mike's web log

The case of the bouncing emails

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:19:57 GMT

Here's a way not to make friends and not to influence people: hand out your personal email address everywhere and then discover that the address is merrily bouncing people. Whoops.

I taught a class over the last couple of Saturdays and told folks they could send their homework to me at mike@mikepope.com. On Wednesday I got an email from a student telling me that the email address I had handed out wasn't working. (The student had managed to find me via a different channel, thank goodness.) I tried sending an email to the address I'd distributed, and sure enough, back it came.

The keeper of my domain (mikepope.com) is GoDaddy. As part of registering my domain and getting them to manage it, I'd gotten "free email forwarding" for the domain. When someone sends email to the mikepope.com domain (e.g., mike@mikepope.com), the message is forwarded to my other, "real" email addresses.

Some months ago, I started getting a steady volume of messages to my real email addresses that told me an email had bounced, often with the message "invalid recipient address." The strange thing was that these were bounces for emails that I had never sent. This turns out to be a well-known problem—spammers forge a From address on their spam mail (they don't want you to reply, they just want you to click the link in the email they send). Spammers use many, many different forged From addresses in their attempts to get around spam-detection strategies. Apparently the mike@mikepope address had fallen into the hands of just such a spammer.

[more]

Blogaversary

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:26:24 GMT

Just a quick note: this blog is 9 years old today. I started it in 2003 as a kind of example project for a book I was working on.

A few stats:

Entries: 2,268
Words: 701,668 (not counting code)
Comments: 2418
Hits: 1,426,013

Something that's kind of amusing (well, to me) is a page that shows the times of day when I've posted, by hour. It seems, for example, that my most productive blogging time (posting time, anyway) is between 11:00 pm and midnight.

I've been thinking about rewriting the blog pretty much since I started it, what with new and better ASP.NET technologies coming out all the time. Perhaps year 10 will finally see that happen!

Me versus the squirrels

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:08:06 GMT

For Friday Fun this time, I'll tell you the story of how I've been waging war on some squirrels. And how that's going, or not.

We have birdfeeders on our deck:

Some of our birdfeeders

They’re nice. We see all manner of wildfowl — not just the variety of songbirds that we have here in the NW, but occasional surprise visitors like flickers and jays. Now and then we’ll see a hummingbird, who seems to visit the feeder when the pickings are slim elsewhere.

And then there are other visitors. Those would of course be squirrels:

Squirrel [#]

As it turns out, many of the things that birds like, like sunflower seeds and suet, are things that squirrels really, really like also.

Now, I don’t have anything against squirrels as such. They’re, you know, cute and stuff. I don’t even particularly mind squirrels having a snack at the feeders.

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15 years and a book

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:05:00 GMT

More Friday Fun. This week I celebrated 15 years as a full-timer at Microsoft. My colleagues at work took me out to lunch and presented me not just with the giganto crystal that you get from the company as your 15-year marker, but with a very cool present: a book. Not just any book, tho — it is, to quote the title page in full:

The

Scientific and Literary

Treasury:

A New and Popular

Encyclopedia

The Belles Lettres:

Condensed in form, familiar in style, & copious in information;
Embracing an extensive range of subjects in

Literature, Science, and Art.

The whole surrounded with

Marginal Notes, containing concise Facts
with appropriate observations.

By Samuel Maunder

This was published in 1858 in London. (Actually, it’s the revised edition — the original was published in 1840.) It’s a beautiful little (literally little) book, bound in leather with an embossed title on the spine. Here’s a picture:

(The glasses are in fact required; the book is set in 6-point type.)

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Teenagers and light bulbs: the complete series

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:43:29 GMT

For Friday Fun this week, a roundup of some, er, observations that I made on Facebook.

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: In a minute. I said, in a minute. Yes. Yes! I said I would, didn't I? All right, sheesh! I'm doing it now, okay? All RIGHT, I'll do it. God, you are SO ANNOYING.

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
Q: I said, how many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
Q: I SAID, HOW MANY TEENAGERS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?
A: Did you say something?

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's NOT FAIR! It's not my turn! I did it last time!

