I came across this amusing blog post about Amazon.com’s German-language site’s product recommendations for a baseball bat. I didn’t particularly believe it, except that they include a link through to the product page, confirming that it is, indeed, actually what is shown on Amazon.
This latest anti-piracy ad seems to only get across one point: its makers are horribly out of touch with this “21st Century” thing.
Furthermore, selling pirated software? If you were going to buy a pirated application or video, why not just download it yourself? I’m pretty sure that’s not what the video wants me to take away, though.
I’ve been looking at the Kindle again lately. I have a lot of PDFs, so I would have to get the Kindle DX, which is $489. (Incidentally, the small/normal Kindle appears to have been reduced to $299 recently.) The DX looks unreasonably big, but I think that it’s pretty comparable to an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. Electronics should be small, but the screen to read books on should be big.
$489 is a lot of money. The ability to consolidate many PDFs on it is neat. If I were still in school I would give a lot of thought to getting it, photographing all the pages in my textbooks, and converting to PDF. Textbooks are heavy. (I don’t condone it, but there is apparently such a thing as pirated e-books, including textbooks.)
You can subscribe to many major newspapers and have them delivered to your Kindle. The same is true of a few dozen magazines. This is an incredible idea. The pricing seems off to me, though. $14/month for the New York Times? It’s cheaper than subscribing to the print edition, true. But it’s enough to make me realize that it’s probably not worth it. If it were, say, $5/month, I’d sign up without thinking. (If I had a Kindle.) Additionally, they have poor reviews, with users complaining that graphics don’t always look good at all, and that the Kindle versions often don’t have the full content, with articles occasionally being truncated.
I’m not really into buying books, though. I like libraries. When libraries don’t have the books I want, I often try to get them from half.com. $10 for a book is a bargain in some cases, but it’s still $10 more than the library charges. I buy a handful of books, but not if I don’t have to. Plus “buying” an e-book isn’t really teh same as buying a dead-tree book. I think it’s going to take a long time for people, myself included, to see them as analogous. The whole scandal with Amazon deleting a book from customers’ devices that they found was sold without proper arrangements for loyalties set them far, far back in this area, too.
The browser is fairly basic, but pretty awesome. I don’t go anywhere without a 3G iPhone, though, so it’s not as if having “real” Internet access with me is something new. And it sounds like Safari on the iPhone does a much better job of handling graphics, etc. than does the Kindle. Having looked into this a bit, it seems that you’re effectively forced to go through their proxy servers, and that nothing, not even DNS, will work if you don’t. This works great for what it’s intended for, but poorly if you’d hoped to “hack” it to do more. (For example, if it had an ssh client, it might be much more attractive to me, since it would be of great benefit to me professionally. But it doesn’t, and one won’t work, unless it’s through a webpage.)
It’s also disappointing that there’s not an SD slot for expansion.
At the end of the day, though, $489 is way too much. If I could use it for ssh anywhere, and if there was a wealth of free content, it might be worth it. But if I’m buying it to buy books for, I don’t think it’s worth more than about $199 to me. Sorry, Amazon.
I found a TED talk, How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air. A firm was tasked with improving air quality at an office park in New Delhi, where the air quality was very poor. They have a blog post with more details if you’re impatient.
Here are 30 Areca Palm seeds on eBay, though it seems that it might take a few years for them to grow to maturity. The Areca palms apparently not only help to purify air, but they are humidifiers, too. It seems like it’s the most difficult to grow, though, but far from impossible.
A lot of news agencies are reputed to have banks of scanners, to ensure they’re hearing everything public safety agencies are doing. In a discussion of some “sensitive” frequencies used for surveillance in the area on a local scanner group, there were a few references to the local media having been aware of them for a long time.
So it’s easy to see how this happened. Some guy in a news agency heard the Coast Guard on an alternate channel of theirs discussing a “suspect vessel” firing shots, and knew that Obama was in the area at the time. Instant pressing news! Except it turns out that the Coast Guard was conducting a drill. It’s really pretty common practice. A few years ago I spent about 30 minutes glued to the scanner hearing about a bomb that had gone off in a neighboring town’s high school, and the enormous response by the police department and SWAT team, until someone finally said something over the air indicating that it was a drill. My local fire department is much better at stating “This is a drill!” as often as possible, to the point of annoyance.
