Random thoughts

Current Music: DJ Tiesto - Magik 1 / Qattara - The Truth -Coufsat Mix
Current Mood: TGIF / 'nuff said :)

Ok, so I don't usually post links, but this one, I just can't help myself.
I don't usually do religion bashing, not only because it's too easy :) but also because honestly, I believe people should be able to believe in what they want as long as they don't come to my house and try to tell me all about it on a sunday morning.

But guess what? I didn't have to do it, this article does an awesome job of it. I'm still laughing at the irony of it. Do check it out

Current Music: Faithless - No Root - In the end
Current Mood: annoyed, don't screw with my South Park recording...

The letter I just sent to Tivo:

Hi,

Being an engineer, I am a demanding customer, and I have been reasonably happy with your products and services (which means you've been doing a good job).

However, a bit more than a week ago, comcast changed their channel lineup out of the blue so that pretty much none of my extended channels match anymore. I live in sunnyvale, CA (94085), about 10mn from your headquarters, so I'd be surprised if none of your employees experienced the same thing and already reported it (and I found out way later that you were indeed aware of it)

I called support, which seemed intent on sending me to Sony when it was clearly a software/service issue, and I ended up arguing with the CSR because he wanted to send me to Sony when I told him that selecting change channel lineup was crashing the tivo software (which otherwise never crashes for me).
Never mind the fact that I had to explain to him what a crash and a reboot was (i.e. "describe what happened", "well, I select the menu option, I get the basic drawing, no letters or options, the tivo freezes, and after about 10 seconds, the watchdog kicks in and the kernel reboots", which is what I explained on my third attempt of conveying the fact that the software crashed on that menu option, but he kept asking for more details, saying he didn't understand reboot or crash).
I got more and more aggravated when he was telling me that I had to contact Sony and RMA my unit when it was clearly a software bug (and said Sony also did Tivo software support, is that really true?)

Of course, this wasn't the problem at hand, I was just being nice and playing along with his script. The problem is that after about 10 days, you're still feeding me the wrong channel data, and worst of all, there is no supported way for me to override the bad data (well, if I cared to spend the time, I could probably use Tivoweb, browse the MFS filesystem, find the relevant resource(s) and fix them, but seriously, I shouldn't have to do that)
I've been getting country music instead of the daily show for more than one week, and now I've just missed the Latest Episode of South Park because of your inaptitude to fix a simple channel name to channel number mapping. I am very pissed!

Your CSR explained that you go through some arbitration company to request a channel lineup update and that comcast has to send it back to them and then them to you. Why so much unnecessary red tape? Anyone can just spend 10mn, map the channels and adjust the lineup for almost if not all of them without any help from comcast whatsoever. I personally couldn't care less whether it's an official change or not, or whether comcast plays well with others or not (they don't), I just want the lineup to be up to date.
Do you know that my Replay TV updated its channel lineup quicker than I realized that it had changed (in other words, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't even know that comcast remapped all its channels).
Seriously, where do the service fees go? I have an original Tivo, so I haven't gotten a new feature in more than a year (nor am I really expecting any, even if I'd appreciate them), TV guides can get gotten off several services in a trivial fashion, so the least you could do is to make sure that my channel lineup is up to date, and doesn't stay broken more than 10 days after it changed.
At this point, you're just tempting me to setup MythTV or Freevo.

I trust that you will get this fixed, but the fact that it still hasn't, and that I have to send you this letter is not acceptable

"I don't understand, those devices (ZPM) are usually plug and play, this one must be running an older version of windows"
(a ZPM, Zero-point Power Module, is a high energy source from the Asguards, in case you were wondering :)

What's funny, is that the guy said that with a straight face, in passing, hoping no one would notice or something :)

While I was jogging/rollerblading around in New York City, I used the opportunity to listen to the audio book, read by the author: Richard Clarke.
Of course, we already all know that Bush is a congenital idiot, we know he lied about WMDs, we know how he shifted the focus from The Taliban/Ben Laden to Irak/Sadam wasting billions of tax dollars and pissing off a lot more arabs who now have another reason to distrust or hate America, and yet reading about (or hearing) about all the details, his recounting of 9-11 from his perspective, and the whole story from his point of view of before and after is a quite interesting story, in more than one way.
Go buy the book, or get the audiobook.

Current Music: Remainder of the Tiesto Concert in Holland taped Sat Night
Current Mood: Well, this shit does piss me off, what can I say...

So, to read the NYT, and other silly subscription required sites, you can go to http://bugmenot.com/

And now, you can go check out this article , which is one of those things that make me ask WTF am I doing here.


Yes, I am actually quite tolerant of people's religions as long as they don't condone killing other people, but shit like this

• loria Oshima, a teller who prays with customers at the drive-up window, all will explain the bank's success in the same way. Jesus Christ has blessed them because they are obedient to his will. Jesus told them to take his word out of the church and bring it to where people interact: the marketplace.
  
• He says he has performed more than 60 faith healings in the bank and has ''saved'' another 60 people on bank premises.
  
• A major response in this country to Islamic terrorism has been a rippling of Christian muscle. In the post-9/11 universe, Christians have become more aggressive in pushing a religious agenda on social issues ranging from gay marriage to stem-cell research
  

Now, the part about Intel having employee groups that gather to talk about the bible, or have an Islam prayer, that's quite different. IMO, that's quite fine, they are just special interest groups that happen to be about religion, but they don't ask other employees to listen to the word of god, or build god designed CPUs or something...

Can't all those people who now want to evangelize at work gather in all the bible belt, we draw a big line, and put them in a different country, where they can freely elect their Messiah, George W Bush... (oh, if you don't mind, we'll keep the weapons on this side, they might do bad things with them).
Or, maybe we should just persecute them, and have them flee by boat to some not yet much populated area of the world, with easily overrun natives, and ....
Oh wait, that's actually been tried already (besides, it feels like there's more of them than of us)
Maybe I should just go to an Island that used to be a penal colony instead. I hear they have nice diving there...

Linuxworld isn't exactly an exciting show anymore, just a sad, shrinking, commercial show (nothing to do with what it used to be in its first seasons like summer 1999 , winter 1999 , summer 2000 , and summer 2001 )

Anyway, the main reason I went was that I was invited by my friends Jeremy and Chris to the Golden Penguin Bowl, I really wanted a glass penguin, and it was on my way back from the French consulate in San Francisco where I went to get my passport renewed :) (it also didn't hurt to run into a lot of former coworkers and fellow linux geeks)

We were playing against the microsoft linux team, and while I came with the appropriate geek attire (I was on the geeks team), they came disguised as storm troopers with Darth Vader, it was quite funny. They actually did pretty well; we won a few questions on microsoft, and they won a few questions on linux. In the end, we were slightly ahead, and we ended up winning hands down on the last question which was listing as many Unix and Posix operating systems as we knew. The judges compared it against a list of official answers, and we were about 5 ahead of the other team. I was amazed that they actually accepted my AUX entry, an ancient and obsolete Unix for Apple servers that no one knows about :)

Anyway, that was good time spent. The rest of the pictures are here . Jeremy gets kudos for his great two sides of the force costume :)








The Geeks won by being able to list the most Unix/Posix systems


I've been needing one of those glass penguins for a while :)

I was watching a Nova special yesterday on all the people who had been involved in discovering the science that led to the fundation of Einstein making his 5 groundbreaking discoveries, including E=mc2, and only years later, some German lady whose name I already forgot (bad me) was able to deduce that they had split Uranium 238/93 by looking at the mass that had been lost in the byproducts, converting that into energy with that formula, and finding 200 million eV, which is the strength of a neutron-neutron bond IIRC.
Anyway, it occurred to me, that if I would somehow end up 100-200 years in the past, I would not actually remember a whole lot of everything I was taught in math, physics and chemistry during all my years in school. Ok, I remember uranium 235 and 238 (rich), but didn't even know its atomic number (necessary to know the proton/neutron split), 93, or forgot about the 7 planes electrons orbit at. Don't ask me about maxwell's equations, much of anything on electromagnetism (at least I know that they're linked, which wasn't know at the time), and I would quite struggle to compute any differential equations, matrix multiplications, differentials, or dévelopement limités .
All in all, I'd be fairly useless 200 years ago, if I didn't get to bring my HP48SX, its library of all physics/math/chemistry equations, and a set of fresh batteries. Shame, shame...

