Ordinary Nothing

When it comes to phone carriers in Israel, there is only one company that provides in-country land line phone connection. But cellular phones, and international calls, are open for some competition.

My boss at work signed with one of the International carriers, called Barak. And for some reason they decided to be nice. So when you call out, instead if just connecting the line and keeping it quiet, they play this chirpy little tune, and have an announcer thanking you for calling with them.

If you make the rare call once in a while, I suppose it could be alright. But when you make lots of international phone calls, as we do from the office, this is maddening. I’m getting sick of hearing their tune, and want to yell back at the recorded announcer to stuff it when I’m hearing the thank you…

They provide the service of international phone calls. So if I make a phone, I should get a connection. Why the incessant self-advertisement? It doesn’t help! it’s annoying! And if it was up to me I’d really switch to another carrier just so I won’t have to listen to this message ever again.

Those International phone carriers I mentioned in the previous post are often also ISP companies.

This is a rant about the ISP services of the same Barak company from the previous post. But I never used them for Internet connection myself, so this is all hearsay. Of course, this is hearsay from what I consider trusted sources…

First, I have a friend that the company he worked for used them as an ISP. After several months they broke off, and switched to someone else. According to my friend this was due to many connectivity problems, many times where the supplied bandwidth didn’t match what they were paying for, and problems with customer services.

Second, I have another friend who used them for his home ISP. And encountered two interesting problems:

1. He needed to access some websites in Hong Kong. And while those sites were linked to from other sites and forums, he was never able to connect, like the sites are down. Until at some point he tried connecting from a computer in another place, and got there without any problems. Some more testing revealed that he couldn’t get to those sites from home, but can from about anywhere else with different ISPs. And just in case anyone wonders, there is nothing in Barak’s terms specifying that they do, or can, block sites. And this was a simple commercial site, in any case.
   
2. He received very low bandwidth trying to download things using P2P file-sharing programs like eMule. For normal file downloads, he did get the bandwidth he was paying for. It wasn’t configuration problems, and those were not files with very low availability. Again, nothing in Barak’s terms specified them blocking/slowing any sort of traffic.

He contacted their customer support about those two problems, asking if his impressions of site blocking, and protocol filtering, are correct.

Their reply? They offered him a huge discount for an even higher bandwidth connection. Yep, nothing about the problem, just offering him to pay less. Sounds very… evasive, doesn’t it?

Needless to say, he said bye-bye and switched. Since then he can connect to those sites, and the eMule download speed has improved drastically…

This fuel station, in my city, that I often use has recently did some re-arrangement, and moved some of its fuel pumps. As part of the changes they also took advantage of the opportunity, and upgraded some of the equipment.

But they didn’t make sure that the upgrades fit together. Oh, technically everything works. It’s more of an interface problem.

The way it goes now, on several instances during the process (passing the credit card, entering car number, choosing to limit amount of fuel, and so on) the screen on the system now instructs the user to press the "Proceed" button.

Which wouldn’t be bad by itself, if it weren’t for the fact that the keypad doesn’t have such a button. There’s one labelled "Confirm", though, which works well enough.

So, yes, it’s simple, and quite easy to make the connection. Heck, I managed to do it myself. It’s still a problem, though. And considering that many people tend to be very cautions and literal when they deal with computers, I won’t be surprised to know that some people actually have to call for help saying that they can’t find the button.

Last week we were finishing up this system that we were supposed to ship over the weekend. And during the final inspections my boss noticed that one of the screws holding a panel looked rusted.

He called over our mechanical engineer, and asked him how could he have missed a rusted screw. He was understandably angry, since it creates a very poor impression when a large and expansive machine comes all new and shiny, except for some rusted components…

The mechanical engineer didn’t see the problem, though. It’s just a screw, he said, so what does it matter? It still holds, after all. After a brief argument he agreed to replace it with a new one, but I get the feeling that he still doesn’t quite get it. Which could be a problem in the future, and certainly means my boss will inspect his future constructions much more carefully.

And then it occurred to me, this was actually a good thing. It’s always best to be ahead of the competition, right? Well, with rust, we are years and years ahead. Just imagine how long it would take the new screws on machines from other vendors until they finally manage to rust… And we can be there today, right now. Now, that’s what I call forward thinking.

People never cease to amaze me. They always find ways to do the unexpected, and use things in ways that nobody could foresee in advance, or plan for.

Which is a problem for manufacturers everywhere, because when they sell something, all of a sudden they need to start to not only think about how it will hold up to regular use, but also what other strange and twisted ideas will people have about it.

And because the product wasn’t designed for these ideas, sometimes those odd usages may be dangerous. And if the odd notion becomes popular enough, products sometimes have to be recalled, for safety reasons, through no fault of the designers.

Like these nice gel candles. Which had to be recalled because the gel can catch fire. How silly is that, I ask you? Why would anyone in their right mind would ever put a candle near a flame, after all, right? Right? The notion is absurd! It’s obvious why the company didn’t bother checking for this in advance…

Or, like these candle holders. Which it turns out are made of plastic that can ignite and melt. And which contain a battery, that can explode due to the heat. Again, quite absurd, because why would anyone put a candle holder in contact with fire? It’s not like they burn candles in it, or anything like that…

Hat tip to The Old New Thing.

I was following some posts in a Yahoo group, when they showed a pop-up message, asking me to answer a survey. The message gives the strong impression that it’s yet another survey about Yahoo, probably about the groups, so I decided to see what it’s about this time.

You do agree that having it titled as coming from Yahoo! Research, and saying that it’s time to tell Yahoo what I think, indicates it’s about Yahoo, right?

Well, wrong. It started asking me about my opinion on various American airlines, and how likely am I to fly with them. But never mind, Yahoo! need to make a living, and since I don’t pay direct money for the services I take from them, I can see this as payment.

What the problem was, is that I kept being offered to take this supposed survey again, and again, and again. It only appeared when I was logged in, so they could easily know I already took it. Why bother me with it, then? Even if they don’t want to keep a list of Yahoo! IDs that took it, they can surely store something in a cookie. In any case, once I took it, I’m not supposed to see the pop-up again.

And it wasn’t just a rare occurrence. There were a few days where the thing kept showing in nearly every second page load. Sometimes on each page load.

And when I tried to press the Take the survey button image, I was taken to a page telling me that:

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, you do not qualify to take this particular survey today.

Nice, isn’t it? Because it was me who was really interested in going there again, without being prompted at all, sure. And I did not qualify? Qualify ?! This gave me the strong feeling that they decided they didn’t want to say "Sorry, we screwed up, you already took the survey, sorry for bothering you", and instead decided it’s better to tell me it’s my fault, that I’m not up to some standard. Not a way to make people happy, guys. If I don’t qualify, tell me why.

Even better (well, worse), this page opened instead of the original Yahoo page I was viewing, not in a new window, and not in a pop-up window. And yet they put a "close" link on the page, like you do on pop-up pages that can be so closed. Except… This wasn’t a pop-up page. So there was this "close" link there, and it didn’t do anything. At all. I tried, I knew it was out of place, but was intrigued as to what it would do. It didn’t do anything. Very professional, I was so impressed.

