Ordinary Nothing

Surveys are complex. There is a lot that you can do wrong. Actually, looking at many surveys around, there is a lot that is done wrong. Time after time.

Sometime it’s the big stuff. Sometimes small.

Sometimes the surveys are not done to get answers, but to show what you want the answers to be, by skewing the questions. That’s bad for academic research, but very popular in politics.

And sometimes you really do want answers. Which is hard to do right. Ask the wrong question, ask them in the wrong way, or give the wrong options for answers, and the results may not say what you think they do, or may be impossible to analyse properly. That’s why there are those who deal professionally with surveys, know the theory (and, hopefully, statistics), have done it many times before, and should be able to avoid most of the mistakes.

They usually don’t do the really big mistakes.

They do, however, often do small, or really incomprehensible, mistakes. I guess finding a professional can be a problem as well.

Take, for example, a survey currently being run by iPerceptions , for InforWorld and ComputerWorld.

Both these clients are one client, belonging to the same company. And they do very similar things. So the surveys are practically identical (I did the ComputerWorld one originally, and just now noticed they also run it for InfoWorld. I progressed a little bit, and they’re the same questions in the same order with the same possible answers. Just the name of the company in the survey changed).

This survey has some strange points.

One main problem was that they apparently forgot that some questions may not apply. There was one (maybe 2-3) question where they did have an option to indicate the question is not relevant, or that I don’t know or can’t judge. For all the rest, and there were many of them, I was asked to rank the sites on many criteria, some of which really didn’t interest me and I didn’t know. But the options were just to rank.

Assuming that I’m not the only person who goes through a site that has many different sections, and doesn’t know (or use) all sections, this means that the answers they receive are worthless. What do you pick when you don’t know, or can’t rank? Do you say that it was excellent, since you don’t know it’s bad, causing a potential problematic part to appear good? Do you rank it as very lousy, since it didn’t do anything for you, thereby causing a potentially excellent service to appear bad? Do you rank it in the middle, trying not to judge either way, but still making anything really good, or really bad, seem more average and undeserving of attention?

This is why these things usually contain an answer to state that this question isn’t relevant for you, and you don’t have a real answer for it. But here, no. Good luck to them in the later analysis.

A second point is much less severe, but far more amusing and baffling.

In the personal details, at some point they asked for year of birth. And provided a field to type the year number in. With a maximum of 500 characters. Yes, you read that right, 500 characters to answer the question “In what year where you born?”. They also made the text box large enough to type a small essay in.

What sort of an answer where they expecting? Hmm… Maybe…

That’s a tough question, there. I don’t know what year I was born in. It was a cold, harsh, dark year for my family. My parents were moving a lot. I don’t have no birth certificate, ’cause they were always running from them cops. Who need a stinking certificate? My mom knew I was born. And I had a tough childhood, so people tell me I look 40, but I bet I’m younger. I don’t remember much from those years, really can’t say. Is this important? If it is, I can try remembering, just let me know. Yes?

That’s not a true story (for me, anyway), but it does have exactly 500 characters. For comparison, writing something like 2008, or 1912, takes 4 characters (as does “NOYB“). They could have even been generous, cover all their bases, and give 5-6 characters (You know, for time travellers, or for really really old people). Maybe 3 digits more, for a space followed by “AD”, in case they’re actually worried? A little longer still, so they can get “year of the dragon”? Why the heck 500 characters?

You want to know what’s even more strange? This is in the third part of the survey. In the first part they already asked most personal questions (gender, business, people working in same company, etc), including one about age. But there they just gave several age groups (e.g. 24-35 or something like that), so I suppose they really needed the birth year too.

Then again, if they ask for birth year, why bother asking for age? Odd, that.

Well, I was in a nice mood (this was more amusing than annoying), so I decided I’ll let them know. At the last page of the survey they had a link to provide feedback. I was actually impressed with that, since sometimes I have comments, and nobody official to tell them to. This was nice. Or so I thought.

It was a mailto style link, that contained an email address, and a prepared subject line with the code/number of this survey (Good idea, so they won’t have to wonder what survey it was, and I won’t have to try and describe it too much to ensure they identify it).

There was just one main problem with it. The email address they provided? It wasn’t correct.

I sent a message. I got back a bounce.

<info1@iperceptions.com>:
208.65.144.12 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 553 mailbox info1@iperceptions.com is restricted (Mode: normal)
Giving up on 208.65.144.12.

Impressive. This is a company that specializes in running surveys. In getting feedback from people for their clients. Except they can’t seem to arrange to get feedback for themselves.

It seems like a typo. The “1″ in the email address does not belong. I checked later on their site, and this address is listed there, without the “1″, in their contact page. But, well, by that time I was out of the helpful mood, and into the annoyed and unimpressed one. Which I think is perfectly understandable.

When a group of several people eat together at a restaurant (or bar, coffee shop, etc…) there are common ways to split the bill:

• One person pays everything.
• Split evenly.
• Each pays for their own portion.

The exact values are of course a bit fluid on the last two options, since the numbers may be rounded. Currency is discrete rather than continuous, after all. Not only that, but it’s often simpler to divide up to the main coin and not the sub-coins^[1].

The payment can be done by cash. In that case the people would usually just collect enough, pay with it, and divide the change between themselves when the change comes back. The work on properly dividing the charge is on the customers in these cases.

Sometimes, though, people pay with credit cards. Which means that many times the waiters will just receive a bunch^[2] of cards, with simple instructions on how to divide the charge between them.

The common one is of course “Split it evenly”. And these are the cases where money is often rounded to higher coins, since apparently most waiters have a problem with fractions. I can recall maybe 1-2 cases, ever, where the individual charges weren’t rounded with one person paying the extra.

When things are not split evenly, well, that’s when the fun begins. And by “fun” I mean an all too common tragic comedy of errors.

The simple case is when the customers still calculate the amounts in advance. In this case the waiter receives exact instructions in the style of “Put 100 on this card, and 150 on that card”. Simple. Easy.

And they still sometimes manage to get it wrong:

1. The bill comes back split evenly.
2. The amounts are charged correctly, but on the wrong cards. In this example, the first card is charged 150, and the second 100.
3. All of the cards are charged the same amount, which is one of the sub-amounts. So, for example, for this 250 bill either both cards will be charged 100, or both will be charged 150.
4. Some of the cards may be charged correctly, and some will be charged an unrelated amount. This is because the complexity of the task got the waiter confused and he/she charged an amount due for another customer entirely.

I had all of these happen to me, as a customer in restaurants.

One time I had two of them happen in a series. The waitress made a mistake (#3 above), I alerted her, and she came back with a “correction” that included another type of mistake (#4 above). When there’s a charge, and a cancellation, as a customer you’re requested to sign on both. If you simply don’t sign on the charge, it creates all sorts of complications. So I ended up having to sign five times for my bill that day. What did I tell you? Fun!

It also happens, though, that the job of dividing the charge is placed on the waiter. Sometimes the customers know the difference between what they’re supposed to be billed for, but not the final amount.

In which cases someone has to do the calculation. It’s a simple enough calculation, you know the total, and you know the differences.

And the natural tendency would be to let the waiter do it. People just had a meal, are finishing up, and they need to pay the bill. Why would they want to do the work, as easy as it is, when there’s a waiter that will have to process the charges anyway and is being paid for it?

Makes sense.

Except it doesn’t. Because many waiters seem a bit deficient in the math department.

The latest time this happened to me was a couple of weeks ago. I was finishing a meal with a friend. We basically shared the dishes, so almost everything was supposed to be split evenly. The only difference was that I had an extra glass of some medium-pricey alcohol.

The waitress arrived, and saw the two credit cards on the tray with the bill. The dialog between me and the waitress went something like that:

Waitress: Should I split this up?
Me: Yes, but it’s 70 more on this card.
Waitress: Right. 70 on this card, and the rest on the other card.
Me: No. Split it between the cards, so that this card is charged by 70 more than the other card.
Waitress: Eh…
Waitress: Hmm….
Waiterss: I’m…. err… not….
Me: It’s simple. Just split evenly, add 35 to this card, and reduce the other 35 from the other card.
Waitress: Ah. Yes. OK, sure.

And this is the math lesson for today. If you want to divide a sum X between N people so that everyone pays the same except for one who pays an extra Y, this is what you do:

1. Divide X by N. Let’s call that A for average. You already know how to do that. This A would be what you’d charge each card if you had to split evenly.
2. Divide Y by N. Let’s call that B. This value is like the average of the differences. Mathematically it’s the exact same process as the previous step, so if you knew how to do it, you know how to do that.
3. Everyone, except the person who has to pay more, pays A-B. You know how to do subtraction already. It’s the same thing you’d do if someone paid part by cash and part by credit card, and you’d have had to reduce the cash amount from the total to get the credit card charge.
4. The person who has to pay more pays A + [(N-1)*B]. Basically all the B’s you reduced from the bills of the other people, you add to this one’s bill. You already know how to do addition too. It’s just like what you’d do if someone asked you to charge the tip on the card as well, telling you how much is the charge and how much is the tip. You already know how to do multiplication as well, it’s what you’d do if you got everyone else’s cards and they all told you they have to pay B.

That’s it. Easy. Simple steps. And these are all things that waiters are supposed to know how to do already.

Except sometimes they don’t.

In this case, for example, I was indeed charged 35 more. The other card? Charged exactly the amount of an even split.

Wait, wait, I know what you’re thinking. In this case it would mean that the total would come to 35 more than the real total, right? So the waitress, or at least the cash register computer, should notice something is off, right?

Right.

But they had a simple solution for that. You see, the final bill came back printed with three items:

• Credit card charge : A
• Credit card charge : A+35
• Refund : -35

So the total was absolutely correct, making the waitress feel perfectly happy about it. No problem if it all adds up, after all.

Except that, of course, we didn’t get that refund. The bill did not come back with 35 cash, nor did one of the credit cards get a refund (which would have kind of defeated the whole purpose, but at least would have meant the amount of money passed from us to the restaurant would have been correct).

Our poor waitress didn’t quite see the problem. It all adds up after all, and the total is right. Luckily another waitress/supervisor did see the light immediately after a very brief explanation.

Waiters should learn a little basic math. Me, I should learn not to trust waiters to do even the most basic math. I think I learned my lesson. Now it’s their turn.

1. OK, Poor terminology here. I mean that, for example, to split 25$ between to people you’d sometimes, often, see one charged 13$ and one 12$, rather than 12.5$ each.[back]
2. 2 is also valid for “bunch”[back]

I just got a message from Yahoo letting me know that they’ll be shutting down the Yahoo Photos service soon.

The stated purpose of which was to let me know that I need to take out the pictures I stored in Yahoo Photos and move them elsewhere.

Except that, well, I don’t have any pictures in Yahoo Photos.

