoma, the percentage is not different than for normal/random population at the relevant ages.

And not a word of explanation about the mechanism by which sitting in front of the computer increases intra-ocular pressure, or increases the susceptibility of the retina to be damaged from the pressure.

Oh, yes, and high myopia is a risk factor by itself due related condition of the retina (very roughly high myopia can indicate larger eyes, so the retina is more stretched to start with). If they get slightly above average percentage for people with high myopia (and the overall percentages here are at or below average), they don’t need the computer usage to explain it…

Yep. A lot to worry about. Now I have a good reason to stop spending all this time in front of the computer.

I just love it when science is done so well…

Hat tip to David Akin.

There is this really nice person called Ze’ev Rosenstein. He’s so nice that the US have asked Israel to send him over, since they’d really like to keep him at their place, for ever and ever. They also asked for a couple of his close friends, since those friends agree to tell of all the wonderful things about him that he is too shy to say himself.
OK, enough of that, it’s not what I want to talk about. He’s a criminal (allegedly), and the two witnesses willing to testify against him are also criminals (allegedly). And I was reading that the two witnesses were sent to the US in secrecy and under guard, and once they testify in front of a grand jury they will enter the Witness Protection Program, to reduce the chance of revenge from the nice Mr. Rosenstein.

Which got me thinking about how effective Witness Protection is. The witness gets a whole set of manufactured identification, history, profession, and what’s not. Supposedly under the new identity nobody is supposed to know who the person really was, except the few people who put them there and who monitor them to make sure the new identity is not blown (And that the witness is not likewise blown up, naturally).

Now suppose someone searching for the elusive witness manages to find them. Suppose further that they manage to kill the witness. What do we, as the public and general media consumers, know about it?
If it was a really big case, someone talking against a very large crime organization boss, then the killers may publish the fact, in order to try and prevent other people from deciding to testify against them.
But many people placed under witness protection are not that popular, and their death is simple revenge without any lesson. Like in this example, once Rosenstein is behind bars he probably doesn’t need to intimidate anyone else from testifying against him. And making the identity of the killed person public will only put his protection and police under the spotlight and so increase the efforts of catching the killers.
So it’s possible to assume that in most cases nobody will rush to the media saying "We just offed¹ this guy, who was so-and-so, because he testified against this-and-that".

This means that apart from the killers, and the protection team, no one will know the victim’s true identity. And the protection team sure as hell have no reason to come forward to the public.

Ergo, the minor headline in some local paper will be along the lines of "Window repairmen shot dead during home robbery. Unknown killer still at-large". Followed with a few lines explaining that the house wasn’t actually robbed, so maybe the culprit was surprised during the robbery, shot the homeowner, and ran off. And that would be it, no international coverage, and no followup.
No one else will know.

All those people that disappear into witness protection and you never hear from again? They may be safe behind a new identity, or they may most of them be dead. Could be witness protection has no effect whatsoever, except to keep people from knowing how bad it is so they will be willing to testify.
There’s no way to know if it’s like that, or it it’s indeed efficient.
The only guarantee is that it’s less efficient than what can be surmised from comparing the numbers of people getting witness protection to the known number of people found…

So if you have a reason to testify, do so only if the reason is good enough even under the assumption that you will be found. The only people promising otherwise can’t prove their point, even if they may be right.

1. Or iced, or eliminated, or cleansed, or whatever criminals nowadays like to use as euphemism for murdering someone.

There was recently a survey (Sorry, Hebrew link only) here in Israel assessing the behaviour and health of teenagers. One part, the one I found amusing, deals with safety and terrorism.

Apparently 22% of children from 6th to 10th grade feel, due to "political instability and the security conditions", that their lives are in danger. Riiight. Sure thing. Look around in a school, and every fifth kid feels their lives are in danger from terror. I’m convinced. Friends who have children at these ages just constantly talk about how their kids are terrified and all their kid’s friends are too. Not.

In addition, 37% of teenagers (Possibly out of the 22% above, the article phrasing is unclear) reported a terror event occurring next to their home, or knowing someone hurt from an act of terror. To which what I have to say can be nicely summed by WTF?! . Terror acts are great attention grabbers. People pay attention to headlines about terror more than to headlines about other things, like traffic accidents for example. But there just aren’t that many acts of terror. Not that many people die from terrorist activities. There are a lot more casualties from traffic accidents. The idea that 8.14% (0.22*0.37) of children personally know people hurt in acts of terror (How many friends away from home do kids have, for crying out loud?) is preposterous.
Unless of course the survey was not on a representative selection of the population, but rather focused in the more terror-stricken areas. But if that is case, which is contrary to what is stated in the article, then it has no bearing upon the general population and should not be used for anything in global political decision making processes.