Eh, at least I know the sun rotates around the earth, and that we have to send ships filled with hydrogen to refill it once in a while, that's already one thing :)

I was shuffling my SA-Exim logs, after realizing that I had more than 1G of spam mail saved, I also found the highest scored spam ever: 86.2!
In the meantime, I also found that my anti-spam software has blocked more than 70,000 spams on my server. Go me! :)

Subject: SPAM: 86.2: ºô¸ô¶}©±Àu´f¤è®×¡I ¦n§·m¥ý³ø¡I
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=86.2 required=7.0 tests=BAYES_99,BIZ_TLD,
DOMAIN_RATIO,FORGED_IMS_HTML,FORGED_MUA_IMS,FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD,
HEAD_ILLEGAL_CHARS,HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP,HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR,HTML_90_100,
HTML_CHARSET_FARAWAY,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_WEB_BUGS,
HTTP_ESCAPED_HOST,HTTP_EXCESSIVE_ESCAPES,MIME_BASE64_TEXT,
MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS,MIME_HTML_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI,
MISSING_MIMEOLE,MPART_ALT_DIFF,MSGID_SPAM_CAPS,MSGID_YAHOO_CAPS,
RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100,RAZOR2_CHECK,RCVD_BY_IP,RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM,
RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_DSBL,RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL,
RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL,RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB,RCVD_IN_XBL,SPF_HELO_SOFTFAIL,
SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS,TO_MARCNEWS autolearn=spam
version=3.0.3-mmrules_20041125
X-Spam-Report:
* 3.8 MSGID_YAHOO_CAPS Message-ID has ALLCAPS@yahoo.com
* 1.2 HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP Relay HELO'd using suspicious hostname (DHCP)
* 4.1 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
* 4.4 HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR Relay HELO'd using suspicious hostname (IP addr 1)
* 4.0 TO_MARCNEWS To marc_news
* 3.8 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS Spam tool Message-Id: (caps variant)
* 0.1 RCVD_BY_IP Received by mail server with no name
* 2.9 SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS Subject contains too many raw illegal characters
* 3.1 SPF_HELO_SOFTFAIL SPF: HELO does not match SPF record (softfail)
* [SPF failed: Please see
http://spf.pobox.com/why.html?sender=rr.com &ip; =24.95.54.50 &receiver; =magic.merlins.org]
* 2.1 HEAD_ILLEGAL_CHARS Header contains too many raw illegal characters
* 2.7 FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD 'From' yahoo.com does not match 'Received' headers
* 0.5 HTTP_ESCAPED_HOST URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL's hostname
* 2.3 BIZ_TLD URI: Contains an URL in the BIZ top-level domain
* 0.2 HTTP_EXCESSIVE_ESCAPES URI: Completely unnecessary %-escapes inside a URL
* 3.2 DOMAIN_RATIO BODY: Message body mentions many internet domains
* 0.0 HTML_WEB_BUGS BODY: Image tag intended to identify you
* 1.8 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 0.1 MPART_ALT_DIFF BODY: HTML and text parts are different
* 4.0 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 BODY: Razor2 gives confidence level above 50%
* [cf: 100]
* 5.0 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
* [score: 1.0000]
* 3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
* 0.0 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area
* 0.0 HTML_90_100 BODY: Message is 90% to 100% HTML
* 0.3 MIME_BASE64_TEXT RAW: Message text disguised using base64 encoding
* 7.5 RAZOR2_CHECK Listed in Razor2 (http://razor.sf.net/)
* 3.1 RCVD_IN_XBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
* [24.95.54.50 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
* 0.0 RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB RBL: SORBS: sender is a abuseable web server
* [24.95.54.50 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
* 2.0 RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL RBL: SORBS: sent directly from dynamic IP address
* [24.95.54.50 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
* 3.0 RCVD_IN_DSBL RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org
* [http://dsbl.org/listing?24.95.54.50]
* 6.5 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
* [Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?24.95.54.50]
* 0.1 RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL RBL: NJABL: dialup sender did non-local SMTP
* [24.95.54.50 listed in combined.njabl.org]
* 4.1 RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM Bulk email fingerprint (double IP) found
* 2.4 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts
* 0.0 MISSING_MIMEOLE Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
* 2.4 FORGED_MUA_IMS Forged mail pretending to be from IMS
* 2.0 FORGED_IMS_HTML IMS can't send HTML message only
* 0.5 HTML_CHARSET_FARAWAY A foreign language charset used in HTML markup

As we fight our way northwest into the great unknown, only one thing remains certain: is that I hate you guys with every tired muscle in my confederate bottom. We have taken topeka, and now I must rally the men en route to Missoura, because I will not stop until we have won it all, and you guys are my slaves, because I hate you guys, I hate you guys so very very much :)
This is why I love South Park :)

Another favourite is "I hate you guys, words just cannot express how much I hate you guys" :)

Current Music: Les enfoirés - 2000 - La Bombe Humaine
Current Mood: Fair

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday with Cingular/AT &T; yesterday, for the 5th or 6th time.
This all started with me being an AT &T; customer, which was fine, until the day they got bought by Cingular. In theory, that means a bigger and better network to roam on, so that was good news.
In real life, this meant two networks that my phone could see, but this also meant that AT &T; turned off their closest tower to my house, leaving me with a far away tower with bad signal.
This turned out to be because Cingular Wireless had their own tower down my street with great signal. This was all great except that my old phone would not use the Cingular tower since it wasn't its 'home network' unless the AT &T; tower totally disappeared, which it seldom did (i.e. I had enough signal to get one unusable bar). Solution to that was to reconfigure my phone to manually lock to the (otherwise inferior) Cingular network. That worked for home, until I went out of Cingular coverage, and my phone wouldn't pick a working AT &T; tower until I put it back to automatic mode. Lame...

Solution from AT &T; : "you have to get a new phone with a new 64K Sim, along with cingular service". For quite a while, I just didn't bother since I was still using the old and reliable TDMA service on my Siemens S46 dual mode tri band phone, and one day they sent me a letter that they were going to turn that service off.
All, right, great: at this point I didn't have a choice anymore and bought a new Nokia Communicator 9500 (unfortunately it only did 1900Mhz in the US, no 850). Cingular asked me why I didn't buy one of their 850/1900 pre-programmed phones instead, and that's mostly because they were crap, like the Palm based Treo 650 (the Palmsource engineers, some of them I know personally , have since then fled the said company, confirming that that phone and its OS has no real future).
Anyway, the Nokia Communicator 9500 is a great phone, I went to Cingular to migrate my service from AT &T; to Cingular, went through more work to get everything working again, and ended up with a more expensive plan I didn't really need.
I then go home, and end up with the same exact problem: phone locks in on AT &T.; Grr!!!