I tested it a while back. Once. I just put a couple of pictures there, saw the behaviour, and then removed the pictures.

Haven’t used the service in over a year, I believe.

And in any case, I don’t have any picture there. When I tried to follow their link to go to my pictures, just to verify, it didn’t show me any picture either.

So I know I’m not using the Yahoo Photos service. And Yahoo knows I’m not using the Yahoo Photos service. In this case, what exactly was the point in their email?

I just don’t get the thought process of some people.

Some days ago I had to take a bus ride. This bus covered two areas (same city, and a different city it was going to), so had two different ticket prices based on the destination.

The cheaper ticket was 3.50 ILS, and the more expensive one was 4.60 ILS.

I needed to go to a station in the same city, and I had too many leftover small coins, so I prepared exact change. 8 coins, totalling 3.50 ILS.

I went on the bus, and gave the coins to the driver.

The driver then counted the money. He went over flipping the coins one by one. This was definitely counting. He saw exactly how much money I gave him. And again I remind you, there were only two different fares for this line.

After counting the money, he pushed a button on his register, and it printed a ticket. Or a sort of a ticket/receipt combo, since these new machines look pretty much like cash registers elsewhere. And are amazingly designed to print the actual fare, the worth of the ticket, at the very last, where you can’t see it when you take the ticket out.

Of course it’s possible to take a look at the ticket after pulling it out. But that requires doing so consciously and intentionally. If you just take the ticket out of the machine and put it in your pocket, you won’t see the value.

So I took the ticket, put it in my pocket, and went onward inside the bus to get my seat.

Suddenly the bus driver yelled at me. He asked me where I was travelling to.

Somewhat perplexed I told him what station I needed to get to, and that it’s inside the city.

He then started to complain, being quite indigent, that I should tell him things like that when I ask for my ticket, because he needs to know what fare to charge me.

Turns out that, after counting my 3.50 in exact change, he still assumed I wanted the 4.60 ticket, and that’s the one he issued me. So when I just went inside the bus without paying the reminder of the money, he was annoyed.

I went back, gave him the ticket, and got a new one. Somehow I refrained from apologizing for my inconsiderate behaviour…

Look, we all know why people buy toilet paper, where they put it, and what they most likely plan on doing with it. Right?

When toilet paper rolls with delicate designs such as light drawings of flowers, puppies, or abstract shapes came out, I didn’t really get it. I care about the texture, but not about how it looks like.

Ideally I prefer not to look at toilet paper. Not for long.

But apparently everything is a market, and even toilet paper makers have aspirations and imagination.

A few weeks ago I discovered there’s black toilet paper. Deep uniform rolls of black toilet paper. Quite pricey, too.

And now I see another version, going not for the artistic angle, but for the useful-pastime angle. Sudoku toilet paper. With a new Sudoku puzzle on every sheet.

What toilet paper innovations are we likely to see next?

The last ones left a few months ago. This starts to feel like a recurring theme, the companies in nearby buildings are stationary, but the people trying to get the upper floors in our own building never stick for long.

The last ones were quiet, and we had little interaction with them. But the newcomers give a first impression that remind me more of the ones we had before.

They came around with the landlord, as he was showing them around the place. And no, I’m not sure what reason is there to show someone around after they already closed the deal. Presumably they got to see what they’re renting before that.

They were quite an odd looking pair (even number of odd people is a lousy pun, isn’t it?).

My boss asked the one that seemed in charge what business are they in.

Stocks.

Informative, and highly descriptive. So my boss asked for a few more details, trying to understand just what will we be getting.

Oh, you know, all sorts of stuff. Like, err, toys. Or computers. Stocks. All sorts of stuff.

So my boss further asked if they’re just using the space for storage, or will there be an office there. And if they’re importing merchandise, or doing something else?

The guys said that he’ll be there personally in an office as well. And that’s it’s not an import business, it’s “stocks”. Consisting of “Toys, all sorts of stuff, computers, whatever”.

The exact word he used, all this time, was “stockim”, with the “im” being a Hebrew suffix for plural, like the “s” in English. Normally when a Hebrew word exists people use it. Such a form of the English noun with a Hebrew suffix is only used when the word is one for which there isn’t yet a Hebrew word, or it’s a very uncommon word.

Stocks, if it’s not obvious, is a word for which there are a few perfectly suitable, and well used, Hebrew equivalents. So even if it wasn’t clear from the guy’s demeanour and attitude, it was obvious he wasn’t exactly talking about moving regular stocks, but usings “stocks” as a codeword for something else…

Oh, well, at least this time they didn’t get parking rights, so we won’t have to share the limited parking lot of the building. Still, looks like we’re going to have some good high-quality legal company again.

An Islamic group in Indonesia decided to aggressively object the publication of a local Playboy Magazine edition.

Two policemen were injured Wednesday when about 100 demonstrators, most of them Islam Defenders Front (FPI) members, attacked the Playboy Indonesia editorial office in South Jakarta.

Protesters pelted the building with rocks, shattering windows and panicking the tenants.

A very violent reaction. And while 100 aren’t that large a group in general, it’s a very large group if they’re all actually taking part in the riot and not just standing and looking.

There are legitimate ways to object to things you don’t like, but this sort of violence isn’t one of them. If they think there are legal issues, and they claim they do, then they should have used the courts. If they object to the content they should avoid buying the magazine, and encourage others to do the same.

The demonstrators earlier visited National Police Headquarters to complain about the publication of the magazine. They made a bonfire of about 100 copies of the magazine.

Burning about a 100 copies of the magazine is also not the way. And not only because book (and by extension magazine) burning is bad in general. It’s also because in order to create a bonfire of a 100 magazine they had to first purchase those 100 magazines.

This happened before the riot. So these weren’t copied found in the offices by someone breaking in.

Buying the magazine is a good way to encourage publication. It’s demand. Playboy doesn’t care if people read the magazine, or burn it. They earn the same amount of money either way. And either way they can claim the buyers think it’s hot (OK, lousy pun there, sorry).

Plus, imagine how this looks like in the organization’s expense account. Going over the general ledger of an Islamic organization and finding a purchase order for 100 Playboy magazines is bound to make some accountant giggle.

Imagine that, since it’s related to the organization’s goal, they ask the Indonesian equivalent of the IRS for a tax refund…

The Independent Journalists Association (AJI) condemned the attack. AJI secretary-general Abdul Manan said

…

“According to press regulations, the FPI could face a maximum Rp 500 million fine,” he said.

500 million Indonesian Rupiahs are a little less than $53,000. On the one hand it seems like a small amount of money compared to the damage described. On the other hand in local terms it may be quite a lot, I’m really not sure.

I’m also not sure why someone from a journalistic association is a reliable source in determining the maximum fine the organization may receive for the damages they caused. Even if the lawsuit for damages will be done by the AJI, and not directly by Playboy Indonesia, or the country (remember, policemen were hurt), their lawyer should make these kinds of comments, and preferably base them on what they request in the lawsuit. This, however, just seems pulled out of nowhere.

And just how seriously do these guys take it? Was that just a one-time riot because people got in a frenzy? Well, no, it’s more serious to them than that, according to their leader:

“If the magazine continues to be distributed, the FPI is ready to go to war,” he said

Of course, saying war when you’re an organization, rather than a country, carries a different meaning.

Still, it’s a shame that people can actually consider going to what they consider war for a purpose as important and crucial as preventing publication of a magazine.

Chief editor of Playboy Indonesia Erwin Arnada said

…

“Playboy Indonesia is in full compliance with Indonesian law and does not, and will not, contain any nude photography. We have also …

What was that? Playboy Indonesia magazine will not contain any nude photography? Hmm…

I never actually opened an issue of Playboy, but aren’t these things supposed to kind of be about… nude photography? Isn’t that like the whole point?

Or is this supposed to be the version where people finally, finally, actually mean it when they say they only read it for the articles?

In my previous post I mentioned trying El-Al’s new system of online check-in through the Internet before reaching the airport, the few problems they had with the procedure, and some of the expected benefits.

Now I’ve actually taken the flight, and got to experience the results in the airport. The short version is that they get lots of points on intent, but still fail miserably on execution.

The first, and most direct, benefit was supposed to be the ability to skip the regular check-in lines. Since people who went through the online procedures already made their seating/food/etc selection, they can use a quicker queue to only send the luggage. That’s the theory anyway.

The printed check-in paper had a note stating we need to go to a specific check-in desk (number 78 in this case) instead of the regular check-in desks used for the flight.

But the big electronic billboard in the airport, listing the gates for flights, included gate 78 as well. It was right up there on a listing of “All flights” together with a few more general desks. Meaning that we all went to that line, but regular passengers for regular check-in did so as well.

In my case, for a example, two people in front of me were this older woman who seemed to have lots and lots of problems, and a younger relative who seemed to have lots of issues of his own. Our line actually became the longest queue at some point, because the few people from online check-in all went there, but other people could distribute themselves based on queue length.

One woman behind me on the line even complained quite loudly that she could have saved time by not doing the online check-in. And the sad thing is that she was right.

A couple right behind me were there for regular check-in. People tried telling them that this is a line for people who only did the online check-in, but they pointed to the large electronic billboard, and said that this line is good for them as well. And the sad thing is that they were right as well.

What’s worse, at some point the woman working at that desk started to almost cry to a supervisor that she’s also taking regular people, and she can’t hold under all that pressure, and that the queue is getting too long, and they have to do something. I would have felt really sorry for her if I weren’t so busy being one of the people annoyed at having to wait so long in the queue that was supposed to be the fastest.

Eventually the came up with a temporary solution. They managed to find another clerk to open another desk, and someone arrived to tell us that all the people who did the electronic check-in should go to desk 75 now.

This was of course a temporary solution, since all the people who didn’t arrive yet would all still come to desk 78. In the future they should probably just have a different listing for it on the billboard, which they can change in real time. They can’t change printed paper, though.

Another point of confusion was that they also recently started with the idea of E-Tickets. Plane tickets that you can print from their site. Which are an entirely different thing from the boarding pass you can print during the online check-in. Except that, naturally, it doesn’t feel that different to people. There were a few who figured that since they printed their tickets online, then they did their online check-in.

We moved to desk 75, and gave our luggage to the person operating it. And they gave us a real boarding pass instead of the one printed online. They also verified with us again the seating arrangements and the other details. Which is to say, the procedure took about the same exact time as a regular check-in, since we went through the exact same procedure.

Well, not entirely. This was longer. Because of the other benefits that online check-in had, the coupons for a free coffee and a discount at one of the stores. They said that they had to give us a coupon for the coffee.

Actually, they asked each and every one of us if we printed the coupon during the check-in, and each and every passenger told them that the printed document did not include a coupon. So we were directed to desk 77 to take a coupon for the coffee.

