mike's web log

Sounds phishy

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:04:27 GMT

It must be my week to attract folks with malicious intentions. I have some ads in on craigslist, so I was happy to get an email this morning about one of them. Until I read the email, I mean:

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:

Get the jive on Route I-405

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:24:55 GMT

Aside from congestion, cost, and urban blight, there are many things to like about the US interstate freeway system. For example, the naming scheme. Many people apparently don't realize this (to my surprise), but freeways are named according to conventions that can tell you, the driver, something about the road you're driving on.

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.
[more]

Beat the heat: email

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:15:16 GMT

The Seattle area is experiencing record heat this week (~100 degrees). At work, Facilities has notified us that they're diverting HVAC resources to keep the computer labs cool and are encouraging us to find ways to reduce our heat impact.

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.

Is college the only path?

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:38:23 GMT

Among people I know, the discussion for the most part is not whether a kid will go to college, but how this college business is going to be paid for. People start college funds for their toddlers. A college degree is seen as the minimum entry point to a career, or was back when people still talked about careers.

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.

[more]

Sign(s) o' the Times

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:08:10 GMT

This is by a condo complex not far from where I live.

The many dimensions of fasteners

Sun, 03 May 2009 22:50:16 GMT

I’m going to propose to you that each of the items in the following picture is an eight-dimensional object:

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 [more]

HP support: "What, haven't you given up yet?"

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:07:25 GMT

I work for a company that's often accused of having evil intentions. If it does, that doesn't manifest at my level: we obsess about trying to do the right thing for customers, even if we don't necessarily achieve this to the level of everyone's satisfaction. As but one example in my little world, we really do go to extreme lengths to try to be sure that our text is a) readily translatable into multiple languages and b) comprehensible to non-native speakers who do choose to read it in English. (More on that in the near future.)

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-~~processor~~core 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."

[more]

Sign o' the Times

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:46:09 GMT

Just got back from vacation. Here's something we saw in Chicago:

How much is that exactly?

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:45:09 GMT

In the book Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos suggests an exercise that illustrates the scale between a million and a billion. A million seconds, he explains, is about 11-1/2 days. A billion seconds is almost 32 years.

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:

A feel for big numbers, with grains of salt.
The MegaPenny Project. Orders of magnitude with pennies -- the pictures are useful.
[more]

Roundup

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:58:27 GMT

I'm actually supposed to be working on something. This is more fun.

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.]

Roundup

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:35:27 GMT

Birthday boys today, as noted practically everywhere, are Darwin and Lincoln. If you've got some spare time today, read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address ("With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ...").

Bible Illuminated. The New Testament meets National Geographic. Interesting idea. [via Jeff Atwood, who referred to it as "Bible 2.0"]

The Wired.Com Tech Layoff Tracker.[1] Watch the job market in the tech industry tank, bleah. Links included to other, similar (similarly depressing) tracking sites. Speaking of things economic ...

You Try to Live on 500K in This Town. The Fashion & Style section in the New York Times explains the hardship of a $500K cap on executive salaries. I imagine that the sympathy level for this situation is floating at around 0 percent. Golly, they'd have to pull their kids out of private school. Of course, many people can just kiss off higher education for their kids altogether, can't they? As but one thought.

Darwin The Dog Lover. The writer claims that Darwin's scientific skills (implication: leading to the theory of evolution) were sharpened by his interaction with dogs. Sure, what the heck, I'll buy that.

[1] [more]

Roundup

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:02:20 GMT

What kind of person uses a computer to generate their cover letter? At night?

4 Types of Person (a guide to stupidity) Odds are that you're not a Mr. Spock.

The Sky in Motion. Beautiful time-lapse movies of the night sky. [via Friend Steve]

Resolution Randomizer. Let the computer make your resolutions. The text is ok, but the graphics are great. (Requires Silverlight.) [via Brad Abrams]

Cover Letters from Hell. Killian & Company posts excerpts from some of the worst cover letters they've gotten. They observe: "An error-free letter is now so freakin' rare that the minimal care required to send a letter with zero defects, combined with a few crisply written simple declarative sentences, will, alone, guarantee a respectful reading of a résumé." [via Fritinancy]

Retailing rantz and ravz

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:03:47 GMT

Some companies get it, some don't.

ThinkGeek. I had something sent to a friend, but left off the apartment number, my bad. UPS wouldn't deliver, sent a number of cryptic emails kind of suggesting that they might try contacting the recipient (I did include his phone number). Ultimately, UPS returned the package to ThinkGeek. Their solution? They said "no problem," and shipped out a new one at their expense. Speaking of which ...

UPS. Excellent company when things go right. But when things go wrong, just try to contact them to discuss it. We had a package delivered here for the previous owner. Took a long time to find someone to tell this to, and over a week before they came and took it away. Plus, as noted, they don't exactly have USPS first-class service for attempting to work with imperfect information.

