No Zytrons In Range

I’ve been inspired by LiveJournal’s Virtual Gift Store, but I think I can do them one better. I’ll make you a deal, for a limited time only, you can be the proud owner of this icon:

Yes, you’re seeing it correctly. That’s over four thousand pixels available at a single low price. Not only is each pixel painstakingly selected from one of over 16 million individual colors, but this lovely showpiece even includes transparent pixels. Transparency not available for most icons at twice the price!

But wait, there’s more! In addition to the normal sized icon, you’ll also receive, not one, not two, but five (5) small wallet-size icons! Use on your iPod, Zune, Cellphone, or any electronic device– perfect for showing off your icon while on-the-go!

    

What, you ask, is the price for this tremendous collection of beautiful hand-crafted butterfly icons? You might want to sit down for this:

That’s less than two dollars, less than your morning coffee! But I still don’t think that’s a good enough bargain, so let’s sweeten the deal. Order in the next 10 minutes and you’ll also receive the versatile large icon:

This large icon is perfect for those formal occasions, when not just any icon will do. Your friends will be amazed at the detail and clarity!

Call now, operators are standing by.

P.S. Yes, Firefox 3 apparently does support the blink tag. Go figure.

A recent “live chat” with an Earthlink customer service representative. Proving that if you ever see anything that looks like dry-loop DSL in Washington State, you’re dreaming and should go back to bed.

Chat Information: Thank you for choosing our secure EarthLink Sales chat. All agents are currently assisting other customers. Thank you for your patience. You are number ’1′ of ’1′ customers in line. Your estimated wait is ’0′ minutes and ’30′ seconds.
Chat Information: Hello and welcome to EarthLink’s secure live Sales chat. You are chatting with Kelly K..
Kelly K.: Thank you for using EarthLink’s live Sales chat. How can I help you today?
James Schend: Hi, I currently have Verizon and I want to drop my landline phone service and get dry-loop DSL, is that a service you offer?
Kelly K.: Great, I can help you with that.
Kelly K.: Let me see what is the best service available for you.
Kelly K.: To do a check for service I will need your full name, phone number and complete physical address at that location.
James Schend: My name is James Schend
James Schend: Phone is ___-___-____
James Schend: And address is __________
Kelly K.: Thank you.
Kelly K.: One moment while I get that information for you.
Kelly K.: Thank you for your patience.
Kelly K.: I see that you are serviceable for our High Speed DSL service.
Kelly K.: Our Freestanding (Dry Loop) DSL Internet is not available at that location yet.
James Schend: Ugh, that’s no better than Verizon. Is there any way to be notified when it’s available, or request it?
James Schend: I’d rather not give Comcast any money, but I’m sick of being ripped-off for a local phone I never use.
Kelly K.: I am afraid no. Well you can keep your phone service to the minimum so that our Highspeed DSL Internet can run.
James Schend: What would that cost per month?
Kelly K.: This is a best effort technology with speeds up to 1.5mb on the download and up to 128kb on the upload.
Kelly K.: Right now I can save you $99 by waiving the fee for equipment and activation. You then get the first 3 months of your contract for only $12.95/ mo. and the remaining 9 months are just $39.95 each.
Kelly K.: I can get this started for you right now, if you would like.
James Schend: I’d rather have 3 mbit, is that available?
James Schend: That’s what I currently have through Verizon.
Kelly K.: Sure.
Kelly K.: This is a best effort technology with speeds up to 3.0mb on the download and up to 384kb on the upload.
Kelly K.: Right now I can save you $99 by waiving the fee for equipment and activation. You then get the first 3 months of your contract for only $19.95/ mo. and the remaining 9 months are just $39.95 each.
Kelly K.: Would you like me to get this order started for you?
James Schend: What kind of phone service comes with that? You said the bare minimum, but I still ahve to pay all the phone taxes
Kelly K.: Well we do not provide phone service.
James Schend: You just said it would be minimum phone service to qualify for DSL
Kelly K.: I am just telling you that you can keep your existing phone service to the minimum cost so that you can use our Highspeed DSL Internet.
James Schend: That’s no different than what I have now, except I have to pay 2 bills every month
James Schend: Instead of one
Kelly K.: Well that’s right but EarthLink DSL service is rated the best service by PC Magazine as well as JD Power. With all of the additional features that we offer with our Internet service that is hard to get with other companies , along with our Award Winning Technical and Customer support
James Schend: I don’t care about any of that, I just want internet service at a decent price with NO local phone and NO cable TV.
James Schend: I don’t know why it’s so damned hard to get that.
James Schend: I’m knowledgeable enough on computers that I guarantee that I’ll never call your tech support or download your software.
James Schend: I just need service.
Kelly K.: I understand your concern but our Freestanding (Dry Loop) DSL Internet is not available at that location yet.
James Schend: It’s 2008. When will it be? When I’m long dead?
James Schend: Sorry, I’m just so frustrated that I’m chained to this goddamned useless phone.
Kelly K.: I understand your frustration.
James Schend: Well, thanks anyway for your help. But paying more and having two bills instead of one isn’t an improvement.

