January 2007 Archives

If you ever needed proof that the people in Miami have absolutely no class whatsoever, CNN reports that the city of Miami is planning an official celebration for when Cuban president Fidel Castro dies.

Sure, they're trying to be all like, "it's a venue ready for people, if they wish, to speak to the media, to show their emotions," and they're trying to claim it's not to celebrate the death of a world leader, but c'mon, who the hell do they think they're kidding with that line of bull?

Regardless of what you think about Castro, planning a gala party -- big enough that it needs the frickin' Orange Bowl (capacity 74,476 people) -- to celebrate the death of another human being is simply inexcusable.

Classmates.com, I have always thought, was such a great, simple, idea. Make the barrier to entry low for people to register themselves as being part of a given high school or college class, let former classmates reconnect after "all these years", etc., etc. Sitting in the middle collecting money from the people who actually want to originate messages, or set up reunions is just "Easy Money", especially if it's done right.

However, like a lot of people, I know that "everyone I give my e-mail address to, or at least most, re-sell that information to other people, even when I tell them not to." It's just a fact of life. So, since I own my own domain, I create custom addresses for different companies. American Express might have one address. My credit union has a different one. Then, if I get spam, I can look at the recipient and see "who sold my address against my wishes and gets to lose my business."

Amusingly, this isn't about that particular problem with Classmates. Classmates has been fastidious about not sharing my address with anyone.

However, they do now seem to have a problem with the fact that my address they've got on file is classmates@XXXXXXXXXX. They tell me "that address is denied." When I tried to get them to explain why it's denied, what I got back is crazy-talk:

A recent audit of our database revealed that the vast majority of registrations that were using Classmates as the username were not legitimate registrations, but instead were bogus registrations listing the names of people who do not really exist. This resulted in large numbers of fake names being added to the various directories on our site.

Since our members rely on our ability to keep them connected with other members, it has always been a top priority to ensure that our database is as accurate and up-to-date as it can possibly be. As such, the decision was made to deny anyone from registering on our site using an email address that contains Classmates. This decision has helped our efforts to establish a database that contains only the names of “real” people that our members can actually connect with.

I'm sorry, how again does restricting the use of "classmates" in the e-mail address prevent people from signing up fictitiously? Short answer: It doesn't.

Long answer, though, is that in reality, it's Classmates.com's way of ensuring that addresses which are submitted to it don't explicitly tag themselves as "being given to classmates". In other words, they want my "real" address, and not the alias, so that there's no ability in the future to track down if they sell my contact info to someone else.

So, I told them to either allow me to use that address, or they'd lose my business. Frankly, these days, Google is a lot more useful for "high school reconnecting" than Classmates is, so it's not like they're bringing a lot to the table. They told me no. Oh, well, c'est la vie.

What the hell did those Chinese bastards do to Jack Muthafuckin Bauer, eh? He breaks down crying cuz he had to shoot somebody? Christ, wasn't it just last season that he executed a fellow CTU employee just to have a chance at getting some information, and now he gets all skinned-knee girly-crying because he had to shoot Curtis in the shoulder?

I thought Jack was back, better than ever, last night, when he went all The Lost Boys on that guy, ripping his carotid artery out with his bare teeth, but now he's gone completely 180º in reverse, pansy-style.

Also, seriously, a note for future government officials - Jack Bauer is never fucking wrong. Any time you find yourself wanting to second-guess him, could you please just remember that he's saved the world more times than you've had sex, and quite probably he's saved your life, personally, at least once. And every time a government official has ever doubted him, it's always made the government look incompetent. SO, if you find yourself doubting him, just remember that the last fifty or so government officials to doubt him looked like retards later.

D and I were joking that "every time Jack crawls out of whatever hole he's been in, the world goes to hell," and that if I were President, there'd be an executive order that "If Jack Bauer turns up on the radar, today is an excellent day to test whether the NAOC is really fully functional, and to get me there toot-sweet.

All that said, though, it looks like it's gonna be a really exciting "day".

Without a doubt, this is quite possibly the funniest web-comic I've ever read.

If only it weren't all true.

This year, thanks to my adoring wife and my wonderful sister-in-law, I received two gadgets that I'd been wanting for a while.

First, in a tip of the hat to a previous blog entry, I finally managed to get my hands on a calculator that supported Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). My sister-in-law, S., got me an HP 33s calculator. While it doesn't have the cool horizontal profile of the older HP calculators of my youth (but HP doesn't make any that do look like that anymore), it has all the same features, and the two-line display actually makes the RPN functionality a little easier to use (as you can see the previous element in the calculation stack that way).

A couple people who I've told about this wondered why I wanted a calculator given that I've got computers-aplenty at my beck and call. The reality is that "appliances" have their place. Just as I'm not trying to build my own DVR and am willing to trust my cable set-top box or TiVo to "just work", there's something nice about having a little device next to your computer that you can use to do the "quick math" functions you need to do throughout the day. I can't count the number of times in a given day where I fire up a terminal window and type something completely lame into bc, or worse, when for some reason I'm feeling particularly brutal, to do something like:

$ perl -e 'print ((12345/6)*7-8)'

To have that functionality off to the side? Very convenient.

Then, my lovely wife got me a Harmony 880 universal remote. This thing is frickin' sweet, that's all I have to say.

It's programmed entirely via a computer application (Mac-compatible!), accessing an online database of damned near every TV, cable box, stereo, etc., etc., ever made. There's a community of people editing and modifying and improving this data, so the codes are nearly always right. The biggest "hiccup" I had with mine has to do with the fact that my HDTV unit doesn't support discrete-input selection. This means that if I want to go from "VIDEO1" to "COMPONENT2", it's not just a single infrared code, like it is for most TVs, but instead is a sequence of "[NextInput]" codes, to cycle through all the VIDEOx inputs, past COMPONENT1, and finally on to COMPONENT2.

But I can't fault the remote for a failing in the TV. To be fair, we have the same problem with my older remote -- the one D has never liked (for those who care, it's an MX-500... it's not a bad unit, but not nearly as friendly or as cool as the Harmony).

D now has a whole bank of buttons that pushing them will automatically switch to the right input on the TV, change the channel on the set-top box, etc. It's easier for her to use, and it's cooler to look at. That and I'll save a fortune in AAA batteries, since the Harmony is rechargeable.

(PS - Kudos to Amazon.com... Christmas night I figured out that I wasn't having some incompatibility problem with the [Pause] code for my cable box, but it was in fact that the Pause button on the remote itself was dysfunctional out of the box. Amazon Fedexed a replacement on Tuesday, and it arrived on Wednesday, a mere two-day delay that they're eating all the shipping on... contrast that to a problem my boss' boss had with one where $NAMELESS_VENDOR disavowed all knowledge and he had to deal with it directly with Logitech as a warranty issue, over about a week or so.)

So overall, a really good Christmas for gadgets in the Balling household.

One thing I love about working for a college is Christmas Break.

At Vassar, we got (this year), from December 22 through January 1 off. Paid. No need to dip into vacation pay to be able to spend time with friends and family over the holiday week.

Of course, it's a little sad that I've got to head back to work tomorrow. I was just getting into the swing of "Wake up, play some Warcraft, eat some lunch, play some Warcraft," and now that's totally gonna be shattered.

Although this week should be fun. I have a new employee working for me, starting on Wednesday. Fully half of my direct reports now (not including student employees) are, by bizarre coincidence I swear!, all people who I know from my past lives.

My boss' boss joked that I'm planning a coup, but headed that off at the pass by reminding me that it's no fun if the guy you're overthrowing would happily give up the position of power. *grin*