Leasing Your Life

Posted by on April 8, 2016 No comments

A couple issues came up around the same time, so of course, I feel like I need to give this consideration to see if it’s a “thing” or not.  It’s all about giving up control for various reasons.

The first item is some recent news that people who bought some home automation system called Revolv are going to find themselves out of luck soon because the company that owns them (Google, pretty sure) is shutting it down.  This is ridiculous.  How and why would you ever want such a critical device dependent on another company.  And why would they make a product that couldn’t function on its own?

This seems to be the promise, that you trust a company and they will take care of you and manage everything.  Why is this accepted?  You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.  Yes, that sounds correct, but I don’t think people really get it.  They purchase a physical device and think they own it, but they don’t.  It only works while you keep the subscription active.  In this specific case, the subscription cost is zero, but it can still be terminated at any time.

Along the same lines, I’ve noticed my employer is getting sucked into more and more subscription services and that bothers me.  Our time clock software runs on some other company’s web servers.  Our printers have been outsourced and are managed by an outside company.  Our wireless network is managed through some cloud-based application.  And I hear we are changing our security badge system soon.  I have a pretty good idea how that arrangement is going to be.

So, how vulnerable is my employer to downtime?  After researching the time clock system, I can’t tell if our time clocks will work if there is an internet outage or if the time clock company is down or hacked or out of business.  It’s obvious that we’re paying a monthly fee for this service, but if they go out of business, we have nothing usable.

The printers may continue to function if their company goes under, maybe not.  I don’t know how new users would be granted access to the printers.  The Wireless system is probably the same way.  If the supporting company closes up, we’d probably be frozen in time until we replaced the system.

That’s a lot of trust to be granting to multiple companies.  Gone are the days where you buy something and run it into the ground.  Now everything is subscription based with an unknown lifespan.  It’s a terrible way to live.

Music In The Valley

Posted by on March 21, 2016 No comments

Last weekend, I had a pretty productive CD run.  I think I picked up a dozen new ones.  One of the “why not” buys was a disc called “The Best of Starship”.  It was a cheap-looking CD.  Really cheap.  Like one of those compilation CDs that companies make just for some quick bucks.  It turned out to be something really different, though.

I don’t own any Starship albums, but I do know the songs pretty well from the radio.  When I put the CD in and played it, I didn’t immediately recognize the music.  After the song played a little longer, I recognized it, but something was still off.  The singer’s voice was familiar and all the notes were right, but the production of the track was different.

I looked at the album cover for clues.  In small type at the bottom was “New Recordings by the Original Artist.”  How strange.  What I was experiencing was the Uncanny Valley effect.  That effect is typically associated with robots, how people’s perception of them rises as their realism improves, then suddenly drops off as people get really creeped out by the tiny inconsistencies.  I’ve also had the same thing with software, where if the replication of an application isn’t exact, the little differences drive you crazy.  You notice all the little things.  At that point it’s better to create something entirely different.

And that was the case with this album.  It wasn’t a live album.  You know you’re getting a different sound when buying a live album.  It was a studio album, but it wasn’t like studio outtakes or demos or alternate takes.  It was just doing it again.  And it wasn’t like redoing it with the intent to improve on it, it was trying to remain faithful to the original.  But it wasn’t.  The production was much more sparse – less overdubs, less polish.  It almost sounded like a MIDI sequence plus guitars, plus the original vocalists.  It was good enough to be recognizable.

I have to say, it’s the strangest CD I’ve ever come across.  I’m torn between throwing it away because of (to borrow the uncanny valley’s terminology) the revulsion at what I was hearing or keeping it because it’s such an oddball recording.

SpamBastard–1aauto.com

Posted by on March 5, 2016 No comments

I had an application idea at one time and actually finished writing it, but ended up never doing anything with it once it was live.  It was spambastard.com and its purpose was to catch companies that would sell, lose, or otherwise mishandle your email address info.  The concept was simple.  You sign up for their site using their domain name @spambastard.com and if any email comes in with a mismatch between the FROM domain name and the TO domain name (as the username, before the @), the email address would be considered compromised.