Macy's. Gift wrap, individual boxes, individual gift bags? No problem. Probably cost them as much as they made off me.

Pretty Good Goods (Prairie Home Companion store). Ordered something, took a week for them to acknowledge, three weeks for the item to arrive. Missed that birthday, oh well.

Target. Individual gift receipts for every purchase, item clearly labeled on each receipt.

[more]

Career advice upended

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:20:14 GMT

Heh. Mike Rowe, the guy who does the show Dirty Jobs, has a different take on some advice we've all heard:

In the long history of inspirational pabulum, "follow your passion" has got to be the worst. Even if this drivel were confined to the borders of the cheap plastic frames that typically surround it, I'd condemn the whole sentiment as dangerous, not because it's cliché, but because so many people believe it. Over and over, people love to talk about the passion that guided them to happiness. When I left high school--confused and unsure of everything--my guidance counselor assured me that it would all work out, if I could just muster the courage to follow my dreams. My Scoutmaster said to trust my gut. And my pastor advised me to listen to my heart. What a crock.

This guy sees jobs that you can be pretty sure were not the end point for someone who was following their passion: sheep castrater, manure collector, sewer repairperson, and a whole bunch of jobs that need to get done regardless. His observation is that people seem happy enough in these jobs, even so.

He attributes this to the reverse of the advice: "The happiest people I've met over the last few years have not followed their passion at all--they have instead brought it with them." So it's not what you do that makes you happy, it's your attitude toward it. Which ends up converging, I think, with the advice he's so dismissive of. Whether it's because you are doing something you have a "passion" for, or whether you can bring "passion" to anything you do, the result is the same: you take an interest in and pride in your work.

Jnan Dash [more]

Where are all the bookstores? (Or any?)

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:01:46 GMT

I just made the interesting discovery that within the borders of the city that I nominally live in (just outside), there is exactly one bookstore, whose primary businesss is actually "metaphysical supplies." Dang. And I don't think that there has been a collapse of a once-lively bookmongers' trade in the city, either. I think there have just never been any ever.

Not that it's impossible to find a bookstore, assuming you like mall-based and/or chain bookstores; you just gotta go over one city to Shopping, WA. (Names have been changed, but only in letter, not spirit.)

I suppose the economics of bricks-and-mortar(-and-books) bookstores requires a certain minimum population density in the store's, whatsit, catchment area. Our city, aside from a couple of huge manufacturing facilities (e.g., Boeing) is pretty much just cul-de-sacs, drug stores, and pizza places.

Still, it seems that it's representative of ... something, dunno, that there isn't a proper bookstore anywhere in the city. Possibly it's just representative of me needing to not ruminate on this too much.

PS I guess I should note that we're about a mile from a branch of the King County Library, which has served us extremely well. Not so handy for the Christmas gifts, tho.

Roundup

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:33:52 GMT

Getting toward gift-giving season. Let the crass ads begin ...

Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas, aka make your own Pollock. Just move the mouse around and click. [via Daughter Sabrina]

Microsoft's SideSight: Something Apple Should Watch. Taking the touch screen virtual, for (e.g.) devices that don't have enough actual screen space.

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition). Sample: "Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends." The original is on McSweeney's; Angela Liao has created an image of what the Facebook page would look like:

[via Son Zack]

My First Rifle. Crickett .22 rifles. Perhaps your young one wants the Model 221 in pink.[1] It's probably a pretty good idea for the company to add the tag line "Not a toy." (This ain't no Red Ryder carbine-action range model air rifle, kid[2].)

[via Colleague David]

[1] [more]

Versus interruptus

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:41:35 GMT

Some pre-holiday tomfoolery. In an email, Sabrina noted that a friend of hers had written the following:

A paradoxically self-referential Haiku

Or maybe it's self-referentially paradoxical?

Seven syllables?
Not for me, thank you;
I'll just stick with five.

Haha. I liked this so much that I decided I wanted to do this, too, and I came up with the following:

There once was a lim'rick (so-called)
That started but then it got stalled
Five lines? What a chore
This one had four

Ok, your turn ...

Roundup

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:14:02 GMT

Tired. So tired.

Kafka for the Kindergarten Set. Aaron Swartz with another dispatch about our educational system. He doesn't like NCLB-inspired testing:

Every year, a couple months before school ends, a kind of controlled experiment happens in NCLB schools: The principal remains the same, the teachers remain the same, the students remain the same. The only thing that changes is that the test is over, forgotten until next year starts. And suddenly everything changes: test prep boards come off the wall, students start writing poetry, they go on field trips and do science experiments, they work in groups and do real reading.

