Ordinary Nothing

There’s this nice young women I know from an online group. Not too long ago her boyfriend proposed to her, and recently she found out she’s pregnant. She was so incredibly happy and excited, it was sometimes difficult to follow her message threads from the rapid bobbing and jumping around. But it was sheer joy to see someone so genuinely happy in life.

Today, she and her fiancé were involved in a car accident. It was described to me as a hit and run frontal collision (No, I do not know how you can have a serious frontal collision, and then go ahead driving, and run away. Didn’t seem appropriate to badger her brother about this detail when he let us know on the group).

Her fiancé died, and so did her baby, a girl who only got about three hours of life…

She is in a hospital at the moment, undergoing surgery, but is expected to make full recovery. Talk about being grateful for small graces… But at least she could carry on, and somehow get on with her life. I expect the emotional trauma and damage will be far worse than any physical damage.

This is all seriously and majorly unfair, and is a huge tragedy. My heart goes out to her. I do sincerely hope she will be strong enough to pick up, and manage to live with this and restore her life.

Safe recovery, Nutz, and may you not lose the light.

That same Golden Palace Casino which has purchased a plethora of odd things in the past on eBay auctions, has recently also won a similar bid on a car which was, probably, owned by Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now the new pope.

What I find more amusing is this report from CBC news on it, including the paragraph:

A bidder with the username “golden palace casino” won the auction on Thursday evening.

Their story is dated from 06 May 2005 06:40:30 EDT, which is 10:40 GMT. The BBC story I linked to above, is from 6 May, 2005, 00:55 GMT. Which makes it much earlier, giving the CBC report about 10 extra hours to get more details had they wanted to.

And yet the CBC reporter didn’t bother to do a minimum amount of research, to see who is the mysterious buyer who spent close to 190,000 Euro to buy this car on eBay, settling for reporting the name, and that’s that.

I recognized the name. But even without seeing it before, any quick Internet search on the name would have resulted in dozens of reports about the crazy purchases by this casino. Why couldn’t a proper journalist do that? Most of them did manage to, after all.

Those invisible and unexplainable points in the body, which have such a tremendous medical effects if you stick a needle into them, despite them not being noticeably different from any other point? Well, yet another research shows that acupuncture doesn’t help, this time a study that demonstrates how acupuncture is no more effective than placebo for reducing migraines.

Shocking, isn’t it?

My own personal familiarity with acupuncture is very slight. I did know a doctor once who took acupuncture courses, and then started providing services using acupuncture in things like obesity treatment. I didn’t follow up on his patients, so I can’t say, but during that time he was a bit chubby himself, so you can guess just how good that worked.

Via Bob Park from What’s New, who put this best:

Acupuncture is
widely touted for treating migraine, but in 12 sessions over 8
weeks, sham acupuncture, in which the needles are inserted in the
“wrong” points, was just as effective as inserting them in the
“correct” points. This should greatly simplify the training of
acupuncture specialists. Just stick the damn needles anywhere.

In the recent year my company started to sell a certain system worldwide. One of the systems went to a rather large company, L, which can also act as a reseller for our system as part of their own production line. And which also intended to also use if for presentation purposes, in exhibitions and the likes, as part of their product lines and solutions. L asked for a discount price, and due to the fact that we were trying to push the system, and the fact that this would also provide publicity for our own system, my boss decided this would be a good investment, and gave them a nice discount.

Fast forward to last week. My boss met with the head of a different company, G, who was also interested in purchasing such a system. And started the discussion by asking for the same price we gave L. When my boss asked what price he was talking about, the guy from G pulled out a printed copy of the email that my boss sent in the past to L’s representative.

My boss explained to the person from G that the price cut there was an investment, and that now we are also not so avid to push the system, since it’s not so new and we have sales. And that due to that we cannot sell him a system at such a low price (which is break-even, or even a loss for us. I’m not entirely familiar with the cost analysis, but it would in any case not allow us to make any profit from the sale).