That domain and application is long dead, but I’ve been able to replicate the same concept with my personal email domain.  That eliminates the hassle of creating a second account for every site I sign up for (one with my real email and one with a spambastard email).  To date, I’ve only had a few cases where I’ve had to take action.  Those cases are:

  • albumartexchange.com – There are many people including myself who posted on their forum and complained that they received PayPal phishing emails to their unique email address.  The website did not respond.
  • lakelandlelectric.com – That debacle was chronicled already.  The utility company did follow up with an explanation of how it happened and how the process was unfortunately legal.  They said they would push for tougher laws on keeping customer information private.  This prompted a follow-up email from the spammer who was incredulous that government would try to reduce transparency.  See, transparency is only good when it works in your favor.
  • paypal.com – This got compromised after only nine people knew of its existence.  Whether it was sold or stolen, I don’t know for sure, but I am pretty confident that some eBay seller has a compromised account and a spammer is looting their customer list.

Now we can add to the list – 1aauto.com.  I placed an order with their site in January (remember when the punks broke the mirror off my car?).  Today, I get a political email from John Kasich’s New Day For America to that email.  So I immediately send a message to 1aauto.com saying they’ve either sold or given away my info or their customer database has been hacked.  So which is it?  I got a pretty quick response.

Hello and thank you for your email.

I do apologize that you received a spam email to your account. I can assure you that your information is secure and we have not experienced any kind of hacking. We do keep our customer information confidential and secure and have several measures put in place to prevent against fraud and stolen identity.

Thank you for notifying us. We will keep tabs on this and look into what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.

So, I guess the answer is the owner sold out his customers to promote his choice of political candidate.  The fact that this happened at all negates the statement “We do keep our customer information confidential“.  As far as what they can do to prevent it from happening in the future, that’s simple.  Don’t do what you did again.

Thanks to spam law requirements, the spam email footer confirms the email address that it was sent to.  It tells me that I was added to the list on 2/24/16 via opt-in (gee, I don’t remember that), and gives me ways to unsubscribe.

There’s no sense in unsubscribing.  The email address is out in the wild and is now worthless.  Do I want to spend my life unsubscribing from every email campaign that gets that email or do I want to kill off the email?  The choice is pretty simple.

This scenario makes me pity people who only have a single email address, like @gmail.com or @outlook.com or @yahoo.com.  They don’t have the option of closing their account or changing their address.  Consider how easy it is for me, every email (except my personal email) is known to exactly one company.  Email gets compromised, only one place to change it.

You Don’t Get What You Don’t Pay For

Posted by on February 23, 2016 No comments

Applying the concept of the tradeoff triangle – Good/Fast/Cheap; pick two, I recently had the opportunity to choose zero.  Or maybe I got them all, just in a crappy way.  I’m talking about visiting an urgent care clinic.

As you may have seen in past posts, I’m not a fan of health.  Luckily, I don’t get sick.  Until I do, that is.  And when I do, I usually stick it out until I’m better, or in some future instance, I die.  Well, this was a case where I wasn’t getting better, but I wasn’t dying quickly enough to get over the annoyance of being sick.  And since I don’t really have a primary care doctor, I went to a clinic.

Since I don’t really have a doctor, I’m not sure what is routine and what isn’t.  But I’m pretty sure if they cared, they wouldn’t weigh me with my pockets full of stuff.  And they would probably check my temperature to see if I had a fever.  Maybe check my heart rate while they are checking my blood pressure.  Maybe they would show a little bit of interest in me.  But, maybe not.  It’s just a walk-in clinic.

Maybe they would actually protect their customers’ personal information.  Posted throughout the clinic were signs that stated there were scammers calling their patients and asking questions similar to a satisfaction survey.  The problem is that through some phone trickery, the call would cost you $3/min.  My question is, how are these scammers getting your patient’s contact info?

To sum up the entire visit, I recited the primary symptoms I had: trouble swallowing, swollen tongue and tonsils as well as secondary symptoms I suspected were relevant.  All this was entered in some cloud-based web application. (I initially thought he was searching WebMD for the answer.)  Then the doctor came in, looked in my mouth (not even using a tongue depressor) and said, “yup” and entered an antibiotic prescription in the web app that was sent to my Walgreens.  That was it – he said the medicine should work in 7 days, but if not, there were 3 more days on the prescription.  He walked out and I walked out of the building.  But not before forcing him to make physical contact with me by shaking his hand.

I left with a prescription that should fix what ails me, but I didn’t leave with any encouragement that I was going to get better.  That is depressing as hell.  But, I guess I did expect a bare-bones experience.  In my tradeoff, Good was not chosen, Fast was fast in the wrong part of the experience, and Cheap was pretty much the entire experience.  This does little to promote any desire for longevity in me.