More time with support on the phone, eventually I get a knowledgeable person from tech support who sends a reprogramming to my phone's Sim card to tell it to prefer Cingular over AT &T.; That was yesterday, the phone accepts the programming, I turn it back on, and still the same thing!
More time with support, more explaining why I didn't want to use their crappy phones, and eventually the support person tells me that my phone must be overriding the Sim's preferred network (i.e. Cingular) and that I should talk to Nokia to see if I can disable that.
I do so, and Nokia tells me that there is no such setting, and it must be a problem with the provider.
Joy...

Y'all suck!

Anyway, I'm back to locking my phone on one network, and having to change that every so often when I get out of Cingular coverage. It sounds that my only hope at this point is to wait for Cingular to actually merge both networks so that they only show up as one. With a little luck, that'll happen in a few months...

Of course, I could switch to T-Mobile, the other GSM provider, but they just have an inferior network and don't offer EDGE, just GPRS...

I'm so glad I live in a technologically advanced country.

This was my 3rd visit to the Vintage Computer Festival. I managed to go to the 4th, 6th, and 8th. While it was a bit small this year, it was still entertaining to visit.
For one, I got to use a PDP-1, and play spacewar, the very first computer video game, which a technician loaded from punch card tape.
A few pictures are below, and the other ones (including a few videos, including the difference engine), go there






this is back when you could see a status light for each bit of each register in the CPU

Someone actually made a Babbage difference engine out of mecano. Babage only ever described the machine in drawings in 1849, but never got it built due to how complex it was for the time



can you say big floppy? (it was actually an optical drive)


The first palm PDA prototype

Yes, I admit it, it's been one of the shows I've been watching when I work on my laptop, or as background when I'm around the kitchen/living room.
By watching it, I think I actually learned a few useful things about interactions with coworkers, bosses, and the workplace in general.
If you have no idea what it is, it's a 15 week long interview to get a job working for Donald Trump. The candidates get a task each time, and compete against one another to achieve the task. In the end, the winner gets a high paying and ranking job for Donald Trump. Smart of him to have come up with that idea.

I just finished watching the finale, and I was quite disappointed that after both top candidates had been so good, and Randall won, he said that he did not believe the other candidate should get a job working for Trump too, making a bogus reason that there should only be one winner. He really seemed like the kind of person who would be happy to share his victory, and for whom victory didn't have to be at the expense of someone else.
This shows how much I still have to learn about human nature...

When driving to work this morning, I noticed a bunch of police cars blocking off 101S on Fair Oaks, and considered turning around to take central instead, but since it looked like something potentially interesting was happening, and 101N seemed to be moving, although somewhat slowly, I took it.

Turns out, I caught the beginning of a parade of hundreds of police officers from all over the area.
It was a bit surreal, hundreds of officers in a single lane (carpool lane) in an otherwise blocked off Hwy 101, with all kinds of police vehicles, vans, limos, etc, going on for 20mn+ while I was driving the other way, taking pictures, and trying not to rear end the car in front of me :)
Turns out it was to honor officer May, who was brutally shot and killed a few days ago in East Palo Alto.
Read more from sfgate

After I posted the pictures at work, soon after people started asking WTF happened on 101S (since it did mess with commute traffic in a pretty major way), it started a long thread as to whether inconveniencing thousands of commuters, and causing accidents on 101N.

It's hard to say. At least, they did reach their goal of drawing attention to the problem.
I personally give to the CHP 11-99 foundation , a worthy way to help.

The other pictures, and a few videos are here

No, you may not make comments about how taking pictures and movies while driving was probably not a good idea. Some people did crash on 101 due to watching the officers, but I didn't, I'm better than that :)

I'm still amazed (and happy) at how well the simple premises I used when I wrote sa-exim . I looked in my spam folder, and just found a new high
spam score record, where it just broke the 100 mark (106 to be precise).

In the meantime, I still get less than 1 spam a day in my main inbox (from several hundred thousands received), and my mail doesn't get eated by some provider that puts legitimate mail in my spam folder...

X-Spam-Level: **************************************************
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=106.0 required=7.0 tests=BAYES_99,ENVCALLBACK,
FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL,HDRCALLBACK,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02,
HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1,MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS,
MIME_HTML_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI,PERCENT_RANDOM,
RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100,RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100,
RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100,RAZOR2_CHECK,RCVD_HELO_IP_MISMATCH,
RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_DSBL,RCVD_IN_XBL,RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO,
TO_EFREI,UNRESOLVED_TEMPLATE,URIBL_AB_SURBL,URIBL_JP_SURBL,
URIBL_OB_SURBL,URIBL_SC_SURBL,URIBL_WS_SURBL,X_MESSAGE_INFO
autolearn=spam version=3.1.0-mmrules_20041125
X-Spam-Report:
* 2.9 FROM_LOCAL_NOVOWEL From: localpart has series of non-vowel letters
* 4.5 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
* 9.0 HDRCALLBACK Envelope sender callback failed
* 8.0 ENVCALLBACK Envelope sender callback failed
* 6.0 TO_EFREI To old efrei address
* 4.4 X_MESSAGE_INFO Bulk email fingerprint (X-Message-Info) found
* 1.3 UNRESOLVED_TEMPLATE Headers contain an unresolved template
* 4.0 RCVD_HELO_IP_MISMATCH Received: HELO and IP do not match, but
* should
* 1.5 RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO Received: contains an IP address used for HELO
* 0.5 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image
* area
* 1.8 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 5.0 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
* [score: 1.0000]
* 3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
* 3.6 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04 BODY: HTML: images with 0-400 bytes of words
* 1.5 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100 Razor2 gives engine 8 confidence level
* above 50%
* [cf: 100]
* 1.5 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100 Razor2 gives engine 4 confidence level
* above 50%
* [cf: 100]
* 7.5 RAZOR2_CHECK Listed in Razor2 (http://razor.sf.net/)
* 4.0 RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 Razor2 gives confidence level above 50%
* [cf: 100]
* 3.0 RCVD_IN_DSBL RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org
* [ ]
* 6.5 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
* [Blocked - see ]
* 3.9 RCVD_IN_XBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
* [220.77.108.253 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
* 3.8 URIBL_AB_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the AB SURBL blocklist
* [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
* 4.1 URIBL_JP_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the JP SURBL blocklist
* [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
* 4.0 URIBL_WS_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the WS SURBL blocklist
* [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
* 3.0 URIBL_OB_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the OB SURBL blocklist
* [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
* 4.5 URIBL_SC_SURBL Contains an URL listed in the SC SURBL blocklist
* [URIs: insane-extreme-amazing.com]
* 0.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME
* parts
* 2.3 PERCENT_RANDOM Message has a random macro in it
* 0.9 HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1 HTML is very short with a linked image
Subject: SPAM: 106.0: massive toys deeper and harder into their tight pussies & asses.
X-Spam-Prev-Subject: massive toys deeper and harder into their tight pussies & asses.
X-SA-Exim-Version: 4.2 (built Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:44:12 +0100)
X-SA-Exim-Scanned: Yes (on mail1.merlins.org)

// posted by MM @ 12:54

I just got this from a coworker:
http://www.vta.org/schedules/VTA_Bike_Map.pdf

It's a nice map of all the bike routes around the bay, quite nice.