Also, 34% of teenagers reported that the feelings of insecurity effect their social lives. Yea, right.
No less than 46% reports that it prevents them from going to "various places". Unless those places include the Gaza strip, this makes no sense whatsoever. Kids in these ages don’t make travel decisions apart from where do they want to hang out with friends. I can safely report from personal observation that the amount of people in general, and of teenagers in particular, did not noticeably drop from cinemas (About same amounts of screaming brats interfering with me watching a film in quiet), coffee shops, and the likes. Certainly not a drop as serious as 46%. Although to be honest, for those who are afraid to hang out with friends, 42% by the survey, this can certainly explain the change in social life.

And the cinch? 27% reported feeling less focused in their studies. Pe-leeeease. Schoolkids are not focused on studying due to worries about terror attacks? As if schoolkids need an excuse not to be focused in studying. How many of them bloody want to study at all to begin with?! Sounds like an excellent spoon-fed excuse.

Interviewer: "Do you feel that worries about terrorist activities causes you to be less able to concentrate on your homework and school material?"
Kid: "Less able to concentrate… on homework… eh… yes! Sure! Right! That’s it! I really do want to study hard! I do! But I’m so afraid some suicide bomber will come over to my house and explode while I’m at my desk! Yes! That’s why I don’t do my homework so well! Honest!"

Great survey. I hope nobody pays much attention. Don’t know how the other parts measure up, but if they’re up to the same exacting quality…

Why is it that whenever three or more trucks get together on a two-lane road, all their drivers immediately feel the need to start a prolonged game of leapfrogging?

One slow truck bypassing another is annoying, but understandable. The slightly-faster truck driver doesn’t like being delayed any more than I do.

But a whole group equally slow trucks changing speeds so that they could go on overtaking each other in turns…

OK, I’m calmer now. Thanks.

[Update, the last: They finally fixed it!]

[update: Well, They've done some more. And I'm practically livid.]
[update2: There seems to be some progress on the technical side, although I can't grasp the logic of it]
[update3+4: Some progress. Not done yet, but the filtering problem seems practically solved for now]
[update 5: Back to square one. Everything is as it was before they've started working on the problem, and I can't get anything sensible out of customer support]

There has been some progress changes regarding the problem I encountered with Yahoo! Mail’s bulk mail filtering and my futile attempts to get help through their official tech support system.

A certain Brad Garlinghouse (VP, Communications Products) from Yahoo! made a post on the Yahoo! Search Blog regarding changes to Yahoo! Mail, and asked for general comments and suggestions.
So, being happy to finally have access to a real person involved with Yahoo! Mail, I talked about the problem, with links to my more detailed posts here.

And, not too surprisingly, some people at Yahoo! read it, and they tried to solve the problem.

I started sending myself test messages to see if there’s any change, and after a short while I noticed a rather big one. When I sent myself a problematical message, I was presented with a CAPTCHA challenge. One of those annoying pictures with distorted letters and numbers, used to make sure I’m a real person sending the message, and not some bot.
It came with an explanation that this is done to prevent outgoing spam out of Yahoo! accounts.

Which is overall fair enough if the message is highly suspected as spam. Only it probably isn’t since if I sent a similar message in from an outside account it would not get to the Bulk folder but to the Inbox one.
This is also not directly related to the fact that even if a message is suspected as spam, it should still get to the Inbox if the sender is in the Address Book.
But the important thing was that after passing the challenge, the message arrived to my inbox.

If I sent the same message to another Yahoo! address, I got the challenge. If I sent it to a non-Yahoo! address, I didn’t get it. It seemed a bit strange if the reason is suspected massive spamming (And never mind why is sending a geocities link in a message have to be considered spam). So I posted another comment on their blog post.
And they fixed the apparent problem. Later on when I sent the message outside of Yahoo I also got the challenge.

Again, sending such a message in from an outside non-Yahoo account always got it to the Inbox, so I’m still not sure the problem is spam detection per-se.