Instead I pressed the browser’s back button, returned to the original page I started from, and… Guess what? I got this pop-up image asking me to take a survey…

There is yet another study claiming that dark chocolate is healthy, due to high amounts of antioxidants. This is not new, since the benefits of antioxidants are touted for quite some time, as is the fact that chocolate is rich with flavanoids, a type of antioxidants.

The first reason I like this particular article is that it bothers to emphasise several times that those health benefits are only in dark chocolate, not white or milk chocolate. Since I’m very much pro dark chocolate, and con the thing called milk chocolate, this is always nice to hear. Mind you, this is something the article mentioned as shown in other studies, but this particular study only compared dark and white chocolate, no milk. Which is also a good thing, since these are the two kinds I acknowledge as deserving to live, and no self-respecting researcher should refer to milk chocolate as chocolate…

OK, enough silly chocolate bashing. Chocolate good. the other reasons are more fun, anyway. Read:

Investigators from the University of L’Aquila in Italy found that after eating only 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces, of dark chocolate every day for 15 days, 15 healthy people had lower blood pressures and were more sensitive to insulin, an important factor in metabolizing sugar.

Yes, that’s only 100g. Like, a full pack of chocolate. Daily. So far the word was that a tablet or two of chocolate per day are good. But a whole packet, that’s a whole different ballgame, methinks. Even one of the investigators, a Dr. Ferri, admitted:

He added that each 100 grams of dark chocolate contains roughly 500 calories.

Not to mention plain fat. At least dark chocolate is low on carbohydrates (sugar - for you uneducated lot), so that’s something.

Beyond that, we have the amazing research quality and methodology:

Ferri and colleagues asked 7 men and 8 women, all healthy, to eat 100 grams of dark chocolate or 90 grams of white chocolate every day for 15 days. The subjects consumed no chocolate for the next 7 days and then switched to the other chocolate type for 15 days.

First, sample size. Seven men, eight women. That’s like, wow, fifteen whole people. I doubt anyone can question that they are totally representative of the population at large, and give great confidence to the results.

Second, 100g of dark, compared with 90g of white? Why? Especially since they expected the flavanoids to be the key factor, and, well, white chocolate doesn’t really have those. But if they wanted to make sure, taking the same amounts would make for a stronger case. And if they didn’t want to bother checking, why do a research in the first place? The way it currently goes, someone can legitimately claim that they didn’t prove much…

Odd.

And now for the really fun part, chocolate manufacturers jump on the bandwagon too.

"While the University’s results are exciting — especially for chocolate lovers — not all chocolate contains high levels of flavanols, which impart these potential heart healthy benefits," says Dr. Catherine Kwik-Uribe, PhD, Research Chemist for Mars, Incorporated, the world leader in cocoa science. "In fact, only certain cocoas and chocolates are specially processed to retain much of the flavanols naturally occurring in cocoa beans."

Yes, the take themselves seriously, having lots of scientists around. I like the world leader in cocoa science title. And in case you were wondering which certain kinds of chocolate have most flavanoids, why, they’re the ones made by this selfsame company using its unique and special processes. I wonder why nobody tried to publish this explanation and then give a different company the credit for being better…

Based on 15 years of research, Mars has developed the only patented and proprietary Cocoapro® cocoa process to preserve these important cocoa flavanols that often are destroyed during standard processing.  This unique process, used in the chocolate in a new Mars cocoa-based snack bar called CocoaVia®, helps retain the natural goodness of the cocoa bean while keeping the pleasurable taste characteristics of chocolate

Uh-huh. I think this paragraph contains more superlatives than even dark chocolate contain flavanoids. On the other hand, laughing myself silly is also good for my health, so whatever works.

And they to are aware of the dangers of eating too much chocolate (Or at least of the dangers of being sued by obese kids claiming they only ate tons of chocolate because of this press release):

While research is promising, Mars Nutrition Communications Director Marlene Machut cautions, "It’s not about eating more chocolate, but rather about working flavanol-rich foods into an overall healthy, balanced diet. First start with plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and then you may be able to fit in an 80-calorie CocoaVia® Bar."

Yes, that’s a may be able to fit in an 80-calorie chocolate bar. And do you remember, that whole 100g packet of chocolate, from the research, was about 500 calories? So was the research an overkill on the amounts, or are these itsy-bitsy bars just not good enough? Interesting…

Oh, yes, and they managed to write flavanols throughout the entire press release, including the quotes from their chemist, who should really know better. Or was that just a marketing trick? Maybe their chocolates are poor in flavanoids, and this way they can deny claiming the opposite.

Hat tip to Nonliteral .

Last Sunday I was invited by a friend (let’s call him H) to go to a show by an Israeli rock band, Rockfour. The performance was in a pub in Tel-Aviv, was supposed to be an acoustic concert, and was free of charge (Meaning they didn’t charge a ticket for the show, not that you could be in the pub for a long time without being expected to order something).

We arrived at about 22:00, and the show was supposed to start at 23:00. An hour in advance was supposed to serve the dual purposes of giving us some time to eat and drink before they start, and to get a good sitting place before the onrush of the crowds.

Well, one and a half out of two ain’t bad. There were still some seats by the bar when we arrived, true, but they were on the distant side of the bar, far from the stage and without a line of sight to it. Still, we could sit, and for the time until the show starts, that’s plenty.

Things starting a little late is an all too common occurrence, but this was more exaggerated than usual. The performance only started at about 23:50. Not that it was much of a problem, since we are friends, and definitely had enough to talk about. Plus, there were some amusing incidents helping to pass the time, which I’ll get to shortly.

Their songs are in English, and, at least according to my friend, who is a fan, they sang the more well-known ones. At least, he managed to identify all of them based on the first few notes. At most, I managed to recognize that some of them sound vaguely familiar…

The performance itself was good. The music is the calmer type of rock, which I like, and they play and sing well. Although, frankly, I’m not sure that I’d have labelled it an acoustic show, because apart from an acoustic guitar, it didn’t seem that anything else fit the bill. In any case, we received more than good value for our money, so no complaints there.

Before the show started we were sitting, as I mentioned, next to the bar. At some point some guy arrived to the bar, put down a glass of a 1/3 litre of beer, pointed at it emphatically, and asked the bartender for "another 1/2". She looked at him oddly and asked "Another 1/2, or another 1/3?". The guy looked at his glass, looked a larger glass of 1/2 litre that stood nearby, and pondered. Eventually he came up with "Er… a small 1/2. Like this." and pointed to his 1/3 glass again. The bartender deserves a lot of credit, she managed, though barely, to keep a straight face. A lively discussion ensued, and eventually the guy agreed that he wants another glass of the same size as the 1/3 glass he had with him (notice the lack of admittance that it may not be a 1/2 litre glass).

Another guy arrived next to the bar at a different point, and asked for "diet coke". Mind you, here in Israel, when speaking Hebrew, you call it "Cola", or in this case "Diet Cola". The only people actually saying "Coke" are some tourists. This guy wasn’t a tourist, he was local. Which places him in the different category of people who, very mistakenly, think they’re very cool.