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: I DID do it. I DON'T KNOW know why it doesn't work. You said change the light bulb and I CHANGED it, ok? It's not MY fault that you buy defective bulbs. Why do I have to redo it? It's NOT FAIR!

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: I FORGOT. All RIGHT, god, I'll do it later, OK? Leave me ALONE.

Q: How many teenagers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: I DON'T HAVE TIME to do that, I have SO MUCH HOMEWORK because we have a test tomorrow that's SO HARD.
Q: How do you know it's a hard test?
A: Everyone keeps saying so on Facebook.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, these were inspired by real events. :-)

With age comes wisdom

Thu, 05 May 2011 15:18:07 GMT

Although the consensus is largely that getting older sucks, it does have its benefits. For example, with age comes wisdom. I'm pleased to say that this applies even to me. For example, just in the last few days I've gained some wisdom about various things around the household. It's the kind of wisdom that's really only the result of years (decades!) of experience, so I imagine that younger people wouldn't have this kind of insight. As an example, I've put together a little quiz that if, like me, you've recently gained this wisdom, you'll have no trouble with. Younger, less wise people? They will undoubtedly struggle with this one.

Ready? Here we go.

The best time to throw a load of towels in the laundry is:

When it looks like you're getting low.
When you have to keep using the towel you've been using for a week.
When you've had to use the hand towel to dry yourself after a shower.

After you've washed and folded a load of towels, the best place to put them is:

In the bathroom next to the shower.
In the laundry room two floors down.

The best time to add shampoo to the grocery list is:

When you've only got 1/4 bottle left.
When you're out.
When you've taken two showers without shampoo.

When you come back from the grocery store, the best place to put the new bottle of shampoo is:

In the shower
On the stairs leading up from the garage.

The best time to put a bottle of shampoo in the shower is:

As soon as you've gotten back from the grocery store.
After you've now taken three showers without shampoo.

Pretty deep stuff, eh? Well, my pretties, it's taken me a lifetime of hard-won experience to achieve these insights.

Gee, wonder what I'll learn next week?

Lessons from a near miss on the motorcycle

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:49:06 GMT

I had a near-miss on the motorcycle the other day that gave me some food for thought. I was traveling down 148th Ave in Bellevue, which is two lanes in each direction, with a wide island between opposite directions. In fact, this is exactly what it looks like (thanks to maps.google.com):

At one point, I'd been in the right-most lane, but I'd noticed that it was not moving very well. I peered ahead and saw that there was someone about 5 or 6 cars ahead of me who seemed to be slowing down and putting on his blinker, but then not turning, then speeding up, then slowing down, and so on. Basically, an erratic driver.

I swung into the left-hand lane. It was still during rush hour, so there was a fair bit of traffic, but in my lane, at least, things were moving pretty smoothly, so I was able to move up a bit. As I was getting close to the erratic driver (ER), tho, the car that was immediately behind him started moving into my lane, apparently fed up with ER and intending to get out from behind him. Like this, allowing for my primitive drawing skills:

I was forced toward the island, obviously, but thankfully, the impatient driver did notice me and jumped back into their lane.[1] I'm not perfectly clear on possible outcomes, but I think there was a chance that the car would have hit me.

[more]

10,000 miles of motorcycling

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:55:37 GMT

I've been riding motorcycles for about a year and a half. It's one of those things that I kind of thought looked fun for, you know, about 40 years, but never truly imagined myself doing.[1] But midlife crisis is a funny thing. And so it happened that a friend of ours was moving out of state and wasn't taking her motorcycle — a venerable 1985 Honda 450 Nighthawk — and my spontaneous notion to ask her if she wanted to sell it set in motion a chain of events that resulted in my own motorcycle, a safety class, a license, a new motorcycle, and many miles since then. These days, I commute more on the motorcycle (40 miles round trip) than I do in my car, rain or shine.