But the problem was officially solved. Even if it’s a case of curing the disease while killing the patient. After all, the reason I was sending myself emails with links is as a short and easy way to place reminders to places I’d like to look at again soon. But passing the CAPTCHA challenge made it long and cumbersome, so the net effect would be to just cause me not to use Yahoo! Mail for these messages but another email service. Which is a pity since overall I really do like Yahoo! Mail.
But the problem was solved, technically. If I did send such a message, it arrived to the inbox. I did suspect that the actual cause was not fixed, and this is just some ugly workaround, but there was no possible way for me to reproduce the problem, so that was it.

Until today.
Originally, beside having the mail problem, I also had a larger problem with the handling of my report by the support / customer-care team.
As I logged in this morning to check emails, I noticed a message from Clarence in Yahoo! Mail Customer Care. It was a followup to my previous correspondence with them on this problem. And by followup I don’t mean that they started a new thread about it, but that it was a reply to one of my messages to them. Not to the last one, mind you. In fact it was a reply to the exact one where I told them I’m not willing for them to log into my own account to check the problem.
And what did they want this time?
Well:

We would like to follow up with you regarding your recent inquiry to Yahoo! Customer Care. 

We understand you were receiving messages to your bulk mail folder.  We attempted to duplicate the issue by following the steps you outlined below, yet were unable to duplicate it.  Are you still experiencing problems of this sort?

If the problem continues, please reply to this email. 

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.

We appreciate your assistance in troubleshooting this issue.

Notice that the "For us to look into…" paragraph is identical to the one they used the last time. This is particularly amusing considering that this is, as I wrote above, in direct reply to my message saying I’m not allowing them, which was in reply to them asking. And it’s all quoted in this message…

But in any case I was glad that I got a response. It means someone may have also noticed a problems in this front, and there may actually be someone there to talk to (Clarence?).

I was not surprised they were not able to reproduce the problem, since there were changes. So I decided I’ll reply stating the changes I know made, and thanking them for following up anyway. But before I sent the reply it seemed prudent to make another check and see if something changed.

Something did.
I sent the same message to myself, and was not presented with the CAPTCHA challenge. My initial reaction? Great, maybe the finally solved it properly and so removed the challenge that served as temporary work-around. I fired off one more message, and went to the Inbox to see them. The messages were not in the Inbox, they were in the Bulk mail folder.

Back to square one. Several changes along the way, and now the problem is just like it was before…

Which leaves me the possibility that the Customer Care people will be relevant and professional this time. Maybe Yahoo did something on that front, at least.
I sent them a message explaining the changes, and that maybe they need to try again now in order to reproduce the problem. (In a perfect world they should also be in synch with the development team, but…).
I also stated again that I don’t want them in my account. In case they will have a problem again, I did offer to create a new dummy account, verify that the problem occurs there as well (Shouldn’t be any different, it happens in several real accounts of friends), and give them full access to that one.
And I explained again how to reproduce the problem, in small and easy steps.

If any reader here wants to try, it goes about like this:

1. Add yourself to your own address book. (This is to illustrate that the message goes to the Bulk folder even for AB contacts)
2. Send yourself a plain text message with:

• Subject: Test

(Can be pretty much anything as far as I noticed, but this one is verified)

• Body: http://www.geocities.com/whatever

(You can as far as I noticed replace the "whatever" word with anything you want, as long as something is there, erasing it won’t work. adding further sub-directories, and a final  page, will still cause the problem.)

Then just sit back and watch it get delivered to your Bulk folder. Despite it being a message from you to yourself, and despite the sender address being in the address book.

Now I wait. I’ll keep updating this post if there are changes to the actual problem, or if there is some progress (or an active lack of of one) from the Customer Care people.

Update:
Instant messengers are wonderful. Especially those that come with email providers like Yahoo. Because when you get a new message, the IM let’s you know.
For example: When people from Yahoo! Customer Support log into my account DESPITE BEING SPECIFICALLY TOLD NOT TO, and start sending test messages, I get to bloody see it. Amazing, isn’t it?
Even if the messages are deleted immediately afterward, I know they were there.
Better still, I refreshed the Inbox page fast, and actually saw a message labeled as being sent from me, only from the wrong timezone and IP addresses. A message which was not subsequently deleted and is currently still there, I assume because I opened and read it (since the previous ones, that I didn’t see on the webmail interface, are not there now).