In any case, he asked for his "Diet Coke", to which the bartender replied that they don’t serve soft drinks, only alcoholic beverages. "What, not even a diet coke?". Yes, apparently not even a diet coke. She asked him if there’s anything else she could give him. The guy gave it serious consideration, and asked for… soda. Me and H were trying very hard to avoid bursting out in laughter, I’m not sure we managed. The bartender, again, kept an almost straight face, and explained, exactly as she did several seconds ago, that they don’t serve soft drinks, only alcoholic beverages. The guy gave up, and ordered a beer.

H and I were discussing this, reaching the conclusion that it’s a silly policy, since they surely stock non-alcoholic beverages for various mixes, so why not offer to sell them if people are willing to buy? I came with the classical example of asking if they have a Bloody Mary (Vodka with tomato juice and some flavouring, if it’s news to anyone), and when they said yes, asking for a Virgin Mary instead (Same thing, only without the Vodka. Yes, technically you can call it tomato juice, but it doesn’t sounds as cool when you sit next to a bar).

But the discussion was moot. Someone else approached the bar, and asked for mineral water. We were waiting for the bartender to give him the explanation about serving only alcoholic drinks. Instead, she gave him mineral waters. We failed to see how mineral waters are an alcoholic beverage, or to understand why this, apparently available, option wasn’t suggested to the previous guy.

Later into the evening, a girl squeezed next to H to get to the bar. This was about the time the show was supposed to start, so the place was jam-packed with people. Those sitting places of ours were at a premium. The girl waved at the bartender, but she had to wait for quite some time, since there were a lot of people waiting in queue. So in the meantime, apparently to discourage idle small talk, she turned to my friend and told him that she only wants to order a drink, but she isn’t social, and so he doesn’t have anything to talk with her about. Not lacking in ability for retorts, my friend replied that if it becomes difficult they could always talk about the weather.

Which should have been the closing phrase of the conversation. Instead, this girl started to talk about the weather. With great enthusiasm. This is the first time in my life that I saw a "So, how about that weather" type of line actually working as a conversation starter. Amazing. So the girl (Let’s call her D) and H started chatting with each other, and I was trying not to snigger too much in their faces.

Since it was a long wait, a friend of D arrived, offering her a sip of her own glass. Which contained some sort of a white wine. To which D replied that wine is for nerds, and refused. An amusing reaction, isn’t it? Well, not amusing at all, compared to the fun-value of what she eventually ordered… Yep, wine.

Somewhat later, the show finally started, and H wanted to go closer to the stage. We decided to be polite, and offer our seats to D and her friend. So H stood up and went looking for her. There was a coat on his chair. And I placed my arm over his chair in a very obvious manner. Yet it took less that three seconds for the first person to arrive and ask if we’re leaving, and if he can take the chairs. I had to fight a bunch of them off with a stick, figuratively speaking, until D and her friend arrived.

H, in the meantime, offered D the seats, in exchange for her phone number… He was joking of course, and she really would have gotten the seats regardless, but I’m not sure how obvious it was to her. In any case, she gave him a number, and the number even turned out to be real…

So we moved closer to the stage, and actually managed to make our way very close, so got a good look at the band members and their equipment. At which point we did have to grudgingly give them the acoustic guitar, but it still didn’t make this an acoustic performance.

And during the show I needed to go to the toilet. I made my way through the thick crowd, only to discover that there are several people waiting ahead of me in line. The first one entered a freed booth straight away, leaving one guy, and one girl that arrived immediately after me. The girl was very agitated, and jumped up and down all the time, expressing her urgency. Eventually she knocked on one of the booths, yelling at the occupant to move it. A while later, probably longer than was necessary, just to spite, the occupant left, and started throwing choice expletives at her. The guy that was first in line wanted to enter the booth, but a cleaning guy just arrived, and insisted that he needs to go in and clean first. During the distraction of the arguments, another booth opened, and some jerk who was behind us all in line run immediately in and locked the door behind him.

Eventually the cleaning guy, who has won the previous round, went out, and the first in line got in, leaving me, the jumping girl, and a couple more guys that arrived in the meantime. The latest one asked about the queue order, and was dismayed to discover that there are so many in front of him. At which point the girl, and the guy that arrived after her, explained that they know each other, and don’t mind sharing. Yes, just what you’ve heard.

Eventually the hijacker went out, and the girl gave me an agonized look, asking me to please hurry it. I told her she can go in first, since it looks like she needs it much more urgently than I do. She uttered a thank you, and dashed over, only to be stopped by the cleaning guy that entered before her and started cleaning the booth…

But eventually he went out, and she went in. Alone.

All in all, the evening, or night, went very well. I did made the mistake of thinking that it won’t be crowded. Which was a very stupid assumption given that it’s both a popular pub on it’s own account, and had a free music show by a good band. The thing is, I really don’t enjoy crowds.

Or, what’s worse at bars, the cigarette smoke. People smoke in bars. And when you put a lot of them in a closed room… Let’s just say that the first thing to do after each and every bar visit is throw all the clothes into the washing machine, to take the stench of the smoke out.

Both facts, the crowds and the smoke, may help explain why I very rarely find myself in bars. That, and the loud meaningless noise many of them like to play as foreground music (yes, that was a snipe at it being overly loud). But the latter wasn’t a problem in this bar, at this evening, of course.

I saw this little article in today’s paper announcing that the department of tourism declared its intent to build an hippodrome in the Negev, to be used for horse racing and bets. They expect it to be a centre of tourism, and to cause other tourist attractions to be built in the same area. The minister of tourism is quoted as saying that "The state would benefit from the bets that will take place in the hippodrome, and the Negev will enjoy the creation of many labour sources".

First, I’m really not so sure about the merit of the idea. Sure, there are horses in Israel. But we’re pretty far from being well known as the equestrian capitol of the world. So people who are seriously into horse races won’t come, due to it being too amateurish. And are people who are just enthusiasts, or want to experience a race for the first time, really expected to come to Israel of all places? This makes very little sense to me.

Unless we expect serious horse breeders and racers to bring their own horses here. A lofty ambition. Too much so, I think, considering freight for a race horse to Israel would probably cost a lot more than inside Europe or the US. They won’t bring them until we get a good reputation, and we won’t ever get that good reputation without people bringing them.

All of which doesn’t matter much, because the way I see it, and the way I can’t believe my esteemed minister of tourism doesn’t see it, the point is to allow gambling. Yes, bets on horse races are gambling.

So how come this goes on so quietly? There were discussions once about opening approved casinos in Israel. It suffered from many loud objections, citing things like increased crime rate, or people losing too much of their money. It reached such a state that on the last election we had a potential party running that was only about making gambling legal (which it now isn’t), and they didn’t get enough votes to enter the Knesset.

So how come betting on card games is illegal and much contended, but opening a hippodrome and betting on horse races doesn’t raise any hackles? This is the exact same thing - gambling. Or am I missing something?

A couple of weeks ago Yahoo! changed the interface of their Groups service. And they made some very unfortunate choices during the overhaul, which looked nicer, but drastically reduced usability.

They did, however, provided an easy access to a feed-back form. And they paid attention to the comments, fixing the main problems almost straight away. And by now all but one of the problems is fixed. So basically I’m impressed, and in a good way. Currently, the groups look better, and retain the previous functionality, so that’s a success.

