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Friday, 16 October 2009
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Sounds phishy
posted at
12:04 PM
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Dear Seller
I 'm interested in purchasing your advertised item and i will like to know the final price if is okay by me.And if I can pay with a cashiers check, If this is okay with you do get back to me immediately for me to arrange the payment. Concerning the shippment, my shipper will come and pick it up from your location as soon as we seal this transaction. Do get back to me immediately with your Full Name, Contact Address and Phone Number for me to issue out the payment check to u asap cos am right now out of town but i can instruct my client overthere to issue out the payment check to u as soon as u get back to me here also im paying you an extra $50 to get this advert off the internet cuz am really interested in buying it. Hope to hear from you soon.so u can get back to me via my email at kellyqueen06@yahoo.co.uk
Best regards,
Ann
NB:- i will be looking forward to hear from you soon. Do attach the picture if available. Thanks The prose is wretched, but that's par for the course on craigslist. The real tipoff was the offer of a cashier's check, which is a well-known scam. And the fact that the responder is offering to buy my item and ship it. To the UK. Which is slightly suspicious, given what the item actually is:
[categories]
general, personal
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posted at
05:24 PM
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Here are some general rules. (They don't apply in every case. There are other subtleties as well.)
Two-digit (primary) routes
- Numbers are intended to be unique.
- Even numbers run east-west.
- Odd numbers run north-south.
- Freeways divisible by 10 (I-10, I-90, etc.) represent major E/W freeways. The lower the number, the further south the road. I-10 runs from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, FL. I-90 runs from Seattle to Boston.
- Freeways divisible by 5 (I-5, I-95, etc.) are major N/S freeways. The lower the number, the further west. I-5 runs from Canada to Mexico through Seattle and Los Angeles. I-95 runs from Maine to Miami.
Other two-digit routes
Two-digit freeways not divisible by 5 or 10 (I-84, I-88, I-76) are often spurs that link other interstates, often older roads renamed. Different numbers exist in order to avoid duplicated numbers when possible.
[credit]
Three-digit (auxiliary) routes
These are routes that take off from and sometimes return to a primary route.
- Numbers are intended to be unique within a state. For example, there is theoretically one (each) I-405 in CA, OR, and WA.
- An even starting number (I-405, I-225) means that the route meets an interstate at both ends.
- An odd starting number (I-195) meets an interstate at only one end.
- I-4xx numbers are often bypasses that touch the same freeway on both ends.
This excellent graphic from kurumi.com summarizes these conventions:
Here are some examples:
I-405 in Seattle connects to I-5 at Burien and Lynnwood. | 
Denver has I-225 and I-270, which connect to I-25 and I-70. Denver also has I-76, which connects I-70 and I-80. |
Makes sense? Now you know why I-90 and I-5 meet in Seattle. Need more? Here ya go:
[categories]
general
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Tuesday, 28 July 2009
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Beat the heat: email
posted at
05:15 PM
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 I have contributed the following suggestion! Sending emails raises the temperature. As individual characters of an email are pushed through the Ethernet cables, they scrape the sides, which results in friction, which results in heat. (The bigger the characters, the more they drag along the sides of the cables.)
So to keep heat to a minimum, I am recommending that people:
- Send as few emails as possible.
- Keep them as short as possible.
- Use small letters.
I think that this suggestion alone will reduce cooling load significantly.
[categories]
general, seattle
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Wednesday, 27 May 2009
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Is college the only path?
posted at
06:38 PM
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But between the mania for outsourcing that started in the 90s (or thereabouts) and the current economic downturn, the golden ticket of a college degree is looking a little tarnished.[1] A person with a pessimistic POV might wonder why we're training all these kids to jump into a job pool that, at least for the moment, seems to be drying up.
