Ordinary Nothing

Shipped packages and crates can carry all sorts of warning labels on them. The most common ones seen being “Breakable”, “Do not fold”, and their ilk.

Today I noticed a new one on a large package delivered to our office.

In very large block letters, with a colour highlight, was the sentence “DO NOT FREEZE”, and beneath it, in slightly smaller font “Sensitive Against Freeze”.

I had no idea shipping companies had a tendency to freeze packages.

Very strange.

Not to mention pretty bad grammar on the smaller sentence, but that’s beside the point.

A woman was found dead in her apartment in London. Which isn’t all that rare, people do die. But this one was lying dead in her apartment for close to three years before being found.

Police believe she probably died of natural causes in early 2003, and was only found in January this year when housing association officials broke into the bedsit in Wood Green, North East London.

They were hoping to recover the thousands of pounds of rent arrears that had piled up since her death.

So for three years nobody noticed, or cared, that she was missing.

No friends wondering what happened to her and why she didn’t call them for a long long time.

And apparently even the landlord was willing to wait three whole years (two if she paid a year in advance, not very likely) without at least bothering to… I don’t know… come over and knock on the door? That must be a very nice landlord.

Some mail was marked February 2003, and medication and food had February 2003 expiry dates, the spokesman said.

Nobody even noticed the smell coming from the apartment.

Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.

The electrical company didn’t cut her power off, for three whole years? Or was she on a deal where the bank transferred the money automatically every month? In that case, it’s amazing she kept enough money in her cash account for three years’ electricity.

And that the bank didn’t notice the lack of any income, and the electrical company didn’t notice the unusual usage patterns of never-varying electrical consumption.

The people who gave her all these Christmas presents never wondered why she didn’t call to thank them, or invited them for Christmas the year after? Maybe all the presents were really lousy.

Most of all, though, I want to know the model of her heater. Three years working non-stop, and the thing still functions? I want one.

Every few years we have someone trying to drill for oil in Israel. Stories appear about how they have some new idea, new findings, new theory. Almost always they also state how unlikely it is that Israel won’t have any oil deposits while our neighbours have a lot of them (Politely ignoring that they don’t have it on every single location, and Israel isn’t that big).

And, unsurprisingly, every time they fail miserably. Or at best, just fail quietly. Often they find nothing. Sometimes they claim to actually find oil, but in depth and quantities making it not worthwhile to to drill.

The thing is, there’s no oil here. We don’t have any. Not in the ground anyway, just in tankers we use when buying it from abroad. No, really.

Yet people insist on failing to get the hint. The plethora of hints. The whole army of them. As if geological surveys and past experience are nothing to them.

And now there’s another one.

This one is on the right track, though. You see, considering that there’s no oil to be found here, it will take a miracle to find any. Literally. And this group is totally on the right track for miracles. They’re not using guesswork, and hope. Oh, no. They’re using scientific methods. Mainly, they’re basing their drilling on some cryptic and obscure verses from the Bible.

Yes, Biblical reference. How more scientific could they get?

<sigh>

If someone commits suicide on a busy street, it’s likely they have a desire to attract attention, and to be noticed. To go out with just a whimper, you don’t need to do it in a public place, right?

But it turns out that, like in almost everything else, committing suicide is also affected by timing:

The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration, authorities said.

The 42-year-old woman used rope to hang herself across the street from some homes on a moderately busy road late Tuesday or early Wednesday, state police said.

If you have the poor timing to hang yourself at a time when dressing up as corpses and trying to scare people is popular, you can’t complain when they just mistake the body for a part of the scenery…

While our postal services generally, sometimes, do their job quite adequately, there are flukes. We do sometime get envelopes addressed to neighbours, or to someone with a similar last name but on a different street.

But the most recent such wrong delivery was more amusing. Because of the sender, the intended recipient, and the type of mistake. You see, this was not sent by a private person, nor was it one of the usual commercial messages. This was an international mail, all the way from Luxembourg. And the sender was NAMSA, a NATO agency.

