07.01.08
Posted in Ranting at 8:33 am by DMZ
There’s a weird Prius ad that keeps running on Craigslist, and it starts
2007 TOYOTA : PRIUS HYBRID 60 MPG US$ 5400
followed by a ridiculous description and then, in huge letters, the email address to contact the person, and a chunk of spam text.
So I searched on the email address — they’re in every Craigslist location. There’s 31 on that location alone, all in the last day.
There are more elaborate variants, with similar spam text at the bottom: you can search for “georgecallum878@gmail.com” too and see the same pattern.
Or chrisgrande898@gmail.com did a ton of them at the start of the month, offering almost exactly the same text as George Callum would a week later.
They’re flagged and removed almost immediately, but I don’t see what the angle is here, unless it’s just an attempt to get people’s addys. And the fact that it’s been run repeatedly makes me think they’ve got to be getting something out of it or they wouldn’t keep trying.
But the spam text is random, torn from Wikipedia I think, the kind of stuff used to get spam email past Bayesian filters:
another Red Sox pitcher hurl a no-hitter and the next Fenway Park no-hitter won’t come untilcoin It originally meant the side of a die with only one mark before it was a term for a playing card Since this was the lowest roll of the die it traditionally meant ‘bad luck’ inin 1977 to become Harris Queensway plc until the company was taken over in 1988 Lord Harris was also a non-executive director of(4 8 15 16 23 and 42) It is also the number of minutes within which these numbers must be entered into the computer and the button must be pushed
– it’s not as if people are searching for that stuff. Randomized post stuffing isn’t going to get a lot of people searching for those terms, seeing a Prius ad, and handing over their email addresses. You’d want to go for Allison Williams or one of those other weird keywords that delivers a bunch of strange traffic to your doorstep.
I don’t get it. Unless it’s all more or less automated so it doesn’t require any effort, it doesn’t seem like the return would be worth it.
Also, the people at Eastlake Auto Brokers post over and over about their cars and it’s really annoying.
Permalink
06.29.08
Posted in Ranting at 6:12 am by DMZ
From Dan’s Data:
Embassy couldn’t possibly allow Cartrivision to just be a general purpose record-and-playback system. They were just like today’s split-personality entertainment megacorps, who on the one hand want as many people as possible to pay to “enjoy” their “content”, but on the other hand would rather like it if any customer who even considered copying some of that content for a friend immediately burst into flames.
Permalink
06.21.08
Posted in Ranting at 1:52 pm by DMZ
I used to make coffee with my Aeropress. It was pretty awesome. I got more and more into it, started being able to tell the difference between good and bad cups, started rating the local coffee places, and eventually I bought a nice Rancillio Silvia and a quality grinder to do it at home.
For a while, I was happy. But the more I know about how it’s supposed to go, the more frustrated I am.
There’s a rule for making espresso shots, which is that you want (for a double) 2-2.5 ounces of liquid in 20-25 seconds. Once I get that dialed in, I can pretty consistently make it. Then I bought a nice tamper to replace the awful one that comes with the Silvia, along with this book, this horrible, cursed book from Cafe Vivcace.
It’s a great book, but it’s got all kinds of descriptions about what a shot’s supposed to look like as it pours, coloration, how to tamp, all the variables to control, and I can’t make a good shot now.
Seriously. I’m totally screwed. I’ve been trying to get to their level, and it’s not happening, and now I’m thinking “I really need one of those temperature sensors, no two, and then better… no! no!” They turn out horrible and bitter, none of them look like they’re supposed to when they come out or when they’re done, I’m tinkering with everything and generally unhappy.
I had to do a bunch of work from home this morning, and before I did, I tried to make a cup. It took me five tries this morning to get a decent shot, which I eagerly gulped down. Five tries, and it wasn’t even that good.