One other odd problem which I’m not sure about, related to the amount of members in the group. After the graphical change the group I was monitoring listed about 200 more members than there were before… And there weren’t more than 4-5 people tops who joined during that day… Odd, and I still don’t know whether the problem was before the update, or after the update.

My original list of problems, as I listed in the feed-back form was:

1. The main messages list doesn’t show message ID for individual message. This is actually useful sometimes. You also removed the option to find a message by number/ID. I, and other people I know, used this, several times.

2. Messages on date view are sorted as new-on-top, with no possibility to change that. From the main list choosing "last" goes to the first messages, and "first" to the last. In a single message view, "next" goes to an earlier message and "previous" to the newer ones. This is different then before, and feels very upside-down. Please either change it back, or make it a user-option.

3. The new message posting screen allows to specify a language. The drop-down list is not alphabetically sorted, so if someone looks for a language they have to read all the list entries.

4. Please make the message preview, and the nice break lines, on the message list optional. It’s prettier, but less functional when I want to go over several messages in advance. I want the ability, that I had on the previous layout, of seeing as many message subject at once.

5. The message view page has an ad which pushes inside the message area. This mean that the first few text lines of the message are shorter. This is very very bad. If some of those lines are quoted, and the ">" character are properly formatted to fit standard line length, the first few lines of the message will still look broken and unreadable once the length is changed. Don’t do that.

Thank you for your attention, and please do address these issues. The new look is nicer and friendlier, but parts of it drastically reduces functionality, which is not worth it.

And like I said, they fixed everything, except the problem of the ads inside messages (#5 in the message). This is still there, and still a problem. It is a big problem, but I don’t expect they’ll fix it, since the ads probably pay money.

But the rest is fine, so overall I’m satisfied. The next/previous problem was fixed straight away, as where the ID related ones.

The ability to choose sort direction and preview were added later. Currently it’s through a URL parameter, which does the job, but is carried through all index and message views, so changing the sort option also changes browser history, making read messages appear as unvisited links. But that’s minor and doesn’t change often. I’m still not sure that there are advantages to this system over others without this drawback, but I can see why this was the simplest to implement.

Sometimes the rampant paranoia of the Americans amazes me.

Pilots are instructed not to fly near nuclear power plants. But they are also not allowed to be told where are the plants located.
Yes, they are not allowed to fly near areas which are not specified to them. Nice and easy to do, isn’t it?

So they decide to find out by themselves, run some searches on publicly available data, and publish it among themselves. Only to be told that they’re not allowed to reveal those secrets. And back to square one.

Oh, yes, and it seems that it’s really not that hard to find those power plants.

Yes, the invention we’ve all been waiting for is finally here! Remote chicken petting device!
And, er, if it’s not absolutely clear, chicken here isn’t a euphemism for anything except chicken.

Because, of course, everybody needs to be able to pet their chicken when it’s in the yard and they are inside, right?

And even better, to pet the chicken when you’re out of the house, maybe at the office, or maybe visiting friends. Can’t leave the chicken unattended without constant petting. It may feel like you don’t love her.

Hat tip to Letters of Marque, which is often quite interesting, despite (or occasionally, like this time, because of) Heidi’s obsessive interest in chickens…

This is a long study about Gender Issues in College Student Use of Instant Messaging. But if you can’t read the whole thing, these are the highlights.

Mainly, they claim to find clear differences between the way men and women use IM. I read their differences. And you know what, I actually know college/university students who use their IM accordingly. But I also know just as many, if not more, who don’t. Heck, if what they claim was true, then I would just have to be an hermaphrodite.

Which I’m not. Seriously.

But what I find most amusing is the general claims, beside the main interest of the study, that most subjects were found to not use those obnoxious shortening of words which are so common on SMS and IM conversations (Oh, wait, did I say common on IM?! Well, guess I did… Imagine that…). And that there is an extremely low percentage of spelling errors in those IM conversations (about 1%).

So very little occurrences of "10x u r gr8", and very little occurrences of people forgetting a few letters, or slightly twisting words.

That’s absolute rubbish, you know. I use IM, and mostly with university/college students and recent graduates, considering I’m a part of that group myself. Personally, I try very much to keep my spelling, and using full words. And I fail on the spelling front occasionally. Many people don’t try, or care, to work for spelling, and some don’t care to work to write whole words. A much higher percent than this study find...

Heck, most of the time people don’t even bother commenting when they’re conversation partner shorten a word, or misspell a word, because of how common it is, and how everyone is doing it anyway.

The US has perfectly valid, real, and legit, 2$ bills. They’re just rare. So many people aren’t aware of them. Especially low level salespersons, it would seem. Oh, and cops.

So what do you expect happened to a man who tried to pay in Best Buy with 2$ bills? Right, police was called, and he was arrested. Just like that.

Nice. In some places, you can’t even pay with money.

I just wonder if, this being America, he’ll sue over his bad experience…

A little while ago I was reading a post discussing the effects of the environment on code quality (i.e. how working conditions are related to the quality of programmers). And one of the items mentioned there was dedicated floor space.

Which makes sense, it’s easy to see the relation between the quality of work done, and whether you’re stuck in a tiny cubicle or in a spacious office. In either direction.

In any case, the sizes discussed where 46, and 87, square feet. And for about any case of area, 46 square feet would indicate an area sized 6.78 x 6.78 feet. Very intuitive, very obvious, very mathematically correct, and yet I managed to misinterpret it.

You see, in all the times I got to be around anything involving construction and floor space (Workers and architects discussing room design and carpeting for my home when I was little, or similar discussions more recently about office buildings for companies I worked at), for some reason everyone called an N by N meters area "N square meters". This is patently wrong, and I have a hard time believing it’s some sort of an industry standard, but that’s what they all did. So this way of referring to floorspace got stuck in my head.

And reading 46 square feet, I automatically converted it to a 46×46 feet area, which is huge. Certainly as the smaller option being correlated with the less-good programmers, but even in and by itself it’s larger than about any office I saw anywhere…

I replied accordingly, asking if maybe it’s a mistake and they intended to write 4.6 and 8.7. Which is, as was appropriately replied to me, about the size of a refrigerator box, and certainly not something you could stick an average programmer in. Well, not in working order, anyway.

One good thing came of it, I’m finally rid of this particular problem, and will be able from now on to treat all area measurements the same, regardless of what is the area actually of. Which is the proper mathematical approach to things. At least I only got a little embarrassed, rather than comissioning a new hourse and coming to view the construction only to discover I’m paying for a palace…

I’m planning to go on a trip to the US, with a friend, on September. As Israeli citizens, we need a visa to be allowed into the US. I have an old non-immigrant B1/B2 visa, and my friend doesn’t have any. So I wanted to make sure mine is still in order, and my friend needs to get a new one.

My own visa was issued in 2000. I was working for a start-up company, which at some points decided that they may want to send us (anyone on the development team) to the US for whatever reasons. So they urged us all to get US visas, and dealt with all the costs and bureaucratic process themselves. All I needed to do was say yes, so I did.
Of course, as happened to most start-up companies, it didn’t quite manage to sustain itself, and I never did went to the US, but the visa remained.