The woman there again asked if I didn’t already had a coupon. At that point I thought maybe the reason for me was that I did it by phone, and the support tech didn’t fax it to me. And that there were other technical problems preventing it being printed for all the other passengers near me. What I didn’t know and, much worse, the El-Al people there didn’t know was that these coupons were not offered for printing at all.

I was given a coupon for a free coffee, and went on. I didn’t realize how clueless they all were, so I didn’t think to ask them for a coupon about the 25$ discount at the duty-free sports shop. I assumed that they know their procedure, that the coffee requires a coupon (since it’s hard to track) but that the discount will be given by presenting the printed boarding pass which we all still have. Since they didn’t mention it, but were sure to mention the coffee coupon, this was a reasonable assumption. Reasonable, but wrong.

But let’s stick to the coffee for now, before getting back to it. The coupon was for a free coffee at the Arcaffe stand in the duty-free area.

The duty free in the new terminal in the Ben-Gurion airport has a central area containing most of the duty-free shops, and a few concourses radiating from it into the gates. Arcaffe has a stand in the central area, so I reached there, and showed them my coupon. And the man there told me that the coupon only applies to the second stand they have on concourse D.

Not that big a problem, since it’s not a long walk (and in that particular case near the gate I’ll have to take anyway), but somewhat annoying. They’re the same network, and should be selling about the same thing, so I can’t see the sense in the separation. Plus, this was not listed on the coupon page.

Oh, and if you took a look at that map, notice that the Ben-Gurion airport site has managed to misspell Arcaffe in English. I just saw that, and I must say I’m not impressed.

Later on I went to the Arcaffe location on the D concourse, showed them the coupon, and asked what it included. I expected that, as this is a deal/coupon, it will basically be a small cup of a regular coffee, or somesuch.

So I was pleasantly surprised. The employee at the shop told me that it covered all the various kinds of coffees they have. And it covered both the smaller sizes and the larger sizes.

The cost difference to them is of course much smaller than the cost difference on the menu presented to customers, so being consumer-friendly like that is a smart move, and one that I liked. Since it’s a deal with El-Al however, I wonder based on what price are they charging El-Al. It has to be a fixed price per coupon…

So this one benefit turned rather very well. Now back to the sports store, which turned out not to be quite as simple.

I went to check the store. Now, the deal there was a 25$ discount for any purchase above 100$. Meaning that the coupon is only useful if I actually find something there that I want to buy in those amount.

The store contained sports gear (mostly clothing and such), and shoes. Actually it looked a lot more like a shoe store than a sports store.

I didn’t need any of their sport gear, but I did manage to find a very nice pair of New Balance shoes which were comfortable and looked good. And since I can actually use another pair of shoes, that was alright. They cost 109$ (Which is the same as the retail price in the US, so is cheaper than the retail price in Israel), which made them a relative bargain at 84$ after the discount.

I reached the checkout counter, told the clerk there that I did El-Al’s online check-in so deserve a discount, and showed her the printed (and faxed) boarding pass.

She asked for a coupon (You guessed that was coming by now, right?).

I told her I was not given a coupon, and was not told that there’s a coupon. I asked if the printed boarding pass isn’t enough as a proof that I did the online check-in. She called a supervisor to ask, and gave the reply that they get the money back from El-Al on the coupons, so as far as they’re concerned the coupons are like money during the purchase, and they can’t go on without it.

Very annoying, and something I did not expect. Though maybe, given the state of confusion in other aspects of this check-in experience, I should have. So I asked her to keep the shoes at the counter, and went to find someone from El-Al who could give me my coupon.

I went to the information desk, and the guy there said El-Al has a lounge (King David’s Lounge, intended for first-class and business class passengers) with El-Al’s people there which I can try and talk to. I went there, and the woman at the counter sent me one further door outside to their Passenger’s Support counter.

In I went, and was greeted by a young man working there (called Yehuda, or Yoav, or somesuch. I asked him later, but forgot to write it down, and the name got a little fuzzy in my memorry). I said that I didn’t get my coupon/voucher for the 25$ at the sports store, and he looked at me quizzically and asked what I was talking about.

Turns out that this El-Al employee, which they placed there for passenger support, was not even notified about their online check-in procedure. Not only did he not know about the coupons, he wasn’t even aware they had online check-in. At all. This is a major screw-up from El-Al’s side.

I explained to him about it, and showed him the printed boarding pass, and the page saying that doing the online check-in should entitle me to that discount. He checked for some things on his computer, apparently didn’t find anything useful, and called a supervisor.

Now, the coffee coupon was a pretty simple thing. Could have been easily reproduced by a home printer, and looked like it has been photocopied. So I expected they’ll just tell him to print a copy of the coupon at his station, and that would be it. No such luck. It requires an “original” coupon (which turned out to be of the same simple-print and photocopied quality. of course).

And they didn’t have them in any location inside the duty free. They had to send a stewardess in from outside with it. Meaning that she’ll have to go through all the security check points, and whatever else people have to do to get into the terminal. Not a quick process.

Not quick at all, actually. It took over 25 minutes. He told me it would take a while, so I went to do other things in the terminal. But his time estimates were way off, at about 10-15 minutes, so when I came back to ask what’s going on (He did take my phone number and said he’d call me, but I decided to go back and check in person) he still didn’t have anything.

Because of the long delay, and the fact that my boarding pass was closing, he went with me back to the store, and tried to ask the saleswoman at the counter if she’ll accept his personal guarantee as an El-Al employee that he’ll give her the coupon later. He showed her his ID and everything. But, as we expected, she said she couldn’t and will require an actual physical coupon.

Eventually a stewardess came rushing in. carrying a huge pile of pages with the coupons. He took one, wrote my details on it, handed the page to me, and that was that.

At that point there were a few other El-Al employees in the Passenger Support area. They asked what that was about, and he explained it to them. They too never heard that El-Al had this online check-in option.

All in all I’d say that this could be a good thing, but they really have to pay more attention to their procedure, and iron out all the kinks. The guy at the support counter was extremely nice and tried to help, but the overall experience has been extremely amateurish and disorganized…

Most of the US movie studios are claiming to be going to offer their movies for download, through a site called MovieLink

On the face of it, a good thing. Saves shipment cost and time. Allows to easily see the movies on the computer. And could be cheaper since many of the costs are cut.

Except that they managed to do it wrong on almost all fronts. If this is supposed to be their way to combat piracy, or compete with similar offers, they’re on a totally wrong track.

New films will be priced similar to DVDs—between $20 and $30—while older titles will sell for $10 to $20, the news service said.

That’s mistake number one. When someone downloads a movie they get less. They don’t get a nice box, or a nice disc that they can hold in their hands and feel. They don’t get any extras which movie DVDs almost all contain, and which are a large part of their attraction. And if they want to see it on their TV, they have to work on it, and can’t just slide the disc into a DVD players.

And when the offer is less, the price has to be less. Simple economics. You can’t charge the same for an obviously inferior product, because people won’t buy it.

And what do they do? They charge the same amount as the boxed DVD. And there’s another issue, it’s also annoying, because they have less costs. They didn’t have the expense, however small, of arranging for the box, the design, the printing, storage, and many other things involved with creating DVD boxes. Sure, on-line distribution has associated costs as well, but the marginal cost per movie is much smaller in the on-line versions.

But wait, that’s not even the biggest problem. This is:

he downloads available on Movielink will include copyright protection software that prevents them from being transferred directly to a laptop or portable device, or burned onto a disc that will play in a DVD player. Copies of the films will only play on a maximum of three different computers, which must be authorized by Movielink, the news service said.

When someone buys a DVD, they can put it in any DVD player they want, and watch it. Well, as long as the region matches (another totally annoying, pointless, and needless concept, but that’s a different rant. And something which is also quite easy to bypass). They can also watch it on any computer that has a DVD drive, something which is becoming very cheap and very common. This, however, is more limited. It cannot be used everywhere a DVD is used. It cannot be used as freely as a DVD can, even with all the limitations that DVDs carry.

So this downloaded movie gives far lower flexibility. And very likely carries an expiration date, since future computer installations may be counted as a new computer. And yet, same price as a DVD. Stupid.

Movies which “include copyright protection” also usually mean they can only be viewed with the specific program that the company provides. Compared to DVDs which can be viewed with any DVD player, and with many different media playing software on computers. Or compared to other computer movies, like the pirated ones they think this will compete against, which can be played with any media player the user wants.

So users will not be able to use whatever program they like the best, or most comfortable with. Also, as is often the case with these tie-ins, the program they’ll provide is bound to be limited, and less useful, than other available alternatives, for many users. Some people may prefer it, but all the rest will just be stuck.

An what happens in a few years? Other programs can come and go, but there will always be alternatives, and support for common video formats will always be kept. But with a format that just one program, from one company, supports, what happens if they decide to close shop? All those downloaded movies, those paid for downloaded movies, become unreadable data.

After reading that article, I still had one other question, about another issue which has a large impact on how good the new offering is. What is the quality of the movies? Is it identical to the DVDs? Superior (for new movies)? Inferior?

So I decided to go to their website, assuming that they should have the data there. Guess what? They decided to also make the website as useless as possible.

After going to the site I was redirected to a page telling me:

Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading movie download service. We want you to enjoy our powerful movie experience, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.

We hope you enjoy the products and services offered below.

If you are an existing customer of Movielink and believe you have reached this page in error, please access Live Chat with Customer Service under Help in your Movielink Manager.

This is the wrong thing to do on so many levels:

1. IP Geolocating is pretty good these days, but still not perfect. They can block potential real customers, in the US, from reaching their site.
2. This is the website, not a direct link to purchase a movie. The website (potentially) does a lot of other things. Provides information, for one. So why block it to all people from outside the US? Publicity is good publicity, even if it’s for someone who isn’t currently a customer.
3. There can be US customers, who have accounts with them, who are travelling abroad, and want to check their account. Why prevent them? If paying customers can’t access their accounts, they will get angry. Guaranteed.
4. What are those “products and services offered below” exactly? Nothing below right now except a trademark/copyright notice.
5. How can you be “the leading movie downloading service” when you haven’t started working yet? Even if you are, why should I care? You just told me that you don’t want my business.
6. If you actually realize that real customers can be caught by this thing, as you must in order to give that instructions to people who installed your program, then this same instruction is absurd. These same people won’t reach a stage where they can download the program, so they won’t have the Movielink Manager, and won’t be able to access live chat. You’re saying “If you can’t get to our program, please use our program to contact us”. That’s stupid.

Oh, yes, and the stupid page has the word “untitled” as the page title, and uses table elements for alignment… Very bad design. Actually, the other pages in the site I reached later, they are all formatted inside table elements.