Yes, just because Washington State is home to Microsoft, Amazon and Nintendo of America doesn’t mean we get any reprieve from the lousy state of Internet provider monopolies in this country. God-forbid I go my life without a useless and annoying land-line telephone, Verizon’s doing me a favor by offering me shitty service!

(P.S. Yes, I realize I was pretty rude to the sales person there. Oh well.)

This is all I ever see when I try to use Google Docs Offline while actually offline. Brilliant work there, Google. (It seems to work fine while I’m actually online, if that’s any consolation.)

A relatively recent Firefox update, I think maybe 2.0 when it came out, added a clever new feature. It saves a running log of your session so that, if Firefox crashes, the session can be restored as if it was working all along.

(Normally I’d gripe about Firefox crashing at all, but since it runs third-party code in the form of plug-ins, I suppose there’s not all that much the Mozilla Foundation can do about it. Being a Mac user from the Classic era, and remembering the horror of Extensions, I’m particularly forgiving on this front. The session restoring is better than nothing.)

The problem is what Firefox thinks an “interrupted session” is. Specifically, if Firefox is running and I log out, restart, or shut down, Firefox, the next time I start it up I’m presented with the annoying dialog box from hell: “Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly:”

No, Firefox. It didn’t close unexpectedly. I chose “Log Out” from the goddamned menu, and I expected it to close. How else could I log out if my applications didn’t close? Der.

This presents two different possibilities, listed in order from kind of stupid to completely stupid:

1. The Mozilla Foundation believes that Firefox users are so stupid they won’t realize that the OS will have to close Firefox to restart.
2. The Mozilla Foundation is so stupid that they don’t realize that the OS will have to close Firefox to restart.

So what does Google have to do with this? Well, they’ve introduced a new plug-in for Firefox called Google Browser Sync which, well, it does pretty much what the name implies it does: it syncs all browser settings between multiple computers. It also, lo and behold, has a feature where it can save your session and restore it, much like Firefox’s built-in feature that does the same thing.

The only difference is what Google considers an interrupted session: Any time Firefox is closed, for any reason, your session is interrupted. Were you finished browsing? Doesn’t matter, if you close Firefox, your session was interrupted and Google Browser Sync will “helpfully” ask if you want to restore it.

Firefox’s definition of “interrupted session” is stupid. The OS telling Firefox to quit isn’t an “interrupted session” no matter how you look at it. But Google’s definition is beyond stupid, I’m afraid. My only question to the developers of Google Browser Sync: How do I end my Firefox session without interrupting it? Do you have to go back to your homepage before closing it? Or maybe go to “about:blank”? Whatever it is, please tell me.

Well, it’s only a matter of time before a Google executive finishes setting up their projector for the high-roller tech demo, opens up his copy of Firefox and sees this:

And the feature will be gone forever.

Looks like I netted myself a scammer recently. I got this email a couple weeks ago expressing interest in one of the domain names I have for sale:

Hello,

We are interested in trivialpedia.com

Your name was listed for sale. Please let us know your price.