It does seem a bit insensitive to have a training exercise on 9/11, but then again, not many people would be aware of it if the news agencies hadn’t blindly reported what they heard on the scanner.
I somehow wound up on the GOP mailing list, and received this e-mail today:
Dear Matt, Once again, President Obama stepped in front of the prime time TV cameras to attempt to sell the Democrats’ leftist health care scheme to legislators and anyone else who might still be paying attention. The charm offensive isn’t working. Americans no longer feel the need to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. They have seen through the hype and media adoration to understand that the Obama Democrats are determined to push their far-left agenda on our country whether the American people like it or not. You can feel the rising mood of freedom-loving Americans across this country. Not afraid, but incensed and determined, that their government not be a menace to our hard-earned liberty and prosperity. They are extremely concerned that the President and his congressional allies are launching an unprecedented assault against the principles upon which America was built. At town hall meetings, Tea Party protests, and countless other gatherings of concerned patriots, Americans are saying enough is enough. Enough taxes. Enough spending. Enough debt. Enough entitlement. And enough arrogance. Enough. Those running the Administration and Congress have never seen this kind of public outpouring of dissent. They alone who have the right to protest. They who “know best.” They are wrong. Our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Those aren’t just fancy words. They are the bedrock upon which our republic was founded. Whether power hungry officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill like it or not, they are to serve the interests of the people — not the other way around. Well, the town halls are over, and Congress is back in session. That’s why you still need to show your support for the principled position of fiscal restraint, personal responsibility, and unfettered liberty as opposed to the Obama Democrats in Washington who are trying to force leftist “change” upon our country. Send a personalized e-postcard, your own “Declaration of Independence,” to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who lead the elitist, “progressive” Democrats. Let them know enough is enough — you won’t stand idly by while they threaten our livelihoods and liberty with their outrageous Washington power grab. And when you send your virtual postcard, I hope you will also take this opportunity to make a secure online contribution of $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can to the RNC today to help fund our efforts to recruit and support effective, principled Republican candidates who will know who they work for when they defeat the Democrats this fall and in 2010. Let’s hold the Obama Democrats accountable for their opportunistic, selfish power grab. Please send a strong message to the Obama Democrats today Sincerely, Michael Steele Chairman, Republican National Committee P.S. Matt, you can make the Obama Democrats in Washington know you mean business — send them an e-card today. And when you do, please take this opportunity to make a secure online contribution of $25, $50, $100 or more to the RNC to support and elect Republicans who believe in the conservative principles America was founded on. Thank you.
While I’m hardly a GOP sympathizer, I consider myself open to both sides. And their e-mail surely disappoints in that regard. Note that not a single fact about health care is mentioned, yet the plan is an “unprecedented assault against the principles upon which America was built,” and represents an “opportunistic, selfish power grab” by “Obama Democrats.” For one, why oppose the plan? It’s utterly unmentioned, and most of the reasons I’ve heard are based on baldfaced lies.
But more significantly, I think, it never once mentions the GOP plan to reform health care. During the elections, McCain was nearly as vehement as Democrats in stating that the health care system needs urgent reforms. We need to lower costs, insure more people, and improve quality. It would seem that you can’t do them all at once, except that many other nations are doing just that. And the thing that bugs me so much is that I know that some Republicans have excellent ideas, and that, if both parties worked together, we’d have the most effective, most efficient health care system in the world.
But instead, we have this crap. Name calling, baseless accusations, and outright lies. I hear that Pelosi has cooties, too.
SEO has been a fairly weak area of mine in the past, so I’ve been trying to brush up on it. Some of the stuff mentioned is really obvious and repeated everywhere (don’t use Flash if you want it indexed; pay attention to keywords…), but there’s a whole industry around SEO. I just came across 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love, which, although it includes some of the banal advice, is also chock-full of useful advice. Some of what’s mentioned goes against some of what I’d intuited but makes me happy as a netizen to know: “keyword bombing,” for example, often ends up counting against you. Apparently, leaving spammy links in the comments of other sites can do harm, too. A constant supply of fresh content helps to boost relevance, it seems.