And a minute ago I thought “hey, I should go have a cup of coffee”… and I didn’t want to go make it. All I want is a good cup of coffee. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
Permalink
06.09.08
Posted in Ranting at 5:00 pm by DMZ
On the way in to work today, I had to fish out cash because I didn’t have my bus pass, and I realized that with gas this high, even my extremely short trip to work starts to makes economic sense just on the gas. It’s only ~4 miles each way, but it’s all sitting at stop signs and long stop lights. Seriously, from my house to work, it’s eight stops one-way. My 14-year-old Volvo gets well under 20mpg running back and forth (in fact, it might be sub-15, which is totally embarrassing and why I don’t drive to work). I’d always looked at bus fares and figured it to be a wash, but that’s not the case at all.
At $5/gallon for the premium the 1994 Volvo 850’s owners manual tells me it needs, I’m looking at $1.25/trip over four miles, and Metro’s only $.50 more than that.
Atrios mentioned something similar today:
At $4.50 per gallon in many places I guess that changes. If you’re getting 20 mpg, a 50 mile round trip commute will cost you $11.25. The 13.2 mile trip from downtown Minneapolis to the airport, which you can do on the train for $1.50, costs 3 bucks by car.
The point I’m trying to make is that when gas was cheap, people thought in terms of the cost of filling the tank rather than the cost of making a trip. People didn’t really make a marginal cost/benefit calculation because they didn’t really perceive the cost for short trips. That’s changing.
Permalink
06.06.08
Posted in Ranting at 9:35 pm by DMZ
It’s been a while since I ranted about politics, this, from Elenanor Clift, doing a post-mortem on the Clinton campaign:
She did run an extraordinarily close race, and if the Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as the Republicans, she’d be the nominee. If Obama hadn’t outorganized her in small caucus states like Idaho, which the Democrats have no hope of winning in November, he wouldn’t be the nominee.
This may all be true, but it’s first unknowable and second condescending and manages to miss the point at once.
They both attempted to win the nomination under the rules set at the start (mostly, since Clinton later attempted to change them when it favored her). It’s like watching a baseball game and then saying “if the winner was determined by stolen bases, the Brewers would have won.”
Well, sure, had nothing else about the game changed. But if the winner was determined by stolen bases, both teams would have spent a ton of money on speedy baserunners instead of good fielders, they would have fielded only left-handed pitchers who could deter the runner on first, and they’d have devoted their farm systems to producing cannon-armed catchers who could throw out anyone.
Obama and his campaign showed an absolutely amazing ability to organize without the support of existing party structures, they raised astonishing amounts of money, and they worked the rules to their maximum advantage, and they won and won and won.
Who’s to say that if the rules were different, and both teams played on a different field, under different rules, that they couldn’t have won then as well?
The best we can say is that Obama won the contest at hand, and the rest is unknowable. And it’s okay to leave it at that.
Permalink
05.10.08
Posted in Ranting at 10:42 am by DMZ
I’ve had an eye out for a hybrid for a while — Mrs. Zumsteg in particular has an extremely short commute on city streets, and her car is going to need replacement at some point here.
Anyway, I saw this in a Prius ad:
Mileage is around 91k right now, which is considered pretty low for a hybrid.
What does that even mean? Are hybrids supposed to have high miles? And who considers that low? My insurance company figures that ~10k/year is normal. This thing isn’t far out off that pace, but that’s not low.
The really interesting thing to me is that someone composed that sentence thinking it was a selling point or even a mitigation strategy. Now, if it was highway miles, you might go “okay, well, that’s not 91k of stop and go, at least” but the author of this ad thought something like “I’ll disclose the miles… jeez, that seems high now that I’ve written it down. I should say something. Um, ‘At least it’s not 100k?’ No, that just reminds them it’s close. What do I do?”
And eventually settled on this bizarre nonseqiutor. What were the rejected second halves of this sentence?
Mileage is around 91k right now…
- later it’ll be around 81 if I can figure out how to reset this stupid tamper-proof odometer. Heck, 71.
- and 91 was a pretty good year, if you think about it, am I right?