It’s a 10 year visa, so officially it only expires on 2010. I do know, however, that in the last few years the Americans have changed the process of issuing visas, and have much more stringent demands, so I wanted to ensure that the visa is indeed still valid. It would have been a very unpleasant surprise to land there, only to be sent away since my type of visas were globally cancelled.

The current requirements include things like fingerprinting, more in-depth interviews, and facial pictures sized 5×5 cm, with the ears visible. Yes, the ears have to be visible on this non-standard sized picture. If you have a picture with your ears covered by hair, or hidden due to a slight angle of the photo, it’s no good. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they intend to use it for some never-effective facial recognition system at some point.

In any case, I didn’t have any of these things, so thought it prudent to make sure I don’t need them, and that the Americans will stand behind the old visa they gave me.

I went to the list of all US embassies, found the site for the Israeli one, and went in hunting for information. Things were pretty confusing, and I didn’t find anything that seemed very clear cut to me (at least not enough to face the risk of making the wrong decision), so I decided to ask them. There was a contact page, listing a phone number, and the hours for calling. Only two hours per day, four days a week, but two hours are more than enough to make a phone call.

As an interesting side note, they don’t work Sundays (probably since it’s still weekend in the US), and they don’t work Fridays (since it’s weekend in Israel). So they have a short week. Sweet deal.

OK, back to the story. So I called, and called, and called, but nobody actually answered the phone. Instead of trying the next day, I decided to try and send an email.

Funny thing, on their email lists, there are addresses @state.gov which are official email addresses for the State Department of the US, but the general-purpose email address is named ac5 (??) and under a local Israeli ISP account. Still more odd, another email address is at an Hotmail account. Not very inspiring or professional. But the one for non-immigrant visas was an official State Department one, so I sent an email to that.

I had another possible problem, my passport is only valid for about half a year after the planned trip. Which doesn’t sound like it should cause any problem, but there are places where they want a passport valid for longer times in the future, so I had to make sure the current US isn’t one of them.

I sent an email about the two questions, detailing the condition and date, and asking if the visa is valid, and if I will need to increase the valid term of my passport before the trip.

I received a very quick response, which arrived on the next day. Which contained, apart from the polite pleasantries:

If you have a valid visa, simply carry the old passport with the valid visa
on it with the new passport and present both passports at the port of entry
to the US. Your length of stay will be limited by a validity of your
passport.

My passport is, like I wrote to them originally, still valid on the time on the planned trip, so there won’t be a second one. And I wasn’t sure if "If you have a valid visa" is enough of a confirmation that the expiry date on my old visa is enough to make it valid. So I sent another message explaining my concerns and asking for more details.

The response included:

The new fingerprints requirement from the U.S. Department of State, which
became effective Monday December 1, 2003 applies to those applicants, who is
planning to visit the United States and have no valid visa in their
passport. The above requirement is implemented by all American posts
worldwide and does not waive visitors of providing fingerprints at a
port-of-entry into the United States. Therefore, if you have a valid visa of
an appropriate category, which covers the purpose of your visit to the U.S,
you are not required to provide fingerprints at the U.S. Embassy prior to
your visit.

Which I believe does answer my question. My visa is good. They will still take my fingerprints when I land, but they won’t send me back due to lack of valid visa.

I sent them back a thank you, and that’s the end of this story.

Basically, they lose points for not answering the phone, and for not paying exact attention on the email, but gain more points by responding to the email quickly, and giving me the answers and information I needed pretty soon. Not sure that this isn’t a case of low expectations, but they did surpass whatever expectations I had, so that’s good. Considering that this is holiday season, and they’re swamped with visa applications, I think I received a pretty good service in the email part.

To continue the US visa stories from my previous post about my own visa, my friend needs to get a new visa. Which is a whole different ballgame.

To get a visa, you need to go to an interview at the embassy, and bring with you various forms with information about yourself and the planned visit, and that photo I mentioned. They also take your fingerprints, and try to assure themselves that you’re not trying to sneak in and immigrate.

Once you have taken your picture (which due to the non-standard size means you need to take it especially for this, and can’t use any other passport photo you may already have), there are two problems remaining, filling the forms, and getting to that interview. Oh, and paying a hefty processing sum, which will not be returned to you even if your visa application is not approved, but that’s just the cost of doing business these days.

Let’s start with the simple one, the forms. Plenty of personal information, along with the part where you’re supposed to honestly reply to questions about whether you are a terrorist, drug dealer, mass murderer, or anything like that.

Traditionally, you schedule the interview through a travel agent, and the travel agent gives you the papers. You can then fill them up in the time you have until the interview, and bring them with you.

But ever on the cutting edge of progress, the US State Department have noticed the existence of the internet. So they have a special site for Electronic Visa Application Forms. And before we get to content, let me just say that the site is a technological wonder. They run a javascript code intended to ensure that visitors run a browser version compatible with the site, and have an Acrobat Reader version compatible with the PDF (commonly used for documents that can be easily viewed and printed on most platforms and computers) files they create. Except… The script is a total bust.

The code was written in 2003. The newest version of Acrobat Reader available today is 7, yet the code checks for, or rather try to check for, up to version 9. Talk about forward thinking. But, well, it doesn’t check properly, so visitors with Acrobat Reader 7 installed are told that they don’t have a recent enough version. Apparently the minimum version is 5. Now, I know 7 is greater than 5, but they don’t. So anyone who is up to date is guaranteed to be told they are not updated enough to properly work with this site. Cool, eh?

Anyway, you have two options. The first is to download the forms in PDF format, and print them at your home. If you schedule an interview through a travel agent, this is basically identical to taking the forms from them, except that you pay for the paper and ink yourself. If you get in by the other method (which I’ll cover soon), this can be convenient.

But wait, there is the second option. There is a web form there, with fields for all the information you’d need to fill on the paper form. So you can enter all the information directly on the site, and submit it there. Now, anyone with even a little web experience would automatically make the very likely assumption, that this would enter the details directly into a central database, and it won’t be necessary to use the actual paper forms, or remember to carry them with you on the interview.

And anyone who makes this natural assumption would be wrong. What it does, once you fill all the information on the web, is generate a PDF of the form, with the information entered written into it. You still need to print it, and you still need to take it with you.

If you have a particularly lousy handwriting, it could make some sense. If it’s much easier for you to fill forms on a computer instead of write on paper, it could also make some sense. For most people, it doesn’t make sense. People would use it to save dealing with papers, but it doesn’t quite do that.

OK, say you’re done with that. Now you need to schedule an interview. On the off-season, that’s easy. Contact your travel agent, and have them schedule one. Two or three days, and you’ll get an interview. But, well, now isn’t off-season, it’s holiday season, and everyone is out to get a visa. The waiting time for a scheduled appointment is about two months. Yes, two months.

So what do you do if you need it sooner, or if you just need to know that the visa application will be approved, since you want to arrange for plane tickets, hotel reservations, and the likes, in advance? This is our case. There is time until September, but some things are better done now. Yet if for some odd reason the visa will be denied, that’s a lot of money that will be lost on cancellation fees.