The bigger problem was that the email was a private one. As a rule, individual price quotations are not something which companies are supposed to pass along to other companies. Not as a general rule, and certainly not when it is clearly specified that this is a one-time offer and is a special discount under special circumstances, as that email did specify. So G should never have seen that email.

My boss called the guy from L, to complain, and asked him why did he give the owner of G this message. The guy from L was stunned, claiming that he never did passed along that email…

As it turns out, the G boss was visiting L’s headquarters for business, a short while ago. And for some time they left him alone in the office, going to check for some data. And he used that time to open their file cabinets, browse through folders, and photocopy documents. Which included a printed copy of that email.

This was a senior of a rather large international company, during business meetings with another large international company… Lesson learned: Do not leave anyone in an office unattended, no matter how respectable he may seem.

Needless to say, he won’t be getting that discount.

A young women called in to one of those radio shows that play songs by request. The show’s host said hi, and asked her what would she like. So far so good, and quite normal.

Then she answers “Could you give me something?“, which leaves the host in a bit of confusion. You could hear it in his voice when he asked her “Wha… what do you… er… mean, give you something?“.

So the girl answers him that she wants a gift, like they give everyone. Sometimes they do give callers some semi-promotional gifts, after they ask for songs. The stunned host says that sure, no problem, they’ll add her to the list, and transfers her off the air to the receptionists in charge of taking caller’s details.

During the entire exchange, she didn’t ask for any song to hear. Talk about missing the main point.

One of the various tools laying about in our office is a digital varnier caliper. It’s a pretty handy tool when someone (usually not me, since I deal with computers, not the physical parts) wants to get exact measurement on something.

And obviously, when the two arms of the caliper touch, the distance it measures between them is zero. A total of 0.00mm, to be exact. Here, see for yourself:

Now, guess what happens when you push it a little? Well, obviously the designers thought about that, and the caliper can measure negative distances. Actually, you can zero it on any position, so it can in fact measure even large negative distances. This is fine, a good feature.

But, what happens if when it’s on zero, you push it just a little bit? So it doesn’t really move, not even a 0.01mm? Why, it would still show zero, you would expect, right? Well, wrong:

That’s right. minus 0.00mm distance. Release the caliper, and it will be back to 0.00, tighten it slightly again, and it will be -0.00 again… Cute, real cute. This mean that there is a real and concrete amount of distance between the two zeroes. So, what is that distance? Because mathematically speaking, it has to be, well, zero…

Many around here in Israel seem excited over the Israeli team winning on the Euroleague games. You can catch screaming people, and people babbling without control. There are numerous celebrations on the streets and in community centres. Heck, one of my mother’s client set an appointment with her, and forgot to even call and say he won’t be arriving…

All because a group of our highly paid muscled guys turned out to be marginally more successful than a group of someone else’s (Spain?) highly paid muscled guys, at throwing balls through hoops. Truly fantastic. Of all the things we need in this country, being the best at throwing balls short distances through hoops, is certainly at the top of the list. Along with bouncing same balls on the floor while running, of course.

Sorry, did I say our guys? I meant our, as in the ones we hire and pay for, not that they are Israelis. From what I was told, about half of them are foreign contracts. So the victory, the exciting point, is that some Israeli coach was able to assemble a team of people from all over the world, that was able to shoot balls through hoops better than a team that some Spanish coach was able to assemble…. Do you get the sense that maybe I don’t quite feel the full impact of the gravitas of the situation?

Texas. Happily married couple, and two young kids. Then the model citizen of a father get arrested for sexual assault. This is a problem for them, since they don’t want to break the family apart (your husband gets arrested for sexual assault, to which he admits, and you want to preserve the family so much?! Why?!), and it’s hard to stay together when some of you are in jail, right?