Since Google sponsored the Stanford solar powered electric vehicle, the students were nice enough to bring their vehicle to our parking lot for us to look at.
The Stanford team won the race by a hair this year, and their vehicle can reach about 65mph with internal Li-Ion batteries plus full solar power. It was nice to see it face to face.

My roomba was having problems vaccuming, with no good reason, so I called Roomba tech support and they sent me a firmware upgrader by mail. It's kind of strange that they just didn't use a normal serial port and computer software, but in the end, what mattered was that their little gizmo upgraded the firmware, and my Roomba is happy now. Both cool and weird :) (a few other pix here )

I recently did a little online shopping, at ScotteVest , where I got a few multi pocket pants, the nicest ones being the hidden cargo pants with 11 pockets and compartments, as well as the 237D 3 season 33 pocket jacket :)
Needless to say that I like them very much :) I was also going to write that I stopped short of buying the solar panels so that I didn't look like a total geek, but after looking at the page again while linking to it, I thought they were too cool not to buy (and would come especially handy at burning man if I can't secure reliable electricity)
As for their pricing, while they don't give any of their clothes away, they are priced quite favorably compared to half decent stuff you'd find in stores.

Code   Name                             Price   
LNG-BK  SeV Lounge Pants Black          $79.99  
        . Size: S:S                         
HCP-B   Hidden Cargo Pants Black        $79.99  
        . Size: 3234:3234                   
HCP-S   Hidden Cargo Pants Stone        $79.99  
        . Size: 3030:3030                   
HCS-S   Hidden Cargo Shorts Stone       $49.99  
        . Size: 32:32                       
UCP     Ultimate Cargo Pants            $99.99  
        . Size: 3030:3030                   
237D    237D                            $159.99 
        . Color: O:O                        
        . Size: L:L                         
CMLBK   Camelbak 35 oz Omega Reservoir  $21.99  
Tie     Gadget Tie (Special Offer)      $9.99   
MFL-CA  Microfleece Pullover Camo       $39.99  
        . Size: L:L

For Thinkgeek , I did my bi-yearly visit for new toys, and sure found nice ones

 Item                                               Qty         Price
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Caffeine Candy Sampler v6.0                        1          $13.82
 Laserpod                                           1          $53.90
 Si-Link FM Transmitter                             1          $15.40
 The Bionic Wrench - 6-inch                         1          $19.11
 The Bionic Wrench - 8-inch                         1          $21.75
 Levitating Desktop Globes - 8 Inch Globe           1          $55.00
 ROMP (Random Oscillating Magnetic Pendulum)        1           $7.42
 Floating LCD Clock and Shuttle - Base w/Clock      1          $55.00
 Flexible Shaft Ratcheting Screwdriver              2          $13.19
 Soldius 1 Solar Charger                            1          $64.06
----------------------------------------------------------------------

/me < - happy :)

I recently went to an event with a coworker who took pictures with an SLR Canon Camera that took cr2 raw pictures. My goal was to convert them to jpeg, and integrate them with my own pictures (merging/interleaving them by date using the picture data inside cr2 and Exif for my jpegs)

Here were the steps:

1. Convert all the cr2 pictures to jpeg
   You need to install dcraw , and then after reading the man page, I figured this would be a decent command that would work for most pictures:
   for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -c -q 0 -B 2 4 -w -H 5 -b 8 $i | cjpeg -quality 80 > $i.jpg; done
   (cjpeg comes from libjpeg-progs )
   
2. Set the cr2 file time to the cr2 picture date inside the file:
   for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -z $i; done
   
3. Set the file date on the jpegs to match the cr2 dates: for i in *.cr2; do touch -r $i $i.jpg; done
   
4. Find a matching picture between both picture sets, and compute the offset between both cameras (it should be 0 in an ideal life, but real life is usually lees than ideal :). ls -l image.cr2 vs jhead image.jpg will give you the times for each picture
   
5. Temporarily offset the time in the jpeg pictures that didn't come from cr2, like so: jhead -ta-4:55 *.jpg
   
6. If you only had jpeg pictures, all with Exif data, you could use jhead -n *.jpg to rename them all so that they sort by date, but here we'll have to use the file times to sort them, so we'll ask jhead to set the Exif time as a modification date for the pictures that were jpegs to start with: jhead -ft *.jpg
   
7. By then you can now merge both sets of pictures in the same directory, and you can then use the program of your choice to rename them by filenames that are sorted in the same order than the filenames ls -ltr *.jpg should list
   the pictures in the order they were taken
   
8. I personally use midnight commander (mc), go to the picture directory, select 'sort order' by time, select all the files with + and enter, and put them all on the command line for rename with rename -y mergedpicts 100 CTRL-X T , rename being a special script of mine (follow the link to download)
   

And that's it, after all those *cough*simple*cough*easy*cough* steps, you end up with a bunch of jpegs ordered chronogically.

The end result of all this work was my picture library of pictures from the Reno Air Races

After AT &T; tried to tell me with a straight face that it was ok to pay $60 to call france 14mn, and graciously back-ordering a $5/month international dialing upgrade to lower the price when I complained loudly, I switched to Pioneer Telephone .
3.25¢/mn to the US, and 6¢/mn for France is more like it, and how it should be.
There is also a nice site that compares all the long distance plans in California

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I had been looking for a multi function fax/flat bed scanner/copier/printer, with ethernet and wireless support.
First, when I happened to stop by Office Depot, I saw the HP Photosmart C6180 , which seemed to be a decent device. It was a bit expensive ($300), but I figured that if it came from HP, it would have to have great linux support, so I bit the bullet and bought it.
Well, after several hours of configuring it, and setting up linux to talk to it, I came to the conclusion that I was somewhat disappointed. In the process, I also had to upgrade my windows/vmware image to W2K SP4 (I had no service packs before in order to keep the image as small as possible) so that I could try some of the windows software for the scanner.
Printing did work pretty easily, but I never got faxing to work except from the command line and on the printserver, not remotely. Sending jobs through the printing system just would hang forever and I couldn't find an easy way to just use the fax as a printer from windows. As for scanning, it just wasn't supported on linux and required windows to work, which is quite disappointing. HP did put out the hplip software suite, but outside of a spiffy control panel that doesn't do that much for me, it didn't get faxing working, and it didn't support scanning...
A few days later, I ran into the Brother MFC-665CW at Fry's while going to buy something else, and it turns out that office depot had it too, but helpfully was hiding it in the back and just did not feel the need to display it. That's disappointing because the unit only cost $150, supported everything the HP did, also had a build in answering machine and phone handset, and also had full linux support , including for scanning over IP. Go figure... Anyway, I ended up returning my HP Photosmart to them, and got the Brother MFC instead.
I still need to spend some time to configure it, but it looks like a much better choice for half the price.
Sorry HP, but your product was too expensive, inferior, and you even tried to sell out linux for your own benefit this past month.

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Current Music: Asot 271
Current Mood: Good

After watching all the current episodes of Heroes in 3 days (11 episodes), I watched the 14 episodes of Firefly , and the resulting movie again: Serenity .

Heroes was an interesting series to watch, even if the premise behind it is actually not that different from the 4400 : humans who were changed to have supernatual abilities.
It'll be interesting to see the rest when it comes out next year.