Assuming I'm reading trends correctly, we therefore seem to be undergoing a little bit of a, um, adjustment in how we view the skilled trades. Back in March, the NPR correspondent Adam Davidson appeared on the radio program "This American Life." His mission, he said, was "to save his cousin DJ's life, to make his life better." Save it how? Cousin DJ had dropped out of college. By dropping out of college, Davidson maintained, you are making a conscious decision "to not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decade." The program then featured a three-way conversation between Davidson, his cousin DJ, and the economist Pietra Rivoli, whom Davidson had enlisted to help him convince cousin DJ of his folly.
 You can probably see where this is going. Dr. Rivoli sided with DJ; specifically, she sided with him because DJ has job experience and skills that pay decently, that are in essential trades, and most importantly, that cannot be outsourced. In contrast, as a journalist, Davidson himself, Mr. College, could easily be out of a job any time. (You can listen to the podcast; look for episode #350 on the 2009 program archive page. This segment starts at 8:29.)
This last weekend, I had the interesting experience of having a tree guy come over with his massive stump-grinder machine and chew up a huge stump. He came at 10:00 AM; we were the second of five appointments he had that day. He doesn't like stump grinding, he said (his weekday work involves comparatively tamer work with a chainsaw), but he can pick up $1000 in a day with his big chomper. If this weekend was typical for him, he's sure not hurting for work. And even if work slows down, he's not going to get laid off -- he owns his own business.
In an article "The Case for Working With Your Hands" in this week's New York Times magazine, Matthew Crawford makes the same point again:This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Crawford goes on to describe the satisfaction he derives from repairing motorcycles, especially in contrast to the type of white-collar work he did before. He explicitly addresses some assumptions about manual work:When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options.
[...]
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions.
[...]
The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. The emphasis in Crawford's article, as well as in Dr. Rivoli's conclusion, is on skilled trades. Cousin DJ has an array of construction skills, including framing and cabinet-making. Crawford is a doctor of the mechanical world, and in our day and age, the skills of a good mechanic can sometimes seem as essential as those of a good G.P.
It's hard for me at this stage of life to imagine what it might have been like to be, say, an electrician instead. But it's not something I shudder to think about, or that I would panic about if one of my children unaccountably developed a career goal that involved the trades. I am happy that I went to college, and am happy that that's what my kids are doing. But it's clear enough to me that success does not start only when you pick up your diploma.
[categories]
general, readings
[tags]
career, college, blue-collar
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Monday, 25 May 2009
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Sign(s) o' the Times
posted at
03:08 PM
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[categories]
general
[tags]
economy
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posted at
10:50 PM
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Eight? Yes. Or more. Or fewer. It all depends.
Of course, I’m screwing with you. (haha, get it?) I'm using a mathematical definition of dimensions: In Cartesian terms, an object's dimension is "correlated with the number of coordinates that is required to map it."[1] It seems probable that when Descartes was inventing analytic geometry, he did not realize that he could have been analyzing a problem I've been having with coffee cans. Which I'll get to in a moment.
So, eight dimensions? Here are eight attributes/characteristics/coordinates/dimensions to identify this object uniquely:
| Fastener type | screw | | Category | machine screw | | Drive type | Philips | | Length | 3/4" | | Diameter/Gauge | #8 | | Thread count[2]/pitch | 32 | | Material | Zinc-plated steel | | Head style | pan |
Go on down to the hardware store and take a stroll through the eponymously labeled Hardware department. Screws, nuts, bolts, washers, pins, nails, anchors ... this department consists of a very large number of small boxes. The boxes are grouped by the categories listed above, and probably several more, like measuring system (US or metric)[3]. If you're in a playful mood, approach an employee who’s skulking about and ask them if they can help you find "a screw." Count the number of questions they have to ask you before you settle on one particular fastener. That's the measure (well, one measure) of how many dimensions the fastener has.[4]
Let's go back to the screw at the beginning. If I ask my lovely bride what this thing is, she can tell me precisely: "Yeah, it’s a screw." Which is to say, it's not a pony. Those eight dimensions? Who cares. Sarah has no more need to distinguish screws by thread count and head style than I have to categorize, dunno, crochet needles by diameter and length (and 12 more dimensions, no doubt), or women's sandals by size and style and color (ditto), or letters by font and size (wait, no, that one I need).