- but that includes the time I went to the store for chips but they were all out and that shouldn’t count
- and I’m going to rack it up even faster after placing this ad
- most of it from driving back and forth to your mom’s house
Permalink
05.05.08
Posted in Ranting at 10:22 pm by DMZ
You can come to emusic in two states:
- logged in
- not logged in
If you’re not logged in, it could be because you’re a member or not.
So let’s say you’re not a member. You’ll look around as much as possible (emusic hasn’t historically made it easy to browse their selection, which I don’t understand) and either decide to sign up or leave.
If you’re a member and you’re not logged in, you may well hit the “login” button.
No one who is not a member, logically, would hit that button. If you were designing the next step, you should assume that your audience is members who are not currently logged in.
Right? So here’s their page.
I don’t mind so much that I’m taken to a login page. But it’s one of the worst examples of poor design I’ve ever seen on something this simple. A login screen should ask for
1. Username/email/whatever the ID is
2. Password
That’s it. Here, you’ve expressed an intention to login, and you get a radio button defaulted to “I am not a member”. Why would you be there if you weren’t a member?
Every time an emusic customer - someone who is subscribing to their service, handing over money every month - goes to login, that button is defaulted to no, and they have to click it to “Yes I have a password”. Every one of them.
Why would anyone who is not a member fill in their email and then hit “submit” on a login page? There’s no indication at all of what could happen next. If they do, by some miracle, they’re taken to the registration process.
Why? Why would a new customer go to “login” then fill in their email address as if they had an account, then hit submit?
Clearly, this page serves two masters: they want to let people log in, and then someone decided that they needed to let people register there as well. But if people wanted to subscribe, there’s a “sign up” button on the front page (!!!). If you were going to subscribe, that’s where you’d go.
It takes you to the registration page, the same as if you’d gone into the login page and blundered past the registration. That makes sense.
I don’t understand why they deliberately designed a page that annoys its intended audience every time it’s used. “I enjoy giving you money each month.” “Hang on, let me poke you in the eye real quick.”
I sent emusic a note about this as a user, where I said “please, if you’re not going to fix the page, could you at least default the button to ‘yes’?” and they said they’d pass the comment along.
It’s a line of HTML. It would take someone five, ten seconds to fix that default and then I don’t know how long to propagate it out. They haven’t done it.
When I work on user interface stuff, I always try and remember examples like this. What’s the user thinking when they come to the page? Are there rough edges we can smooth? If this page can’t easily serve two purposes, can we break it out?
Permalink
Posted in Ranting at 6:35 pm by DMZ
I was idly considering cataloging all the injuries I sustained, but instead, I’d like to recognize the indispensable tools of spending a week under the house repairing and rebuilding plumbing runs.
#1 Sawzall
I am so happy I bought one of these. I went through a lot of blades, because it’s hard to cut through galvanized pipes, but holy mackeral, compared to using a hacksaw, it doesn’t even compare. 3/4″ rusted pipe, tough. Drywall, CPVC, anything else? Like butter.
Saved me more time than anything, and fun to use, too.
#2 12″ pipe wrench and
#3 10″ pipe wrench
Bite and turn. Easy to adjust, use, and a decent hammer in a pinch. Heavy enough for stability, light enough to wield accurately. With two, it’s easy to brace piece A and then turn piece B against it.
#4 massive quality adjustable crescent wrench and
#5 smaller quality adjustable crescent wrench
Almost the same deal as above, except with fittings. A good adjustable crescent that keeps its sizing while in use and under torque is sweet.
#6 Map gas torch.
I can’t believe how handy this thing proved. Mostly used in soldering new copper joints, also handy for heating up stubborn rusted fittings. Also made me feel secure about being able to defend myself from spiders, though it never came to that.
Also of note: the nice 500w portable work light with protective grill, now severely dented. The surprisingly effective respirator mask. Neosporin. Flux. High-quality solder.