Firefly unfortunately was killed by Fox, who were just assholes on this front. They refused to show the pilot because it was in widescreen, and didn't fit what they wanted to show. They soon after cancelled the show without ever giving it much of a chance, even though it had started to attract a lot of viewers.
The later movie Serenity did great too, but Fox retains all the TV rights, so the series is likely going to remain killed.
Kind of sad when things like that happen, but then again Fox is also Fox "News", so they're already on my shitlist. Too bad the Firefly producer didn't sign up with some other channel originally.
But then again, if I were to get one show back, I'd take Babylon V first. Firefly was nice even if the wild west, 6 shooter atmosphere looks a tad weird to me, but B5 was better :)

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I sent the following Email to Jetstar (even though they try to hide their Email address), as well as the Australian board of tourism with a shred of hope that they might do something about their ridiculous 7kg per carry on limit within the country.
(ok, I might have just slightly exagerated some of the points below, but that was to drive the point across :) )

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am Emailing you because of my severe dissatisfaction with how I was treated during a flight with your airline, and let you know how disconnected you are with reality of you are hoping to attract tourism.

In a nutshell, you charged me more than $150 for what you called extra luggage, and you were really trying to charge me over $300, you humiliated me by having empty all my luggage and carry ons to meet the ridiculous 7kg/carry on luggage limit, and you denied me entrance with a carry on (small laptop backpack size) and my small laptop bag when in 20 years of flying I have never had a single airline deny me a carry on, and my laptop bag as a personal item, which your staff did.
Unless you tell me that you are going to make clear changes to improve the situation, I will forever avoid your airline, and warn all others against using it, starting with my 10,000 coworkers at google, and all my peers in the computer conference community.

I flew from the US to Sydney for 2 weeks to go to a conference and to go diving after that. I didn't pack my entire house, I just took enough clothes for the trip, some light diving gear (not even a BCD, or full suits), and my laptop and related computer equipment in my laptop bag.
My girlfriend and I had 2 checked in pieces of luggage each, between 15 to 25kg each, well under the 32kg/piece limit. We also each had a small backpack as a carry on, and a laptop bag.
This was no problem for our flights to and from Australia, and I guess we got lucky because it wasn't a problem for our flight with Jetstar from Sydney to Cairns. However, on the way back, some overzealous employee of yours maybe decided to apply your ludicrous rules on carry-ons.
First of all, I don't care that some loser was able to sue after getting a carry-on on his/her head. I didn't fly to Australia to have silly restrictions because of one person who had one problem and was allowed to sue successfully somehow. Australia isn't worse than the US, is it?

While my carry-ons were small, they are dense: my computer equipment, batteries, cables, and accessories do weigh a fair amount. My laptop bag is closer to 15kg and has never been below that, nor can it be: I need that equipment, and I cannot check it in as if I ever lose it, I am risking my job.
Your staff not only refused to let me take my laptop bag, but also told me that I could not take my carry on and my laptop bag, so I could not even rebalance the weight between the two (and again, I cannot check this in: I value my job and my ability to do work and give my talks at conferences too much to allow any airline to handle that sensitive equipment again)
Then, I'll save you the overweight bill we got from our check in luggage plus carry on weight that now had to be checked in too. We had to grossly cheat to avoid paying over $300, had to move lots of already carefully packed luggage around to meet your rules, and had things broken when we got there because of that rebalancing, and empty space in a piece of luggage that was otherwise well packed and padded to prevent damage to the internal items.
In the end, we lost 30-40mn, I felt fairly humiliated, and you charged us an extra $150 or so, and that's again only because your representative gave me no choice but to grossly cheat so that I could still keep my laptop with me and not pay several hundred dollars more.

So, my problem with you are:

• your sales staff on the phone flat lied to me when they told me that I would be able to take my carry on and my laptop bag with me on the plane, even though the laptop bag would never be 7kg. I quote what your staff said: "if it's a laptop bag, we allow it regardless of the weight, we know that 7kg can be difficult to meet". It is outrageous than your checkin staff later says that it's not true, and effectively not only fines me heavily for the weight, but made us spend more than 30-40mn, almost making us miss our plane, to move lots of things around.
  
• The 7kg/carry on limit is a joke. If Australia or internal carriers don't stop this silly rule, I will simply take my tourist dollars elsewhere (I spent about $10,000 this time, and I'l be happy to spend them elsewhere next time)
  
• Denying us a small carry on backpack and a laptop bag as a personal item, is unheard of.
  
• Your staff was totally inflexible and couldn't care less whether I made my flight, got home, or not.
  
• Because my international flight was not with Quantas (I couldn't use them because their times didn't work for me), my international check in luggage allowance didn't transfer to you. I can understand that you would not let me check in 32x2 kg of luggage without any financial compensation, but you should sell $100 international luggage allowance vouchers for travellers instead of charging an insane $7/kg, or $300 on top of the flight for a person who does happen to have the 32kgx2
  

Please let me know if the way I was treated is representative of how you do business, and if not, whether you are willing to make things right. This will also let me know whether I should warn all my coworkers and colleges against using your services, or not.

Thanks
Marc

Labels: public

I was going to my host sister (Alanna)'s wedding in Dallas, and called a few hotels nearby. When I called the 3rd hotel, and asked if they had internet connectivity, the reply was "internet, is that like the TV?"
Oh boy...

Labels: public

After trying the draganflyer Ti (thermal intelligence) for a few days, I ended up returning it.

It worked really well outside thanks to its thermal intelligence (it had 4 heat sensors that could make the unit self-level by seeking the temperature difference between the sky and the ground).
Unfortunately, without thermal intelligence, indoors, it just wouldn't level that well, which was disappointing for a $1000+ RC device, so I returned it.

You can find a few videos here , and if you are curious, the details of my experience are below (as the reason for return that I sent that company)

Below, I am going to give you details for the benefit of your design
team.
While I have obviously had it for more than 1 month, it was DOA and I only
received a working receiver board last week.
I tried it the next day, and the day after with help and feedback from your
tech support, but ultimately, I was disappointed with it because of its
performance when Ti was not enabled.
Your support folks reviewed test hovering videos in my house, showing how
wobbly the unit was and how hard to control it was. They suggested prop
wash, so I went to a bigger indoor facility and had similar results:
The DF does a bad job of saying level or in one spot without Ti.
I'm sorry, but a $150 X-Ufo does a near perfect job of this until you spill
its mechanical gyro. Whatever your solid state gyros do, is good enough to
run the motors in a way that the unit doesn't flip over or stays generally
level, but they can't keep the unit fully level and hovering without Ti.
The X-Ufo can, and with a solid state gyro upgrade kit from Germany, it does
apparently fine flying outside in winds (which the mechanical gyro can't
quite do).

As things stand right now, the DF Ti does do a great job flying outside with
Ti on, but it's just very disappointing without Ti. Because I typically
mostly fly indoors, it unfortunately makes the unit unsuitable for my use
and I would therefore like to return it after 2-3 days of use/testing.