Where they told not to clear enough? Let’s see…
This is from the message I sent them, as specified above. Everything quoted here is quoted in the message body by the replies. I stripped irrelevant lines, but everything here is in the message, no additions. Notice that as this is an email, the oldest bits are in the bottom, and the newest at the top.

Let me start again by saying that I do NOT want you
logging into my account.
If you can’t see anything on your accounts, I’m
perfectly willing to open a new dummy account, make
sure the problem occurs there as well, and give that
to you. Is that acceptable?

Let me know whether you manage to reproduce it now or
not, and if you want me to create and hand over a demo
account.

— Yahoo! Mail <mail@yahoo-inc.com> wrote:

>
>
> If the problem continues, please reply to this
> email. 
>
> 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.
>
>
> > Original Message Follows:
> > ————————-
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> > — Yahoo! Mail <mail@cc.yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > 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.

Did the fact that I said "I do NOT want you logging into my account" mislead them? Could anyone possibly understand this phrase to mean that I don’t particularly want it, but won’t mind if they do?!

I know that technically they can log into all mailboxes/address-books/notepads/whatever and do anything they want with them, but it’s not accepted behaviour, and not something that their privacy policy allows. This is why they asked. But darn in, You must accept NO for an answer. I’m pretty sure this was decided by courts long ago…

True, one shouldn’t keep anything unencrypted that one doesn’t want the whole world to have access to, but there is still a fake feeling of privacy for things which can become public but shouldn’t. And knowing that support people are running around my mail and contacts is not a particularly nice feeling.
Even if I trust that they are professional enough not to touch anything not needed for the solution of the problem.

Do I trust that they are professional enough, with this past record? Not quite…
Heck, this one message that I did catch, that got into the Inbox? It had "test" in the subject, and "test" in the body. Not the URIs which cause the actual problem. Despite repeated explanations.
No wonder they were not capable of reproducing the problem. They either ignored the explanations, or are bloody morons (And yes, I can use mildly foul language when I’m in the mood I’m currently at).

I ran some more tests myself. The first one got to the Inbox and not the bulk folder. But for some reason it was not marked with the Rolodex icon (meaning that despite being sent from the same address, it’s not recognized as from someone in the address book). The two reached the Bulk folder as before. The following one took about 10-15 minutes to arrive, but arrived at the Bulk folder as well.
Problem not solved.

Update2:
I sent some more test messages to see where they’ll get to. Got some peculiar results, although overall I think it’s an improvement. Three different URIs in the message body caused three different results:

1. http://wwww.geocities.com/testing/abc.htm  -> Message arrived to the Inbox as it should.
2. http://www.geocities.com/whatever -> Message arrived to the Inbox, but there is no Rolodex icon next to it. Meaning that the Yahoo! Mail interface decided the sender is not in the Address Book. The sender of course is identical to the one in case 1, where the Rolodex icon does appear, and is in the address book. In this case there is no "View Contact Details" link next to the sender when reading the message. There is one in case 1. The address itself is displayed properly.
3. http://www.geocities.com/bli -> Arrives at the Bulk folder. So the problem is not yet solved.

I sent several messages with each link, the results where exactly the same for each link. Separating case 1 from the other two seems straightforward (wwww instead of www), but I can see no conceptual difference between the 2 and 3 URIs. Trying to keep the same structure as case 2 and 3, replacing the work "whatever" and "bli" with other words, the messages arrived to the Bulk folder like in case 3.
Does it mean the word "whatever" got a special case ?! Or is there a rule that I just can’t see?

… After writing this I tried again with another word, and got the CAPTCHA test again… So either the handling is even more complex and obscure, or I just caught them smack down in the middle of work, which can account for odd behaviour.
So I’ll stop checking for now, and check again in after several hours.
The current CAPTCHA test is very barbaric, though… I apparently failed the first attempt (They didn’t bother getting rid of letters that look the same in both lowercase and uppercase), and instead of getting to try again I was told that I need to pass the test in order to send messages, so the message was not sent and was not saved. No options to go back.

Update3:
Shortly after the previous post the system seemed to revert to the original state, just as it was at the beginning, with the mail delivery problem.
Nothing much seemed to happen for a few days, I didn’t hear anything more from the Customer Care team, and sporadic test emails behaved in the same fashion.

Today I emailed another message to Yahoo Mail’s Customer Care, asking what is being done regarding the problem and if there’s any progress (There was a bit more there, like a complaint that they logged into my account, and asking if they need more explanations, but that’s the gist).