I've been thinking a lot about the dimensions of fasteners because when the frogs are croaking and the woodpecker is whanging on our chimney flue, it's time for my annual garage cleaning and organization festival. Among this year's organizing tasks was what to do about all the damn fasteners that I've accumulated over the decades as leftovers from dozens of home-improvement projects.
 When I first met Sarah, she had a simple approach to this task. Nails, screws, hooks, whatever -- it all went into a coffee can. When she needed a nail to hang a picture, she could root around in the can and pick out a likely looking piece of hardware. Which is to say, Sarah utilized a one-dimensional system -- the number of variables by which she organized fasteners was 1, namely, the can.
My collection used a system that was basically a version of this. I had nails and screws and hooks and miscellaneous stuff "organized" in every conceivable container from Tupperware to cottage-cheese tubs. Among all these I had one can labeled "Screws," another "Washers," another "Nuts." Any time I needed a fastener, I would dump some containers and rake through them to find, say, a 1/4" screw and matching nut and washer.
In my dreams, my garage would be organized like a hardware store, with little bins for every conceivable value of every dimension of every fastener I have. If I wanted a 2-inch #14 machine screw with coarse threads and made out of brass, why, I'd just pull out the right bin and I'd be all set.
But does that even make sense? How many dimensions do I actually need, anyway? If I had the eight- or ten-dimensional system that a hardware store uses, three-fourths or more of the bins would be empty. When I go scrounge around for a screw, what exactly are the characteristics that will help me home in on the fastener I need? Or stated in another, more practical way: how many coffee cans was I going to need to organize everything well enough that I could find stuff when I want it?
This is where dimensionality becomes subjective. If you were organizing your fasteners, you might decide that after you've sorted everything into nails and screws, the next most important characteristic is length. You would have bins (or in my case, cans) that might be labeled "Screws- 1 inch," "Screws-2 inch," "Nails-1 inch," "Nails 3-inch," and so on. Me, I might decide after sorting screws and nails that I want to sort screws into type (wood screw, machine screw), then size (1 inch), then coating (zinc, brass).
 Point is, the dimensionality -- the sum of the characteristics that puts the screws and nails into individual cans -- becomes a matter of utility, of experience, and perhaps of personality. My collection of machine screws might be three-dimensional; yours, two- or five-dimensional.
And we don't even have to fix on a single dimensionality. I might sort most of the screws using three dimensions, then have a can for "Screws larger than 4 inches." Or I might throw all carriage bolts into one can. And I might have a can labeled "Tuftex Deck Drain Fasteners" (I do), whose dimensionality (1) has no relationship to anything else in other cans.
Categorizing and organizing is an exercise that can sort of run away from a person who has tendencies toward obsessiveness. It can become a thing onto itself, where the goal drifts from having a way to quickly find a bolt when you need one to the goal of devising a perfect system, each dimension identified and labeled, a can available for every possible value of every possible dimension. I know this, because as I organize all my screws and nuts and nails, I can feel that tug toward the ever-finer categorization of everything in the shop.
In the end, tho, practicality has to rule. I don't have enough cans; I don't have enough space for those cans, even if I had them; and I certainly don't have time to get out tweezers and calipers to examine every last fastener and make sure it goes into its proper home.
So I now have a shelf of cans for pretty much everything. Some of the fasteners are finely differentiated, some a little less so, and I still have a couple of cans that could have a label on them that says "Screws (1 dimension)" Instead, tho, those cans are labeled "Miscellaneous." And that will have to do for now.
[categories]
general, personal
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posted at
03:07 PM
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 What brings this to mind is an ongoing, um, discussion that I've been having with the customer service (I did not actually write customer "service," although I was tempted to) at HP. I bought an HP Pavilion[1] a couple of months ago for work stuff. I specifically wanted a multi-processorcore box that had lotsa-lotsa RAM because I want to run Vista 64-bit on it. The computer actually came with Vista Home 64-bit. Begone, said I. I flattened the box, loaded Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and began configuring it with goodies like Virtual PC.