The 450 was a classic starter bike — easy and fun to ride. So much so that it led to an interlude with a Yamaha 650 that is overall best forgotten, other than it was a valuable (in fact, expensive) lesson in the intricacies of carburetors and the difficulties in getting parts for old bikes. In this period and while son Zack and I were getting ourselves used to the whole world of motorcycles, we attended a motorcycle show here in Seattle, where I developed an instant crush on a 2010 Honda Phantom Shadow. The "shadow" part alludes to the color theme, which deemphasizes chrome in favor of black. (I believe this was the first in this vein, tho now all the manufacturers have variations of this matte-on-black scheme.) The bike has a vaguely retro look that hails back to the days of 1940s Harleys (think Marlon Brando in "The Wild One") and in dispensing with chrome is also meant to invoke a kind of bobber style.

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The case of the missing tollbooth

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:33:42 GMT

I got one of those robo-tickets not long ago, where you get caught on camera (or similar) and a week later you get a ticket in the mail. The infraction in question was that I'd crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and not paid the toll. (For those of you not familiar with the topography, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge connects Tacoma on its east side to Gig Harbor on its west side.)

I sent the form back and requested a "mitigation hearing," in which admit that you committed the infraction, but you tell them that there were, well, mitigating circumstances.

This all happened shortly before Christmas. My wife and I had attended a social event in Tacoma, which, let me emphasize, is not where we live, and which I don't know all that well. On the way home, through a set of maneuvers that I absolutely can't reconstruct, instead of going northbound on I-5 toward home, we somehow ended up going westbound on SR 16. Moreover, we didn't even realize this until all of a sudden I saw a sign for the Narrows bridge. But by the time I saw the sign, we were past the last exit on the Tacoma side, so like it or not, we were going to cross that bridge and head toward Gig Harbor.

Under the circumstances, the reasonable thing to do is to go to the next exit, get off the highway, and turn back the way you came. Yes? That's what we did. The exit immediately after the bridge is Exit 8, which is for 24th St NW. We got off there, crossed over SR 16, then got back onto the highway going eastbound toward Tacoma.

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Personal 2010 Trends

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:58:49 GMT

People like to sum up a year as it comes to a close. In that spirit, here are some random observations that I, um, observe about my personal 2010.

Coins. 2010 might be the year I virtually stopped using pocket change. We've been on a long and very gentle slope toward a cashless society, but this is the first year I really noticed this in terms of carrying around coins in my pocket. I throw my spare change into a little piggybank, and in the last two years I accumulated only $27.29 in change. The only things I can remember actually using change for this year was a parking meter and the vending machine at work. However, the former takes cards, and the latter takes bills and everything is now at least a dollar (and most of it is inedible), so there are that many fewer places to get rid of coins.

Media. In 2010 we ditched cable TV. One of the local video stores went bust. My wife watches news and recent TV shows on her laptop. I listen to the "radio" using Pandora. We have a Netflix account, but 95% of the time, we watch something via streaming.

Wheels. In February I bought a new motorcycle. Since then I've put 8000 miles on it, mostly commuting. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that this is substantially more miles than I put on my car. In theory, I could call the insurance company and tell them that I only use my car "occasionally" or whatever their phrase is for a non-commuter vehicle.

Dogs. We have only 33% of the dogs that we started the year with.

Blogging. Holy cow, look at those numbers.

Happy end of 2010! Let's see what 2011 brings.

New weasel-osity with customer-initiated rebates (CIR)

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:46:07 GMT

Anyone with a modicum of retail savvy knows that retailers are constantly trying to set price points that balance their margins against what customers seem to want to pay. One traditional way to do this was to put things on sale (i.e., discount them) to drive sales.

As we've all experienced, retailers these days like to offer discounts -- sale prices -- in the form of rebates. There are two kinds: instant rebates (IRs), which are taken off the price when the cashier rings it up, and "customer-initiated rebates" (CIRs), which is the kind where you have to fill in a form and send it in.

From the seller's perspective, CIRs are a great approach. First, the retailer can post a discounted price, which looks like a sale. Second, rebates are often offered through the manufacturer, so the retailer doesn't have to eat the discount at all. Third, the rebates have very specific steps and requirements (the more cynical will maintain that these are crafted to maximize consumer error in rebate-request submission), and many folks either won't bother at all or will not complete all steps correctly. Estimates for rebate redemption vary. Some think around 50%; others say "The industry average is less than ten percent. And it can be as low as one percent."