I don’t know if it’s related to my prompting, or just a coincidence of timing, but right now I sent some test messages of the same problematical patters, and they arrived into my inbox. Well, two out of three did, the third is in transit. I assume it would as well, if not I’ll update here again (Update4: Arrived into the inbox, same as the rest).

So why am I saying that the problem isn’t entirely solved? Since those messages (from me to me, with a geocities link in the body) are showing in my Inbox without the rolodex image (the one indicating that the sender is in the Address Book). But messages from me to me without a geocities link show in the Inbox with the rolodex image, as they should.

This means that whatever was done to solve the problem, was not geared toward correcting it, but toward making it appear as though it’s not there. The crucial symptom is gone, my messages do not get into the Bulk folder. But something is still wrong in the logic that classifies them differently than other messages.

Update5:
For the last several days the messages are back to being received into the Bulk folder. Everything seems to behave just like at the beginning, before anyone at Yahoo! started to deal with the problem.
Obviously they know something is there, or they wouldn’t have made the repeated changes I saw, but they can’t seem to actually solve it.
Personally, whatever else goes behind the scenes over there, I’d expect that a simple match against the Address Book should be enough, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

As for their Customer Care, I got a response to my message, but it only address the CAPTCHA challenge. A certain Jane explains that the challenge is meant to prevent automated spam tools (Yes, I’m certainly an automated spam tool, sending a single-digit number of messages per day at all, and a smaller single-digit number of messages to myself). She also informs me that they use "a variety of techniques" in order to decide when to present the challenge. And concludes by explaining to me how to pass the challenge (’Cause obviously I can’t get by myself the idea of writing back the word I’m seeing).

Since the challenge is no longer presented to me on every sent messages, this is moot anyway.

I sent another reply explaining that the problem is not the challenge, but rather the messages getting to the Bulk folder, and that she should read further back in the message if it wasn’t clear. This is why you should let one person deal with a problem start-to-finish, and not pass each reply/iteration to a different person who doesn’t know what it’s about.

At this point I think I’ll give up on them.
The technical problem is obviously too complicated for Yahoo! to solve (Can’t match the sender with the AB entry, or match the sender with the recipient, or realize what’s the problem with geocities).
And the Customer Support ability to grasp simple English, or follow a conversation thread, have obviously not improved any.

It’s a pity that overall Yahoo! Mail is still much better than the competition. But apart from this problem, and as long as I don’t need anything from their support, it’s really good. I don’t quite get how they can deploy a generally very good service while using seemingly incompetent people, but they do.

More updates will come only if there’s something serious to report.

The office space of the two floors above my company’s is getting occupied again. It was empty when we moved in, got later filled for about half a year, left vacant, and now we’re getting new neighbours again.

On the practical front, the only expected problem is that parking space is going to become a precious commodity again.

But currently we’re wondering how colourful are the new neighbours going to be, compared to the last ones.

Not that the last ones were something special. Oh, no. Of course not. Not at all. All they did was use the space as a warehouse, for storage. They were quite adamant about it, too.
And the way things happened, there was no reason for anyone to think the area was filled with anything other than storage.

Before they came in, workers came to fit the office area to the new requirement. They installed all the things needed in a regular warehouse.
Including air conditioning units, per each room near each window, not a central cooling unit.
And including several nice wooden half-circle tables with green padding. The kind you usually expect to see used for blackjack storage.
And including a large sign on the street, in horrid lovely red-green colors, stating nothing except the street name and house number.
And white paint for the walls. Lots of white paint. Can’t store anything near walls that were painted years ago.

Or the fact that several workers were in the place, almost 24 hours a day. Several quite well dressed people that stayed inside the warehouse. And a couple of muscular, tattooed, scarred, flashy dressed individuals who wandered outside all the time to help the visitors/clients park. And a couple of muscular, quiet, somberly dressed guys that just stood outside the door. And a bunch of scantily clad ladies (and I probably use the word "ladies" nearly as loosely as they were) that wandered around and attached themselves to visitors.

There were quite a lot of visitors for a warehouse too. And they didn’t seem to carry too many crates and boxes around. There were people going in and out all the time. Almost 24/5 (Well, maybe almost 24/7, can’t be sure since we only work 5 days a week. On the few times my boss got to the office on the weekend, they were usually there.).