City Museum Photo Tour. Sabrina visited St. Louis over the weekend and sent me a link to this. Looks amazing, I'd love to go.

Fox Says, "Smile, You're Under Arrest". Summary: “It’s COPS as comedy and no one’s ever tried it before." Reality TV: it's a race to the bottom. (Hey, maybe that's a new show: Race to the Bottom.) [via naum]

It's Lovely! I'll Take It. Subtitle says it: "A collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings." Everything from bathrooms with underwear hanging up, to bedrooms with guys lounging on the bed, to $500K houses with plywood in the windows:

Ya know, the bar is very, very low for real-estate listings.

[via Kim]

Every little bit counts

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:25:30 GMT

You might not normally think of software as a product that you can slap an Energy Star sticker on. If so, you just haven't thought about it enough. However, the people who created Notepad++, a text editor, have considered green design for their coding. From their Web site:

By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendlyness[1], Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

How have you coded green today?

[1] They're also helping to reduce the critical -i- shortage here.

How not to honor veterans

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:41:06 GMT

It never ceases to amaze me how willing businesses are to appropriate any holiday for their own commercial purposes. This showed up in my Inbox recently:

Presidents' Day, well, whatever. When the Feds combined Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays to make a generic holiday, and then made it one of their Monday-based "observed"-type days off, the shine was pretty much off that particular celebration.

But Veteran's Day, for heaven's sake. This is a holiday that's about reflecting on service and on sacrifice:

To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.

-- Woodrow Wilson [source]

On [this] day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves[1] to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower [source]

Free shipping, c'mon. You can't even pretend that that's anything but blatant hucksterism. If they really wanted to observe Veteran's Day, they could try the two minutes of silence that is observed at 11:00am in many places to remember the fallen of WWI. Like, shut down the Web site for two minutes and post a tribute to veterans for those two minutes. Yeah, right. That [more]

Roundup

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:07:31 GMT

Happy Birthday, Sarah!

The Things He Carried. "Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show -- security theater is the term of art -- I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness." [via Jeff Atwood]

It's not a compliment. Join wishydig as he hunts for a suitable definition for twittad, a connotative trainwreck of a name that was (apparently) coined in seriousness.

Curiouser and curiouser. Dioramas on a different scale. [via Daughter Sabrina]

Spill

Six Apart CEO: Down Economy Boosts Blogging. Here's the logic: "[...] a bad economy will probably lead to an overall uptick in blogging, Alden says. 'When you don't know where else to invest," he explains, "you invest in yourself.' [...] When you get laid off or your company goes under, it's a good time to build your personal brand by blogging."

Roundup

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:20:09 GMT

Polls, polls, polls. What is this, Livejournal? One more for youse.

Choose wisely. "There is no question, but there are eleven possible answers." [toque salute: Fritinancy]

You Suck at Craigslist. Choice morsels carefully selected from among the ads posted by our ... less gifted writers, let's call them. [via Friend Kim]

Tastespotting. Per the contributor (Daughter Sabrina), "Just like notcouture, except food and not clothes!" Basically, food pr0n.

Men's Reactions Peak at Age 39. Took me a moment to get this. [via Jeff Atwood]

Roundup

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:47:36 GMT

It's the animals-and-quizzes roundup today.

Wearing The Hair Of The Dog. Subtitle: "Portraits Of People In Clothes Made From Their Pets' Fur." I like my dogs a lot, but even I find it slightly weird to make clothes from dog wool. However, I'm not sure why. [via Daughter Sabrina]

A Quick Guide to International Raccoon Appreciation Day. I regret that I missed this, which took place on October 1. The idea is actually to promote appreciation all supposed "nuisance animals," an effort that I approve of.

Can you guess where my accent is from? Think you have a good ear for accents? Give this a try. You'll do particularly well if you can distinguish, say, an Estonian accent from a Lithuanian one, based on 5 seconds' worth of speech. [via wishydig]

Country quiz. Can you identify a country based on its shape? I did somewhat better on this than I did on the accents thing. [Also via Daughter Sabrina]

Roundup

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:47:36 GMT

Roundup

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:55:21 GMT

I'm waiting for A Very Important Delivery today from UPS. Knowing the kind of pace that those guys work at, tho, I'm afraid to even, like, go tinkle lest I miss the harking of the doorbell.

Brain quiz. How much does your brain know about your brain? Haha. I got 9/10, meaning that I was not using 10% of my brain. Haha again.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. Always amusing. Samples:

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

100 Skills Every Man Should Know: 2008's Ultimate DIY List. There are a number of things wrong with the premise of this article. Among them is that it's hard to sort out the practical from the macho. Note that there are a couple of items that were probably not on the 1962 version of this list. [via Michael B]

Take our survey. A Language Log contributor posts a survey about surveys. Most representative question:

[more]