Well, the Americans have figured out a solution. Based on the classic first-come first-served system, each day the have a queue of people which will be accepted for an interview, the first 100 of them. And yes, this does imply that every day there are much more than a 100 people who try.

According to the web page on the site, the people are counted in the morning, when the embassy officially opens for business, and the first 100 are listed and told to return at noon. This mean that you practically burn the entire day on this, but you at least get an interview on the same day.

But there will be a line, so it’s best to get there before time, right? Preferably a lot before time. How bad is it, you ask? My friend planned to get there at about 5 AM. Which may have been very late, since someone else my friend talked to, who did the same thing a couple of days ago, arrived at the evening of the previous day, to wait all night long. Yes, all night. It turns out that there are a lot of people who wait in line the entire night in order to get to the embassy first thing in the morning. It’s like those super-popular rock concerts, or something. Some even bring sleeping bags with them. Which I totally don’t understand. Waiting in line I can get, but sleeping in line, on a promenade, with dozens of people wandering around you?

My friend arrived on 5AM anyway, to see if maybe it would be enough. Well, guess what? There were people coming… and going. No line. The security guard outside provided an explanation, saying that about a week ago the system was changed. They now count the first 100 applicants at 19:00, not in the morning. This of course was not announced anywhere, and is still not listed on the site, so people kept arriving and being turned away.

The guard advised arriving at 16:30-17:00, in order to manage to get in. Looks like a reasonable time if people aren’t crazy enough, and he should have the experience of the last several days, and so provide a decent estimate. Right?

Wrong. Just to be safe, my friend arrived some time before 16:00. And got a number very very close to 100. Five minutes later, and it would have been a no-go. And sure, that mean that they gave the numbers to people when they arrived, not kept them waiting till 19:00. This is the right thing to do, I think, and just keeping the people standing in line would be pointless and mean, but that’s still not the official guidelines, as were told to my friend. They need to get themselves in better synch.

Oh, and all the people got a numbered tickets, and told to return the next day at 12:00. All of them. So at 12:00, another long queue of 100 people milling about, waiting for the few interviewers to go through them. That’s a long wait, if anyone wonders…

At least my friend has strong family ties, work, university studies, and no reason to want to live in the US, so the visa will in all likelihood be approved. America be willing.

I got a phone call today. The women presented herself as working for my credit card company. According to her, details of credit card numbers, including my own, have leaked from a certain business establishment.

She wasn’t very forthcoming about the business involved, claiming that they cannot provide more information at this time regarding it. But the card needs to be cancelled.

I asked if they think my credit card details leaked because someone made suspicious purchases with it, or because they know for sure that there has been a leak from a certain place. She assured me that as far as they know my card was not used, yet, but that the details are out.

She then read to me the last two transactions made with the card, yesterday, and asked me to verify that they’re indeed my own. Which they were.

This had the added benefit, though I’m not sure if it was intentional from her point, to let me know she is probably legit. The two orders where made from different places, using different payment methods, so anyone with access to the data is either from the credit card company, or has access to my own computer.

All the information she asked, in order to verify the person she called is really me and so authorized to cancel my card, was my date of birth. And by the reasoning of the above paragraph, I knew this wasn’t a phishing attempt, since anyone with her data already has access to this information as well.

This isn’t that bad a verification method from her point too, since while anyone trying to pretend to be me would have that info, she made the call herself from a number they have for a long time. A wrong number wouldn’t have been able to give a date and pull a prank, and intentionally planting my phone number at their database is too much work for someone just so they could cancel my credit card after stealing its details.

So we cancelled the card, and I’ll have to survive the weekend without. According to her it would take three business days to issue a new one. Hopefully, by Monday next week I could actually buy stuff, or withdraw money. She did ask if I had enough cash on me, or want a slight delay to go withdraw. But I have some cash, so I told her to cancel straight away.

This left me curious as to where the information got out from.

And seconds later, I received an email, from a second-hand book store here in Israel, letting me know that:

We just got a notice from our hosting service that some of the information on transactions from our site may have been tampered with.

Because we can’t confirm the extent of the damage at the present time, we feel obliged to inform you of this current situation.

We notified the credit card companies and we suggest you do the same and act according to their recommendations.

We apologize for any inconvenience and are sorry that things such as these can happen.

Feel free to phone us for additional information or questions

Which is very honest of them. And rather prompt, at least assuming the credit card company didn’t wait too long with it.

Their website is currently down. I assume they switch hosting, and using the opportunity to clean everything up. Time will tell.

In case anyone missed it, and until recently I’d never have though of it as a possibility, the Pope John Paul II has died. A few weeks ago.

I’d have thought anyone and everyone have already heard about it. It was covered in about all the news and media sources, all over. Certainly in the "western" world, but in right about everywhere else as well. If you told me that there’s a person who managed to miss that fact, I’d have said no way.

That is, until I met that person last Wednesday. I was meeting with a few friends, and during the course of the evening the conversation also drifted in the direction of the new papal candidates, and the terrible coverage in the media. And one of them suddenly said something like "How old is the Pope now anyway? He’s really old, right? Must be around 87 or so?".

We all stared at her agape. She looked back, saying "What?". So I politely explained that the current Pope is dead. Has been for a couple of weeks. And the other people nodded, and added that it’s true.

Which got us a nice "What? You’re kidding me, right? Right?". It took us as long to realize she’s serious as it took her to realize we were…

Don’t get me wrong, I make fun of her here (well, it is a funny story), but she’s otherwise a very intelligent and nice person. But as she explained, she doesn’t really follow the news. Lives in a dorm without a TV, and doesn’t pay too much attention to the newspapers.

Or as she put it "So how should I have heard?". I was as nice as usual (Yep, I’m like that even with friends. But it’s in a friendly-teasing manner, so that’s all right) and said "You could talk to people occasionally". Which she actually does, but apparently the topic never came up during all that time. Amazing.

Needless to say, it took her some time before the red colour receded from her face.

And I can proudly say I had the honour of meeting the last person on the world to hear about the Pope’s death. And the double honour of helping close that category of people.

Now, should I tell the Guinness committee? Is she eligible for world fame?

I ran a simple search on Yahoo!, for two quoted phrases, and forgot to close the second quote. No big problem, since the normal options are either that the search engine would guess right on its own, or will guess wrong and ignore the double-quote character.

Instead, I received an error page, with this nice line at the bottom:

d=document; function init() { addHandlers(); } function addHandlers() { if (oRoot=document.getElementById(’yschres’)) { if (!oRoot.getElementsByTagName(’ul’)) return false; var aSpns=oRoot.getElementsByTagName(’ul’); for (i=0;i

The sort of thing you can expect from some improperly debugged web page, but not from a service as experienced as them.

Quite odd.

In any case, a second attempt with the same malformed search string, a little while later, worked properly. And while I didn’t get result (which is true, even had I close the quotes), I also didn’t see the error message and the server code.

I’m subscribed to Nature magazine for years now. The sciences are a hobby of mine, and Nature is one of the best, and oldest, interdisciplinary journals out there.

My current subscription was nearing the expiration period, and I logged in to the site to renew. I don’t usually use the site much, since I read everything on the paper, but when it comes to registration it beats filling a paper form and sending an envelope, hands-down.