A couple of weeks after I got the box, it refused to boot. After some diagnostics and some hardware switcheroo, I determined that I had one bad bank (2GB) of RAM. With that block of RAM in it, the machine froze; when I removed the memory unit, all was fine except, of course, that I was short 2GB of RAM.
I contacted (via chat) HP support. After about an hour of highly intermittent chatting, I was instructed to do what I had already done (test all the bits of RAM). This was interspersed with crap like "Don’t worry I will help you" and "I will pull up the records and resolve the issue."
Anyway, long story short, HP's one and only proposed solution is that I box up the computer and send it back to them so that they can "bench" it. They can't just send me the replacement RAM because it's "delicate." (Not so delicate, of course, that I couldn't swap it around inside the box per their instructions.) Oh, and before I ship them the box? Please restore it to its factory state. Like, put Vista Home back on, yadda-yadda. Oh, and by the way? Allow 15 working days for turnaround.
I opined to them that this was not a satisfactory solution. We've been back and forth a number of times since, which is to say, I get to keep explaining the situation to a succession of different support people who keep telling me that a) I need to send back the box and b) if they haven't heard from me soon, they'll close the case as resolved.
As I say, we at least take a shot at helping customers. HP's policy seems to be to basically to make it so inconvenient for the customer to pursue a fix that yon customer gives up and goes away.
Which I probably will do. I figure that if they want me to pack up the box and ship it, I might as well pack it up and return it to the dealer. I lose nothing, I think, except further opportunities to get the same brush-off I've gotten so far.
Who designs a process like this? Who executes it? Does this process, like, work for HP?
[categories]
general, technology
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Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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Sign o' the Times
posted at
08:46 AM
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[categories]
general
[tags]
economy
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Friday, 20 February 2009
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How much is that exactly?
posted at
08:45 PM
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 Our economic woes, it is estimated, may reach the point of a trillion-dollar meltdown. (And that's hardly the most imaginative estimate.) And that's the size, to use a round number, of the government's proposed bailout.
How long is that in seconds? Well, let's look at it this way, working backward from today:- A million seconds ago: Feb 9, 2009. I was preparing for the recent office move.
- A billion seconds ago: Feb 9, 1977. I was a junior in college.
- A trillion seconds ago: Upper Paleolithic, aka Stone Age.[1] 30,000 B.C. Our ancestors were painting on cave walls.
Does that help you picture the size of a trillion dollars? Hard to grasp, isn't it? If this doesn't do it, here are some further resources that might help:
Update 23 Feb: I've been alerted to another quite popular way to grasp the size of these numbers, which is the "spend since the birth of Christ" comparison. If you had started spending $1/day since Christ was born, you'd still be only about 2/3 of the way to a million dollars. For a billion dollars, you can been spend $1000 per day until the year 2734. And the mind bender, again, is that to spend a trillion dollars, you can have been spending $1 million per day since 0 A.D., and you'd still be only about 2/3 done. (video) Dunno about you, but I find this sort of amazing.
[categories]
general
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Wednesday, 18 February 2009
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Roundup
posted at
09:58 PM
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Big Machines Dancing. (video) "Beauty can be found everywhere, even in a pit surrounded by hulking machines." [via Toolmonger via Friend Dennis]
How to Stop Picking Your Nose. Illustrated.
Diagramming the Obama Sentence. For those of y'all who don't follow all the language blogs.
[T]he elegant balance of the central construction shows that Obama has a good memory for where he's been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he's going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram.
In diagram form:
[via mxrk]
YouTube Comment Fight! (video) "There's gonna be a rumble tonight!" I guess I'll ask again: is there any point in YouTube comments? [via ... don't remember. Prolly Twitter.]
[categories]
roundup, language, writing, general
[tags]
videos, sentence diagrams, backhoe, nose, how-to, obama
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