Our company provides IT security services and performs security audit of local and global networks. Our clients are mainly based in Europe and Canada.

So investing in names is an additional direction of our financial strategy.

Looking forward to do business with you.

Regards,
Harold R. Ferguson
President
ITC Security Services
============================================================================
NOTICE – This communication may contain confidential and privileged
information that is for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any
viewing, copying or distribution of, or reliance on this message by
unintended recipients is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
message in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message
and deleting it from your computer.

===========================================================================

I took this email at its word, even though it was being sent from a free email address. (The address was ferguson@phreaker.net.) So I wrote the following reply, which is also helpful if you’re curious why I registered that domain name:

Harold,

I’m not sure if you’re aware of the current debate in the Wikipedia community over the application of notability guidelines on Wikipedia. I registered the domain name trivialpedia.com with the intention of creating a spoof/alternative to Wikipedia, running the same MediaWiki software package, which would have a policy of never deleting any wiki stories, no matter how pointless or trivial.

Wikipedia currenly has 5.7 million registered users, and tens of millions of unregistered users, so I’m sure you can see how valuable a domain like trivialpedia.com can be. The domain name is currently registered through Network Solutions through November 5th, 2009. I’m asking $1500 for the name.

Thank you for your interest, and I look forward to your reply.

I’ve read about domain name scams before, and this next reply seems to be a perfect scammer’s reply:

Hello,

Sorry for delay with this answer. We celebrated my newborn child. I’m a happy father now.

Now let’s talk business.

Can you accept 1,400 USD?

Do you sell domain with a web site or just name?

If just name it’s ok. Web site is not necessary.

Have you had your domains appraised already? Can you show me your valuation certificates? As fas I know it’s a common practice to show appraisal of domain name (even without traffic and web site) before doing business.

Without appraisal I risk to overpay. In other words I won’t be able to make a profit on reselling this name. It’s very important for you and me to know the current market value of your domains.

Of course, we must be sure that you are engaging an appraisal company with REAL manual service. I heard many appraisal companies often made inaccurate auto-generated appraisals. I will only accept appraisals from independent sources I trust. To avoid mistakes I asked domain experts about reputable appraisal companies in a forum

http://domaintalk.ourplace.com/Archive/740529.htm

Just check this posting.

If the appraisal comes higher you can adjust your asking price accordingly. I also hope you can give me 10% – 15% discount of the appraised value.

After I get an appraisal from you we’ll continue our negotiations.

How do you prefer to get paid: www.escrow.com, www.PayPal.com check or wire?

Hope we can come to an agreement fast.

Looking forward to your reply.

Notice the following details:

• He inserts some personal details, a glimpse into his life. Nobody doing a business deal would put in those details because they’re frankly irrelevant.
• He makes an offer that’s only $100 less than my original offer. That’s not typical/normal, normally you’d counter-offer a third to a half less the original offer.
• He asks if there’s a site associated with the name. Obviously, Harold here has done zero research. If he had visited the name in a browser, he’d see there’s no site there currently.
• The vast, vast long explanation of how important appraisals are. Notice that it doesn’t contain any offer for him to pay for the appraisal, even though he’s quite capable of it and welcome to do it.
• As mentioned before, this email came from a free email address. I did pop off an email to “ITC Security Services” (at least the Google result that most closely matched his claims) asking if they could confirm his employment, and got no reply back. That might be company policy, or it might mean the entire company is bogus. (Website looked legit, though.)

I sent him back a reply pointing out a couple of these flaws and asking for some assurance before we continue:

Harold,

As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a common domain name scam involving domain name appraisals. Specifically, the scammer would send an email to the domain owner requesting that the domain owner pay for a high quality appraisal. After the appraisal, which the scammer would receive a commission for, the scammer would send an email saying that they are no longer interested in the domain being offered.