Yes, NATO. Isn’t that fun? I bet most people don’t get envelopes from NATO at all. I certainly know we didn’t ever. And still, it came. Well, it wasn’t really addressed to us, of course, but those are just details.

The intended recipient, as I said, wasn’t us. Not at all. It was an unnamed acquisition and procurement specialist, in the “IDF technology division”.

Err… Except that the IDF doesn’t have anything named “Technology Division”. Instead there’s the “Technological and Logistics Directorate“, better known here as Atal. Or, to be more exact, ATL (in the corresponding Hebrew letters), which is an acronym. A for “Agaf” meaning directorate or division, T for “Technologiot” meaning Technologies, and L for “Logistica” meaning… you got that right, Logisitics. Yes, the base words for Technology and Logisitics are the same in Hebrew, which can give you a clue as to where they were borrowed from. The abbreviation is pronounced as Atal.

Normally I wouldn’t be too surprised that someone over at NATO isn’t aware of the exact way things are organized in our military. But if you send envelopes to someone, it means you have some interaction with them. Which in turn means you have to know who it is that you’re interacting with. So I find their “Technology Division” odd.

The address was indeed in the same city we live in, which explains why it got to the same post office branch. But as to why it arrived to us, that’s a mystery to me. There is no name on the envelope, so someone familiar with us at the post office (Yes, that does happen) couldn’t have gotten confused. There is no street address, so nobody could have delivered it to the wrong house on the right street. There is no house number, so nobody could have delivered it to the right house on the wrong street. All it had was a POB number, four digits, of which two are similar to ours. That would rather be, similar to ours and to plenty of other people’s. There’s a huge limit as to how much variance POB numbers can have.

So someone was sloppy.

In any case, we didn’t open the envelope. Likely it’s also not interesting, since it went from one body dealing in logistics to another. On the other hand, it also went from one body dealing in armament procurement to another. So maybe it was interesting. But the point is moot, we returned the envelope to the post office, so they could deliver it to the intended recipient. Or deliver it yet again to a wrong recipient, but that’s their problem, not ours.

Why it didn’t go through the various diplomatic or military channels is beyond me, though. If you have important (The envelope was marked as priority airmail. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it may) military related material to send, between two military organizations, trusting the usual post seems questionable. And in this case at least was a demonstrably bad idea.

Had there been anything even remotely classified in there, someone might have opened it and read it. The fact that we didn’t doesn’t mean that nobody else would have been curious. And, like I said, we’re not the only people with such a badly matching POB number.

Oh, well…

During one of the days of the international opera program, I noticed something thin and black dangling out of one of the drainpipes near the conservatorium.

At a first glance it appeared that a cat was resting in the drainpipe. A second look made it obvious that the cat wasn’t just temporarily resting, but was busy starting on it’s eternal rest.

Since it’s both not something nice to see, and a potential health hazard, I informed someone from the conservatorium staff who seemed in charge of the building and maintenance. He told me that it will be taken care off on the morning of the following day. He further explained that the city is doing some works in the surrounding parks, so some things aren’t looked after well enough in the interim.

The next time I was there, a few days later, I forgot to check out on the ex-feline. But I was there again about two weeks afterwards, and decided to take a look to make sure they dealt with it.

On the plus side, there was no black cat stuck in the drainpipe.

On the minus side, there were parts of a cat’s skeleton stuck there… So I assume this was not taken care off by the city’s maintenance or health crews…

At least by that point it was no longer a health hazard. Nor was it an aesthetic problem, since the tail isn’t dangling out of the pipe any more, and nobody can see the remains without peeking in purposefully.

I’ll probably be in the area again in a few months, so I’ll go over to take a look. In the meantime, rest in peace, kitty.

I sent a small package abroad this morning.

On the envelope there are two marked areas, one for the sender address, and one for the destination address. Each of these has a few lines, for the different parts of the address. Very standard, has been like that for years and years.

The clerk I worked with in the post office this morning isn’t a new one, she has also been there for several months, if not a few years. She knows the drill, knows her way around, and have done it all plenty of times.