More Phones!

Posted by on February 22, 2016 No comments

A while ago, I had the idea to take a cheap Windows phone and turn it into a dedicated portable media player.  The prime motivator of that idea was cost.  $30 for an electronic device, especially one with a good touchscreen, is pretty unbeatable.  That experience has been pretty much ok.  There’s a few issues that will hopefully be worked out in the future.  But another opportunity came up and I moved on it.  More phones!

The media player phone is a Lumia 435.  The new deal is a Lumia 640, again for $30.  I bought two.  And I still would be getting back the $60 Lumia 640 from the GF when she gets her Sony fixed.  So that’s three phones of the same make and model.  What could I do with them?

The first thing I thought of was home security cameras, but the first idea I could take action on was a car dashcam.  I looked in the app store and found a few free candidates and a few paid candidates.  So I got the free ones and set out to see what it would do.

I purchased a windshield mount and put the phone up under my mirror.  With that and my GPS on the windshield, it looks a little ridiculous.  But it’s not too distracting (at least not doing the day because the polarized screen just looks black with my sunglasses on.  At night, it’s a little more glance-worthy).  The way the dashcam app works is, the camera is constantly recording and discarding video.  It keeps a certain time period in memory at all times.  When you touch the screen to indicate an incident has occurred, the app saves that piece of video to the phone.

In two days of use, I already captured my first incident.  It was a rabbit.  Now I can replay the horrible thumping sounds as many times as I want!  Viva technology!

The Way Things Used To Be

Posted by on February 17, 2016 No comments

Today at work, I was CC’d on an email for an upcoming project involving some work with some company or other.  Someone on their side had a bunch of “technical” questions that didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t doubt that they were relevant questions, but they seemed to be in another language.  It reminded me of a time long ago at an old job when I sometimes had to work with pharmaceutical companies who were in regulated environments.  They used words and phrases in a way that meant something very specific.  If you weren’t in the industry, you wouldn’t understand, and they would use that against you.  You wouldn’t get to work with them unless you spoke their language.

So that I could try and understand this company, I visited their website.  They are a multi-national finance company, and as such, you can imagine they are the least Internet-savvy company ever.  They may actually be the least marketing-savvy company ever.  But, I remember these days.  I remember when sites like this were normal.

Back in those days, the metric for a good site was how much information you could get online.  Well, that is still the metric, sort of, but today, that information is the customer-useful type, like inventory, pricing, technical manuals, warranty status, you know, exposing your internal data to the world.  But, when you don’t have that type of data, like if you’re a bank and not a retailer or manufacturer, you still want your site to look huge.  What do you do?  You fill it with bullshit – lots and lots of bullshit.  And this site delivered.

I was amazed at the volume of verbiage on the site and how vapid it all was.  It was more than I could enumerate myself, with links going all over the place and a navigation menu so large, it had its own close button.  I downloaded a website copier and set it to work on their site.  It found 95 pages!  And that was just on their home domain.  They had a couple of other subdomains, too.  One was 65 pages and the other was a WordPress site, so the site downloader downloaded author pages, archive pages, individual pages, etc, so the pagecount was unusable.  Still, being a webmaster for 150 pages of content has to be a nightmare.

And all of these pages said nothing.  And some pages said even less than that because they were grammatically incorrect.  Maybe I can give a pass on that because the site is multi-lingual.  Anyway, my original reason for going to the website was to find out what they do.  On one of the four (FOUR!) pages of the About Us section, one of the paragraphs reads:

The goal we have proposed is that in each of the many contacts we have with our stakeholders a differential experience to provide sustainable value is conveyed. So we have established our vision as a company and some guiding principles defining our commitment towards those stakeholders.

That is what the entire site is like.  What kind of zombie composes page after page of meaningless, worthless garbage?  Well, a long time ago in another job, that might have been me.  Not likely, though.  That old company got some decent contracts, but not big enough to write hundreds of pages of dreck.

I also remember when I could think and write in that nebulous language.  My early websites for my own consulting work may have been like that, trying to make my one-man shop sound like a large company (it didn’t work).  But everyone’s grown up now.  Being a lone consultant doesn’t have a stigma and businesses can be proud to be whatever size they are.  But some companies still seem to be stuck in the past.