Oh, well, I still wanted to know about the image quality, so off I went to run the site through a proxy, preferably one in the US…

And was then greeted with a more nicely designed page (visually nicer, but still the same horror from a technical standpoint), containing a little self-advertisement, links to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and nothing else useful. Why? Well, the main thing was this message:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service your browser scripting AND cookies must be enabled.

I don’t want to enjoy the service. I don’t want to even use the service without enjoying. I just want some information. But no, I have to enable scripting and cookies. Oh, well, if I have to, I have to. So I did. And tried again. Still no go:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.

We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Let me give you a hint. It is totally, entirely, and completely possible to download files in Firefox. Really.

Well, I don’t want to check stupid questionable sites in IE, so instead I changed the User Agent string, in essence lying to the site and telling it that I’m using IE as my browser. The sad (or happy, depends how you look at it) fact is that about 90% of the sites which insist they require IE actually work perfectly well in Firefox. The only feature on most of them that doesn’t work is the browser version check. So it was worth trying here as well.

No go:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service your browser ActiveX must be enabled. Click here to learn how.

ActiveX components, for anyone who doesn’t know, are full fledged programs. This means code that can do anything it wants, that has to be allowed to run on the computer. Now, for sites you absolutely trusts, when it should do very specific things you want it to do, that may be acceptable. But for a movie studio site I know nothing about, when I don’t even want to run their service but only to see some information pages?! No friggin way, sorry. Especially not with the abysmal entertainment industry history on the field…

I did take a look at their page of recommendations on how to enable ActiveX on IE… Here’s how it starts:

1. Open Internet Explorer browser and select the “Tools” menu
2. Select “Internet Options”
3. Click on the “Security” tab
4. Move Security Level slider to “Medium”

They don’t only ask to put their own site in the trust list. Oh, no. Anyone who doesn’t know any better is instructed to lower their security settings for every site on the Internet… Horrible, terrible, pathetic, and even dangerous.

Well, back to that main page. At least they did provide minimum system requirements:

.High-speed Internet access
.Windows 2000 or XP
.Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
.Available only in the U.S.

And no, I don’t know why they have those “.” at the beginning of each line either… What I do know is that it’s possible to watch movies on operating systems other than Windows 2000 or XP, and that it should be possible to download them with other browsers.

The last thing I did before giving up was checking those Terms of Service, to see if maybe there I’ll find some technical information about the quality of the video they provide. No such luck. But I did find other interesting things (emphasis mine):

(ii) Retained Content License. Upon payment of the License Fee, Movielink will grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited right and license under copyright to create and retain a permanent copy of the Retained Content and to view, use and privately display in your Residence or for Permitted Non-Residential Use, the Retained Content purchased by you, subject to the following rules:

(A) You may retain a permanent copy of the Retained Content on the hard drive of your personal computer (or other device specifically authorized by Movielink) to which the Retained Content is initially delivered via a connection to the Services over the Internet.

(B) You may make a single back-up copy of the Retained Content on removable media (e.g., recordable DVD) in the same format as the original downloaded file to play on (i) the single computer to which it was initially delivered and (ii) if specifically permitted at the time of purchase on the Website (on a case-by-case basis), up to two (2) additional licensed computers for your personal non-commercial use. In order to enable viewing of your Retained Content on personal computers other than the one to which it was initially delivered, you will have to obtain a new license by connecting each such computer to the Services via an Internet connection, logging in to your Account and downloading a new license. Any back-up copy of the Retained Content on a DVD will not be playable on a traditional DVD player. Movielink may determine from time-to-time in its sole discretion those devices that are compatible to receive a license to view Retained Content as indicated on the Website at the time of downloading and installing the new license. Any rights granted to you hereunder (or on the Website at the time of purchase) to make and keep any copies of Retained Content is solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners in any audio or video content contained within any Retained Content.

So, in essence, they are not letting anyone to buy the movies. Only to license the right to see them, and store them in a limited fashion on specific location that they approve. And that’s supposed to be worth the price of a DVD one can actually buy, and own?

You may not: (i) frame or link to the Website except as expressly permitted in writing by Movielink;
…
(iv) copy the Content or any portion thereof, except as specifically provided for herein;

Oops. Oh, well, sue me. I want to see a judge looking at this without getting into fits of hysterical laughter. Not allowed to link to the website except as expressly permitted… Get real!

5. MINIMUM SPECIFICATIONS. The Services will operate only on those hardware and software platforms specified on the Website. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have the appropriate software, hardware and Internet connection to operate the Services. Movielink reserves the right to cease supporting any hardware or software platform at any time, with or without notice.

I think this clearly shows that I wasn’t kidding when I said one day people may upgrade their computer only to find out that they can no longer see their downloaded movies, doesn’t it? It will work only on what hardware they want, and they reserve the right to stop supporting any hardware and software whenever they want, without notice…

So we have a bad deal, under bad conditions, and with bad execution. Inspiring, isn’t it?

With this attitude, I have a feeling they’re not going to see too many paying customers from within the US as well. Of course, once that happens they won’t try to figure out what they did wrong, they’ll just go on to blame it on piracy and on how people expect to get movies completely free…

Heck, I’m perfectly willing to pay for movies, if they’re worth anything. Many people are. But that’s for usable movies, not this dreck. Make the legally purchasable movies with similar quality to the pirated stuff, and as usable, and people will pay a fair price, a price higher than zero. People are aware that there was an investment in making a movie, and that the makers need to make money. Most people do want to play it fair.

But not when it’s good pirated movies compared to crappy legal ones. That’s not a competition.

I’ve just noticed one of the oddest types of TV show sponsorship notification I’ve ever encountered.

Anyone who watches TV shows, at least on channels which aren’t entirely viewer paid, must be familiar with both commercial breaks, and sponsorship notification. To clarify my terminology here, which may not be the proper one, by commercials I mean those breaks in the program that show general ads and try to sell you products, and by sponsorship notifications I’m talking about the specific subset of those which aren’t a regular product commercial but rather say things like “This show brought to you by SponsorCompany”.

I was just now watching a local TV show, and the commercial breaks also included a sponsorship notification for the show. But they went a little bit more than just saying that the sponsor company helped to finance the show’s production.

They presented the website address of the show during that sponsorship notification. And the official web address was not in the main domain address of the show, but in a sub-domain named after the main sponsor. So anyone trying to go to the show’s website will have to type the sponsor company’s name to get to it.

To illustrate, if the show had been called Example, and the sponsor had been SponsorCompany, then instead of the show’s address being http://www.example.com , it was http://sponsorcompany.example.com . And that’s the only website address for the show that was presented.

There’s an amusing twist, though. This address, and the main domain address, both automatically redirect to a different page, under the domain of the TV company producing the show. So the sponsorship isn’t ever in the address beyond being typed initially. And it doesn’t have to be typed there, but just optional.

Odd.

The Tel-Aviv municipality handles the administration of organized parking lots through a municipal company, Ahuzat Ha’hof (Roughly translated as “The Beach Mansion”). This company is in charge of the proper operation of the parking lots according to the city regulations, and to contracting out individual lots to subcontractors.

The regulations leave it up to them, and the contractors, to determine the operating hours of each individual lot. The condition is that on the hours where they don’t operate a lot (By putting a person there, to monitor entrance and charge for parking) they must leave it open for free public use.

A policy which actually makes sense. The lots will be free on the hours where there are not enough potential clients to make it worth for the contractor to pay workers, while the people who do look for parking will not have to go look elsewhere while there’s a whole empty parking lot nearby.

And this last is something which sadly does happen in many places where it’s less regulated. You can sometime see cars doing the rounds looking for parking, while there’s a large area that could have held them all, with a locked gate. Not entirely unreasonable from the lot operator’s perspective, though, since they do incur maintenance costs on the lot operation, even when it’s freely open. Even just the usual wear, and the potential for damage that people will cause the unattended lot, costs money on average.

One big problem that occurs with leaving parking lots open while not having well defined working hours, is that it’s not immediately obvious if the lot is open or not. When you go to park the car, and someone is standing at the entrance and charging, it’s not obvious if they’re official employees of the parking lot, or not. There are quite a lot of cases where other people take advantage, standing in front of those parking lots while they’re supposed to be free, and pretending to work there.

On occasions it can be obvious. Some of the parking lots have some sort of small shacks where the workers sit. So if someone is sitting outside, while the shack is locked and the lights are out, they’re cheating. Most people, however, are not very observant. Sad, but true. Plus, many of these places either don’t bother locking this shack properly, or simply don’t have one, so this cannot always be used as an indication.

The end result being that this sort of thing is far from rare. And they usually get away with it just fine, since nobody, or at least nobody official like the police, seems to care. People complain, on the few cases they realize they’ve been had, but it doesn’t get anything done.

Usually it doesn’t, anyway.

A few days ago there was a supposedly big sports game of some sort (As you can surmise, I’m not a big sport fan). And the parking lot, belonging to this same company, was officially out of the working hours and so open for free public use. Except that some entrepreneurial spirit saw the golden opportunity, and decided to sell parking tickets. Which worked well enough for most of the evening, until someone noticed something was fishy and raised hell.

Since there were a lot of people there, and sport events get noticed, this got noticed this time as well. The matter was, at long last, brought to official attention, be it the police or the municipality. They finally deigned to realize that the problem exists, and that something should be done.

Now, what I’d have thought a normal person would do, when confronted with a problem of thieves posing as official parking lot operators and swindling the public, is to try and figure out ways to catch the people who do these things, and discourage this from happening, so people won’t pay when it’s supposed to be free.

But that wasn’t the case, not in real life. Because, well, what bothered them wasn’t that people paid when they shouldn’t. No, it was that the people paid to the wrong party. So they made a new regulation to solve the problem. The decision is that when there are major events taking place near an official parking lot, the parking lot operator is bound to keep the lot working during the event, and charge for it themselves. Just like if it was during their normal working hours, and they’d have made a decision to keep the parking lot running at that time.

There, problems solved. Nobody will be in a position where they pay a thief when they could have parked for free.

Now they’ll pay an official contractor who otherwise wouldn’t even be interested in being there and charging there. No more chance of parking freely near such events, as was mostly possible so far.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Not that spam ever has much of a point for me, beside being a huge bother, but it usually does serve some purpose for the spammer. They want to get people to buy stuff from them. Or they want to con people into thinking they’re buying stuff from them while shelling out money for nothing. But it servers a purpose, and the spam message has some way for the recipient to get in touch with the spammer to give him (or her, women can spam just as well as men can) the money.

And yet over the last couple of weeks I received two types of trackback spam¹ that did not fit into the mold. They were, from the sender’s perspective, totally pointless. Or at least appeared to be so, though there may be possible explanations for each.

One kind were a couple of messages with links pointing to the official SPAM site. The site of Hormel’s Foods Corporation, who are making SPAM for many more years than those annoying unsolicited sales messages are running around. And who have nothing to do with spamming.