I wrote the addresses, both mine and the recipient’s, on the envelope. I then closed the envelope and handed it to the clerk. She then started with her part, which includes weighing the package, telling me how much it will cost, collecting the money, stamping the envelope, and sending it. Except that this time there was a slight problem.

She looked at the envelope, and seemed to be searching for something. It took her quite some time. Then she turned to me and asked what country is the package for.

The country name was written, in big letters, on the bottom line of the recipient’s address field. This is the usual, customary, and mandated place for it. This is the exact same place that the country name is always written on when using those standard envelopes. It should have been the first, and the only, place for her to look for the country name. And she did look. But she didn’t find.

Which leaves me no option but to conclude that the girl either needs a pair of reading glasses, or needs to stop taking hallucinogens before going to work…That was just extremely odd.

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a wonderful idea, and I’m more than happy to do my little share to help publicize the Time Traveller Convention.

After all, some day I’ll be very famous, and so this blog and all my posts will be remembered forever and ever for posterity (Just a second, somebody is knocking on the door… Some odd guy, looking for an Ozymandias. Foreign name… I told him he got the wrong address. Back to the post). So this is the best way to make sure all the future time travellers will notice. I can feel the future history of the world changing and reshaping as I write these words.

All in all, I can think of just one reason why this may not work. Maybe they already have one, planned at a different place and location. So all the time travellers already know that this convention didn’t happen, so they won’t attend. Darn, these things can give a guy a headache.

But, in any case, it makes sense that you’d only need one time traveller convention. So people, if you’re sometime out there, and wondering when and where to go, let’s make this the one. the convention details:

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

Hmm… actually, when I think about it, the reasoning behind there only being a need for one such convention doesn’t quite hold. Sure, they could all come whenever they want to, since that’s one of the advantages of time travel. But that disregards some important aspects:

1. We don’t know the technology. Maybe there are limits, or external influences.
2. What if there are too many of them? The space is rather limited, after all.
3. Do we really expect all time travellers to be able to be friendly, and deal with each other amicably? Heck, we have people from the same time that won’t be together in the same room without trying to kill each other. So people from different times?
4. If some of them hear about this, and know that they didn’t come, they may decide not to come. Yes, that’s the headache factor again.

Still, a marvellous idea, and I wish them the very best of luck. Imagine, this just might work…

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

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

A Doritos chip that looks like the Pope’s hat

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

The names of three newborns, similar deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The response included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hat tip to The Old New Thing.

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

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

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

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

Self denfence trick…
Painful self defence trick.

From the text on the lower-left corner:

Followers of the Iron Hand styles immediately clench their fists tightly, with a crushing grip, and jerk the hand sharply back to the near hip, effectively ripping away the genitals

Brr…

Original image taken from here. Hat tip to Monkey Methods.

Yes, it’s true.

The devil does no longer lurk in the hearts of men. It has some entirely new tricks up its sleeves.

Like, er, drawing self-portraits on turtle-shells apparently.

Nice craftsmanship, though the style seems like an odd blend of ancient Egyptian and post-modern. But who am I to play art critic for the devil?

Microsoft intends to release a pack of six new fonts.

Yes, not all that exciting, I agree.

But some people in the fonts and design business apparently think otherwise, like this review of the fonts.

and the review is… well, here are some ways in which fonts are described there:

• It has a warm, friendly personality
• robust, all-purpose workhorse
• strong and sophisticated
• designed with function and flexibility in mind
• less cuddly, more assertive

And so on and so forth.

You’d think we were talking people, or something.

Fonts…

These latest spam messages are amusing. Nothing different in content, the same offers for cheap mortgages as the rest of them.

But the subject line is a work of art. They don’t offer to "lower your mortgage" or "low mortgage interest rate", no. What they offer is "Become one of the low 3.25% rates".