There are several points of your offer that worry me:
1) Despite supposedly working for a well-known security company which is “diversifying” into domain names, your email address is anonymously generated from a free email site.
2) The forum posting you directed me to to find appraisal services does not appear to be an actual forum– that is, there is no email subscription link, and there is no way to post a new comment.
3) Additionally, the forum posting recommends against using a well-respected domain appraisal service, afternic.com, and instead using an appraisal service that have no name recognition factor.

Before we continue with this negotiation, I’m afraid I have to ask you for some evidence that the offer is genuine. Please respond back using an email address provided by your employer, ITC Security Services and we can proceed from there.

Also, in the mean time, if you wish to have the domain appraised at your expense, please be my guest. Thank you.

And it’s been a solid week now with no reply. Bye-bye scammer.

I guess I should write an update to my last posting about my crummy experience using Google Checkout to make a purchase.

I purchased my iFM and it was delivered, I signed for it, opened up the package and suffered extreme disappointment that the iFM doesn’t work with my iPod. Apparently, it relies on a little port that Apple used to put next to the headphone jack called the “remote port”. (See this delightfully crazy page to see what it looks like.) As you can see, virtually every iPod in existence, except my 30 GB video iPod, has a remote port right next to the headphone jack.

You’ll also notice that Griffin Technology actually has two versions of the iFM: one that works with my iPod, and one that doesn’t. Brilliant.

Five demerits to Apple, for removing a port that tons of iPod accessories relied on for no reason what-so-ever. Two-and-a-half demerits to Griffin Technology for upgrading a product without renaming it. (You can’t really blame Griffin as much when Apple does the same thing.)

So it’s been a terrible customer experience all around, and I still don’t have a working FM receiver for my iPod. I give up.

Small point, then the big point.

Small point, I heard from a friend that Google’s email service, Gmail, is now offering IMAP access to some percentage of accounts. I’ve been looking forward to this for ages, so I logged onto Gmail to see if my account had been set up with IMAP. It hasn’t, unfortunately, but there was a nice prevalent link on the help page named “What about IMAP?” Clicking it? 404 error. Good help there, Google.

Big point. Later I was lamenting the fact that it’s impossible to find a portable AM/FM radio with rechargable batteries, so that you could charge it like your cell phone or iPod and not have to constantly buy more expensive AAAs. That same friend found a product called Griffin iFM which actually plugs into your iPod and turns it into a radio, no batteries required, and even linked me to Google’s product search page of all the retailers selling the iFM.

The most affordable was from an outfit named Jepago. Never heard of them before, but Google supposedly vets these vendors before allowing them to use Google Checkout, and I trust Google more than most web companies, so I clicked the large “Google Checkout” link next to the product listing and proceeded to enter all my billing information– name, billing address, credit card number, expiration date, that little verification number on the back of the card. I hit “Submit” and waited. And waited. And waited. Five minutes later I gave up, resigned to having to call my credit card provider to reverse the charge that I know is coming. Or, at worst, to have to get a new card altogether as this sleazy company sells my credit card information to very crook in the US.

I’d like to tell Google how much Jepago sucks ass, but of course there’s no feedback link for stores. If it has the Google Checkout logo, it’s supposedly trusted and there’s nothing you can do to change Google’s mind, not even an email address to use. Crap.

The next retailer on Google product search with the iFM listed (Advanced Tech Toys) didn’t steal my card, but their site was terrible. When you created an account, it asked for an address but didn’t specify whether they wanted a shipping address or a billing address. I just took a wild-ass guess and put in my billing address. Next step in the process, it says it’s going to ship to the address I just entered, and if I want it shipped somewhere else I have to add another address to my “address book.” Fine; Amazon works fundamentally the same way. So I go to their address book, and it states clearly at the bottom that I’m only allowed one address. Strike two.

The third retailer I tried (priceparts.com) actually seemed to work on the first try, miracle of miracles.

Hey Google, your Google Checkout retailers all seem to suck. Please do a little bit of quality control, and filter out these scam companies and companies that don’t even have a working website. Thank you.

P.S. As I was typing this, I got an email from Jepago.com. Apparently they HAD processed my credit card and created an order, despite their website not working. Thank God, that means they’re probably not going to steal my credit card information, and hopefully there’ll be a human there that can cancel my order.