[more]

Writing for Games

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:08:35 GMT

My friend John is interviewed for the Microsoft JobsBlog on how it is that a technical writer works in the Games division:

How did your career start off at Microsoft Game Studios?
I was working as a technical writer for Microsoft on error messages for Office 95 and telephony projects and that sort of thing. But, like a lot of technical writers, I had a secret life. When I wasn’t at work, I was busy as a screenwriter.

I started working in games in 1996 when a former copy editor of mine from Office asked me to create an online help system for Mind Aerobics, a new puzzle game by Alexey Pajitnov - who invented Tetris. In many ways, my first game writing job was still technical writing.

A while back, I heard a presentation that John did about how the role of writer works a little differently in games than it does in the kind of writing we do. To me this is still one of the most amusing summaries of why reading technical documentation can be less than fascinating:

In technical writing, we want to get to order as quickly as possible.

In story telling, we play with the state of disorder and give out pieces of order a little at a time, strategically, so we can maintain dramatic tension and drive interest forward.

So a technical writing approach to Star Wars would have a big bolded notice on the first page that said, Important! Darth Vader is Luke’s dad!

Geek cred and projects

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:03:59 GMT

Raymond Chen, who is a geek's geek, recently got Windows Home Server so he could back up his machine(s). In the course of recounting his experience, he said this:

Of course, the first thing you do with a new gadget is tinker with it, and I installed Whiist and created a photo album. It was so easy to do, I feel like I'm losing my geek cred. I mean, this sort of thing is supposed to involve hours of staring at the screen, scouring the Internet for information, and groveling through hundreds of settings trying to get things working. If anybody can get a home server up and running with automatic nightly backups and an online photo album by just clicking on some fluffy GUI buttons, then what will I have to feel superior about?

This struck a chord with me. While I have never had near the geek cred of a guy like Raymond, I have certainly had the general guy thing of "I bet I could do this." Create a slide-show application? I bet I could do that. Replace an alternator? I bet I could do that. Install a water heater? I bet I could do that.

And yes, I could do that, and I did. The results were definitely not better than if a pro had done it. Cheaper in money, if not time. (The slideshow, of course, was markedly inferior to what a pro might do).

But as I am coming to realize, my days of having to do everything [more]

That unmistakable sound

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:02:23 GMT

I think that one of the disks on my server computer is dying -- it's making that spin-up-spin-down noise that they make just before they break. (Break your heart, that is.)[1]

If the blog disappears, it's because I'm, you know, servicing the server.

Once again I wonder whether it's really worth it to maintain my own server. Hmmm.

[1] As an aside, I got this image from a site that obviously is auto-translated. From what language, who knows. Here's an excerpt about the warning signs of incipient failure:

Symptoms of harder drive failure

The pre-warnings of harder drive abortion are not consistently accustomed by declining harder drive, if sometimes the agnate absurdity letters may arise and sometimes not. The a lot of accepted signs are beat or abrading sounds, while others, lower in ratings, cover aspersing arrangement achievement and abrupt behavior.

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:

It was 30 years ago today ...

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:35:22 GMT

Today -- September 1, 2009 -- is the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Seattle. I moved to Seattle from Denver in order to go to graduate school at UW. I hadn't ever been within a thousand miles of the place; the closest I'd ever been to Seattle was San Francisco. It's worked out, tho, apparently -- I'm still here. :-)

30 years is a long time. I'm still not a native, but I get a kind of indirect nativeness by virtue of having two kids who are from here. I personally did not graduate from a Seattle high school, for example, but my kids graduated from the storied Garfield High, which makes me almost like being from here.

I arrived on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, which was poor planning in some senses. For example, I wasn't able to check into the department at school that was expecting me, or even go and look for housing. But I had a place to stay, courtesy of a relative of a friend of my mother's, and it was Bumbershoot weekend, so I had a hospitable introduction to my new home.