As additional things that disappointed me and that you'll want to look
into fixing:
- a $1000+ unit shouldn't be using analog transmitters anymore. You should
  at least provide a Spectrum DX7 receiver board as an option. There is
  too much chance of RF interference risk in some of the places I fly in
  and the present is digital DSM2. Analog is dead.
- The new style remote you provide (with the Ti on/off switch) just feels
  cheap. Again, it's disappointing for an expensive device like this.  I
  found that it was very hard to give precise, timely, and small control
  inputs to fly the unit indoors: the remote is not proportional and doesn't
  provide enough precision for very small inputs and corrections
- Again, because you use a cheap remote with no intelligence, I have to trim
  it when flying without Ti, and then untrim/retrim it every single time
  I switch to and from Ti mode. That's just silly and hard to accept for
  a unit that price (and even more so for the multi thousand dollar units)
  Again, allowing for the customer to use his/her own DX7 transmitter by
  putting an AR6xxx receiver on an optional board, would fix this.
- your motor mounting rods should have a pinhole or square pattern that
  would allow for the motors to not spin around the axis and always point
  up. The premounted unit that you shipped me didn't even have the motors
  mounted right, and they were quite hard to adjust.
- Generally, the gyro input or feedback is poor. I know the solid state
  gyros work because the unit wouldn't fly at all without them, but even
  when perfectly trimmed, your unit does not self level indoors with no
  control input. The X-Ufo does.
- Your lipo charger seems slow compared to a real thunderpower charger. I
  have 3 cell lipos that look almost identical to yours, but your packs have
  the balancing connector removed, making it difficult to consider charging
  your batteries or using my own with a real lipo charger/balancer (BTW, I
  did not charge your batteries with anything else than your charger since I
  didn't know whether it was safe, but I also noticed how slow your charger
  was).
- your folding blades are hard to adjust so that they self straighten, and
  when they fold, they get caught into the motor gear and stop the motor,
  which can't be too good for it.
  
I still believe that your product is probably the best one around for flying
exclusively outside with Ti on, but due to the points above, and the fact
that I mostly do indoor flying, I'm going to go the X-Ufo with gyro upgrade
route.

Labels: public , rc

In March, Comcast disconnected my cable internet service, ultimately due to a problem about overusage (too much "unlimited" data used). While they were hard to get a hold of (or at least someone who had any clue what was happening), you eventually have to call a number where they make you feel you are a criminal, and they won't talk to you: you have to leave a number on your answering machine and hope they call you back while you are able to pick up (and leave you shutoff for as long as it takes). Luckily, I had my cell phone with me when they called me back in the evening and explained "you used too much data in February, and got disconnected as a result".
Ok, great, never mind that unlimited is not unlimited, they were likely correct about the data usage (400GB in a month) so I fixed the problem (mostly an rsync backup script that was doing something wrong and using at 20-40x the amount of bandwidth it should have). Their representative said "you have one month to fix it and we'll resume monitoring and shut you down if it happens again". This was March 14th.
About 6 weeks later, in early April, they shut me down again with no warning or call. I call back after going through the useless 1st level support who wanted me to reconfigure my windows DHCP settings and then said I shouldn't be trying to use the service if I had linux, and I eventually talked to their security staff who said "you had an overusage for March again, so we shut you down for good this time"
Me: "Mmmh, you warned me on March 14th, I couldn't fix anything that happened before you warned me, but fixed it after that date"
Him: "You had an overusage for the second month in a row, we had to shut you down, it's our policy"
Me: "Why don't you look at my usage numbers after you warned me and I fixed it"
Him: "We don't have those numbers, we only have all of March"
Me: "But you know March was almost half over before you warned me, and I had no way to go back in time and make that go away"
Him: "Sorry, it's our policy"
Me: "So, what's the point of warning people if you don't give them a chance to fix the problem. What about the one month grace period your collegue told me about"
Him: "There isn't any grace period, sorry"
Me: "So there was nothing I could do then"
Him: "In your case, I guess not, sorry"

Putting aside the unlimited which obviously not unlimited, it's pretty pathetic that while Comcast tries to do the right thing by warning you and giving you a chance to fix an overusage problem, their braindead-ness and refusal to follow basic logic, causes them to shut you down before you can actually fix the problem.
Good job, comcast!
Verdict: "Sorry, you can't be our customer for 1 year". Considering how they work, I'm not sure I want to be their customer at all ever again.

Until they fix their warning system to match logging cycles, or honor the one month grace period they promised me, and then pretended they never had, I can see how they're going to get many other people shut down that way.
If comcast is actually meaning to give their customers a chance to fix a usage over an arbitrary limit they won't disclose, they have some serious fixing to do, starting by not putting their customers in the criminal/DMCA pile that their regular support folks are not even allowed to help.

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If you don't routinely sell stuff on ebay, or aren't verify familiar with, but use paypal, read on.

As you probably know, paypal tries very hard to upgrade everyone to a premier account so that they can scam you 2-3% for each and every transfer you do (even paypal account to paypal account, or from a bank transfer which costs them virtually nothing). In other words, if you send $100 to your coworker for a recent dinner, they keep 3%, and so on.

Obviously, the idea is to never upgrade to a premier/business account.

That said, they (somewhat recently?) changed ebay so that if you sell anything on Ebay, and the seller happens to use a credit card, you are totally screwed.
You are not allowed to refuse the payment and ask the seller to use a paypal funds or bank account funds. They flat out removed the deny payment button.
At that point, you are forced to upgrade to a premier account, unless you wait 60 days for the payment to time out, your auction to go down the drain, and the buyer to get pissed at you.
After that, your paypal account is tainted and you can't use it to get money from your buddies anymore. The only workaround is to open a new and separate paypal account that you never use for auctions.

So, if you sell on ebay, you get dinged twice: first on the auction fee (ok, that one is for the service), and then the needless paypal fees behind it.

The fine print, which is of course well hidden, is in this page


I also suspect (although haven't verified), that paypal will auto-switch your default payment type to suit you: if you're paying a premier member, they'll use your bank account so that they can pocket 2-3% (they do this for me every time, then denying me my credit card payment protection and especially the 3 month loss protection and 1 year warranty extension I'd get with my credit card).
If you're paying an regular member like me, I'm guessing that they default the payment to credit card to then force that member to upgrade.

I hated them before, I hate them even more now..

(update later) I found out that you can actualy downgrade from a premium account down to a regular account if you call their support, as a one time thing. They still scammed me the money for the two ebay transactions, but I was also able to call them about a bad seller who sold me fake nokia batteries, and they refunded me the amount of my payment, which made up for the fees they took me.
I was able to downgrade to regular account this one time.
For next time, I'll know not to put a paypal address directly in an auction, but to ask the seller to contact me first and only pay from bank account funds (and not a credit card)

(second update: reply from paypal, and my reply)

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 10:22:43AM -0500, webform@paypal.com wrote:
> Hello my name is Jim, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding downgrading your account, and I understand your frustration and concern over this issue. I am happy to assist you with your questions.

I called in friday and got my account downgraded.
Should this happen again, I'll just close my account next time.

> Personal accounts, as the name suggests, have always been intended for personal use only, and are not designed to be used for business purposes. PayPal considers the receiving of funds from eBay, Auction, or Website sales in excess of the Personal account limits to be beyond the normal level of personal use. By requiring Premier or Business accounts for all accounts that receive a large volume of payments from eBay, Auction or website sales, PayPal ensures that all high activity selling accounts are treated similarly.

That would be fine if it were the complete truth.
The part where paypal is being totally unfair and greedy is:

• I had only ebayed one item, and the buyer used his credit card by mistake instead of his bank account. Paypal forced me to upgrade to premier just for that one payment, and purposely removed the option to receive a credit card payment, or to have the buyer resend me a payment from his bank account through paypal.
  Note of course that you conveniently make it illegal by your own rules to accept paypal for an auction, and request not to accept credit card payments.
  What paypal is doing here to force me to upgrade against my will is despicable. What you are doing is that I will look elsewhere than ebay next time, and you will lose money instead of making more through so much greed.
  
