All posts by rbowen

Waiting for nothing

I think that what frustrates me the most about driving in Lexington is waiting for nothing. I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting at red lights while no traffic goes in the other direction. Invariably, about the time that my light turns green, cars start arriving at the perpendicular light, in order to wait while one or two cars go through the other way, and they they, too, wait for nothing, for another 2 or 3 minutes.

Surely *someone* has studied the mathematics of traffic lights and can make intelligent decisions about how lights should work so that this doesn’t happen. Indeed, in other cities, I don’t experience this sort of thing. It seems to happen only in Lexington.

What’s up with that?

Blazing saddles

On Thursday, driving along Richmond Road, around lunch time, I was stopped at a red light. As the light turned green and cars started to move, I noticed that the spot in the right lane, where a Chevy Cavalier had been sitting, which was blazing merrily. Then the Chevy itself burst into flames, with brilliant orange flames billowing out from under the vehicle as it drove off, oblivious. Various people beeped and waved, and the driver pulled to the side as black smoke started to billow voluminously from the engine, and from under the car. I held back just a bit, so that I’d be out of range when it exploded. The guy sat in the car for somwhat longer than I would have, and then slowly climbed out as his car turned into a cheery raging inferno.

A fire engine which just happened to be across the street pulled over as I was driving speedily away.

Note to self: Chevy Cavalier not a good choice for next car.

Mind over matter

Today was Sarah’s first day in her new swimming class.

While there there was another class going on with much smaller kids. One little guy suddenly plunged headlong from the side of the pool and disappeared from sight. About 1/28 of a second later, his father plunged in after him, fully dressed, complete with his pager, cell phone, and WinCE handheld computer. He came up with the kid, crying but unhurt, while the life guards were still trying to figure out what was going on.

After things calmed down, he borrowed a towell and disappeared into the changing room.

I spoke to him afterwards, and asked him if his hardware survived. He said that none of it had. but that he didn’t regret what he did. He’d thought about what he might do in a situation came up, and so when it did, there was no need to hesitate, and he knew exactly what he needed to do.

Way to go, dad!

Ebay is of the Devil

There. I said it. EBay is of the Devil. It’s an evil, wicked, unholy addiction. The entire site is geared to get people to buy stuff that they don’t need or want, at completely unjustified prices.

Oh, wait, that’s how our entire economy works. I forgot.

I’ve been looking for a decent compass that didn’t cost a fortune, and I found a “Military style compass”, which I bought for $0.01. Which makes me wonder, what’s going to be wrong with it when it shows up? Will it be the size of a pencil eraser? Will it point SSE? Will it even arrive?

Next, why do they assume that if I just bought one X that I’m sure to want 48 more Xs? I suppose they must have good results with this approach, or they would not do it. Perhaps a lot of collectors shop on ebay. Dunno. I just know that the few times I have gone shopping on ebay, I’ve ended up with stuff that I didn’t really want, and paid way too much for it.

ISSN’s

Ken wants to know who’d be interested in donating time to get ISSNs approved.

Well, I had thought briefly about getting an ISSN, since I knew at least that it could be done, but after seeing Ken’s various mentions of it, I had concluded that it probably wasn’t worth the time.

Yeah, I’d be interested in spending a few of my blog-reading hours providing feecback to the LOC in order to get ISSNs approved. Might even read some interesting stuff in the process.

For those of you who read this, but don’t usually read Ken’s stuff, first of all, you should, but go read his idea about ISSNs.

Confusing spam

I continue to find spam confusing.

Why would someone send out hundreds of spam messages, for example, with no body text? For a while, I just assumed that there was some attachment that I wasn’t seeing because I wasn’t using Outbreak, or that there was some hidden HTML. But, no, there’s nothing at all. I looked at the mbox, and it’s just a blank message.

The business of sending a misleading subject line I sort of understand – to get people to read a message that they would not otherwise read. But when the subject line is “load insect ambrosial”, who’s going to read that?

Oh, and here’s a fun one. I’ve gotten several messages lately where it was apparent that the spammer didn’t quite know how to use their software. For example, the subject line might be %RND_CHARS(8-20) which, presumably, was supposed to generate a string of 8 to 20 random characters.

Another thing recently has been a series of messages with the following subject line:

is could be your Ticket…|Don’t let this slip through your fingers….|The Stars are the Limit…|It222s your time to Come Aboard…|Don’t miss the Train…To your Dreams…|Awesome Opportunity!|Secrets of the Rich Finally Revealed!|See What the “Heavy Hitters” do not want you to know!|Generate Massive Wealth!|Show Me!|Accumulate Massive Wealth!|At Last, Secrets of the Rich and Powerful Finally Revealed!|See What We’ve Never Been Shown Before!|The Last One You Will Ever Need!|WOW! Please Check This One Out, You Won’t Be Sorry!|Staying’ Home and Loving’ It!|Opportunity Express!|Secrets of Internet Millionaires!|Change Your Future Forever!|Finally, an Answer to Your Prayers!|The World’s Greatest Opportunity!|The Most Realistic Program Ever!|Top of the Line Opportunity!|Once In A Lifetime Opportunity!|An Opportunity You Can’t Keep to Yourself!|This One is Really Easy!|You%}

So, I can only presume here that the spammer is a complete moron (I mean, even more than regular spammers) and could not figure out how to get the software to pick just one of the titles. The good news is that you can take that entire list and feed it directly into your spam filtering, and catch that entire category of spam in one easy step. Very helpful of them, don’tcha think?