At least I know that whatever was in storage was well protected. Police cars used to come over all the time. Cops came quite regularly for inspections, to make sure nothing was amiss I’m sure. At least every week.
As Scarface one of the nice parking attendants said (roughly, it’s been a while) "It’s very good they come regularly. If they’ll stop coming to get what they get, then we may all be in a big problem". He obviously meant the safety inspection reports.

I also assume that the merchandise kept there was perishable, or subject to wide market fluctuations. One of their customers arrived on one of the few days when they were closed, and so knocked on our door, asking where the gambling is. It’s nice to know that entrepreneurism isn’t dead, and people are willing to gamble with their investment money on new merchandise. Surely a sign that the economy was in a good shape.

Then they closed down, mumbling something about the police costing too much. I guess it was a clever way of saying that they couldn’t stay competitive with the taxes they pay, since the police (including those dispatched to look over their inventory) are financed mainly by taxes.
I agree, taxes in this country are too high. We get government supplied services, like police protection, for it, but it costs too much.

Luckily, about a month afterward they were back in business. The police cars for some reason seemed to come at a lower frequency. Maybe they got a tax cut by not insisting on having regular police safety inspection.
Alas, police visits frequency slowly rose back to the previous levels. And pretty soon they found a new location, and left us to wallow in loneliness (and spacious parking space) again.
All we have left are the memories, and the street sign.

The new ones aren’t in yet. We’ll just have to wait and see. They intend to use it as an office, though, and not just for storage.

If I mention neighbours at the office, it seems only fitting to also say some words about my relatively-new neighbours at home.
Our previous neighbours had the house for several years, but a few months ago received a good offer for it. So good that they completed the whole sale and transfer in about two weeks. And went to live in a newer apartment in the same city. This means that they must have been offered a tad more than the house is worth. So the new buyers must have loved it very much.

They loved the house so much, in fact, that a day later a lot of construction works came over to work on it, making a few minor modifications. Like replacing the entire balcony, replacing a large exterior wall that consisted of mostly windows, breaking and replacing most internal walls in order to rearrange the rooms, and some more changes.

And those workers were about the most motivated construction crew I have ever saw. They arrived very early in the morning and worked till very late at night.
They worked weekends.

Another thing being replaced was the fence. They had a low fence around the front of the house, and a connecting low-wall between their house and ours. This got replaced by a 2+ meters high thick and solid bricks wall. We had no desire to replace the connecting wall, so they agree to pay for it on their own. And since it looked pretty ugly, they even painted it and made it fit better.

The new gate is also 2+ meters high. All solid metal. With a mounted video camera and spotlight.

Some more spotlights are also now installed around their garden. I’m not sure about cameras.

The owner says he is a toy importer. Not being a major player in the toy import trade myself, I of course have no way of verifying this, but surely he has no reason to pretend.

I never imagined how much clout toy importers have. Those walls are high enough to require a special building permit. Which is usually not granted. Even when it is, it takes time. But here everything just came up rather quickly.

What can I say, just one toy importer who cares a great deal about his privacy. Good to know it’s possible to make so much money on toys. Just one more proof that the economy is good, people don’t need to spare money they spend on imported toys.

So far they’re nearly model neighbours. Can’t say much for their taste in music, or for how loud they sometime play it, but apart from that we had no problems with them at all.
I can live with that.

A friend called me on the IM the other day, and asked for help spelling a word in English.
The friend, whose English is usually quite good, knew that the word sounded like "satel", and gave me an example case where this word would be used.
The exact example isn’t important here, just that the friend knew what the word meant.

The word wasn’t complex, it was "subtle". Didn’t took more than a second to come up with. The friend said thanks, and that while looking for various possible spellings, sticking a "B" in the middle of it did not came to mind.

And that was that.

But it got me thinking about this in a more general case.
Personally I rarely have the problem of knowing how a word sounds but not how it’s written, since most of my English comes from books, not from speaking or from TV. So if I know a word, it’s quite likely I saw it written, and could come up with something close enough for a dictionary/spell-checker to find. But if it’s a complex word, the problem may still happen. And of course a general solution could also benefit people whose vocabulary comes mostly from watching TV, speaking, or listening to radio/music.

So I decided to see if there’s a tool that can be used to locate a word, when what is known about it is how it’s supposed to sound like, and the general meaning. This is quite a lot of info.