While surfing today, I came across some evidence that, despite reading up on it for years and owning several domains, I know absolutely nothing about the domain name market. Behold:

For the image-impaired, that right there is a screenshot of the Sedo.com domain name auction site’s “featured domains.” And highlighted in red is the domain whypaintcat.com with an asking price of $3250. That’s over three thousand dollars for whypaintcat.com.

What the hell! It’s gibberish! It’s not even whypaintacat.com, which would at least be grammatically correct. (Or perhaps whypaintcats.com.) By that logic, my domain hiareyou.com has to be worth at least five grand– it’s equally nonsensical, but it has shorter words in it.

And kind of website could you possibly put at whypaintcat.com!? Is it an educational site for cat owners who want to justify their irrational need to put a coat of latex-based on their pets? Is it a new soft drink with a surreal name to attract hipsters? I don’t get it.

If you own whypaintcat.com, or you recently bought it for an outrageous fee from Sedo.com before Googling it and finding this blog posting, please send me an email. I’m bubbling over with curiosity. Was it worth the money?

And for God’s sake: Why paint cat? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sometimes things just come together. For instance, when I’m sitting around on my ass pointlessly surfing the web and I come across a blog post listing a whole bunch of different videos of random people playing the Mario theme song on various instruments. From there, it was a short step to realizing that, when it comes down to it, embedding a YouTube (or Google Video, for that matter) video is easy… it’s just a single line of HTML code. It’s also trivial to write a small PHP script to randomly insert a text file stored on the server into a page. Combining these two ideas, after a short domain name search, I came up with Yourmario.com.

This site features one of over 30 videos of random people playing the Mario theme song on various instruments. (Those mentioned in the blog post above, plus quite a few others I found on my own.) In addition, it also has a link for you to load a new video and a little comment section. The background to the page is also selected at random, although I only have two of those at the moment, a warp zone background and a bowser background. The comments are stored site-wide, just something so people can leave their mark. And, more to the point, I wanted to practice a little of that shiny new AJAX technique everybody talks about to update content dynamically without requiring a page reload. (Thus, you can leave a comment without interrupting the playing video, or even have an entire conversation with some other random visitor.)

The alpha transparency is one of the interesting little-known HTML/CSS features I found while making this site and decided to put to use. I needed a way to display the Load Another link, as well as the comment section, so that it would work over any background and still remain legible. Seeing as every modern web browser supports alpha transparency, it seemed like a good solution to this problem. The CSS used is:

background: black;
filter:alpha(opacity=75);
-moz-opacity:0.75;
opacity: 0.75;

If you use a syntax-highlighting editor, you’ll notice that none of these variations are highlighted. From what I understand, the third is the actual CSS 3.0 compliant way of setting the opacity, while the first is for IE and the second is for Mozilla/Firefox. I don’t know which of these tags is supposed by Safari, but Safari displays the site correctly as well. I haven’t tested the site in Opera or Konquerer or iCab or anything other than IE, Firefox and Safari.

The AJAXy comment feature was easy to implement once I realized that, despite being called “XMLHttpRequest()”, the relevant Javascript function actually has nothing to do with XML whatsoever. (Well, sure you can use it to read in an XML file, but you can as easily use it to read in a JSON file, or even a plain text file.) All I had to do was create a small PHP page that accepts a comment and writes it into a file, then use the Javascript on the page to periodically read in that file to update the comments.

So that’s that. I plan to spend a couple hours every couple weeks to add new videos to the site, and perhaps new backgrounds if I feel like fiddling with Photoshop Elements, but other than that I’ll ignore it and see what happens.

(By the way, what’s the deal with Javascript naming conventions? Why is it XMLHttpRequest and not XMLHTTPRequest? Both XML and HTTP are acronyms, right? I don’t get it.)

Update 6/28/2008:

At some point I accidentally broke this site while doing an update on some of my other domains. Sorry. It’s back up and working now, I’m not sure what happened. I got rid of the adblock and updated some of the video selections, too.