The author of that site also posits that links from .edu sites seem to be weighted pretty highly. I wish I was aware of this when I maintained three separate sites in college. Of course, many of the other points seem to suggest that blindly linking to my site for the sole purpose of boosting my ratings might not have actually done much for me. What a lot of the good guides seem to keep coming back to is that, more than anything, having content that people naturally link to is the best thing you can possibly do for SEO.
Edit: An interesting tidbit: Google apparently takes domain name ownership into account, so that a change in domain name ownership appears to wipe out any “trust” that the domain build up. This is pretty interesting to me.
Edit 2: The list got reposted as 106 Quick SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love, and it has some more interesting tips. I’m liking the unconventional wisdom: they mention that linking to other sites, for example, isn’t a bad idea. Conventional wisdom holds that you don’t want to waste “link juice” on other sites. Check out #92, which seems to suggest some creepy levels of knowledge by Google.
For a while at work, whenever we’d do any sort of update of code, we’d announce it to users. Sometimes it was ultra-minor features, and we’d just make announcements like, “We fixed a few back-end bugs that may make the site nominally faster,” just for the sake of announcing that we were doing things. But I found a curious effect: we’d fix a single line of code causing a very specific bug, and soon, people started writing in about all sorts of new problems. Some of them were bugs that we’ve known about for months, others were things that were impossible, and the rest were things that couldn’t possibly have been related to the change we made. And then others would pile on, saying things like, “They have problems like this every time they release new updates,” and whatnot. The psychology of this fascinated me, and, when we did updates that had minimal user impact, I started lobbying to make no announcement about them. And when we did that, the number of complaints about bugs dropped. People still reported actual bugs, but it put an end to the “Can’t they do an update that doesn’t break more features than it adds?” posts that blamed our updates for bugs that we didn’t introduce.
The Latin term non-sequitur seemed fitting for that phenomenon, and also for something else that I always found interesting: arguments about the politics of very personal matters. Some have argued that gay marriage out to be banned because homosexuals cannot conceive children, for example, even though no one argues that infertile heterosexual couples ought to be denied the same right, nor is it even a sane reason to ban marriage.
Here’s my latest non-sequitur. And it’s totally true, even though it makes no sense at all: since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I’ve at least doubled the number of times I’ve entered my password incorrectly. It’s a remarkable difference, though perhaps aided by confirmation bias. But the thing is, even with confirmation bias accounted for, it really is happening way more often. But I can usually feel my fingers making the mistake, so I know it’s not a Snow Leopard bug. The only logical conclusion is that Snow Leopard is actually making me press the wrong keys. (Actually, an equally-probable conclusion is that Leopard would allow logins with the incorrect password, and now it’s actually checking it. I’m pretty sure neither of these is true, though.)
Actually, another example of the logical fallacies here is perhaps better shown by the best use of US taxpayer money ever, this diagram purportedly created by the US Department of Transportation, demonstrating that “correlation does not mean causation” by showing an eerily exact precise trend that doesn’t make any sense to have even thought about graphing.
I find myself surfing SlickDeals and FatWallet even when I’m not looking to buy anything… Here are some hot deals I’m aware of, for anyone else materialistic who might be in the market for any of these things:
This Youtube video of a jewelry store robbery gets progressively more and more entertaining.
At the beginning, I couldn’t help but chuckle as they feel compelled to smash the glass door that others had just walked right through, since the door was open since it was the middle of the day. And any time this may have saved is negated when the guy drops a bag and has to bend over and pick it up before going in. I marveled at the remarkably short time between going in and coming out, and was entertained when the guy with a baseball bat came chasing after them. And for extra hilarity, a man comes walking out with a fire extinguisher a minute later.
But then various other camera angles are shown, and it becomes apparent that the sledgehammer-wielding, motorcycle-riding bandits are actually inept criminals.