The first attempt was just to run a dictionary search. On-line dictionaries tend to present possible spellings/corrections.

Usually I use services like Dictionary.com, since they collect definitions from a large number of dictionaries, increasing the odds of finding the right word. In this case is was not effective, the large number of sources allowed it to actually find a definition for the acronym "SATEL", so I got no spelling suggestions.

Trying to get a correction out of Google proved fruitless as well, it didn’t find any definition, and did not suggest a correction. Surprisingly it seems that Google doesn’t bother suggestion corrections to dictionary searches, only to regular searches. And only to regular searches that return few results. Satel, and variations, have tons of results, so no suggestions.
Several other dictionaries provided suggestions, but none useful.

Merriam Webster provided a list of 14 possible corrections, the 6th being "subtle". In this case it proved helpful, and could have been used.
In a general case it may not help, however, since it doesn’t provide suggestions to words it has a translation for. If the word searched is similar enough to a real word, you’re out of luck, or have to try searching for a specifically distorted word, making the chances of a successful match smaller.

There should be some sites that allow searching for words that sounds like other words. A quick search for "dictionary sound like" returned several likely (and lot of unlikely) suspects.

AnsMe provided a long list for a "sounds-like" search on "satel", but none of the results was "subtle". And #2/#1 with 90% match was "stela" ?! How does "stela" sounds like "satel" ?

RhymeZone for "Find similar sounding words" returned 0 results. It did provide a long list of "similarly spelled words", but again "Subtle" was not one of them.
Other places in this category seems to just point to, or take results from, RhymeZone.

So time to go look by meaning. Not to make it too complex, these are the first four basic ideas for meanings I had: "delicate", "gentle", "not obvious", "not blatant".

One option is to run a regular dictionary search and try to fish a result from there. In this case it might have worked, but only since I already knew what I was looking for.
Running a search for "delicate" on various dictionaries returned pages of results that had the word "subtle" in them. But they were not useful for this purpose, since it was not practical to find those without knowing the desired word. It takes a lot of time and effort to read many definitions, and go word by word to see if something seems similar. Doable, but not practical.

Another option is to run a search for synonyms of the first two words, and antonyms of the last two. This has the advantage that the results would usually be word-lists, so are easier to search for one sounding like what we’re looking for.

Giving RhymeZone another chance: "delicate" 23 synonyms including "subtle", "gentle" 25 synonyms without "subtle", "obvious" 3 antonyms without "subtle", "blatant" no antonyms. So there was a result, but still hard to fish. Requires going through a lot of false result to find it.

WordNet: This is a more complex and powerful tool, in that it allows to pick specific meanings of the word to search the synonyms/acronyms for, though it doesn’t require it. This of course takes the time to read the possible meanings, but allows by this to eliminate irrelevant words. It also provide examples for the usage of each of the returned words, so it’s easier to get a sense of their proper context, or how they will sound in a sentence. Here too only "delicate" returned "subtle" at the end of the search. And while it was included in some of the definitions of possible meanings for "delicate", no meaning was an exact match by itself. It might have helped very well, or it might have done quite badly.

And there’s one more, relatively new, option. I recalled that a while ago I noticed an announcement by OneLook that they had a reverse dictionary. For this purpose a reverse dictionary should work quite like a synonym search, only will potentially allow use of words which are not exact synonyms/antonyms but may be found as part of a description. This makes it easier to locate words for which you don’t have an exact single-word meaning, and allow more flexibility on the words used. But it may also return a lot more false results.

I decided it’s worth a short to try. And discovered that they have another feature, which is excellent for the sort of search I need here. It’s possible to search for partial matches on words by letters, and combine this with the reverse dictionary search.

The obvious nearly catch-all way to represent the "satel" sounds-like is s*t*l*. It may be a mistake, it’s possible to spell words otherwise, but not likely. If it wouldn’t have worked, maybe a search for c instead of s, or putting another wild-card character at the beginning, might have been warranted. But mostly I tried to go from the basis of having a word sounding like "satel", so probably the changes in spelling will be extra vowels, double letters, silent letters, and such. Something beginning with an "S", followed someplace by a "T", and followed someplace else by an "L", followed by whattever, seemed good.

With this pattern of searched words, I tried again my four basic meanings, even though a reverse dictionary actually allows to try for more complex meanings. "delicate" returned 7 results, the first of which was "subtle". "gentle" returned 2 results without "subtle". "not obvious" returned a huge number of results, with the claim that they are sorted by relatedness, and "subtle" was the first one. "not blatant" also returned a lot of results, but again "subtle" was the first one.