I wonder how it would feel like to become a low mortgage interest rate… To be one with my mortgage… Hmm…

One service which in retrospect seems obvious, but which I never expected to see…

Find a Grave. Where you can… er… find graves. The main value for most people is probably to locate the graves of important/famous people, but they’re perfectly willing to list the grave location of everybody else as well.

The person currently quoted on this blog’s subtitle, Goethe, is buried in Weimar, Germany. Yea, it doesn’t really matter, but I figured I should check someone, so there you go.

Hat tip to Karen (No, it didn’t come from a blog or a public web page, so no link).

A sexual harassment lawsuit? Check.
Nipple fetish? Check.
A gorilla (a gorilla?!) ? Check.

What more could you possibly ask from a news story?

Two fired caretakers for Koko, the world-famous sign-language-speaking gorilla, have sued their former bosses, claiming they were pressured to expose their breasts as a way of bonding with the 300-pound simian.

Yep, you read that right. And that nipple fetish I mentioned? It’s not the boss’ fetish, it’s the gorilla’s. Seriously!

 

They were threatened that if they "did not indulge Koko’s nipple fetish, their employment with the Gorilla Foundation would suffer," the lawsuit alleged.

 

The lawsuit claims that on one occasion Patterson said, "’Koko, you see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples.’"  

If I’d have seen this at a satire fake-news site, I would have been sure that they stretched it a little too far. I guess it’s true that reality is stranger than fiction…

I mean, sure, wanting to be popular and remembered for ever and ever (Like Ozymandias, for example) is a common human trait. I wouldn’t get riled over someone who does something to help make himself remembered, and gain a name for himself.

But to create a method to monitor your popularity, and have anyone who express interest in you know how popular you are, after you’ve bitten the bullet ?! That’s crazy…

And to create it as a closed technological solution that rely on outside services, without forming any legal contract with those service, that’s just plain stupid.

Enter the Ego Machine:

Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be integrated into a computer processor. A virtual agent running on the computer that contains his ashes will scour the web for mentions of his name. As the mentions increase, an on-screen image of Sullivan will morph into an image of his younger self. But if the mentions decline, Sullivan’s image will age, deteriorate and eventually fade away.

Yikes!

So I do very much hope this will remain just an art exhibit, but for some reason I’m sure there are people out there who would take this too seriously…

Timing is everything, as they say. Just after I go ahead and post about the suicide rate statistics, and how the suicide rate is relatively low here, someone I know go ahead and kills himself…

This guy was the manager of a small company we (the company I work for) worked with on quite a number of projects. He was on good relations with my boss. I met him myself a few times when working on some projects.

He was a nice person, professional, easy to work with.

Last week he came to work in the morning, complete a few things, did a few meetings, then at around midday he left, went home, and hang himself…

His company was doing fine, business was good. According to rumours at the funeral (my boss went) he was depressive, and had a few bouts of rage and depression in the past.

A waste…

I posted this on a certain group/forum, as a part of some discussion too crazy (in a good way) to get into here, a few days ago. This is a "proof" that witches are sweet and funny. Notice that this is about your average fairytale evil witch, no relation no any sort of actual wiccan religion.

Figured I might as well post this here. Very slightly edited to remove personal references or things tied too closely to the discussion on the group.

Warning: This is crazy even compared to my usual level…

Let’s start with the easy one - funny.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

2 : differing from the ordinary in a suspicious, perplexing, quaint, or eccentric way : PECULIAR — often used as a sentence modifier <funny, things didn’t turn out the way we planned>
3 : involving trickery or deception <told his prisoner not to try anything funny>

Witches differ from the ordinary in suspicious, perplexing, quaint and eccentric ways. Surely you’d agree, no? And involving trickery and deception is certainly the modus operandi for any self-respecting witch. And let me tell you, among those who respect any witch, there’s certainly herself.

Ergo, witches are funny. I really can’t see how you could put up any valid argument against it.

Now let’s go to the more complex bit, proving witches are sweet. Please try and follow.