In fact, they’re so not amused by the whole different meaning their product name obtained, that it’s clearly not possible that those were… Spam about SPAM.

It wasn’t theirs, but it pointed to them. Pointless.

It could have been someone’s idea of a joke, sending SPAM spam. I can see the humour. What I can’t see is investing the necessary resources, and going through all the bother. Because those message were, by all technical purposes, spam. Someone had to either get a list of blogs from somewhere, or set up random guesses and searches. And someone had to dedicate computers (Those trackbacks came from two seemingly unrelated IP addresses, meaning from two probably far away computers) to go and post trackbacks on them. It’s spamming technique with spamming tech. And is technically spamming as far as any possibly related laws would look at it.

The second type of trackback spam was more popular, and I received more of those. They started at a high rate, but very quickly (before I disabled trackbacks) slowed to a trickle of once a day, and then disappeared.

They all came from different IP addresses as well, spread all over the US. They seemed to target posts that included the word trackback, or just the word back in the title. So someone was especially trying to target trackback spam at people discussing trackbacks. Go figure.

These ones were more complex, the URIs they used were written as if to different pages, that contained in the address words from the post they were trackbacked (can I verb that?) to.

But all those links, from all those trackbacks, were worthless. Because the site, under which all the pointers went to, was down. Just a general notice from a hosting company that this is an unused domain and is on parking. Nothing there.

So why go through the effort (and with this amount of different IP addresses it may have been a bot net of zombie computers, so somebody invested work and money on this) just to point people to pages that don’t exist, on a site that doesn’t exist, where they can’t make any money out of it?

Although here I have not one, but two, possible yet unlikely explanations.

The first is that this is some sort of whacko tech evangelist trying to warn everyone about the dangers of trackbacks. This would explain the targeting of posts talking about trackbacks, but is pretty stupid otherwise. Usually even the crazies in those minor tech battles are better civilized than that, and don’t invest more than a lot of typing time.

The other option is that this was some sort of busted operation. Maybe the site was live, and real, at some point. Some law enforcement agency may have caught them. Or someone may have complained to their host who decided to shut their site down (Though not likely, I’d expect that these people would usually have their own servers and won’t depend on hosting).

But given the amount of spammers out there, and how little is done about the large majority of them, I don’t buy that either. I didn’t find (Though didn’t look too hard) anything about that, or them, anywhere else, except for similar trackbacks from the same date range. So this would have had to have been one quick operation. Nobody closes down spammers so quickly, ever. Not without it making headlines. All of that spam was sent and posted when the site was already dead.

Most peculiar.

1. Here’s the ultra-quick explanation of what trackback spam is: Trackbacks are a feature on many blogs that allows another blogger to signal that they have a post on their own blog which is relevant to the trackbacked post. This appears on the target post, in a manner similar to a reader’s comment, and includes a link to the second blog post. This allows several people, on several blogs, to keep a discussion on a same subject and keep everyone notified that they posted on the issue. A sort of easy version of going and manually writing an “I wrote about that too” comment. And as everything else, this is used by spammers, who post trackbacks that point to their own sordid sales pages instead of to anything relevant to the post they’re putting the trackbacks on.

How do you decrease the chances that someone will enter your store to rob the cash register and the safe? That’s a hard question, which I suppose a lot of stores debate.

One (or actually, many) of the usual means are security. You can hire security guards. You can put visible cameras that potential robbers know will assist in catching them later. All sorts of mundane stuff like that.

This video rental store in Los Angeles (I think it was somewhere next to Sunset blvd.) used two different ideas

The first one is directed at small-time theft. They state that you’re not allowed to enter with bags or backpacks. People are less likely to swipe a few DVD boxes if they can’t quickly hide them. They put it on the same sign forbidding food and drink, which on the one hand are different things since they’re not related to theft but to store cleanliness, but on the other hand this is also meant to prevent damage to inventory so there are similarities.

We were inside for a few moments, browsing the collection, and we both carried bags. V might have even had a small backpack. Nobody mentioned anything, and they didn’t seem too troubled by us being inside violating that sign on the door.

The second one is directed towards robbery. A sign stating that employees do not have keys to the safe. It tells potential burglars that the money isn’t in a cash register but in a safe. And it also tells them that going inside and threatening the employees won’t do them any good, since they can’t open the safe.

Is it true? I don’t know. Someone who work there has to have keys to the safe, otherwise there’s no way to put money in it, or take money out of it. But for someone scoping businesses, trying to decide where to hit, this might serve as a pretty good deterrent. On the chance that it’s true, robbing the place would get only the profits from one day, or maybe not even that. It won’t prevent a robbery, but it would shift it to a different place, which from the store’s perspective is good enough.

I’m just a little surprised that an area heavy with tourists is such a risk for robberies. I don’t have any experience in the field whatsoever, but I’d have expected people to attempt and be more low-profile when robbing stores.

When shops close down for the night, the owners have an understandable desire to reduce the chances of a break-in. So usually closed stores at night are locked behind solid metal bars, grates, and blinds. And when you go to a commercial center, containing many stores, they all are, one after the other.

So when I went to withdraw money from the ATM the other day, it being located in a cluster of shops, it was not surprising at all to see sights like these:

What was surprising, though, was to find that a supermarket located in the same area, right next to them, only managed to get half the point.

If you look on the left side of the picture, you could clearly see the nice and strong metal grate which covers the entrance. So anyone wanting to enter through the locked sliding doors would be unable to. That’s a wise security measure, just like the bars on all the other shops in the area.

On the other hand, if you’d look at the right side of the picture, the same picture of the same supermarket, what do you see? Yes, you can blink again in disbelief, it won’t change anything. You really are seeing it. A clear glass (well, probably some transparent plastic and not glass, but that’s not really important, is it?) pane. A large and easily accessible clear pane, not protected by anything hard or metallic.

So instead of breaking the door, which is impossible because of the metal grate, anyone so inclined could just break the wall next to it. Very smart, isn’t it? What were they thinking?! Where they thinking?!

Just a minor rant.

A short while ago I updated the credit card number I have on my PayPal account. There was a standard text box to enter the credit card number into, and since it didn’t specify any limitation I did it with the separating dashes.

It’s pretty standard, after all. Most listings of the number group each five digits separately by placing a space or a dash between them. It’s much more readable, and so much easier to verify you didn’t enter any wrong number.

Yet the PayPal page refused to accept the number, complaining that it’s invalid. Entering the same number as a long consecutive string, not broken up, worked fine.

This is very pathetic. This format of writing credit card numbers is common, and done a lot. Stripping the dashes from the number on the server side, after the user posts it, is extremely easy. So why haven’t they done so?

And it must have been going on for a long time. After all, PayPal are dealing with credit cards from pretty much day one, years ago. Forcing me to enter the number like that myself, doing their own very basic data entry formatting, is not impressive at all.

I came across this article complaining about the duration of ads before movies start in cinemas. And let me tell you, those Americans sure have it good relative to what we have here. The complaint raised there is valid and correct, but it’s so much worse here that it feels the norm.

Of course this became an article not because of the problem, but because the people hitting the problem were big names from within the entertainment industry: (emphasis in quoted text is mine)

As head of production at New Line Cinema, Toby Emmerich is not your typical moviegoer. So when he wanted to see “War of the Worlds” the other night, his choice was between seeing the film in a theater with a tub of popcorn or watching it in a screening room at Jim Carrey’s house, with a private chef handling the culinary options. Despite this seemingly loaded deck, Emmerich opted for a real theater.

“I love seeing a movie with a big crowd,” he says. “But I had no idea how many obnoxious ads I’d have to endure — it really drove me crazy. After sitting through about 15 minutes of ads, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Maybe we should’ve gone to Jim Carrey’s house after all.’ “

When DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press took her young twins to see “Robots” this year, she said, “My own children turned to me and said, ‘Mommy, there are too many commercials!’ Now, when the lights go halfway down, I’m filled with dread. The whole uniqueness of the moviegoing experience is being eroded by all the endless ads.”

That all it takes? 15 minutes of ads? Would that be with, or without, the extra time spent on movie trailers? Around here in Israel, 15 minutes of ads is quite standard, and on the short side of the standard. I recently went to a movie before which we saw about 17 minutes of ads, plus 6 minutes of trailers, and both me and my friend felt that this was relatively very nice and short. Seriously.

There was an “amusing”, and sadly very rare, incident around two weeks ago which reached the headlines (article is in Hebrew, sorry): In this case, after watching about 20 minutes of commercials, two of the viewers went outside to complain. They were told by the cinema management that if they have a problem they can take their money back and leave. They returned to the hall, told the other viewers about that, and most decided to take the cinema up on that offer.

I think that this is not likely to have much of an effect, however, because I’ve been to quite a few movies preceded by that duration of ads, and nobody did anything similar. Still, one can hope.

Sometimes including the ads, the trailers, and the various notifications, it can take 40-50 minutes from the official start hour until the movie starts. So the Americans should know that their 10-20 minutes can easily expand.

The article also had a telling quote from Globus United (One of the major entertainment companys here, which owns a large percentage of cinemas, and is the importer of films from Universal, WB, Paramount, and such). They said that (my own rough translation):

The state, as you know, does not subsidize the movie industry, as it subsidizes the theatres for example, and in the price of the ticket (which includes VAT, of course) alone it is hard to cover a multitude of costs (such as electricity, rent, security, etc.), and this is why the ads are required.

My heart bleeds for them.

Expect similar replies from the US cinemas if this issue actually makes waves there.

They also mentioned that in their own cinemas they show the actual start time of the movie. Even if it’s true (and I do not recall seeing anything like this in a prominent location), that is something you can see only after you already arrived to the cinema, not before. The newspaper listing, and website listings, only show the official start hour.

And then they wonder why less and less people go to see movies in the cinema, and more and more they show movies to a half-empty room…

Via Interesting People, via a post on The Big Picture about the reasons for decline in movie theatre revenue. This post here is a slightly edited version of a reply I sent on the IP list, which (so far?) did not get forwarded to the list.

Those who strongly oppose the latest disengagement plan have embraced the orange colour as a sign, and it is quite common to see cars carrying small orange ribbons tied to their antennas or mirrors.

And, while much more rare, some people who strongly support the disengagement, or who are just tired of seeing all those orange ribbons, have started tying blue ribbons to their cars.

In any case, if a person wants to express a political view, that’s fine. If they want to tie small ribbons to their cars, that’s perfectly fine as well.

When the cars aren’t theirs, however, I must take exception. Usually this is not a problem, and people driving company cars (at least in as so far as they are identifiable by having printed/painted company logos on them) avoid putting those ribbons on them. But not all, and not always.