It Wasn’t Me This Time

Posted by on February 11, 2016 No comments

Today, I got an answer to something that I’ve always wondered.  What would I do if an accident happened right in front of me?  Well, it was actually right behind me.  I drive that road every day after work and I know how it can get. 

The road is a two-lane off-ramp connecting two interstates.  At that time of day, the right-most lane gets backed up.  There have been times that I couldn’t merge in and I couldn’t very well stop and hold up traffic in the left lane, so I was forced to take an alternate route home.  Because the right lane backs up and the left doesn’t, I think that people driving in the right lane (and this has happened to me) misread the speed of their lane, because they are keeping pace with people in the faster left lane.  Then all of a sudden, your lane grinds to a halt.

If you’re lucky, you’ll see it happen a couple of cars ahead, if you’re not lucky, the car in front of you will suddenly slow down.  If you’re really unlucky, the car in front of you will swerve onto the shoulder and the car in front of them will be stopped.  All of that happened today.

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I actually was not lucky, I was surprised by the car in front of me.  The cars behind me were less lucky.  I escaped unscathed.  But not being involved in the accident, what was I to do?  This is the question I had been wondering about.

See, I hate the world.  I really hate people.  I blog about it; it’s not a secret.  But I hate that the world is that way.  And so what did I do in this moment of truth?  I pulled over and jogged back to see if there was anything I could do to help.

Everyone was as fine as you could hope for.  One guy who had his airbags go off seemed a little stunned and I had to roll his windows down to get some fresh air in there (Airbags really stink.  That’s the second time I’ve smelled it.)  Another Samaritan was checking on drivers too and said he would call 911, but he disappeared quickly after.

I hung around until the police and paramedics arrived and gave everyone my contact info in case their insurance company wanted it, but I’m not sure I’ll be of much help.  The people behind would have been better witnesses, but everyone’s got somewhere to go…

So, why didn’t I take off like everyone else?  It’s not my problem – I was lucky.  I suspect that I don’t care about “people” because I can’t.  I can’t care about them because I can’t do anything about it.  People trapped in a cave in Argentina?  What the fuck can I do about that?  People right behind me getting in an accident?  I can try to help there.  It’s a proximity thing.  I might have said before that help begins locally and this just reinforces it.

You’re Welcome

Posted by on February 8, 2016 No comments

Every time I read something from Ayn Rand, I get really irritated.  Yet at the same time, whenever I try to do something just for the benefit of others, I also find myself irritated.  It seems you can’t do anything for anyone without hitting some issue.

I like writing software.  It’s a great profession and it gives me plenty of opportunity to experiment, create, and solve problems.  It’s not always work for me.  So there are plenty of times I will create a small utility to fix something or make a task easier for me and I think maybe someone else would find some use from it.  So, I put it out on the Internet.  The idea is nothing new and is pretty well known as open-source software.

I’d been hesitant to do any promotion of my latest creation because I feared a backlash of people that are, in modern vernacular, “haters”.  They contribute nothing but criticism and have no intention of ever offering help.  You know, “I’d love to contribute to your project, but your coding style sucks.”  “Too bad it’s in VB.NET, I could really add some features.” “If I helped out, I’d end up rewriting all of it.”  None of these statements have happened, but they are very likely coming from the elitists out there.

A few days ago, I tentatively responded to a couple of forum messages suggesting they try my utility to solve their problems.  On one forum, someone replied and said they got an error message.  So, I responded with some troubleshooting suggestions and gave a link to my blog for more information.  When I submitted the message, the forum told me my message was marked for review.

Later that night, I got a private message from a forum moderator saying that I was receiving a warning for posting a link to my own blog.  This was not allowed because it was considered “self-promotion”.  Then the message gave an excerpt of the community rules and a message that I was expected to follow them.  As a final insult, the moderator requested a “Read Receipt”, which basically says, “I want you to tell me you’ve seen this so you can’t argue this in the future.”

That completely spoiled my day.  Here I made something to help people, and I have information to share, but I’m not allowed to post it.  The moderator took the time to verify my link when to my personal website, but didn’t seem to notice there was no spam, advertisements, or solicitations on it.  If I had replied as a different person and posted the same link, it would have been fine, because it wasn’t “self-promotion.”  Posting information about another person is fine; posting information about yourself is bad.