So what do you do? Fake the husband’s death. The husband signed a plea, and was allowed to stay on probation out of jail. Meanwhile the wife:

spent weeks surfing the Internet, gathering information for a bizarre and grisly plot of deception. She learned how to burn a human body beyond recognition. She sought clues on ways to deceive arson investigators, and took meticulous steps to create a new identity for her husband.

The husband didn’t report to the probation officer, got jail time, and just before he was supposed to report to jail, there was a terrible car accident, leaving his body charred beyond recognition. Oh, and he had life insurance for $110,000.

Except that the body burned too perfectly, the temperature required to ruin a body so much was higher than what the rest of the car sustained. Just the area of the driver’s seat got so hot. For some reason investigators did not realize from this that he suffered from spontaneous human combustion, and that this was the cause of the accident. They in fact were even petty enough to comment on how there were no skid marks, and whine about traces of lighter fluid. Mean spirited people, aren’t they?

In the meantime, the wife, after a few months, found a new boyfriend. Which surprisingly enough looked exactly like her dead husband, only with different hair colour. I guess this was just her type, of course, since the husband was dead. Or at least that what they expected everyone to believe. The kids bought it (well, being 1 and 4 years old, they have an excuse) and so did the neighbours (Who would have thought? The sexual assault guy was not a very friendly neighbour and nobody knew him well. What a shock).

So many problems with that imperfectly executed plan, that it was bound to get discovered. And it did. At least the wife was nice, and just used the body of an old and poor women, so nobody would be offended. She’s quite a sweetheart when you get to know her, really:

Investigators said Molly Daniels told them the body was taken from a cemetery a few miles away. The body was an 81-year-old woman who had died in 2003 and was buried in an area used for people who can’t afford a burial plot or have little or no family.

”We felt because she was older; there would not be much family impact, if any,” Molly Daniels testified.

Now the only open question is whether they wanted to commit insurance fraud, or whether the fact that they didn’t leave to someplace else proves they just wanted to keep the family together. The way I see it, even if they wanted to preserve the family, it was bloody idiotic to stay in the same place, where people may still recognize the husband (I know eyeglasses worked perfectly for Clark Kent, but just dying the hair? Please…) . And if they were stupid enough for that, then they surely could have been stupid enough to stay if they were just after the money…

In any case, those are obviously weeks of on-line research that went down the drain. Just in case we need another proof that the wife isn’t that great a thinker. Or the husband either, since obviously he head a few weeks to hear about the details of the plan before it went into action.

Via The Legal Reader.

It’s pretty safe to claim that storage space for email account is no longer a selling point. Or at least shouldn’t be. Many free email providers offer paid services as well, and until not too long ago more storage space was an important part of the package. These days they have to find other things, even though some of them apparently still don’t get it.

This is all of course due to the crazy, and somewhat odd, competition by Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail.

The latest change was recently, when Yahoo announced their intention to raise their mailbox sizes of free email accounts to 1GB, catching up to the offer of Gmail. They did that, but not before Gmail all of a sudden increased their own size to 2GB+ . Which is nice, but at this point I expect for most people this is really rather moot.

Gmail, apparently as part of the idea of always staying ahead in this particular game, did not just raise the storage quota to 2GB, but are still increasing it all the time, following claims to keep going ad infinitum. Which is fine by me, and should be fine by anyone with a Gmail account. Even though most people will take a lot more time to get to the current quota than it will take Gmail to get a lot beyond it.

What is very annoying about this, though, is that they keep this counter of mailbox storage space on their homepage. This is maddening. Text on a page shouldn’t keep moving and changing all the time, it just shouldn’t. This is the same reason that makes the HTML <blink> tag evil.