A few days ago I saw one case which was very obvious, when two cars belonging to the same company were driving sompleace, and one of them carried an orange ribbon. Very obviously in this particular case, the orange ribbon was there to represent the opinion of the driver, not the company. But when there is just one visible car, this is less obvious.

The driver really should not have put the ribbon there. A car painted with company colours, and having a company logo, is not only an advertisement of the company, but also to an extent a representation of the company. If the car is involved in an accident, or just drives carelessly, for example, people watching it will associate the behaviour with the company.

A person tying something like that orange ribbon expresses an opinion. By doing it on a company car, this creates an association between the opinion and the company. This is not like in a written text, where a disclaimer can be added stating that the opinions are of the writer and not the company. When people see an orange ribbon on a car with company logo, they could regard the company, not the individual driver, as strongly opposing the disengagement. Or in a general case with other ideas which are expressed by anything attached to the car

That can hurt the company. In this particular case, the entire company is not in support, or both cars would have had the ribbons. So the driver, due to his own personal opinion, risks the company’s reputation, and hinder it with the appearance of political alignments. Very bad form, and extremely rude and inconsiderate. Even if the driver is certain it’s a good cause, he has no right to drag the company into it.

Regardless, one company is obviously greatly enjoying this whole thing. Orange Israel, one of the three large cellular network operators here. The company spent a lot of time and money trying to associate the colour orange with their brand, and their logo is not much more than a simple orange rectangle. While as a company they probably don’t have a political view about the disengagement, they’re probably overjoyed by the tons of free publicity. Their cars are also the only ones on which I suppose there won’t be much of a problem if someone will decide to hang an orange ribbon…

I got a very amusing spam message a few days ago.

The message was from a clinic dealing in various sorts of cosmetic surgery. It talked about a special offer they were having, in which when you order one of their treatments you get all sorts of extra gifts and benefits. Pretty standard marketing stuff actually.

But the special offer was time limited, only valid until a certain date. A date which was three days before the one on which the message was sent.

They didn’t say anything about their regular services. Just about the special offer. Which was irrelevant by the time the message arrived.

And it’s not as if the message delivery was held in the post office, as may sometime happen to a physical envelope. This was an email, which arrives almost immediately.

The message was sent through one of the larger email advertising spam brokers in the country, and wasn’t something they did by themselves. Meaning they probably paid good money for it. If it wasn’t that it was by definition sent by a spammer, I’d have said they need to check the ethics of the people they work with…

It also doesn’t quite make sense that this was a sleazy way to attract attention while not actually putting up the special offer. After all, it’s very easy to knowingly sent a message about a non existing offer, and pretend that it was sent by mistake. The problem I have with that is that while some stupid and misguided people think spam is a legitimate thing, something like that is too obviously not. And that was sent by a known clinic, and not some shady person selling all original Rolex watches that fell off the back of a truck.

Of course, this may also be some sort of phishing/identity-theft attempt, since the link on the message goes to a page asking you to leave details about the requested treatment and contact information. At which point you’re supposed to trust them to only use these in order to contact you, despite the lack of any privacy policy… A page which isn’t on the main site of the clinic, but on the site of the spam company, directed through a third domain…

A delivery guy arrived today with two large packages of electronic equipment we ordered for one of our systems. One package contained the actual device, and the other contained mostly power supplies. Needless to say the electronics were somewhat gentle, though the power supplies are probably more robust.

The guy requested help getting the stuff from the truck, so we took a small cart, and went over to the truck, which was parking outside on the street. He opened the trailer, and I saw that besides our two packages it was empty. The packages were not tied down, or fastened to anything. In fact, they were resting in an angle on the corner that gave the distinct impression they slid on the floor during the drive over, and this is where they bumped the trailer’s walls last.

After putting both boxes on the cart, we moved back to the office. The gate out of our office was half open, a position meant to allow people to walk in, but to prevent cars from entering (Our people have remotes to open the gate, and other people really shouldn’t use our limited parking space).

I told the guy that I’ll go and open the gate, and he kept saying that it’s not problem, and everything will pass. When we reached the gate, the opening was too small for the large boxes. He started rotating the cart in various angles, to no avail.

Again I offered to open the gate. The guy repeated that it’s not necessary, and told me that there’s a very simple way to deal with that. And before I realized what he was doing, he nonchalantly pushed the boxes off, and they came tumbling to the ground. He then moved the cart in, and put the boxes on it again.

I looked at him in surprise, and told him that it’s breakable and delicate stuff. And he responded with something I didn’t expect… “Don’t worry. That’s not breakable. You see, if they thought it was breakable, they wouldn’t have sent it with me. Because they know that if it can be broken, I’ll break it. They also didn’t add any extra padding to the packaging, and used my truck, which has no springs and bumps stuff forcefully all the time. So you have nothing to worry about”

I kid you not. And this was not some minor transporter, but one of the major international transport companies.

Luckily the box that was higher on the cart, and so got the much stronger hit after the fall, was the power supplies and not the other electronic devices.

Next time we’ll make doubly sure that everything is marked “breakable” all over…

that’s not exactly what they said, but that’s surely the only way to read it. A security vendor in the UK claims that their statistics of legitimate (i.e. not viruses and spam) emails show a direct relation between the rise in the temperatures and a decrease in email traffic.

A decrease which they attribute to the economy becoming less productive due to the heat (emphasis mine):

Email Systems says that from Monday to Fridays during the most sizzling parts of June, emailing was down by up to 20% on normal levels. It believes this is an accurate way of measuring corporate productivity across the country generally.

“The reduction in legitimate emails clearly indicates that UK businesses have suffered due to the extremes of heat, suggesting perhaps that as an economy we are simply not yet able to cope with the types of summer that experts are predicting in the years to come.”

But most email messages are generated in companies which are more technological. For starters, they have more computers, and more employees who use them. And these places, well, they tend to install Air Conditioning. They really do. But if they have a working AC system, then obviously the heat cannot have an effect on the productivity… If heat does have such a strong effect (and 20% is a lot), then it follows that all those companies don’t have working AC.

Also doubtful is their claim that the amount of email passing through them is indicative of corporate productivity across the country. Email is to some extent an indicator of a company productivity, but not necessarily a direct one, and not for all companies. Many companies simply do not have that much to do with email. Email could only be “an accurate way to measure corporate productivity across the country” if those companies behaved just like companies that live through email and the Internet. And that’s simply not true, though easy to see how a company dealing with computer security could lose sight of that. They’re just not exposed to any corporations who don’t need their services… Then again, maybe their AC broke down, and whoever came up with those claims simply didn’t drink enough and suffered an heatstroke. That would explain everything.

Local government in the US can legally seize people’s houses and businesses, in order to promote other private economic development of the land.

Yes, that precisely mean that they can take and raze houses in order to allow a mall, or a hotel, to be built, even if the property owners don’t want to sell:

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.

I guess all those American action movies, of home-owners refusing to sell, and greedy land developers trying to scare them off the property using force, are now a thing of the past. All it takes is explaining to some city officials that the new development may bring money, and those home-owners won’t have a legal right to say they like to keep their houses… How lovely.

On the other hand, this would teach a lesson to those nasty people who buy real estate just because they think the area may be worth money sometime. Instead of negotiating with them for compensation that matches the land value, developers could get the local authorities to kick them off. Good riddance, eh?

Hmm… I wonder if we have similar laws here. That could be real useful in handling the current ill-conceived and badly planned disengagement plan. Instead of getting the people there away for the stated reasons, the government can say it wants to build many malls, bulldoze the houses over to make room, and then give the work and franchise to Palestinian contractors…

With every time-limited service subscription, there comes a time when the subscription expires, and needs to be either cancelled or renewed.

Service providers of course prefer if you renew. You may either want to renew, or want to cancel. Which raises the issue of renewal policy. The basic concept would be that you subscribe for a certain length of time, and if you want to increase the time, you need to go and do something about it. Under this model, if you’re not interested, you just don’t do anything, and the subscription will expire. Since renewal means another payment, then it makes sense not to pay unless you explicitly want to.

The second model is the auto-renewal one. The subscription will be renewed automatically, unless you explicitly cancel it. This is unfortunately becoming more and more common, since the service providers really like it. Obviously, if people wanting to renew will always renew, and people not wanting to renew won’t renew, then the method won’t matter. So the differences are in convenience to the customers, and in what happens to customers who don’t pay attention.

The businesses involved usually claim they’re doing this “for your convenience”. Let’s take a look at the options, from the customer standpoint:

• Wants to renew, without auto-renewal: In order to renew the customers have to be aware that the subscription is expiring, and have to manually go and renew the service. Being notified is easy, since the business involved has an incentive to make sure the customer will know. There is a little bit of a hassle in renewing, but in general the process should be very simple, since again it is in the best interest of the business to make the renewal easy. Worst case, if the customer forgets, then the service will stop. Since the customer cares about the service, they will likely notice that (if they don’t, they didn’t really need the service), and go renew. The cost of that will be a temporary disruption of the service, and as long as the service isn’t life-critical (air supply for your new lunar colony dome, for example) that should be just a small disruption, especially since many such services can be renewed retroactively from the expiration date.
• Wants to renew, with auto-renewal: This is the most convenient option for people who want to renew the service. They don’t have to do anything, and everyone is happy.
• Doesn’t want to renew, without auto-renewal: This is the most convenient option for people who don’t want to renew. They made a subscription to last a certain time, the time passed, and the subscription stopped. The business lost the customer, which is bad for the business, but the customer was not interested in the service anyway, so at least they parted ways amicably.
• Doesn’t want to renew, with auto-renewal: The customers have to manually cancel the subscription. If they don’t, they will find that they again pay for a service they do not desire. The customers have to remember to cancel before the renewal date, and the business has an incentive to avoid clearly reminding them, because the business want them to renew. In addition, the manual cancellation may be more complicated than a manual renewal, since the business has little incentive to make sure it’s easy to cancel. An undesired service is also one that the customer is likely not using, and so is less aware of, so there is a decent chance the service will get renewed due to simple inattention. This is good for the service on the short term, since they will get the money for a subscription, but bad on the long term, since it may annoy customers. Worst case for the customer is when the customer forgets, in which case they pay money for a service they will not use, and don’t want to use.

So auto-renewal means that customer who want to renew are spared a simple chore of manually renewing, and people who don’t want to renew either go through a similar, or harder, manual chore, or get really annoyed discovering they unwittingly purchased more subscription time. Unless this is a subscription that absolutely everyone will always want to renew (hint: no such thing, unless you’re the monopolistic air supplier for that lunar dome we mentioned), this does not strike me as being for the customer’s convenience.

Personally, if I ever subscribe to anything with auto-renewal, one of the first things I do is cancel the renewal. If I’ll want to renew, I’ll do it when it’s time. But if I forget, I much prefer the small bother of a subscription lapse, to the huge bother of finding out I paid for a service I don’t want.