Before starting the renewal, I took a quick look at my account details, and noticed a problem. I was listed as working in the pharmaceutical industry. I certainly never provided that information, so it must be a mistake. This is one of the information fields that doesn’t have any effect on me, and only interests them, since it gives them better data about their subscribers.

I decided I can spare a minute to be nice and go and change this. I entered the account details page, changed to a more appropriate category, and tried to update the data.

No such luck. They have required fields which were not filled. Mind you, these are required field that didn’t contain any info previously, so how can they really be required? But specifically, they require that I also fill in my Secondary Speciality, my Main Activity, and my Professional Qualification. Even ignoring the fact that I’m not entirely sure what the heck they’re talking about, why would I be required to provide that info? I don’t want to, and don’t need to.

I’m a paying customer, have a subscription for years, and nobody forced me to go change my details. I’m doing them a favour of updating some details, and they won’t let me do that without divulging even more personal information? Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I could either tell them more than I wanted to, or let them keep the wrong info that I was willing to correct. So I said goodbye, and left them with the garbage info. This makes no sense, why demand to receive more information, when the info isn’t really required? Do they really prefer to get no information about people, than partial info? Why?

And, oh, as a side-note, while the new subscription page works great, the renew subscription page is a total bust. The help system has a page saying something about the entire on-line subscription being inoperational, but the page is entirely undated, so it’s impossible to know how close it is to apply. And the support rep, by email, said that she doesn’t know why the renew pages don’t work, and offered me to send her the credit card details by phone, fax, or email. Yes, clear-text unencrypted email. Sloppy all around.

I just thought this would serve as a good example of what I meant in a previous post when I mentioned the terrible coverage in the media of the new candidates for the papacy.

As it seems, in the addition to the all too common jokes about Black popes, Jewish popes, and the like, some news sources can’t even keep track of which candidates are real people, and which of their candidates are just TV characters.

This is hilarious. If things of the sort were not becoming more and more common in the US, it would have been very hard to believe it’s a true story…

This is what happens when a stupid racist (Remember folks, it’s not libel if it’s true) ex-WWF champion gets his "Director of Communications" to threaten a website that made a little fun of him.

Yes, I’m not sure what "Director of Communications" mean either. Probably like barbers are called hair-stylists, and gardeners are called landscape-engineers, so this is the guy who speaks for Ultimate Warrior. Not because he’s any good at it, but (what a scary thought) because the Warrior is even worse.

Getting offended when you’re called racist, is legitimate. Asking someone to remove a post saying that, is also legitimate. When it’s a satire site, and when you really meant what you said that got you labelled a racist, not so much legitimate. Getting into scare tactics, telling the person that you know where they live, hinting on use of physical violence, and harassing they website owner’s father on the phone… Big nono.

And some more discussion on this, and on the Ultimate Warrior guy.

Sure, the local version of Sesame Street isn’t quite identical to the US one. And sure, I haven’t seen the show for years and years (and years). But we had a cookie monster here, just like there. And they’re now turning it healthy.

The Cookie Monster - Healthy… Imagine that… It’s not supposed to be healthy! It’s supposed to eat cookies! The traditional chocolate chip cookies!

But not any more. It will recommend moderation, only eating cookies occasionally. And it will switch to healthier kinds of cookies.

Yea, sure, the Americans keep complaining that they become more and more… metabolically challenged. But what, are kids really eating cookies like crazy, just because the cookie monster does? Give me a break…

On a side note, 36 seasons, that’s impressive.

A few days ago I noticed an incoming link from Evan Schaeffer, who runs the Notes from the (Legal) Underground blog. He seems like a nice person, despite being a lawyer, and very often manages to be interesting, funny, and entertaining.

Before I start, thanks, Evan. Seriously.

Now let’s start. The incoming link wasn’t for a particular post here which he found interesting, however, but as a round-up of other blogs that had a permanent link to his own. Which got me thinking (ergo this post) about the concept. Of course, I don’t really have this as a concrete problem, since nobody has any permanent links to me on their blogrolls (yet?), but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t form an opinion.

On a side-note, he’s been on the blogroll here for months, and he has been doing these thank you posts for quite some time (this one is #16), so I’m not entirely sure why he got to me now. Not that it matters, either way.

What interests me is why is it interesting for him at all. Had he been linking to me, that would have been interesting for me. My blog is quite small, nobody knows about it, and I’m (happily) a very small fish in the pond. And while he doesn’t quite run the most famous blog on the planet, he’s much bigger and much more well known than me.  So from my POV, a permanent link there may mean something, as unexpected as it may be. But why should he be interested enough in anyone linking to him? I’m tiny, I won’t get him almost any hits, and we’re far enough apart in our areas (He has a legal blog, I have a general mishmash sort of things) that it will probably not even benefit any of his readers that may follow his post to here. Linking to the small legal blogs I can somehow get, but not quite me.

So this is a matter of policy, or principle, then. Acknowledging a permanent link, because it’s proper, or something. Which I don’t quite get from this angle as well. I’m not adding anyone to my blogroll in order to be recognized, but because I think they’re interesting. That, by itself, is really no reason for them to pay attention, or care, at all. I don’t mind or anything, of course, quite the contrary, but it doesn’t mean I agree with the rational behind it. Someone specifically saying something about you, sure, pay attention, in the cases where what’s said has some added value. But someone just thinking you’re interesting? When it’s not a matter of the specific someone being a somebody? Next thing you know, I’ll get mentioned by Volokh (had to pick at least another legal one, of course), Schneier, or Raymond Chen.

OK, enough with that, onward to the story. Yes, there’s a story.

See, I didn’t notice it in the first place because I was searching for inbound links, or because I got a hit from there (Though that what clued me to the exact source. I did get several hits through since, and nobody seemed interested enough to be a returning customer, which just strengthen my point). It’s because I got a hit from del.icio.us (note to self - try to add another post of del.icio.us and Furl sometime in the near future, and put my links some place, just in case someone may care for the things I find interesting, but not interesting enough to post).

A hit from an on-line bookmark service (social, or otherwise) means someone finds me interesting enough to keep the link. Since I’m quite small and totally unread (sorry to my two regular readers), I do care. At least, care enough to see if it’s easy to know who, and what else they find interesting. So I went to take a look what else the del.icio.us user called TES is interested in.

Lots of law-related blogs, it seemed, and I didn’t know how my own blog came into it. What seemed odder was the cataloguing system. You can assign various tags/keyword for stored links/bookmarks. And these tags are supposed to be relevant to the site, and help you find it later. But the tags there seemed too artificial, like someone was just grouping links, by order. My first thought was that it was a very clueless person, that totally missed the idea behind tags, and is just trying to give sequential numbers as some peculiar way of keeping order…

So I shrugged, and moved onward, only to later see two hits, from the same address, one from the same del.icio.us user, and one from Notes from the (Legal) Underground. Aha.