• of course, charging 2-3% for person to person payments from paypal funds or a bank account, is close to theft. I will never use a premier account as long as you steal money that way.
  

I realize that you didn't make those rules, but feel free to forward my comments to your management.

Labels: public

A few months ago, I wrote about our search of an agent we not only felt comfortable working with, but also one that would be realistic in what they charge for their work, and not the outdated, unrealistic 2.5-3% (especially in the case of higher priced homes)

So, several months later and finding the right house, I can share our experience.

Executive summary

The best deal is to go with helpusell.com (half fee on the buying side, i.e. 1.25% or 1.5%, and a set $7k-ish on the selling side).
The agent we ended up with, Chen-Chen Wu (homes@chenchenwu.com / 650.269.5996) was fantastic. In my opinion she provided better service than the average full fee agent.
For that matter, she helped us present an offer that let us win the house even though we didn't actually have the highest bid. Right there, she already earned her entire fee back (and she provided more service than that).

How we picked an agent

I ended up avoiding redfin because of warnings that their agents weren't necessarily good at making "close" deals (i.e. multiple offers and/or a picky selling agent), and that some selling agents would also boycott redfin since they see them as a threat.
I do like the redfin idea, but I was just a bit too nervous about using them, especially on somewhat higher end homes and in multiple bid situations. At 1% fee on the buying side, they were the cheapest though.

Our perks team at work had a deal with clickhomes, which charges a set 2% on the buying and selling side. It's a bit better than 3%, but still too high, especially on the selling side where it's easier to get close to 1%.

We also interviewed several agents to see what you could talk them down to, and what they were offering in return, but we found that many did not want to lower their fee significantly, even if they didn't have to drive us around every weekend (we can look for homes and do open houses ourselves). One eventually did agree to slash his fee in almost half, but considering that this is not what he was hoping to charge, or charges his other clients, it just didn't feel very right to go with him since it could have stressed the relationship by making us lesser worth clients.

In a nutshell, we found that most "legacy" (i.e. full fee) agents were kind of bullies hanging on to their overpriced, outdated and fairly monopolistic pricing scheme. They are obviously good salesmen and all used some amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics to justify their higher fees, but this just further turned us off from working with them.

Help-U-Sell

In the end, we found helpusell.com.
The franchise actually means that each agency may not offer the full range from basic to full service, although the one we picked, Happy Choice Realty, did. Basic service is what you'd want if you're an reasonably independent person, need limited hand holding and you are able to go visit open houses on your own.
For that, they charge a reasonable half fee, and refund you the difference (i.e just .25% or .5% more than redfin). Some Help-U-Sell franchises can also provide more time and help for first time buyers, but of course, they have to charge a bit more for that. The main point is that you pay for what you need and use, and not a flat 2.5-3% whether you're an undecided first home buyer, or a reasonably experienced independent buyer. Note however that not all Help-U-Sell locations offer full service, but the one Chen-Chen works at, does, should you need it.
Anyway, the way it worked with Happy Choice Realty/Help-U-Sell is that they have one of the better online MLS aggregators (they all suck somewhat :) ), you get the Emails as soon as a property in your search area and within your criteria (sq ft, price, # of rooms, etc) shows up.

When you start, you go through all the houses on the market, review the ones you'd like to see, and the agent takes you see them, like a regular full fee agent. Two reasons for this:

1. most of those houses already had their open house, so you need an agent to get in.
   
2. this gives a chance to the agent to see what you like and what you don't and help make better recommendations later.
   

After that, you get the mails with new properties throughout the week and depending on the property, the agent may or may not be able to see it before you at an agent tour, and you can ask your agent before going. Basically, you go see the properties added that week and that peak your interest, by yourself at the open houses.
If for some reason, you can't go to an open house, the agent would then make time to go with you, although you obviously can't do this every week, unless you want to pay a bit extra for the agent's time.

Chen-Chen

Long story short, after many months of searching, we ended up finding the right place, which Chen-Chen actually found and suggested for us, as it was just outside our search radius (it ended up being in Cupertino, across the street from one of the areas we were looking in). Without her, we would likely have missed that house.
She also did a great job negotiating for us, guessing the right educated guess of what amount to submit in our offer, and working the other agent and sellers to make us win :) Another lesser agent could have blown the deal there, or made us overpay.

And of course, it was very valuable throughout the process to have an agent who could tell us what prices should reasonably be, let us know if what we were looking for even existed, and where. Chen-Chen even twice made the difficult recommendation that we pass on a property we did consider seriously, because she thought we could get closer to what we wanted (and while that decision cost her more time and effort, she was also right).
Last, but not least, she had more than one opportunity to get us to get a bigger commission by getting us to pay for a more expensive house or offering more than what was necessary on the one house we got, but never did anything close to that. Unfortunately some other agents will in those situations.
In our case, Chen-Chen, without our having to ask even negotiated the agreed upon price down to lower it by the portion of the fee she wasn't going to charge (this is dependent on the seller agreeing, but most will since they gain on the taxes side too).

While I'm a hard critic, and hard to please when big money is involved, I really have to say that in general Help-U-Sell is the way to go: you pay a lot less on the buying side, a flat fee on the selling side. You're not paying for some big firm with three levels of overhead and fee splitting you don't need, or fancy buildings or the countless dead trees and expensive marketing material the big firms spam everyone with.

And within Help-U-Sell, we've obviously been nothing but delighted with Chen-Chen's work: superior work and ethics without paying more than necessary.
The least I can do is recommend her: homes@chenchenwu.com/650.269.5996.
I would not have spent the time to write this much for someone's work, had it been just adequate or average.

Labels: public

As part of the new tech setup, I've been working on getting my mythtv PC to work with HDTV. That shouldn't be hard in theory, but "theory, theory and practise are the same, in practise, they're not :)".
The first thing I found out is that the AMD Sempron 3100+ CPU in there isn't fast enough to play even 720p in realtime, but I found that by using nvidia's XvMC in the card, that was good enough to barely play HDTV in realtime (although that took some configuring).
Then came the problem of actually recording HD content: I had gotten an HDHomeRun from a coworker, which is indeed a neat little device that records unencrypted HD from cable, and forwards the mpeg2 stream to a computer, in my case my mythtv computer.
Up to then, my cable quality was an issue in the house because the incoming cable feed was split 2 ways outside by comcast, then 6 ways to each rooms, and then another 8 ways next to my my AV center in the family room. Obviously the signal was crap by then and I had to find places where to put amps and where to split the signal just the right amount of times.
I found a good store close to my house where they had all kinds of home wiring stuff, including various amps and high quality splitters, and after that the fun was to find where to put the amps, splitters, and signal attenuators (yes, ampping too much makes things not work) to get everything to work. Oh, the best part is that if you put a cable modem behind a regular amp, it won't work, you need a 2 way amp for the return signal of the cable modem to work.
Anyway, when half a day later I had decent analog cable signal where I needed to, I was able to get unencrypted HDTV channels to both my TVs and especially the HDHomeRun device.
You'd think I'd be done by then, but that didn't do much good until mythtv both had TV guide data for the HD channels, and knew to prefer HD recordings to regular recordings. That part wasn't much documented but I got help on the mythtv-users list , which basically was a matter of finding the right xmlids for the HD channels and giving them a higher priority over the same channels.
Anyway, after all this, I finally got one program in my lineup that recorded in HD: the weekly episode of ER, which was a nice surprise.
Yet, for SciFi-HD, I still get to download shows from BT if I want HD because comcast suck (and if they didn't suck, it'd be encrypted so that I can't get it anyway...).
Some people would ask why I go through this pain, which is a valid question. I still like the flexibility of running my DVR, as well as the occasional tinkering.