This post was started after taking a look at the on-line subscription page for The Economist (At this time I don’t have any intention of subscribing, I just took a look out of curiosity, since the subscribe buttons were there near an article I was trying to read, and wasn’t allowed access to). They have two subscription options, annualy or monthly, each with a link explaining their auto-renewal policies.

And yes, both automatically renew. Even the monthly one, which is typically what you’ll choose if you do not want to be a long-term subscriber, but just have temporary access. Not only that, but a yearly subscription costs $89.00, and a monthly one costs $19.95. This means that if you do a monthly subscription without reading the fine-print, expecting to pay for a month, you may well find yourself after a year having paid $239.40 for that annual subscription.

Nice, isn’t it? The auto-renewal for the annual subscription is bad, but all too standard these days. Monthly subscription auto-renewals, that’s just plain rude. Very rude, even. Those prices are high because people usually do this as a temporary one-time thing. Why force them through the hoops of cancellation, or make them pay if they, not surprisingly, not notice their one month subscription is going to increase itself automatically?

The Economist also don’t handle their own subscriptions, not even though this is a subscription to the web content only, on their own site, so it’s not clear why they need someone else to handle it for them. But when you subscribe, you get an account with a different service, and need to go cancel the subscription there. This is not customer friendly.

At least for the annual subscription option they say they will send an email notification one month before renewal, as a reminder. Nice, but not nearly enough, and these days very likely to just get caught by some spam filter. The monthly subscription, if you wonder, does not come with any such reassurance.

Every system can develop errors, and have incorrect data. And if all the decisions are made by the system, sometime there can be silly mistakes that simply cannot be corrected. This is one of the main reasons humans stay involved, even on cases where all they normally do is serve as a front-end to a computerized system.

Like a sales clerk. The job is to see what is it that you want to buy, enter the information into the system, take your money, and hand you the receipt (a bit oversimplified, maybe, but that’s the gist of it). Most of the time you could do just as well by passing the barcode reader on the products yourself, and swiping the credit card yourself when the transaction ends. With the idea of putting RFID tags on products in stores, you won’t even need to use the barcode reader. The shop employee sitting behind the cash register is usually redundant.

Except when there are problems, or when the information in the system (such as stock quantity, prices, product descriptions, and such) is incorrect. In this cases the human element is necessary, because the person can be shown the mistake, and take steps to correct it. If they don’t have the access required to correct the problem, they can at least exercise judgement and get someone higher up. That someone can, again, be talked to, and shown how the data in the system does not match reality. Having someone you can reason with, and who will not blindly follow the system database, can be invaluable.

But apparently on some stores, even the employees can look straight at the large pack of products from the kind you want to buy, and tell you that they are out of stock. The products are on the shelf, you could bring one to the cash register and shove it in their faces, but they’ll read the line on the computer screen, and tell you that they don’t have it on stock.

This is plain idiotic. Even the manager claimed they were out of stock. And store managers are supposed to have the authority to do something. Maybe change the stock information manually. And if not, at least take the customer’s money, make the transaction manually, and log it into the system later after the error is corrected. The important thing, both for the store and for the customer, is to make the sale. Not in this case, though.

I wonder what would have happened if he tried to just take what he was trying to buy, and walk out of the store. Instead of giving up, to just take it. Usually that would be stealing, right? But the store can’t complain someone is stealing from them an item they don’t have. If it’s not in stock, they don’t have it, so it can’t be taken away from them. Makes perfect sense. Imagine the (imaginary, but no more crazy than the actual one in the story) conversation:

Manager: Stop that, you thief!
Customer: What do you mean, thief? I’m not taking anything of yours!
Manager: That’s our product, you didn’t pay for it!
Customer: Are you sure? It’s yours? Fine, I’ll buy it then.
Manager: You can’t buy it.
Customer: Why not?
Manager: Because we don’t have it in stock.
Customer: You don’t have it in stock? Not even a single unit?
Manager: No.
Customer: Then this unit isn’t a part of your stock?
Manager: Right.
Customer: Fine, then it’s not yours, and you won’t mind if I take it, right?

Would have been interesting to see how that would have turned out…

To each their own definition of strange, I suppose. And those definitions often don’t match at all.

One of the things I would consider strange is if a department, inside a company, would decide to start a blog for the purpose of internal department communication, as a sort of group messageboard. Well, it may not sounds incredibly strange presented like that, since group blogs are indeed a way for several people to communicate at the same place. Right?

But what if it’s not a small company, but a department inside a very large company? And what if the blog isn’t private, but public? What if it’s even run inside an external free blog hosting platform like Blogger, and not by the company? What if this mean that the department using it in fact does everything where everyone can see them, and where they have no control over the infrastructure, despite coming from an organization that can certainly afford to hold their own collaboration severs and infrastructure? Ah, now it becomes a bit strange, does it not?

Even more strange, that working like that for about three weeks, this marketing R&D department of Masterfoods USA, among several posts on their blog about their own activities, and several links to outside reports about their company in the media, has just one outbound link to what is an unrelated post on a personal blog. Linking, in fact, to the third of my posts where I go through interesting referrer lines in my log files, because they think that it’s strange.

Strange, right? Even very strange. Left me quite mystified for a while there. I must admit that originally when seeing the post subject of “Dave, this is strange”, it had a very strong flavour of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If the poster had been named Hal, instead of John, I would have been sure I was being had by someone.

Until it hit me, these people probably think all these blog things are a nifty and cool new idea, or something like that, but don’t really get everything involved. It is for example quite possible that they think their Blogger account is private just because they selected not to publish it to search engines, or something of the sort. They won’t be the first, but then again the other cases I encountered were people who did not have a company IT department to consult with.

And with little understanding of web related issues, they may not know what I meant by speaking about a referrer log. In which case I must agree that that post would seem very strange indeed. And of course the reason they hit mine, instead of the myriad other people who cover their own interested referrers caught in their log files, is that this post of mine mentioned something that got caught in a search they ran.

This group is obviously someplace related to their Mars chocolate department, so they may have got there by searching for Mars, or maybe for Cocoavia. And had an understandably hard time understanding my odd sense of humour in a bunch of seemingly unrelated topics.

Well, John and Dave, if you get to this post as well, here’s a short explanation about referrers. When you click on a link inside a web page, your web browser (That’s the program used to see web pages, Internet Explorer in your case, I’d expect) goes and fetches that new page to show you. So far so good, right? Well, when it does that, the request that goes to the new website, asking for the page on the link, also contains other information besides the link you request. One of these bits of information is the page that you are coming from, where the link exists. This is passed in what is called a referrer header of the request.

And what is that good for, why do people check these? It’s interesting to know where and how people got to your page. So many websites, including lone blog operators (and your own website admin in the company, if they talk to Marketing, and have a clue), tend to go over their server logs, or other statistic providers they use, and see things like what pages people wanted to see, and what was the referrer. That is how I got to your blog, because someone (Dave?) clicked the link there to get here, and so your blog came as referrer.

The main use for that is the search engines. When people run a search in a search engine, the keywords searched are listed in the result page URI, which is then passed as referrer. And it’s interesting to see what did people searched for to get to your page. And this is what these referrer log roundups of mine, and many others, cover. All the highlighted lines there are what people actually went and searched for on places like Google or Yahoo search.

I hope that helped. It’s certainly been a strange experience all around.

A several weeks long worker’s strike in Finland’s paper industry continues, and the impressions now are that it will go on for quite some time.

As in most cases, the strike is related to working conditions and worker compensation. In this particular case it’s not that the workers wish to improve on an existing condition, but that the employers are changing their demands and require more work days from some of the workers. And while they offer compensation, the workers are not satisfied with it, and don’t think it covers the higher demands.

So far it seems a pretty simple case, but it becomes very odd when taking a better look at the details. First, what is it that the employers demand? They want to keep the mill open and working during Christmas and Midsummer. This will require that some of the workers will come to work on what was until now a vacation day.

Not having a midsummer vacation here, I decided to check how long is this midsummer vacation. One day, it would seem. And so is Christmas. So we’re talking two days extra work, though of course working on a traditional vacation isn’t fun.

But wait, according to the same calendar:

On Midsummer Eve and Christmas Eve, the schools, offices etc are closed, but shops are open part of the day.

Not to mention that according to the article:

the employers are thought to want to keep paper plants open during Christmas and mid-summer, saying other industries in Finland do not close down for these holidays.

So two days, where most other people work already, it would seem. So let’s see what is the measly compensation that got the workers so riled up about, shall we?

The Finnish Forest Industries Federation, which represents employers, is offering 1,600 euros and an 11-hour cut in annual hours as compensation for workers who might end up working during Christmas and mid-summer

11 hours cut would be, I assume, more than a single work day, though probably less than two work days. So it’s more like shifting the vacation of those days to other days, than just taking away a vacation day. And if those days were not paid vacations (like I know some holidays are, though I’m not sure in this case), it’s even an improvement in terms, since the workers get paid for working these days, and get paid vacation days instead of unpaid vacation days.

There’s of course the discomfort of not being home on these particular days, which the workers may want, which is where the monetary compensation part comes in. 1,600 euros would be something like 1,960 USD or 8,650 ILS. Divide by two, it comes to nearly $1,000 per day. I know Finland is expensive, but that sounds like plenty of money to me.

Not to the workers’ union, though. They want more:

Paivi Turtiainen, a spokeswoman for Paperiliitto, the paper-workers’ union, said: “We want to have more leisure time; money is not the point. The offer of 11 hours is not for every worker, only for those ordered to work Christmas or mid-summer every year. Not for those who do an extra day here or there during those periods.”

Legitimate, this extra pay is not worth to the workers the few hours they lose from the deal. Understandable. So the company should maybe give them a few extra hours, and be done with it, right? Well, one small problem with that:

Employers say they cannot reduce hours any further because Finnish paper workers already have among the lowest working hours in Europe.

Which also makes me think, could it be so low that those 11 hours are full two work days? I’d expect that people who already have lots of leisure will be happy to sacrifice a little of it for plenty of money. But maybe they have so much leisure, that it usually doesn’t feel like they’re working for their salary. In this case extra work will feel more like having to start working, which is a big bother, and not just working a little bit more, which is a smaller bother.

The more amusing part of the union’s rep complaint is that “The offer … is not for every worker, only for those ordered to work…” . Because as a good union person he must believe that workers to which nothing at all happened, and who keep having a vacation exactly like in the previous years, need to be compensated for not having anything done to them. Makes perfect sense. Maybe it’s due to the emotional trauma of seeing some of their co-workers having to work.

All in all, if this news reports is even mildly accurate, I think on this case I’m strongly on the side of the soulless capitalist machine, and encourage them to exploit these poor workers for all they’re worth.