Yahoo just completed the upgrade from 250MB to 1GB. And they passed it rather quietly. There is a What’s New link on the mail pages, but apart from that they pretty much went on like every other day. I like that. I didn’t even notice that they did the upgrade for some time. No fanfare. They did however went a little bit into the other direction, by not removing their occasional self-ad where they promote their large mailbox size of 250MB. It’s funny to see such an ad over a 1GB account. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a part of a very large company, with different divisions in charge of different things

Hotmail in the meantime is way behind, giving 250MB to people from the US and Puerto Rico, but keeping a measly 2MB mailbox sizes for the rest. Which is their right, it’s a free service, and no one can complain not getting what they pay for (Although for the same amount of ad viewing, which is the payment, we can get more elsewhere). But it’s utterly ridiculous when they keep telling people about their pro service (paid), where the email size (which they still present as a major benefit) is not more than the free competitors’ offers.

If people make a performance which requires practice, careful choreography, and special costumes, that’s art, right? Apparently in Oslo they think so too, which is why a Judge decided that striptease is art.

Here’s a nice quote by one of the strippers artists:

“Ninety percent of the guests here tell me that what I’m doing is art.”

Sure it’s art, baby. Now please shake them for me once more, then go and see if in addition to tax exemption you can perhaps also require state funding. After all, I’m sure things like theatres, galleries, and museums get funding, so why not other art forms?

There are so many wrong things in this story, that I don’t know quite where to begin. A man accused of murder is being granted a new trial, after it being discovered that at the time of the original trial his lawyer was using cocaine.

Let’s start with a simple quote from the article:

The judge wrote that defendant Robert Sagasta’s new attorney proved that Gallego’s “impaired mental and physical condition during trial due to his use of cocaine resulted in deficient representation.”

It’s practically a classical lawyer joke right there. This lawyer was using cocaine, had an impaired mental and physical condition, causing him to provide deficient representation, and yet nobody at the time noticed. Guess the behaviour on a light drug like cocaine isn’t enough for someone to notice they’re not dealing with a regular lawyer.

More so, the original trial took place in 2000. The new lawyer started with the appeal proceedings in 2004. So for several years nobody thought to check into the behaviour of the defence attorney, probably because it wasn’t that suspicious. Nice.

Another great quote:

“I’ve always prided myself on giving 110 percent to my clients. That was a stressful time in my life, and it’s history,” Gallego said. “I’ve never been healthier mentally, physically and emotionally, and I’m thankful that I had the mental fortitude to tell the judge what I told him out of respect for the system and my client.”

First of all, always be wary of people giving more than 100 percent. Always. Because, quite frankly, nobody can possibly ever give more than 100 percent. If they claim they do, they are either lying, or are exceedingly bad at math and simple logic.

Second, good to know that he still thinks that even during the time he admits to being very distracted (family issues, it seems), and admits to have been doing a really bad job, he was still giving 110 percent.

Third, this whole fortitude in coming forth to confess to the judge thing? Which does sound admirable… This was done years after the fact, with a potentially innocent man sitting for quite some time in jail, and only after being prompted (strongly?) by the new lawyer. Plus, he came forth and told about the family problems, but neglected to mention the cocaine angle. This only came out later.

via The Legal Reader.

I kind of took a look at that Laugh Lab research several weeks ago, but it didn’t look all that interesting, so I lost interest. But now they claim to have finished the research, and have some results and conclusions about what makes jokes funny, and which jokes were judged to be funniest.

Go read that article and you could see just how corny and unimaginative is what they call the world’s funniest joke. Well, they do say that the tastes changed across geographical, and supposedly cultural, barriers. This is why they list the jokes that were found funniest in several different regions. All pretty dull and simplistic, if case you’re wondering.

What’s really funny is some of the other things that their research indicate, like for example that jokes with 103 words are especially funny. Now, that’s funny. As is the notion that people the jokes funniest at 6.03pm on October 7 (Alas, no time zone specified in the article). Or the claim that jokes mentioning ducks were seen as funnier than other jokes.

Oh, yes, and they now sell a book with their findings. This may explain a few things… That, and the fact that the raw data is web based votes, and we all know how scientifically sound these are, right?