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Jennifer and I were missing blinds for our house, and some kind of closet solution (right now, we only have empty closets, and nowhere to put our stuff away).
For the blinds, the least expensive was actually to get premium hunter douglas material direct from blinds.com, and tack on a local installer. It was cheaper and better than Home Depot, or 3 day blinds (this is the summary of several days of work and research from Jennifer).

For closets, to have a good idea of what we needed and designed, you can look at what we got after working with Coast Closets, the last design we came up with (note that you can click on the 3D views to see 3D versions of the closet designs). The final proposed price was actually lower after rebates and some tweaks we could have done.

We tried some local companies first, wood, and then melamine, but they basically wanted $7500 to do all our closets. It just felt too much, so we started looking at other options (especially Jennifer).
Eventually, we found Budget Closets for a local option, downgraded our color from floor color to white, and Jennifer later found Coast Closets , which looked like the ideal and cheapest option: we eventually got a quote around $3200, but there were three catches:

1. the design had to be done via Email and or the phone since it was an order from the East Coast. We also had to take very exact measurements and be ok with having closets that would be slightly too small since they wouldn't be cut to exact fit on site. This would have been ok to save $1000, although designing and correcting on the phone was a bit frustrating and pretty time consuming.
   
2. the next issue was that we'd have to arrange for our own local install. In theory it's something we can install ourselves, but we just didn't want the burden or deal with potential problems if the install in the studs wasn't quite right, and later the cabinets fell because of too much weight in some of the anchor points. Problem was that experienced installers wanted to charge a ludicrous $1200-$1500 for a 1.5-2day install, which then made that option not attractive anymore. It would probably work better in places where contractors don't charge an arm and a leg.
   
3. but the last problem which ended up being the dealbreaker for us was that in order to offer better prices than just about anyone else, Coast Closets works directly with the mill and is constrained by what the mill can do, or extra charges they might add if we wanted some non standard cut (making the end price less attractive). Mark from Coast Closets really tried hard to help us, but our closets and needs were just a bit unusual and ended up requiring a bit too much custom work, making his solution not as much of a good match for us anymore.
   

After going back and forth on that solution and seeing how we could work with it, we ended up giving up and going with a small local installer/builder we found while looking for installers: Zen Space Solutions . It ended up costing $4500 at a deeply discounted price since he was trying to compete with the Coast Closets offer. The end result will be about $1000 more, but more custom and better finished. I guess this is what it takes...
At least, we didn't just throw money at the problem, and while it was painful and draining at time, at least we did proper research and diligence in finding the best result/price deal.
Otherwise, Budget Closets would have worked too, although they have more overhead and are more expensive, and for people who don't mind installing themselves, and Coast Closets is still the cheapest option by far if you are comfortable doing your own installs or have access to cheaper install labour than we did.

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So, windows sucks of course, but if you have to pick one, XP is mostly agreed upon as the most usable and least sucky one (although I have windows 2000 in my vmware image because it's smaller and good enough as an application loader).
I wanted to test the new Seattle Avionics Voyager 3D flight planner and synthetic vision software, so I had to use native windows.
First I found out that my WXP partition on my thinkpad was actually broken and that windows would just BSOD after a few minutes of use without any useful error message.

Ok, I used a WXP SP2 CD to do an install/repair on top, but first had to disable AHCI SATA and set my boot drive as IDE to make windows happy (see the SP2 installer has 0 SATA support!). Ok, fine, whatever, I get windows reinstalled on top, things actually work out pretty well, I go in the bios, put SATA AHCI back to make linux happy and go on with my life.
The next day, try windows again and realizes it won't boot longer than 10 seconds, and later I figure out that it can't boot because it removed the SATA drivers in my existing install and became unable to use my drive in AHCI mode. Good job microsoft!
I then wasted a good 2 hours trying to convince WXP to install the AHCI driver (I even knew what chipset I had, which exact driver I needed and where it was on disk), but WXP kept ignoring my request and installing ide-piix instead, the driver for the IDE emulation mode....
In the end, the only thing I was able to do was to find a USB floppy drive, find a floppy (both are hard to get today), find an intel WXP driver floppy generator which then made a driver floppy I was able to use for a 3rd WXP re-install. The best part is that you have a couple of seconds to press F6 during the install boot to tell it you have a driver disk. It went by so fast, I missed it 4 times before I saw and caught it. WTF can't the installer even tell you "I need a driver, do you happen to have one?" instead of "I can't mount your Hard Drive, press F3 to reboot".
Please fire the morons reponsible for all that crap!

Anyway, hours later, system is back up in AHCI mode.
With linux, it would have taken me about 15mn of my time, it would clearly have told me it couldn't find the boot drive, and it would have allowed me to add/enable the driver without having to do 4 consecutive 1H long installs to reinstall a simple driver that I already knew by name!

The thing that worries me is that how ridiculous, and quite frankly difficult, this procedure was overly complicated, and quite frankly borderline impossible for most people, simply because microsoft could not be bothered to add SATA support to their installer, and I think it's because they just want people to install their piece of crap Vista instead, and this part worries me because they're going to make it increasingly difficult to use XP and force people into all the crap that is vista and its even worse license.

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So, Jennifer and I flew to Chicago during the weekend, and for reasons that are a bit long, I didn't have my driver's license with me.
Not to worry though, I knew that for a local flight, licenses or IDs were not actually required to travel within the US.

At the checkin, I showed them a copy of my real license, which they could have looked up by number, but they have no way to do that. I also had a real copy of my old license, which had expired driving privileges, but was still a perfectly good ID.
Why expired driving licenses aren't good IDs if the picture matches, is beyond me...

Anyway, I got the SSSS (special security screening something...), and the sole security guy at SJC proceeded to inspect every single pocket of my scottevest jacket while complaining to me that had too many pockets and too much stuff (he actually missed a couple of pockets).
Then, he started working on my backpack and asked me "is it as bad as your jacket?". I told him yes, he started and then just gave up because by then he had backed up the security line for 10mn.

So, outside of the fact that going through all this when I actually had a fully legit but just expired ID, and a copy of my real ID that they should be able to look up, is pretty sad.
Where they failed is that I was going through security with Jennifer, we had a combined ticket, she didn't have the SSSS, and they didn't search anything on her even though she was with me the entire time.

On the way back, it got worse though: we showed up a bit earlier at the airport (Chicago/ORD). Since I was somewhat annoyed that the previous guy emptied all the carefully sorted pockets in my scottevest, I just gave my jacket to Jennifer, I got the SSSS again, the guy barely looked at my backpack and couldn't look at my jacket since I didn't have it with me (not that he would have bothered apparently), and I went through.
Then, it occurred to me that the only reason I got SSSS was that they had written SSSS on my printed at home boarding pass. Next time, I can just print two boarding passes, they print SSSS on one, and I show the other pristine one at security.

Seriously, this stuff is just a joke!

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