On a final note, the lack of paper of course also have an effect on other industries:

Finland’s berry industry has said it could lose up to 80% of sales this summer because of a lack of packaging to put berries in.

Because everybody knows that it’s totally impossible to put berries in anything except paper. No way that berries could be packaged in plastic, foam, nylon, or anything else of the sort. No, much better to throw away 80% of marketable produce, and blame the lack of paper, than to go and change something, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago my parents purchased a new air conditioning unit for the living room at home. They browsed around a bit, consulted, and finally decided on the model they want to buy.

At the store, when concluding the order, the sales assistant notified them that purchasing this particular model grants them an extra gift of a phone (Cordless phone, according to the company something sold with a retail price of approximately 500ILS). They were a bit surprised, since they didn’t expect it. The sales assistant then showed them their catalogue, and this was indeed announced there. Personally I doubt that the decision of what AC unit to buy should be affected by something like a free phone, but this was the offer. Nice, and honest, of her to inform them even though they didn’t ask for it by themselves, and were in fact unaware.

They arranged for the delivery of the AC unit, and were told that the delivery crew will bring the gift phone as well.

The actual installation of the unit is not done together with the delivery, but by other companies who deal in installing ACs. It’s possible to buy, and install, separately, but in this case they went with the option of using the installers that the store usually works with. So there was one payment to the store, which covered both the purchase and the installation. This unit was reported as some new generation of devices, working on slightly different technology (whatever it may be, I wasn’t involved, and didn’t bother following), so the installation cost a bit more.

A few days later the delivery arrived, with the AC. They forgot to bring the phone, however. My parents called the store, and were told that it was a mistake, and they’ll send it the next day. This turned out to require a few more next days until they claimed that they’re out of stock, and it will only arrive in a couple of weeks, maybe.

In the meantime the installation crew arrived, and installed the unit. It turned out that this device was actually from the older generation, not using the new technology. This required the installation crew to go away, and come back again at a later date, since they were equipped to handle the wrong kind of unit. More delay, and nobody was particularly pleased.

A few days ago my parents received a registered mail notification. I went to the post office to take it for them, and found a check to their account for 200ILS, without any explanation. After a call to the store to find out what is that about, they explained it’s a refund for the installation price.

And a day later they let us know that they have the phone for us.

Everything sorted out alright in the end, but it was a badly organized affair through and through…

My boss ordered a new computer screen for a system our company is about to ship. This was done through a website shop that acts as a sort of a reseller for various other stores.

After a little checking, it turned out that the actual supplier store, whose stock the screen is to go out of, is located physically close to us. So my boss decided it would be prudent to cancel the shipping, and come pick up the screen ourselves. He called the store, talked (twice actually) with a person there to confirm that it would be possible to come take the screen directly when they’ll have it ready. He then contacted the support department of the site, and told them to cancel the shipping since we’ll be collecting it directly.

Several days passed, and we didn’t hear anything from them. The actual store had it in stock, but waited for all the order details to be passed from the site shop. So today he called them again.

The order was cancelled. As the women on the phone there told my boss “you told us to cancel it!”. I guess they missed the shipping part, or the part where while cancelling the shipping he verified that it would indeed be possible to pick up the screen ourselves…

After some arguing they reissued the order, and everything should be sorted out by tomorrow.

The seller at the physical store, BTW, was perfectly willing to sell us the screen directly. At a higher price. He already has it in stock, and he knows he has a potential client, but it’s still noticeably cheaper to buy his screen through a middlemen than directly from him. Go figure.

It looks like the Norwegians have joined the bandwagon.

Anyone heard of the large furniture selling network, IKEA ? Well, most of the furniture comes in pieces, as "flat pack", with instruction manuals explaining how to assemble them.

So what’s the problem? Some manuals contain drawing of human figures alongside the pieces of furniture, illustrating positions and movement needed for the assembly. And the Norwegian prime minister is furious because all the figures are either of men, or of indiscernible gender. So it must be sexual discrimination, you see?

Do you? Really?

Especially those indiscernible gender figures. Have they no shame?!

He’s absolutely right. Next time I buy something in IKEA I want the instruction manual to be jam-packed with drawings of scantily clad females. And be accurate and elaborate, so there won’t be room for confusion. We have to know these are real women, and not men in disguise. Equality is important, dammit! Are you listening IKEA?

On a side-note, the CNN news article managed to get IKEA’s name wrong in the title. The web page title, in the HTML, not the headline. The article itself is correct all the way, but on the title it’s spelled ‘Ikea". An overzealous copy editor?

Hat tip to Common Knowledge.

The rising supply of restaurants, combined with their tendency to congregate, causes a
problem. Parking places get added in a pace that doesn’t match.

More and more people find their way to the same general areas on evenings (OK, the problem
is usually only on weekends), with their cars (There’s hardly any public transportation
after around 22:00, and public transportation isn’t that hot even on peak hours).

The only people that seem to notice are those who charge for parking. This is a good
business. Over time free parking areas are purchased from the municipalities and converted
to payment parking lots. And people pay money to park there.

What nobody seems to notice is that overall it’s bad for business. True, if you want to go
someplace specific, and there’s no free parking available, you’d get into the lot and pay.
But that’s not necessarily the usual case.
This complaint/suggestion is mostly relevant for areas that contain a concentration of restaurants, or
other places that attract people for social meetings.

Normally the procedure is not one where someone decides they want to go eat at place X, and
then try to get company. It’s that someone wants to meet with person Y (or more), and wants
a place to do it at.

Since you meet, you have to meet someplace. If you go out (Doesn’t happen much with some
people, but those are not relevant for this discussion) you need to go someplace, and
usually that would include food/drink/something-of-the-sort.

Obviously the decision on where to meet depends on the possible places. But since most such
places to tend to clump together in specific areas, on many cases the question isn’t a "Let’s go to X" one in which X is the name of an establishment. If many cases it’s the decision of what area to go to, and the specific X is selected only once you’re already there.

Why prefer one area over another?
Notice, I’m not talking about what X can do to make X more attractive to customers, I assume X either does this anyway, or X is a very transient thing and doesn’t matter.

One reason is the selection of establishments in each area. There’s nothing much an owner of X can do about that to get more clients. If X could encourage other attractive places in the area, this would bring more clients overall, but they won’t necessarily go to X. The same apply in the other direction, removing competition makes the overall area less attractive, since only people that originally wanted to go to X will come.

Another reason is specific tastes. If someone desires a certain type of food or entertainment, the preference would go to the areas providing more of these. Nothing much to do here either, for similar reasons.

Another one is variety. Someone that likes familiar things will stick to the same area. Someone that likes to diversify would check their less popular areas occasionally. Nothing (much) to do about the former, but the later are a specific case of the general problem, either how to make them go to X’s area, or how to make them stick to X’s area despite it being familiar.

Another is ease of getting to the area. This includes nearness to the starting point (homes or offices) which X can do nothing about. But this also includes parking. And that’s something that X can do something about.

Does parking matter? Yes, very much. It matters on two separate levels.

The first level is for the one-time visit.
Let’s assume that people who already drove to the area, and are synchronizing the meeting with other people, will not leave but stick to the same area.
If there’s easy and free parking, the people will get someplace, maybe X, do what they want to do, and buy what they want to buy.

If the parking costs money, some people will consider that as a cost to be taken out of the budget for the evening. If the parking was cheap, it’s not a real issue. If not, it can even go as far as create an attitude of "How much more could I spend on one evening for one meeting? This is too expensive". Resulting in them buying less. If they go to X, they may order cheaper courses than they would have ordered otherwise. Or skip dessert, or the extra drink. This is bad for X.

If parking doesn’t cost money, but is hard to find, the effects can be similar. Instead of getting near X and parking, people drive further and waste time driving over and over in the area looking for an empty spot. They will get to X annoyed, and in a sour mood (or at least somewhat less happy than they would have otherwise). It can go either way, since they may order more to cheer up, or order less since they’re pissed off.
The stronger effect would probably be to the order less direction. If there’s a time-limit, they’d get there sooner, so may skip the latest purchases. The time wasted can be considered in similar terms to money paid for parking. And they may arrive in a bad attitude thinking about the effort they’ve already made to arrive to X, so X should better be worth it, meaning that X will suffer due to the increased expectations.

The second level, and the more serious one, is what happens next time (and all the times after it, of course).

Overall prices tend to roughly even out for similar places, so establishments on the same business as X in other areas will charge similar prices. The exact offers, food, drinks, and such would also be roughly similar.
So when deciding on which area to go and look for places to hang out, someplace that would offer the same things with less cost would be better. Between two similar areas, with similar establishments, one where free parking is available, and one where parking needs to be paid for, the choice will become obvious.

It won’t happen overnight. Variety and habits have a strong role. But it will happen.

Except for those rare cases where X is specifically sought after, people will go where they don’t need to pay for more than what they wanted to buy. And where they don’t need to work hard and waste time for it.

It makes a lot of sense, both common and economic.

In addition that, it also seems to match actual facts from the real world. On a busy evening, areas with free parking have more cars than the paid parking lots do.
This not only goes for two lots one next to the other, this works across city boundaries. Amount of cars per parking-spaces where parking is free is higher before the peak times. And there’s more movement, since people don’t feel that they wasted their parking money if they go away someplace else once they’re done. Overall there are more people around in areas where parking is free.

So providing more free parking places will get more people before the rush hours. At the maximum peak this effect is smaller, since people may prefer to pay instead of wasting time searching for a place to park. And since people know that there’s room at the paid parking lots.
Notice, this is because there’s room at the paid parking lots after the free places get crowded. People prefer to park for free. And they therefore spend their money in areas that provides this free parking, since that where they are.

In addition to that, on the really busy times, weekend evenings, some parking places manage to get filled regardless. If there’s no parking at all, people will go elsewhere. If they can’t get into X’s area, then X won’t have them as customers. So more parking places overall is anyway a good idea, free or paid.

Personally, not that I’m representative or anything, but if I observe where is it that I spend most of my meetings-with-friends time, and what causes me to move to other areas, parking is a major issue.

There are a few areas I’m not longer getting to, despite some really nice restaurants there, since I refuse to go around 30 minutes in my car hoping to squeeze into a tight parking space.
There’s another area I don’t get to since it’s impossible to park there for free.

As long as there are alternatives, these places just lose me, my friends, and likely a lot of other people.

If for some crazy reason the trend will continue in the direction of not providing more parking, but taking payment for previously free spaces, we’ll go more to the areas with cheaper parking, or those where search times are lower. Or meet at one of our homes instead.

To conclude, what can X (be X a restaurant, pub, coffee shop, or anything of the sort) do to get more customers?
Help build parking lots, and help make them free.
It’s worth it for businesses in an area to pay for the creation of parking lots. And to pay for those to not charge customers.