First, the easiest bit, witches notoriously have a sweet tooth. They are known for their attraction to all sweet food morsels, including cakes, cookies, and everything that would contain copious amount of chocolate. They eat more of those than is healthy, and the high blood glucose level is in large part responsible for the tell-tale of the trade, the large ugly warts. Every witch has those, but they are not caused by evil (Evil has no dermatological effects by itself), but by the endocrinical imbalance.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking "Aha! But I know many people who eat too much candy, and yet were I to drink their blood it would be salty, not sweet! So you must be mistaken!". But no, you would be wrong. Let me explain:

Witches try to avoid water. It is a well known fact, established by several well-published experiments (some may even be detailed in your collection of fairytales), that witches might melt if exposed to a sufficient amount of water. So far it’s quite simple, but you must be wondering what does that have to do with being sweet, right?

Well, this involves a little bit of basic chemistry. I’m certain you’re familiar with the concept of osmosis. As you well know, osmosis is the process in which, if I’d oversimplify, a solvent may pass through a membrane when on one side the solvent is present with a higher concentration of solute. Translated: If you’d add salt to a witch’s blood, at some point the salt concentration will be high enough that water from the air (and the air is full of water vapour) will be pushed by the osmotic pressure into the witch. The witch’s skin, and blood, will be exposed to more and more water.
And as I mentioned, we all know what happened to a moist witch. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.

So while empirical data about exact dietary habits of witches is minimal, we can safely assume witches try to eat as little salt as possible. So the blood of an average witch, if drank, will not be salty.

But it will also not be plain bland. All this sugar we talked about, remember?

The end result is clear. Theory concludes that witches must be sweet.
Any other option doesn’t make much theoretical sense, and this model will be adhered to unless some contrary experimental data could be provided. And even if the data is contrary, which it’s probably isn’t, the witches are reluctant to share, and we’re forced to stay with the existing theory.

So witches in general are sweet and funny. QED (That, for everyone who was forced to write this during planar geometry lessons at school and have no idea why, is Quod Erat Demonstrandum in Latin, and very roughly mean "what we wanted to prove". Just FYI).

So there you have it.

I had to go to the pharmacy yesterday to take out some prescription. I arrived only about half an hour before official closing time, and this was a large central pharmacy, so there was a long line of people there.

Since they often have more customers than clerks (Yes, yes, they’re "pharmacists", and studies long and hard for it. Sure. But these days they don’t make prescription drugs, just take bought boxes off the shelves and give them to people. The only actual requirement is being literate) they have a queue system in place.

Near the entrance there’s a dispenser with a paper roll of sequential numbered tags. And next to the counter there’s a small electric billboard showing the next number to get services. Pretty common stuff. But the billboard only has a two-digit display. The numbered paper tags go to three digits.

I didn’t have any problem with it. I took out number 608, and the board showed 67. I never doubted that it means my turn is in about 41 people.

Other people seed to have a problem with it, and were not able to grasp the simple mechanics of number overflow over the hundred’s digit. Again and again (and again) someone would take a number and stare entirely puzzled at the billboard, until another person told them that "once it gets to one hundred it will roll back and start again". Then they’d sigh a long "Ahhhh" of understanding, mutter about how long they have to wait, and find a place to wait in.

The fact that so many people constantly were unable to realise that indeed the lower two-digit numbers will return, I found quite sad.
The fact that so many other people kept telling them "one hundred" I found somewhat sadder. The numbered tickets had the number on them! it was six hundred and something. There are only two ways to look at it:

 
1. The billboard shows only two digits. It will only reach to 99, and then start again. It can’t show a hundred, so it will never reach it.
 
2. The billboard shows the last two digits of the whole number. It will reach 600, not 100, it went over 100 nearly 500 people ago.

And yet nobody merely said that the numbers will return, they all said 100. ALL.