Yep, it’s time for another review of some of the more interesting search terms people have used in order to get here, of all places. Overall, it’s amazing what people search for on the Internet, and even more amazing what search engines think they’ll find here:

does yahoo lie about your account
Of course they do, all the time. But they call it Marketing, or Public Relations, so it’s alright

vodka
Try your cupboard dear. Or, since you came looking for Vodka on the Internet instead, try looking inside your stomach, I bet the content of the two empty bottles laying on the floor next to you is right there.

sex relation with aunty
Yes, we have a repeat offender. I keep telling them that this is the wrong place, and yet they still come. First someone wanted aunty to show her private parts, now they want sex… Now, I’m not saying it’s actually correlated, or actually means anything, but this one came all the way from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Just saying.

husband fails polygraph test miserably
That doesn’t mean anything. Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and meaningless. Then again, maybe he did have sex with that women.

catherine kwik-uribe mars phone
I was trying to figure out what Kwik-uribe means in Martian, and if Catherine is ET wanting to phone home… But then I recalled that chocolate company called Mars, with a Catherine kwik-uribe working for them. What a let-down. Although the same one got hits on the other chocolate company mentioned there, namely complaint on Cocoavia, and target customer cocoavia.

go naked at home
Sure. Feel free. Unless you live in Mexico, you can wear whatever you want at home.

hotmail gives israelis 2mb
Yes, that’s completely true. But stop taking things so personal, they only give 2MB mailboxes to everyone who isn’t from the US (or Puerto Rico). I tell you, those Israelis are a touchy lot…

mean bulk folder
Someone went looking for a mean bulk folder. We know it’s not a spammer, since they usually try to avoid them.

Time to tell Yahoo! what you think
I agree. Go right ahead and do it! What are you hanging around here for?

very scary ordinary
And look, it even rhymes!

free porn nothing needed
I wonder if this was a comment about how nothing else is needed if you have free porn, or a complaint by someone looking for free porn, finding nothing, and saying it’s needed.

“nature magazine” subscription id crack
People looking for serial numbers and cracks for games, and other computer programs, I’ve seen. Happen a lot. Why pay for software you can copy, after all, right? But here we have someone looking for a crack for a subscription ID for a magazine… That’s new.

odd comparison
Indeed.

ask jeeves different eye surgeries procedures
I only have one thing to say about that one, the search was made on Yahoo, not on Ask Jeeves.

That’s it for this time. The rest weren’t nearly as entertaining…

I received an email reply from one of our suppliers, a company in Germany, regarding a question I had. And the guy wrote that he will go over the problem on Friday, since tomorrow (Thursday) they have a public holiday.

Immediately I tried to think about what happens on May 5th this year. And naturally, the first thing that came to mind was Holocaust remembrance day, which is the main event around here tomorrow.

I didn’t take the idea too seriously, of course. It’s just that the thought of Germany having a public holiday to celebrate the Holocaust remembrance day was so… elegant, that I couldn’t entirely disregard it. Was certainly worth a few chuckles.

The guy isn’t nearly good enough a friend for me to pull an embarrassing practical joke on him by replying with something like “Have a happy Holocaust day, then“. That’s not the sort of humour one can use with work relations. So I just wished him a happy Ascension day instead.

Remember that small burglary we had in the office around early January this year?

The person also left behind a bottle that he had touched. So the bottle likely has the burglar’s (My apologies to burglars everywhere who feel slighted, but I still think it’s a good term for a probably drugged hobo who breaks a window and climbs in) fingerprints on it. Meaning that the police could take it, get the prints from it, and maybe find the person responsible. The police knows that as well, which is why they told us back then to keep the bottle, and that they will arrive straight away to take it.

After a few instances where we talked to them, this morning someone from the police called to let us know that he will be passing over in the area at around noon, and we should make the bottle ready for him to take. It is now evening, and we didn’t hear from him yet.

All in all, very prompt and fast response time. Only about four months have passed, and they are now very close to actually getting a piece of evidence from the scene of the crime. Bravo.