Now, that way of saying I linked to you, by posting a link and then following the link, is quite common. I don’t do this myself, due to the same reason that often I don’t think whoever on the other side would be interested, and in my case it feels like a cheap way of pushing busy people take a look at my drivel. Sometimes I do, though, but only if I think what I wrote is relevant, and if I can’t do something like send a trackback (when it’s about a post, not a blog, of course. Can’t trackback a blog). But it’s legitimate, and in this case it certainly served it’s purpose.

Which just leaves me wondering, does TES stand for Thanks Evan Schaeffer ?  Or a mistyped attempt at an initial TEST of del.icio.us that got reused? Or something else?

OK, this is getting to be too much rambling even for me, so that’s it on this subject.

Remember the casino that bought the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich for an outlandish amount of money, on eBay?

Well, turns out, they’re very eBay happy (happy as in trigger-happy) over there, and are buying odd stuff all over the place.

A Doritos chip that looks like the Pope’s hat

The rights for the name of a woman, which then had to change her name to that of the casino.

The names of three newborns, similar deal.

and more… I’m not sure who is more crazy, this casino, or the people selling this stuff… On the other hand, as long as they pay, and everyone is happy, what’s the harm? Can’t say why it bothers me so much to see the casino and the silly eBay sellers reach satisfactory Pareto-efficient agreements.

Due to some serious problems from TypePad, where this blog was hosted until now, I’ve moved it to WordPress, on a ‘normal’ hosting provider.

For the last four days or so I was practically unable to post anything on my TypePad blog. According to the TypePad support team (as explained by a nice lady called Brenna) this is because of problems with DST.

Yes, that’s right, due to daylight savings. Something to do with the way they generate archives. So yes, stopping the archives seem like a working workaround, but it’s ugly. It’s broken. And it took them too long to even get that far.

So I moved this away for now. The design and behaviour were of course changed, but I tried to at least start with relatively similar look and feel, and make sure that not too many things are broken. Still, if stuff seems too odd, this is a work in progress, but please do leave a comment instead it’s a problem I’m not aware of.

Hopefully I could straighten out the kinks soon enough.

Recently the spam messages reaching Hotmail accounts turned into large messages with large attachments (100k-350k).

I know this isn’t only my problem, since when mentioning this to other people with Hotmail accounts, they knew about the large spam messages straight away.

And it definitely has something to do with Hotmail, since my other email accounts (of which I have far too many already) don’t get these sort. Other sorts of spam, yes, sure, but not these ones.

Their spam filter does catch all these messages, and transfer them to the Junk folder. But unlike some other email providers, their junk folder counts toward the account limit.For a mailbox size of 2MB (Since I don’t live in the right places), this means that it’s quite possible to leave an empty mailbox, and come back a day later to find out you maxed out… Not fun.

In any case, in the automatic message sent, notifying me that I maxed the account, they gave an email address for questions. So I decided to ask about that. The process is interesting, you start by sending an empty message (or not, I didn’t pay attention to that as first, since it’s so uncustomary), and they send you a link to a page where you can fill the comment/suggestion/complaints…

So, I sent a message about it. The women answering said several things (apart from the excessive formal politeness):

• She will pass it over to the development team.
  
• I can set my junk filter to automatically delete messages.
• They intend to convert everyone to 250MB mailboxes. They do it in batches, so it will take time, but they will.
• The message came with a notice (inserted inside the text, like it was a personal message) that I can upgrade for a paid account to get eight times my current account size.
  

Which is all fine and good, except that I still may lose messages until then. They say that there are five days grace period until the actively delete messages, but they may bounce incoming messages even during that time.

And the junk filter is far from perfect. So it’s lose message if it doesn’t delete, and lose messages if it does.

The idea of paying for 8 times my account (That would be 16MB), on the same message telling me I’m going to get a lot more for free, is especially ludicrous.

So I sent back a reply with these concerns. And got a reply back from a different person, saying basically the same things, and including similar commercials inlined in the personal message. I was impressed by how much they all really cared deeply about what I had to say, and would give it the utmost priority. Yes, I didn’t take that too seriously either.

But in any case, that’s it. Annoying, but hopefully will improve soon. 

Sometimes PR speak is so bad, that it prevents any actual info from showing. Well, alright, that sometimes was a bit gentle, it happens a lot with PR speak. But still , this is one of the more amusing cases I encountered lately.

My boss was checking possibilities for a new computer, and noticed a very cheap option from some seller. So he asked me to take a look at the spec. The computer was a barebone Asus Terminator C3. As a barebone system, it has the CPU as an on-board component, and is pretty weak, but I wanted to see exactly what is it and what can it do.

Which brought me to this amusing paragraph from their site:

Instead of meaninglessly looking for high frequency processor, ASUS Terminator C3 brings you into a new world – it is strong enough to do your office/school job as well as fulfill your multimedia needs. ASUS Terminator C3 is built to be silent, space-saving, and cost effective.

Or in other words: Instead of looking for something that can prove it’s good, trust us, this one can do what you want it to, and we don’t even need to ask what you want to do with it in order to know that.

Very reassuring, isn’t it? Why check for specifications? Why check how fast a computer is. This one would do the job. It’s a wonder the big companies are releasing different kinds of processors, isn’t it, if you can just make one that always fit…

And that’s not even the best part. I found another site selling it, which had even more to say:

Confused about all those CPU naming rules? Do you really have idea about 530, 540, 550, 560 or the difference from them to 2600+, 2800+, 3000+? With on-board CPU, ASUS Terminator C3 offers you enormous DIY fun while sparing the trouble over CPU selection.

Yes, you read that right, they just plain go out and say: Confused about the names and models that big CPU manufacturers use? Don’t worry, we don’t give you any name or model details, so you have nothing to be confused about.

Which is the same thing, but put even better. How does this solve the problem? If getting names and models of CPUs doesn’t help their intended audience avoid confusion, why would no info at all be better? With no info at all (except for trust us of course), I’d expect people would be even more confused, no?

And what about poor people like me, who are actually not confused with all these name? People who want to know what their computer is. Are they saying this one is bad for them? Because, you know, if it has to be bad for the people with technical knowledge, it doesn’t inspire the rest that it would be good for them. And, well, DIY fun?! That surely isn’t what people who don’t get these names and models would be interested in, doing it themselves.

Odd.

Hotmail occasionally send to members (Hotmail mailboxes) these notification messages explaining the many virtues of their new offerings, and miscellaneous stuff.

This time I noticed a part of the message giving some tips under the heading of “Telltale Signs of Identity Theft Scams“, including this one:

Scroll over the URL. If you see lots of numbers, or a different URL, it’s probably fake.

Which is, by itself, quite sensible. It isn’t foolproof, and there are legitimate addresses that look like that, but can usually serve as a decent indication for people without too much technical knowledge. And a little below they provide a link for more information, with the text:

For more information, go to http://safety.msn.com.

And, well, guess what shows up when you scroll over the URL? Let me tell you, the URL showing up on the status bar is http://g.msn.com/3HMHEN/1892

And, as you may notice, it is a different URL (g.msn.com instead of safety.msn.com). I know it’s the same domain, but it may not be entirely obvious to the average Joe who actually needs those explanations. More than that, it has some odd letters and numbers that don’t make sense, which the same average Joe could clearly identify as lots of numbers.

So someone paying attention would have to conclude this is an attempt at identity theft…