Seattle was a different city when I moved here. It was smaller, for one. (Altho most of the growth since then has been in the suburbs.) Some of the institutions that put Seattle on the map -- Microsoft, Starbucks, grunge -- had yet to become famous. In those days, it really was still Jet City. The city expansion of the 50s and 60s (including I-5) had engendered a backlash of opposition that we feel even today in endless dithering about how to improve the urban infrastructure, and the city limped along for decades with roads and mass transit that had been designed for a fraction of the population. (We're catching up ... the story of Seattle while I've lived here is its gradual acceptance that it's a big city.)

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Eyewear by PhotoShop

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 23:45:24 GMT

My daughter has been a big fan of the site ZenniOptical.com, where you can get eyewear astonishingly cheaply. (Normally I go to Costco, but Zenni beats even their prices.)

The downside of ordering by web, of course, is that you can't put the frames on and then squint at the mirror to try to decide if you like the way they look. (Those of you who have serious correction for nearsightedness will probably understand what I mean when I talk about squinting at the mirror.)

Ah, but combine a clever daughter with PhotoShop, and you can get a darn good idea. After I had flagged a number of frames that I thought I might like, Sabrina got my Facebook profile picture, copied the picture of the frames from the Zenni site, and then did a little mashup in PhotoShop. The results were, I thought, excellent:

The site needs a preview function like this, wouldn't you agree?

Two things at a time

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:28:15 GMT

Have I ever recounted my Theory of Two Things? The theory is this: there are many things to attend to in one's life, but I can only attend to two things at a time. For example, here are the sorts of things that are part of my life:

family
work
friends
reading
home improvement
guitar
blogging
exercising
taking classes
teaching classes

And etc. Per my theory, I can only really be putting serious energy into two of these at a time. So, if work is intense and I'm practicing guitar diligently, I'm ignoring family and blogging. If we're doing family things and I'm working on some house project or other, work and guitar and all the rest get short shrift. I can prep to teach a class and work, or I can work and have a busy social life, or I can work out regularly and do home improvement, or I can blog regularly and read a lot, or ... anyway, you get the idea.

Clearly there are people who can handle three or four or more of these types of things concurrently. (I seem to work with a lot of people like that.) But one has to know oneself, no? And I have to recognize, after long experience, that taking on some attention-sucking task means I have to jettison something else, until the total count of tasks is, like, two.

What's your limit for number of concurrent tasks?

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]

Speaking of large numbers

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:59:51 GMT

Another blog milestone today -- sometime during the night, the blog hit counter rolled over to 7 digits:

As noted earlier, compared wtih actual, real blogs, this is nothing -- most of the people whose blogs I read pick up a million hits in months, if not weeks. But hey, it's sumpin' special for this blog, anyway.

So, 5-1/2 years, 2000 posts, a million hits, half a million words:

Blah-blah, yadda-yadda, a milestone hit today
A million times the server has been asked for to display
These pages of Verdana 8-point text all bluish gray
And weeks ago the blog post count inched slightly past 2K.
A half a million words, by god, so little to convey
You'd think by now I might have had some useful things to say.

Haha.

I had this dream where I wasn't prepared ...

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:22:34 GMT

I'm going to teach a class this weekend that's an intro to Microsoft Word styles and templates. I am a, shall we say, avid proponent of using styles (see also), so I look forward to an opportunity to spread the, um, good Word.

The class is specifically an intro class (I got to write the course description, in which this was emphasized). Even so, I get ... nervous. My anxiety derives primarily from a fear that I won't know enough. This manifests itself in a certain compulsiveness. In the time leading up to the class, I start obsessing about ever-more-arcane details, like "How do you remove a multilevel list template from the gallery?" and similar esoterica that a) no one will ask and b) even if they did, I could legitimately say "Dunno, I'll get back to you on that."

Realistically, and in my experience, people for the most part sign up for the class precisely because they are a bit confuddled by this styles business and just want an intro. As described in the catalog. (A few people in the class are usually even still a bit unsure even about general formatting issues, coz let's face it, unless you use Word all the time, this stuff ain't obvious.) You'll always get a question or two from left field, but you don't have to know everything, do you?