Permalink
05.02.08
Posted in Ranting at 12:10 am by DMZ
Last weekend, a small thing got bigger and I ended up tearing out the master shower, at which point I discovered that (as I’d suspected) the people who did the last bit of work in there did a really horrible job. I did what I could tearing down the master, and then got through the week without it, working a little bit after work — the fiberglass insulation was moldy, so that had to go, and so on.
Pretty soon, I was tearing out the plumbing. Starting Friday after work, I started to go through and fix stuff. Hall hot water pressure’s always been pretty bad. I found it’s because the pipe was 90% clogged with corrosion.
And as I went down, I got angrier and angrier. Like this.
Things going on here:
- on the right, that white thing is a CPVC pipe, a hot water run. I don’t know when it went in, but it’s super fragile and breaks easily. I would later crack my head on that very joint, and it came apart, dumping water all over me. So I had to re-do the CPVC run. I did not use CPVC. No one uses CPVC.
- the rest of those pipes are the old steel pipes that have rusted. You can see they’re leaking corrosion at the joints
- the joint in the center there is, on the left, held together by electrical tape. At some point in this house’s history, someone went down there, saw a leak, and made a decision that they wouldn’t fix it. You can see that it’s dripping there.
- behind that piece, you can also see that there’s a different pipe run (cold) that comes in, hits a T, one leg of which continues, takes a 90 degree turn up to another T. All of those fittings were rusty and leaky
Or check out this piece of work:
On the left, a badly-done union. Note that it is leaking rust-heavy water.
On the right, that’s a 1/2 inch copper run from the master shower (which I tore out) to the cold water line. Note that it’s directly connected. Two different kinds of metals. This leads to all kinds of corrosion problems. This apparently didn’t occur to whoever did the conversion.
Anyway, my point is that in going through and making all these repairs at once, it’s good, but it’s essentially a re-piping job. Once I’ve replaced a broken CPVC run and the corroded fittings it’s attached to, I’ve broken the next run of rusted-out steel piping, and repairing that…
So my week’s run:
Friday: get home, plumb
Saturday: plumb (several hours of discussing plumbing while not doing plumbing)
Sunday: plumb
Mon-Wed: vacation
Thurs: plumb
I spent ~7 hours under my house today, which is down from Sunday’s 15. We’re four fittings away from being done, but the problem with plumbing - heh - is that getting those fittings working
Here’s what gets my goat, though. Every time I have to use a Sawzall to pull out a pipe or a set of fittings, I think “Someone made a decision to leave this for me, and I hate them”. And it’s true. Whoever welded those copper runs directly in either didn’t care enough to find out the right way to do that or didn’t care that it was wrong. And it goes all the way back — someone made the design decision to build this place with piping that would rust, even though they were laying it into interior walls.
And working all day in a crawlspace because someone didn’t want to put the time and effort in before me, well, that’s not the kind of situation that leads to happy thoughts about those who came before me.
Still, I have high hopes that the water pressure will finally leap back up when I’m finished. Here’s hoping.
Permalink
04.28.08
Posted in Ranting at 9:15 am by DMZ
Yesterday I spent ~15 hours working on my house’s plumbing, and as you’d expect I’m now covered in small cuts, scrapes, bruises, and one burn. The worst of these, functionally-speaking, is the side of my right thumb, which is exactly where I hit the spacebar while typing.
So writing this is a battle between mindfullness, negative reinforcement, and almost a lifetime of touch typing. It’s going badly.
Also, we still don’t have water. There are four outlets (two to sinks, two to toilets) that use compression fittings and last night I managed to get one of them to go from “spraying water everywhere” to “works” at the end of my long shift. I hate compression fittings.
Now that I think about it, the only thing I like about plumbing at all is running pipe, soldering, and doing the planning, because they’re binary: they either work or you screwed something up. This compression fitting type stuff, where I fix it, it leaks, I fix it, it leaks… oh, how I hate it.
Permalink
« Previous entries