On a different side note, I was once at the same pharmacy when there were about 90 people waiting… This is very close to having 100 people waiting… In which case two people are going to come to the counter claiming it’s their turn whenever the billboard progresses…

Just got another scam message, in the well known mould of the average Nigerians. These things are going on for years now, and yet they didn’t really change those messages much. I do admit that most of those that currently go around at least aren’t written in all capital letters, and aren’t riddled with spelling errors (oh, wait, they still are) but it’s nearly the exact same bogus tales and fishy offers. And yet people must fall for this, or they would stop…

So, in the spirit of having a somewhat boring day, here’s the recent one I got, with comments that I’ll refrain from sending to as a reply to avoid confirming my live email address…

Dear Friend,

We’re not friends. I don’t know you. I’m happy to make new friends, but I rather have a choice before they become such.

      Greetings to you,With warm heart I offer my friendship, and greetings, and I hope this mail meets you in good time. However strange or surprising this contact might seem to you as we have not met personally or had any dealings in the past, I humbly ask that you take due consideration of its importance and the immense benefit it will be to you.

Yep, it met me in good time indeed. As proof, I didn’t just delete it outright. The best reply such a message received from me in years.
And don’t worry, I did not find your message to be surprising or strange in the least. You could say I even expected it, or one very much like it. I’m a well known unscrupulous philanthropist the world over, and receive many such calls for help.
As for considering the benefits for me, I did. Anything that can amuse me and hold my interest for a while is a benefit, especially on a rather boring day. Thank you for providing this bit of entertainment.

     After careful consideration with my children, we resolved to contact you for your most needed assistance on this mutually beneficial and riskfree transaction which i hope you will give your urgent attention. I duly apologize for infringing on your privacy, if this contact is not acceptable to you, as I make this proposal to you as a person of integrity. First and foremost I wish to introduce myself properly to you.

It saddens me to know that even careful considerations did not stop you from sending these messages. It’s even sadder to know that your little innocent children are no longer so innocent, and would consent to this. I think you should invest your billions in the education system of your home instead of trying to smuggle them outside.
I’m also somewhat curious about your definition of "riskfree". You want to take away my money, no? How is that risk-free ? Or do you mean that it’s risk-free for you and your children? I admit, that may indeed be that case…
Glad to hear you’re a person of integrity, though. I’d hate to be ripped off by a person with no integrity.

   I  am Mr.William Koroma  I am moved to write you this letter, this was inconfidence considration,for our present circumstances and situation, i escaped with my wife and children out of Sierrial-Leone to The Nedelands through the aid of the United Nations Evacuation Team where we are now presently residing on temporary political asylum.

It’s Sierra-Leone, not Sierrial. Let’s go over it again, letter by letter, so you will know how to spell the name of your home: N-I-G-E-R-I-A. Better, right?
Last time I heard you escape to Ghana, though. Why did you change your mind?
I though you’d like consideration. I never considered that you’d prefer considration instead. What is considration? Some new slang word from Sierrial?

     However, due to this situation I decided to change most of my Billions of  Dollars deposited in Swiss Bank and other countries into other forms of money coded for safe purpose because the new head of state Ahmed Tijjan Kabba made arrangement with the Swiss Goverment and other European countries to freeze all my treasures deposited in some   european countries, hence i and my wife along with my children,decided laying low in this our tempoery political asylum camp here in Grou   Jirnssum in the Nedelands to study the situation till when things gets better, since president Tijjan Kabba taking over goverment again in   Sierria Leone. One of my chateaux in Southern France was confiscated by the French Goverment, and as such we had to change  our identity so that our investment will not be trace and confiscated.