Overall I think OneLook receives best marks for this. The reason, I think, is that from all the common tools available it’s the only one that allows to automatically search for both the meaning and the way the word sounds like. The other services only allowed to automatically search for one, and then required time consuming effort to manually go over the results.

This is just too amusing.

The Guardian has published a correction to an article:

Jonny Wilkinson (Gregan’s Wallabies plot new England fall, page 27, November 23) is recovering from a biceps injury, not a bicep injury. The singular of biceps is biceps. The plural of biceps is biceps.

This doesn’t sound like an explanation, or an attempt to be educational. This rather sounds more like head-bashing.
The scene I imagine is of an editor catching the poor writer of the original article and repeating this to him in an angry what-kind-of-an-idiot-are-you patronizing tone of voice…
All that’s missing in the correction is the end of the quote going like "Now repeat this 100 times until you get it", which caused the writer such a trauma that they automatically also added the mantra to the apology.

And what may be slightly more amusing - while it’s true that The singular of biceps is biceps and not bicep, the plural can be biceps, but can also be bicepses.

Oh, well. As long as mine works.

[Update: Just added title to the monetary units, some people complained]

My parents do most of their regular shoppings in two supermarket chains.

During their purchases today they noticed a new pricing policy for one of the chain’s Customer’s Club. Annual subscription is 97 ILS in one payment, or 80 ILS in four monthly payments.

Which left them, and me, baffled. Usually spreading purchase cost across multiple delayed payments costs more money than making a single cash payment, or at best costs the same. It makes sense, since the store:

1. Loses interest money, since they get the exact same nominal amount of money, but at a later date (Unless the economy is in deflation, in which case it’s good for them, but that’s not the usual condition).
2. Have less free money at the present time.
3. Incur a risk, since something may happen to prevent future payments from coming.
4. Provides more payments as a convenience to the customer, allowing the customer to delay the expense until they have more income. A sort of reverse of the 1 and 2 items for the customers. And since everyone is in the business of making money, providing utility for the customer is something that can be charged for.

Charging less, and about 20% less (which is a lot), is odd. It’s not done. It’s the exact opposite of the popular action of giving cash discount.

My parents didn’t jump on the offer, though. Last week this chain had a one-day offer for renewals of existing Customer’s Club memberships, for 60 ILS… In one single cash payment.

Go figure.

One of our new neighbours, from the firm settling in the floor above our office, have dropped by yesterday for an introductory chat.
I didn’t get a lot, since he was talking with my boss and not with me. But I did manage to get the main highlight.

The guy said they’re some sort of an investigation/detective agency, and work mainly with law firms.

Some coincidence.
Depending on who exactly their clients are, and what kind of work they do, this puts them either exactly on the same end of the spectrum with our previous casino operating criminal group friendly warehouse holders, or exactly on the opposite end.

We, again, get someone that may attract nice people who will want to burn their offices. But this time it doesn’t come with attached 24/7 guards.

My company is located in what amounts to an industrial area of the city, for crying out loud. We’re surrounded by various manufacturers, service centers, and various industry suppliers. So how come when someone new wants to enter our building, they have to do other stuff?

Well, at least I can’t say it’s boring.

[Update: Just added title to the monetary units, some people complained]

The original plan for this evening included going to see the Cinderella opera.

It’s a project of our local community center, though luckily singers are from the Israeli Opera and are supposed to be good and professional.
The production being local mostly means that there are a lot of local kids running around in the background, or something of the sort. Or at least I hope that what it means, because otherwise it may be too painful to listen too, or even see (Yea, yea, I’m a snob. But have you listened to non-opera singers trying to sing opera? Or to not particularly good opera-singers trying to sing opera? Once you gain even a little taste in this, it’s just horrid).

Our community center has been running (well, trying to run with varying levels of success, more at the end of this post) for several years now shows and performances. Last week we were at a jazz concert, and Smadar (Who is the community center executive in charge of the cultural aspects) reminded  everyone that the first run of Cinderella will be the following week (today).

We talked to her, and after being assured that the singers are pros, we asked for tickets. She didn’t have any on her, but as she is in charge of everything, and we do have some level of personal acquaintance, she said that she’ll reserve tickets for us to take (