I don’t even know where to go from here.  The urge to be extremely childish is really, really strong right now.  But how do you even talk sense into people with a viewpoint like that?  The best course of action is to just walk away, and the assholes win again.  As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

How Staples Is Enticing Me

Posted by on January 28, 2016 No comments

I get emails from Staples because sometimes they’re pretty good with coupons and whatnot.  They show up just about every day.  What isn’t very good about them (aside from the frequency) – and this is a rapidly deteriorating condition – is their subject lines.  I have a pretty deep-seated hatred for click-bait headlines, and running close behind that is a distaste for pointless headlines.  Here’s a bunch of recent examples:

  • ⌛ You hit it big! Open asap for a COUPON!
  • We need your attention! 20% off toner
  • Access: GRANTED.  Buy 1, get the 2nd 50% off!
  • Don’t waste this ☞ You’re first in line to get this COUPON for 20% off…
  • We dare you to miss out: Your sneak peek is here.
  • You’ve unlocked it! It’s official, you’re in. >>Save 60%<<
  • You were chosen: Last-minute gifts inside.
  • You checked your inbox just in time: Get up to $280 off.
  • Let’s see you resist this: COUPONS inside! You hit it big.
  • You rock! You checked your inbox just in time: Get up to $300 off laptops!
  • 🙂 Yes, it’s true! What are you waiting for?

This goes on and on.  Each time I think I have enough examples, they just keep coming…  Who the hell is writing this garbage?  Are they speaking to children?  Is anyone going to be fooled into thinking that they are getting some sort of exclusive offers?  So many questions.

You know when this started?  10/16/2015.  And it was identifiable by the first emoji ever used in the subject line of their emails.  This suggests that the marketing person is young and hip.  Young and hip doesn’t always mean smart.  Just as the younger generation is failing to learn proper composition in its many forms, they are woefully ignorant about business communications.  Staples is a business supply company and primarily communicates with professionals.

Regardless of the target audience, which is being completely ignored here, there are some simple rules with regard to correspondence, whether electronic or physical.  The rule being shat upon here is: “The subject line identifies the context of the letter”, as in “This letter is regarding…”  This is not achieved with “You were chosen” or “We dare you to miss out”.  Seriously, you, a company, are extending a challenge to me, a potential customer, to not purchase something from you.  I don’t think you realize just how easy that is to do.

Ok, I’ll admit, I don’t know if the marketing person/people are “young”.  But they definitely seem to be “young” in experience.  To be honest, the subjects really seem like they were written “offshore” by spam/scam professionals.  I can say that Staples trying to portray itself in this fashion is definitely a turn-off.  If I want to shop at a goofy store, I’ll go to Ollie’s Bargain Outlet.  Not even Big Lots has such corny emails.

Where Have All The CDs Gone?

Posted by on January 28, 2016 No comments

I’m probably really late to the party on this one, but I was recently thinking about the availability of used CDs and came to a realization.  My insight is certainly nothing earth-shattering, it’s just that used CDs are approaching a value of zero.  As such, they can’t be sold for anything of value.

Here’s my brief, one-sided view of the used CD marketplace.  When CDs first came out, I was there.  They were expensive and there was no used CD market at all.  Expensive was $18 back then, which is like selling a CD for $39 today.  Then, before a used CD market blossomed, there was the “bargain bin” at the local CD store.  You could get CDs for as little as a dollar.  “Cutouts” were included in these, where the CD case was notched or drilled to identify it as discounted.  Then, some stores started selling used CDs, but the real place to go for deals was pawn shops.  Pawns shops would have walls of CDs, most always unsorted, which was a real PIA, but really rewarding when you found something you liked.

Now, pawn shops can’t make any money on CDs (and DVDs are quickly approaching that critical mass as well).  What’s the next step after a pawn shop?  A thrift store.  People can’t even sell their CDs, so they just give them away.  That’s where I’ve been having better fortune – at thrift stores.  Yes, I am lucky to have a local used CD store with three locations around me, and their values are usually really good.  But I’ll tell you, if I owned those CD stores, I’d be making regular rounds of thrift shops and picking up well-known albums for super-cheap and selling them in my store.

The one other place you might have some luck is at flea markets.  Sometimes, it’s just some person selling off their personal collection, along with all their other household junk.  Sometimes, it’s a budding business that can’t afford a retail space.  The downside of flea market shops is that there is a very low turnover and new product comes in very infrequently.  So usually, you hit them once and you can be done at that place for a year or so.