Mind your punctuation friend. I know you’re excited and agitated, but it doesn’t excuse sloppy writing.
I was unaware that there were forms of money that could be coded for safe purpose. I guess it’s true that one learns new things every day.
I’m glad to see that you improve with spelling your home country’s name, though. Not there yet, but you’re getting better. Maybe next time…
Frankly, I’m quite amazed by the influence your benevolent head of state has in the international banking community. Getting banks all over the Europe to freeze accounts is quite a feat. And doing it to such a large client as yourself, with billions in those accounts, in literally unheard of.
Next time you have to flee for your life, consider converting some of your treasure to gems. They’re easy to carry and can be easily traded for cash in many locations.
There’s one point I’m not entirely clear on, please help me understand. You have lots of old accounts all over Europe. The government and banks of all those countries agreed to freeze those accounts. So you changed your identity in order to make them not realize that those accounts are yours?! How does it work, exactly? You can’t really go to all those banks and retroactively change the account details after all…
Oh, and just to keep you appraised on local politics, All those countries you talk about have governments, not goverments. Just so you’d know. If you’re fleeing one and complaining about others, at least know your enemy.
Although one of them did grant you asylum. Even if only a tempoery one. Which must be some legal definition I never heard of, of a at least not an English term. I hope for you that it doesn’t mean that the asylum is only temporary and they will stop granting it.

I  have deposited the sum of Twenty-eight Million Dollars only{US$28,000,000.00} with a security company for safekeeping.

All those billions of dollars and treasures, and you only want to liquidate a few million dollars? What, you’re going to leave the other billions there to be located and confiscated? Isn’t it a shame?
Or is it that you don’t really trust me? That you don’t really want to be my friend? Maybe you sent similar messages to thousands of people making the same offer, eh? I’m hurt. It’s also foolish of you, since the handling fees of making all those thousands of accounts would be quite a lot. It’s also very easy to trace a quick opening of thousands of different accounts, thereby making everything not so risk-free for you…

  The funds are security coded to prevent them from knowing the actual content .  What I want you to do now is to indicate your inetrest that you will assist me and my immediate family by receiving the money on our behalf.

How do you security code funds? If you deposited the money with a security company, they must know how much you deposited? Or it it your beloved head of state you’re worried about? But if he can’t trace the account to you, he won’t know the content anyway, and if he can’t, how would security coding anything hinder him?
You certainly piqued my interest, if not my inetrest that you so wanted.
For a man with so much money, you’re not thinking clearly. Or is it that you had to leave your financial and security advisers behind? Find someone else, you can certainly pay them to give you better advice.

     The  Account required for this project can be personal, company or an offshore account that you have  total control over, your area of specialisation will not be a hinderance to the successful execution of this transaction.

I just need a bank account, any account with any bank, right? No bank will ask questions when I transfer those millions in, try to connect the money to you, or report to the authorities, of course.
You can’t begin to imagine how relieved I am to hear that my area of specialization will not hinder the transaction. I was worried that the bank will stop the money transfer simply because I’m a computer programmer, or have a degree in economics. Banks usually heavily frown on these sorts of things. But since you assure me that in this case it won’t be a problem, everything is fine. I have complete confidence in you.

Ackowledge this message, so that I can introduce you to my family as our foreign trusted partner who shall take charge of our investment abroad where we now plan to settle.

What, you want to come and settle in Israel?! Are you sure that’s a good idea? Immigration may give you a hell of a time if you’re not Jewish, you know…
And frankly, me dear new friend, I don’t really want to meet your family. Like I wrote earlier, seeing your children would just be sad.
So sorry, I’ll neither ackowledge this message, nor acknowledge it.

    I want you to assist us in investing this money,but I will not want  our identity revealed. I will also want to buy properties and stocks in multy- national companies and to engage in other safe and non speculative investments.

Your identity is safe with me. I have no clue who you are, so I can’t really divulge that info to anyone else. No worries.
Why exactly do you need me to manage this money for you, though? If you’re coming to live here, you can deal with it on your own. Or hire a firm that specializes in these things. I really can’t compete.

   We have been through a lot of health and spiritual turmoil, hence will need  your understanding and assistance.

It’s not really clear if you’ve been through a lot of health, or if you’ve been through a lot of health turmoil. I’m not sure either option is particularly appealing, so you have my sympathy. Not so sure about my understanding. And a big no for my assistance. Sorry. It’s just that I have reason to suspect (possibly it’s just that your new head of state spread those vicious rumours about you) that you don’t really want me to take this money, but instead will at some point ask me to transfer some money to you, to help facilitate some aspect of the transfer, and I will then not hear from you again (Not because you’d steal it and disappear of course, but because you’ll get caught. But still, there’s a risk in this risk-free venture that I don’t feel I’m willing to take).