But it's hard to let go. And I'll tell you a story. Many years ago (24, to be exact), I started at a new company, which had hired me due in part to my (alleged) expertise with their product. I had barely been there a week when they told me that I would be flying from Seattle to the east coast to do three days' worth of training for a big corporate customer. Big customer. I'd done training before, so this wasn't unreasonable. But I was nervous and because it was mid-winter and I was stressed, I started to get a cold.

[more]

You have (outbound) mail: Outlook mysteries

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:41:35 GMT

I have used Outlook for email for years and have no reason to complain. Just in the last little while, tho (wait, am I about to complain?), I've started seeing some odd behavior in my various and many individual installations. This has to do with how the Outbox is being handled.

My, um, desired setting is that email be dumped into the Outbox before it goes out the door. This helps me solve the hit-Send-and-only-then-notice-the-typo problem, and the less common but more important prolly-I-shouldn't-even-send-this problem.

I regularly use four separate instances of Outlook (four machines[1]), and in each one, something different happens with outbound mail:

Machine 1 (Outlook 2007, work): Email stubbornly refuses to leave the Outbox unless I explicitly click Send/Receive. Result: come in to work in the morning, yesterday afternoon's emails are still sitting in the Outbox, oops.
Machine 2 (Outlook 2007, home): Email refuses to leave the Outbox when I click Send/Receive, but eventually wanders away on its own accord after a few minutes. Result: "C'mon! Can you send the file already!? " It's coming, it's coming.
Machine 3 (Outlook 2003, work): Email does not stop at the Outbox, it passes Go, like, immediately. (I suppose it's in the Outbox for the blink of an eye, but effectively it's sent immediately.) Result: Be dang sure before you click Send.
Machine 4 (Outlook 2003, home): Works as expected. Result: Satisfied customer.

What's weird is that all of these instances of Outlook are configured exactly the same:

(My normal setting is 3 minutes, but I've been playing with this to see if it makes any difference.)

[more]

2K

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:55:34 GMT

This is my 2,000th post. You'd think that by now I'd have something interesting to say, wouldn't you? :-)

I think I'm in love

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:10:27 GMT

Over the holidays, our household became CRT-free because I love, love, love LCD monitors and think everyone should have one. I have long since become a fervent believer in the benefits of dual monitors. (I do not as yet subscribe to Atwood's thesis that the ideal number of monitors is 3.) And I have been quite happy in my relationship with my two LCD monitors.

Ah, but yesterday my head was turned, and how. For reasons I shall explain another time, an HP w2408h monitor has fallen into my hands, and I am weak-kneed at how wonderful it is.

We've read together, we've coded together, and we've gotten cozy and edited together. We watched a DVD together, and it was awesome. One special time we got a little wild and I flipped it 90 degrees, and we could edit whole pages together, with room to spare for comments.

Yes, I have been smitten. My only problem is figuring out how to accommodate my Big Love for this and my other 19" monitors. But I'm sure it will all work out.

The rough-and-tumble of craigslist (and where I fail)

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:10:04 GMT

My friend Michael B has been wanting to get rid of some stuff, so I suggested craigslist, which was an institution that he had no experience of. (But it went great for him.) I'm actually a pretty terrible craigslister, but I'm learning. Here are some tips I've come up with, some of which I passed on to Michael.

1. Keep the ad up until the stuff is out the door. It might look like you've sealed the deal, but there's no downside in keeping the store open till the merchandise is sold.

2. You don't have to respond to every inquiry. As with the hard lessons we've learned in our dating lives, if people seem interested but they don't get a response, they get the hint.

3. Make it first-come, first-served. People will tell you all sorts of things about when they’ll get back to you, meet up with you, whatever, and I’m sure in many cases they mean it. And then you never hear from them again. (Thus the preemptive note that people sometimes include in their responses to the effect of "I'm not a flake!") As a corollary, you don’t need to put people into a queue in the order they responded, and you can (and should) give the stuff to whoever shows up with cash in hand.

4. Make the buyer do the work. It's great for you that someone who lives 60 miles away is interested in your old stuff. If they want it bad enough, they'll come to you to get it. Be ... slow ... to offer to meet up, bring stuff to them, etc. See also previous point.

5. Know your price [more]