May I at this junction emphasize the  high level of confidentiality which this business demands and hope you will not betral the trust and confidence which we repose in you.I  shall put you in the picture of this buiness, i.e tell you where the funds are currently being maintained and also discuss other modalities including remuneration for your services.

Full confidentiality. Nobody will ever know you contacted me. I won’t tell a soul. Everything going on between us will be done with the utmost privacy. One thing I can absolutely guarantee is that I will not betral your trust. I can’t betral your trust. I can’t betral much of anything, and neither can anyone else.
I also don’t want anything to do with this mysterious buiness of yours. I don’t know what a buiness is, I never seen a buiness, and am not in the mood of meeting one right now.
On the other hand, you can perfectly spell modalities and remuneration. Hmm…

   I   shall also inform you with the next line of action as soon as   i receive your response.Is this preposition is attainable? If it is, Please kindly funish me immediately by E-mail with your direct telephone number and fax number to enhance the confidentiality which this business demands.

The position is not quite attainable, no. Dreadfully sorry.
I also regret that I cannot funish you anything, for much the same reasons that I could not betral your trust previously.

  Best Regards,
Mr.William Koroma
NB:Please send all Reply mail to my comfidential email address(removed)

I don’t think so. I may hear more from you if I do. Depending on your friend, I may even as a side bonus get more offers to lower my mortgage, buy a fake Role, or enlarge parts of my anatomy. None of which I will truly need once I have access to all those millions of yours…
And I don’t care how comfy is that comfidential address of yours.

N.B.PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL AND COMPLETELY FREE FROM TERRORIST, DRUG MONEY OR MONEY LAUNDERING.THIS IS COMPLETE LEGISTIMATE BUSINESS TRANSACTION.

N.B.PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THIS BUSINESS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL AND COMPLETELY FREE FROM TERRORIST, DRUG MONEY OR MONEY LAUNDERING.THIS IS COMPLETE LEGISTIMATE BUSINESS TRANSACTION.

Sorry, did I say something about not using capital letters? Sorry, sorry, sorry. My mistake. That would teach me to read things to the end before making wild statements. The all-caps are back.
Good to know that this is totally legal. That may be true some place, but not according to the laws in this country I live in, and that you want to settle in. Maybe you should reconsider your choice of residence.
It’s of course even better to know that there isn’t even a single terrorist involved in this. I’d hate to think I’m being defrauded by a terrorist instead of by a lying scoundrel of a thief.
What isn’t clear to me is how you can assure me that no drug money is involved. How do you know where the money you want to steal from me comes from? Maybe it is drug money, eh? You can’t complain, after all, not after telling me that my specialization will not effect the transaction.

Well, at least you didn’t claim it’s a legitimate business transaction. Legistimate I’m willing to concede to you.

Have a nice day, and may you spend lots and lots of happy years in jail with your friends and family.
Your new best friend,
Yaron.

It was one of those moments that make me sorry I don’t always carry around with me the digital camera that I don’t have… (Note to self: Consider buying a decent digital camera, then consider lugging it around at all times)

Late Friday night. I was walking with a friend along one of the large streets in Tel-Aviv. The very large majority of stores and shops were closed. As we were walking we passed next to a large building front, with locked heavy metal bars on the entrances/windows. And on the wall, between such two locked areas, was a sign. With one word (in English): "Exit".

This, as I mentioned, on the outside of the building.

After we finished chuckling, we decided to look exactly what kind of store would place such a sign on the wrong side of the door. Turns out it wasn’t a store. Further to the side there was another metal plaque identifying the building (also in English). "…Consulate… Embassy of the People’s Republic of China".

Now, I can understand it if the Chinese word for entrance can be translated into English as several different words, and one of them is "Exit" (My Chinese isn’t good enough to know, it’s just an assumption). But surely someone must have noticed that it’s the wrong word and told them to fix it, no ?!